Chapter 3: Images of man and experiments
D. The life of dialogue
In a world saturated with technology’s whirring activity,
human beings and their problems and situations – love, suffering, death – leave
technicians speechless. Human beings,
after all, are so awash with mass-sensations that they no longer experience
life. Thus they nurse a deep anxiety.
Historically, the Enlightenment labored to produce an ‘I’
fit to lord over the world of things.
For Descartes and others, freedom’s expression was a resounding
‘I.’ But the ‘I’ cannot exist on its own
without loneliness. Feuerbach,
addressing this very problem, wrote, “The nature of man is contained only in
community in the unity of man – a unity which however rests upon the reality of
the distinction of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’.” (80)
It was a move mirrored in new evaluations of language where life does
not make language, but is rather made by it.
The ‘I-Thou’ of language is the basis of self-consciousness and
community with others. Thus,
subjectivity is intersubjectivity.
Martin Buber’s work I and Thou brought further clarified the
linguistic element of human relations.
Buber created a continuum of possible human relationships, with the
I-Thou on one side and the I-It on the other.
The ‘I’ of the latter is a subject who perceives and acts. The ‘I’ of the latter pair is an ‘I’ who
hears and dialogues. It is a useful
continuum when considering humanity within the roaring power of technological
life.
The I-it, which asks of human beings, “What?” is absolutely
disjunctive to the I-Thou, which asks of human beings, “Who?” Technological life, which treats human beings
as consumers, or numbers, producers, or liabilities, cannot comprehend the
human life which mediates the whole being in an encounter with actual
living. Furthermore, within the Thou one
may come to themselves and, now whole speak wholly. The I, on the other hand,
offers relentless experiential dissection.
Buber developed an entire philosophy of religion from his
linguistic personalism. “In the ultimate
grounds of our linguistic and spiritual life, God is the true ‘Thou’ to the
true and enduring ‘I’ of man. . . . And if anyone avoids the names for the
unnameable, because they are all misused, and addresses with his whole being
the ‘Thou’ of his life, it is God that he addresses.” (83) As well, the Thou, he said, was accessible
only in the Thou of one’s neighbor.
Community, then, is the new-and-forever after locus of divine
visitation.
Moltmann, though enthusiastic about Buber’s insights, asks
if perhaps the ‘It’ has not been misunderstood.
He asks about the community of work, the everyday community, the life
with others that is more concrete than the small, oath-bound communities of
Buber’s vision. Community, he say,
requires “a common material agency and reliable institutions” the “necessary
and good incarnations of the human into real life.” (84) Modern society, he says, cannot be humanized
through personalization.
“It is not possible directly to repersonalize relationships which have been divided up for a rational purpose. . . . The ‘life of dialogue’ can easily lead to a romantic flight from the reality of scientific and technological civilization. Then it loses its humanizing and healing powers and survives in a petty corner for the criticism of culture.” (85)
Furthermore, he says, industrialization, instead of
depersonalizing life, has allowed it the freedom to dialogue. Thus, in condemning the technopolis of the
I-It, Buber’s personalistic protest cuts away at the floor beneath it. What is good about the community of ‘I’ and
‘Thou’ is that it reminds human beings of their own humanity with one
another. That, he says, should inform
social and political work in the modern world.
“Men will then take to themselves the sorrow of a reality which is
constantly alienated and materializing, and see the future under the image of
its alteration so that it can be characterized as a human society.” (86)
E. The irony of the "man without qualities"
Rootlessness characterizes the order of the day in an
industrial society. For many, there is
no ultimate realization of a universal human society. Yet, irony has become a way forward for some;
the irony of the ‘man without qualities.’
Ralf Dahrendorf, in his essay "Homo Sociologicus," described a
model of human expression, a sociological model. In this model, human beings both describe
themselves and are described by a matrix of social roles: parent, child,
teacher, citizen, bird watcher, female.
Indeed, there is no other way of describing who someone is, whether
someone else or yourself, outside of these relationships. These do not have to do with who someone is,
however, but only what they do. They are
societal descriptions in which someone lives, descriptions that are horizons of
the possible, each one molding the subject to the shape of a different
expectation; a German professor and a farm laborer live on disparate tracks.
Social roles are the process of socialization, molding the man and introducing
him to the society of his peers.
Social roles bring dangers with them. Their role play separates the human person
into personalities, inner and outer in a division which begs the question: “Is
[one] identical with the echo which his personal life has made among other
people?” (88) There is the danger too of
so becoming one’s role that there is no humanity left save what is proscribed.[1] Again, as relationships multiply one upon the
other, the self becomes a juggling act which, in critical cases, could result
in a split of the personality itself.
Each role, each expectation, brings with it different claims. In a whirl of competing demands, can one even
speak of an ‘I’ at peace with itself and the world? Moltmann asks, “Where is he a man, and where is
he free to be man? Or does he just not
appear as himself and as ‘man’ in the functional activity of this pluralistic
society? (90) So is there a subject at
all?
There is hope for a subject if passive imagination is
considered. To the clingy aggregate of
social roles there is always one untouched addition. This one addition, this passive imagination,
allows a detachment, an even laughable point of view by which to critique all
the other demanding selves. This one
addition is the free possibility of being different. “By means of self-irony man can look out from
the reality of his life and reflect, keep his negative independence from
everything and toy with the quite different possibilities that he has.”
(93) So free and open can this ironic
man without qualities be that Moltmann draws a line between it and Marx’s total
man. Both, he says, look beyond
constricting societal walls to bare hills of human possibility.
Yet, Moltmann also warns this passive ironic of romantic
dangers. She struggles to acquire
greater possibilities, but knows she can never belong to any of the roles which
she acquires. She develops an
experimental attitude toward life and “lives the delusion that the thousand
possibilities … are worth more than the one reality.” (93) The external world, the real world, slides
away within the foggy disconnect. “This
fascination is paid for … by an
increasing inability to identify oneself and to become flesh in practical life,
and to love.” (94) With no real place to
stand, the passive ironic ironically is swept along by the active forces, plans
and expectations against which irony was chosen in the first place.
Moltmann sets another contextual warning. This time against a form of Christian
identity. He describes this identity as
such:
If radical contextualization is what it is to be human, then
how can one live from and in God? If a
man is but the result of his social relationships, then how can we understand
him when,
“the transcendent God calls him and he receives the call of the word of God and trusts it, he releases himself at the same time from the enclosedness of the world and becomes free of the powers and laws of the world. He becomes free of the mirror of his social activities and can stand over against himself. He is then no longer the result of his social circumstances, but becomes Son of God and Lord of the World (Gogarten).” (95)
The creature of God lives in a different world than
Dahrendorf’s homo sociologicus. Roles do
not define, but become tools which may be owned without owning. They are no longer laws from jealous gods but
simply roles; they are secularized. The
real does not dominate. At the same
time, the inner self is made sacred because it receives itself from God. There is a place to stand outside the roles,
a place for possibility. Freedom is
granted to the inner self so that there is no longer the cacophonous demands of
society but, instead, the silent place of one’s decision. Chiding Bultmann’s free decision of faith,
Moltmann retorts, “The freedom of faith is indeed always specific in decisions,
but decisions do not turn into decisiveness.” (96) The problem with this point of decision which
stands between the cut made between God and the world (for in the solitary,
sacred place before God one takes refuge from the social demands of the secular)
is that nothing gets done by it. There
is no inner ability in its position to make decisive choices. There is no human incarnation for the sake of
others. Social reality is not
changed. It is a “Utopia of the
negative.” “This form of belief is
always in danger of changing into the romantic attitude of the beautiful soul,
which like a butterfly moving from flower to flower dashes past reality from
one decision to another, without really and effectively taking corporate
reality seriously.” (96) The passive ironic, untouched because she is without
qualities even as she lives in a world of qualities, is aesthetically
attractive. But, as Moltmann concludes
the segment, it arises from the experience of social powerlessness.
F. The adventurous heart
One option in the face of life’s increasing complexity is
raw and direct action. Instead of the
patient labor of maintaining community networks upon networks; instead of
political decisions made more and more obscure as awareness of the layered contexts
are understood; instead of these, Alexander’s sword of naked decision is drawn
from its sheath (Scheide) and with it the clarity of action (Entscheidung).
“Critically Utopian thought builds upon the relationships of the present which have become opaque the objective counter-image of a liberated-harmonious society. . . . Self critical scepticism withdraws from an oppressive social reality into the inner secret of the man without qualities, to satisfy those possibilities in unreality. There is yet a third way, from multiplicity to simplicity, the mover from the thousand possibilities to the one necessary reality, which is the naked decision.” (97)
It is not the purpose of acting but that one has acted that
clarifies. In the teeth of battle,
decisions are elementary, friend and foe are clearly manifest. Moltmann identifies “the struggle for the
existence of the nation” – war –with this very desire. On the level of nation state, political and
social factions, melt away and unify under the banner of patriotism. Such decisiveness, says Moltmann, explains
why facism held such attraction, despite having no plan of its own other than
to act.
The will to power grants unity to the individual as
well. In the commitment to arms, all the
manifold demands, roles and divisions of the self stitch together. Existence is one, a fulcrum between the
scales of living and dying. “Deliverance
from the uncertainty in which one does not know what one is there fore, lies in
total self-sacrifice.” (100)
The best preparation for a life of self-sacrifice is the destruction
of humanistic education. Contempt today
for the ‘ivory tower’ universities, the desire of some to hitch the intellect
to a certain powerful politic, or even the wholesale embrace of anarchy: all of
these, he says, is a treason of intellect against intellect.
Politically, such a life is paved by abolishing
parliamentary procedure and bureaucratic process. The Utopia of the bourgeoisie “consists in the hope that one could transmute the
decisive battle into a continuous parliamentary debate, and put it off by
delay. The opposite to discussion is
dictatorship…” (101) In times of war,
there is no need for congressional debates, but only kill or be-killed. The dictatorship offers seductively a simple,
naked decision. Therefore, dictatorships
thrive in existential politics.
Just as the longing for decision is met by secular
categories of friend and enemy, that same longing is met by ideas of apocalypse
in religious sects and churches. In the
looming shadow of the end, faith is the absolute decision made on the basis of
an absolute call; both, notes Moltmann, beyond verification by any objective
standard. “One can only take an attitude
to them without reference to reasons and proofs.” (103) Faith is the ultimate risk, a leap without
evidence. “It is not the credibility of
its object that is evidence for [faith], but one’s own decisive commitment, in
which man comes to himself.” (103) Yet,
he asks, without a credible object, does one really have the Christian faith?
Brushing away complexity, responsibility and the political
and social demands of responsible human living by means of violence and the act
only brushes them away. It does not
balance the need for society.
Furthermore, the very thing that makes decisiveness so decisive is its
context against the daily background of complexity. Without needs, demands, and deadlines, there
is no way of talking about decision. The
two are related in a negative circularity.
The same circularity appears in religious faith. The existential leap, too, is only an
antithesis against the thesis of the church of historic confession and
liturgical and missiological praxis. The
existential leap has no real substance of its own; inexpressibility is no
foundation. “Christian faith is
indissolubly linked with historical recollection of the Christ-event and with
eschatological hope in the future of Christ, and so is itself a historical
decision.” (104) The call of the gospel
does not bow him to crisis in a last day, but, rather, “opens to him new
possibilities of altering himself and his circumstances. It puts him in the time of love, which trusts
in the possibility of conversion of the ‘enemy’, because it hopes in him, and
therefore does not kill or damn him, but tries to help him to life.” (104) Neither Modern society nor the Christian
faith will find a solution in the naked friend-foe decision. Rather, both should adhere to the better way,
loving and rational dialogue with others.
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