Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Second Sex (1949)

  In addition, we will pose the problem of feminine destiny quite differently: we will situate woman in a world of values, and we will lend her behavior a dimension of freedom. We think she has to choose between the affirmation of her transcendence and her alienation as object; she is not the plaything of contradictory drives; she devises solutions that have an ethical hierarchy among them. Replacing value with authority, choice with drives, psychoanalysis proposes an ersatz morality: the idea of normality. This idea is indeed highly useful from a therapeutic point of view; but it has reached a disturbing extent in psychoanalysis in general. The descriptive schema is proposed as a law; and assuredly, a mechanistic psychology could not accept the notion of moral invention; at best it can recognize less but never more; at best it acknowledges failures, but never creations. If a subject does not wholly replicate a development considered normal, his development will be seen as being interrupted, and this will be interpreted as a lack and a negation and never a positive decision. That, among other things, is what renders the psychoanalysis of great men so shocking: we are told that this transference or that sublimation was not successfully carried out in them; it is never supposed that perhaps they could have rejected it, and perhaps for good reasons; it is never considered that their behavior might have been motivated by freely posited aims; the individual is always explained through his link to the past and not with respect to a future toward which he projects himself. Therefore, we are never given more than an inauthentic picture, and in this inauthenticity no criterion other than normality can possibly be found. The description of feminine destiny is, from this point of view, altogether striking. The way psychoanalysts understand it, “to identify” with the mother or the father is to alienate oneself in a model, it is to prefer a foreign image to a spontaneous movement of one’s own existence, it is to play at being. We are shown woman solicited by two kinds of alienations; it is very clear that to play at being a man will be a recipe for failure; but to play at being a woman is also a trap: being a woman would mean being an object, the Other; and at the heart of its abdication, the Other remains a subject. The real problem for the woman refusing these evasions is to accomplish herself as transcendence: this means seeing which possibilities are opened to her by what are called virile and feminine attitudes; when a child follows the path indicated by one or another of his parents, it could be because he freely takes on their projects: his behavior could be the result of a choice motivated by ends. Even for Adler, the will to power is only a sort of absurd energy; he calls any project that incarnates transcendence a “masculine protest”; when a girl climbs trees, it is, according to him, to be the equal of boys: he does not imagine that she likes to climb trees; for the mother, the child is anything but a “penis substitute”; painting, writing, and engaging in politics are not only “good sublimations”: they are ends desired in themselves. To deny this is to falsify all of human history. Parallels can be noted between our descriptions and those of psychoanalysts. From man’s point of view—adopted by both male and female psychoanalysts—behavior of alienation is considered feminine, and behavior where the subject posits his transcendence is considered masculine. Donaldson, a historian of woman, observed that the definitions “the man is a male human being, the woman is a female human being” were asymmetrically mutilated;* psychoanalysts in particular define man as a human being and woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, the woman is said to be imitating the male. The psychoanalyst describes the child and the young girl as required to identify with the father and the mother, torn between “viriloid” and “feminine” tendencies, whereas we conceive her as hesitating between the role of object, of Other that is proposed to her and her claim for freedom; thus it is possible to agree on certain points: in particular when we consider the paths of inauthentic flight offered to women. But we do not give them the same Freudian or Adlerian signification. For us woman is defined as a human being in search of values within a world of values, a world where it is indispensable to understand the economic and social structure; we will study her from an existential point of view, taking into account her total situation.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Likewise, woman can no more be defined by the consciousness of her own femininity than by merely saying that woman is a female: she finds this consciousness within the society of which she is a member. Interiorizing the unconscious and all psychic life, the very language of psychoanalysis suggests that the drama of the individual unfolds within him: the terms “complex,” “tendencies,” and so forth imply this. But a life is a relation with the world; the individual defines himself by choosing himself through the world; we must turn to the world to answer the questions that preoccupy us. In particular, psychoanalysis fails to explain why woman is the Other. Even Freud accepts that the prestige of the penis is explained by the father’s sovereignty, and he admits that he does not know the source of male supremacy.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  1. Stop what you are doing and admit you are in a danger zone. As soon as the thought crosses your mind that you are doing something that could make you susceptible to becoming actively involved with porn again, you need to stop. If you dismiss or rationalize away warning signs of danger, you set yourself up to plunge further down into the Relapse Zone. On the other hand, validating your awareness of being in vulnerable territory and choosing to immediately disengage from your porn-oriented thinking and behavior helps you to break out of the trance-like state that often accompanies a relapse. Stopping is a way of giving yourself an opportunity to acknowledge that what you are doing is dangerous and will lead to problems. “When I realize I’m looking at something that is similar to porn,” Corey told us, “I stop, and tell myself, This is porn and I need to stop! Hearing myself say it out loud brings me into reality again. It keeps me from lying to myself, which, obviously, I had gotten pretty good at doing when I was watching porn.” The skill of stopping your behavior and honestly admitting to yourself what is happening is vital for being able to successfully deal with relapse at any level. If you find yourself thinking about using porn, STOP! If you find yourself purchasing or looking at porn, STOP! Even if you are in the middle of masturbating to porn, just STOP! Interrupting old patterns of porn use allows you to resume control of your thoughts and behavior and make good decisions about what to do next. 2. Get away from porn thoughts and materials. Once you are aware that you’re in a Relapse Zone, take immediate action to create as much distance as you can between yourself and porn. If you had been thinking about using porn, focus your thinking on something else. Keep your distance from sources of porn. If you’re at a computer, turn it off and walk away from it. If you’re watching television, change channels, turn it off, or get up and leave the room. Take a walk, call a friend, listen to music, spend time in nature…do whatever it takes to shift your consciousness away from porn. (See exercise, “Shifting Your Attention.”) Shifting Your Attention

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Still. Amid the muck and grime, there was a small glimmer of awareness: It was ridiculous that it took me sixteen damn hours to figure out that I was upset and four more to ascertain why. Why didn’t I figure this out sooner? Could I have wasted less time and spent less energy being upset if I’d identified my feelings and moved on? I could have told Joey about feeling irritable last night. I could have let him comfort me. We could have tried to talk about it or made new anniversary plans. If I’d acknowledged these feelings earlier, I could have asked for the attention I wanted. But instead, I felt that hollow, dry, fine feeling. The same feeling I had when I talked about knives to my throat. The same feeling you get when you have to stop crying, pick up the rag, and finish cleaning up the soap. The silent, soundless expanse. Maybe you can hide in the desert after all. I may not have United States of Tara levels of dissociation. But it’s now clear I do have my own kind of dissociation, tamer and perhaps more dangerous in its subtlety, because up until now, I’ve been able to ignore the fact that it even existed. — Weeks later, I found a journal entry from my sophomore year of high school: I think there’s something wrong with me. I’m jaded. Like…super jaded. I kind of wish I could feel again. I wish I could be genuinely happy, like I used to be. I don’t feel that anymore. I even wish that I could be depressed, scream-at-the-world-stab-myself-in-the-chest angry, like I used to be. But I can’t feel that either. When all of these terrible things keep happening, everything should have fallen apart, but it didn’t. It was like I was watching it all through a glass. It was a movie. A movie. I had used the same exact phrasing Eleanor used when she’d questioned me from her worksheet, the same language clinicians and psychiatrists use to diagnose people with dissociation, the language I denied in her office. It was now clear that I had hung a veil up decades ago—a thick white sheet in the back of my mind to keep certain truths from myself. The dread was a catchall. It was a colorless amalgamation of feeling because I did not have the tools to tease out the wild knot of my real emotions and needs. The dread was a sliver of light escaping from behind the veil. When I used EMDR to move the veil aside, I found: My parents never loved me, and that’s not my fault. What else was hiding behind the veil?

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Nonetheless, so many factors converge to thwart woman’s independence that they are never all abolished simultaneously; physical weakness is no longer an issue; but feminine subordination remains useful to society in cases where the woman is married. Thus marital power outlives the feudal regime. The paradox still being perpetuated today is established: the woman most fully integrated into society is the one with the fewest privileges in the society. In civil feudality, marriage has the same features as in military feudality: the husband remains the wife’s guardian. When the bourgeoisie is formed, it observes the same laws. In common law as in feudal law, the only emancipation is outside marriage; the daughter and the widow have the same capacities as the man; but by marrying, the woman falls under the husband’s guardianship and administration; he can beat her; he watches over her behavior, relations, and correspondence and disposes of her fortune, not through a contract, but by the very fact of marriage. “As soon as the marriage is consummated,” Beaumanoir says, “the possessions of each party are held in common by virtue of the marriage and the man is the guardian of them.” It is in the interest of property that the nobility and the bourgeoisie demand one master to administer it. The wife is not subordinated to the husband because she is judged basically incapable: when nothing else prevents it, woman’s full capacities are recognized. From feudality to today, the married woman is deliberately sacrificed to private property. It is important to see that the greater the property owned by the husband, the greater this servitude: the propertied classes are those in which woman’s dependence has always been the most concrete; even today, the patriarchal family survives among rich landowners; the more socially and economically powerful man feels, the more he plays the paterfamilias with authority. On the contrary, shared destitution makes the conjugal link reciprocal. Neither feudality nor the Church enfranchised woman. Rather, it was from a position of servitude that the patriarchal family moved to an authentically conjugal one. The serf and his wife owned nothing; they simply had the common use of their house, furniture, and utensils: man had no reason to want to become master of woman who owned nothing; but the bonds of work and interest that joined them raised the spouse to the rank of companion. When serfdom is abolished, poverty remains; in small rural communities and among artisans, spouses live on an equal footing; woman is neither a thing nor a servant: those are the luxuries of a rich man; the poor man experiences the reciprocity of the bond that attaches him to his other half; in freely contracted work, woman wins concrete autonomy because she has an economic and social role. The farces and fabliaux of the Middle Ages reflect a society of artisans, small merchants, and peasants in which the husband’s only privilege over his wife is to be able to beat her: but she pits craftiness against force to reestablish equality. However, the rich woman pays for her idleness with submission.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Engels retraces woman’s history from this point of view in The Origin of the Family; to him, this history depends essentially on the history of technology. In the Stone Age, when the land belonged to all members of the clan, the rudimentary nature of the primitive spade and hoe limited agricultural possibilities: feminine strength was at the level of work needed for gardening. In this primitive division of labor, the two sexes already constitute two classes in a way; there is equality between these classes; while the man hunts and fishes, the woman stays at home; but the domestic tasks include productive work: pottery making, weaving, gardening; and in this way, she has an important role in economic life. With the discovery of copper, tin, bronze, and iron, and with the advent of the plow, agriculture expands its reach: intensive labor is necessary to clear the forests and cultivate the fields. So man has recourse to the service of other men, reducing them to slavery. Private property appears: master of slaves and land, man also becomes the proprietor of the woman. This is the “great historical defeat of the female sex.” It is explained by the disruption of the division of labor brought about by the invention of new tools. “The same cause that had assured woman her previous authority in the home, her restriction to housework, this same cause now assured the domination of the man; domestic work thence faded in importance next to man’s productive work; the latter was everything, the former an insignificant addition.” So paternal right replaces maternal right: transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed. Man reigning sovereign permits himself, among other things, his sexual whims: he sleeps with slaves or courtesans, he is polygamous. As soon as customs make reciprocity possible, woman takes revenge through infidelity: adultery becomes a natural part of marriage. This is the only defense woman has against the domestic slavery she is bound to: her social oppression is the consequence of her economic oppression. Equality can only be reestablished when both sexes have equal legal rights; but this enfranchisement demands that the whole of the feminine sex enter public industry. “Woman cannot be emancipated unless she takes part in production on a large social scale and is only incidentally bound to domestic work. And this has become possible only within a large modern industry that not only accepts women’s work on a grand scale but formally requires it.”

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  But to prefer suffering to violence means to be good, or at least less evil than those who do to another what they do not wish to have done to themselves. And so all the probabilities are in favour of the fact that not those who are better than those over whom they rule, but, on the contrary, those who are worse, have always been and even now are in power. There may also be worse men among those who submit to the power, but it cannot be that better men should rule over worse men. This was impossible to assume in case of the pagan inexact definition of goodness; but with the Christian lucid and exact definition of goodness and evil, it is impossible to think so. If more or less good men, more or less bad men, cannot be distinguished in the pagan world, the Christian conception of good and evil has so clearly defined the symptoms of the good and the evil, that they can no longer be mistaken. According to Christ's teaching the good are those who humble themselves, suffer, do not resist evil with force, forgive offences, love their enemies; the evil are those who exalt themselves, rule, struggle, and do violence to people, and so, according to Christ's teaching, there is no doubt as to where the good are among the ruling and the subjugated. It even sounds ridiculous to speak of ruling Christians. The non-Christians, that is, those who base their lives on the worldly good, must always rule over Christians, over those who assume that their lives consist in the renunciation of this good. Thus it has always been and it has become more and more definite, in proportion as the Christian teaching has been disseminated and elucidated. The more the true Christianity spread and entered into the consciousness of men, the less it was possible for Christians to be among the rulers, and the easier it grew for non-Christians to rule over Christians. "The abolition of the violence of state at a time when not all men in society have become true Christians would have this effect, that the bad would rule over the good and would with impunity do violence to them," say the defenders of the existing order of life. "The bad will rule over the good and will do violence to them." But it has never been different, and it never can be. Thus it has always been since the beginning of the world, and thus it is now. The bad always rule over the good and always do violence to them. Cain did violence to Abel, cunning Jacob to trustful Esau, deceitful Laban to Jacob; Caiaphas and Pilate ruled over Christ, the Roman emperors ruled over a Seneca, an Epictetus, and good Romans who lived in their time. John IV.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Lullus was born in Palma on the island of Majorca. His father had gained distinction by helping to wrest the Balearic islands from the Saracens. The son married and had children, but led a gay and licentious life at court and devoted his poetic gifts to erotic sonnets. At the age of thirty-one he was arrested in his wild career by the sight of a cancer on the breast of a woman, one of the objects of his passion, whom he pursued into a church, and who suddenly exposed her disease. He made a pilgrimage to Campostella, and retired to Mt. Randa on his native island. Here he spent five years in seclusion, and in 1272 entered the third order of St. Francis. He became interested in the conversion of Mohammedans and other infidels and studied Arabic under a Moor whom he had redeemed from slavery. A system of knowledge was revealed to him which he called "the Universal Science," ars magna or ars generalis. With the aid of the king of Aragon he founded, in 1276 on Majorca, a college under the control of the Franciscans for the training of missionaries in the Arabic and Syriac tongues. Lullus went to Paris to study and to develop his Universal Science. At a later period he returned and delivered lectures there. In 1286 he went to Rome to press his missionary plans, but failed to gain the pope’s favor. In 1292 he set sail on a missionary tour to Africa from Genoa. In Tunis he endeavored in vain to engage the Mohammedan scholars in a public disputation. A tumult arose and Lullus narrowly escaped with his life. Returning to Europe, he again sought to win the favor of the pope, but in vain. In 1309 he sailed the second time for Tunis, and again he sought to engage the Mohammedans in disputation. Offered honors if he would turn Mohammedan, he said, "And I promise you, if you will turn and believe on Jesus Christ, abundant riches and eternal life." Again violently forced to leave Africa, Lullus laid his plans before Clement V. and the council of Vienne, 1311. Here he presented a refutation of the philosophy of Averrhoes and pressed the creation of academic chairs for the Oriental languages. Such chairs were ordered erected at Avignon, Paris, Oxford, Salamanca, and Bologna to teach Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic.893 Although nearly eighty years old the indefatigable missionary again set out for Tunis. His preaching at Bougia led, as before, to tumults, and Lullus was dragged outside of the city and stoned. Left half dead, he was rescued by Christian seamen, put on board a ship, and died at sea. His bones are preserved at Palma.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Different manifestations of pleasureIt is all the easier to write about discomforts and displeasure because they seem to distend time, and time allows us to focus. Even if they do not register with us straight away, they carve out a furrow within us which represents time. The slapping sessions never went on for long, the bathing in sweat was by no means a key element of my relationship with that man, which doesn’t alter the fact that while they were going on I, active and passive, would be waiting (and watching). Talking about pleasure, extreme pleasure, is much more a work of art. Isn’t it anyway commonly compared to being transported out of oneself and the world, and, therefore, outside time as well? And is there the added, aporetic problem of wanting to identify and recognise something that no one has yet described for you, or only sketchily?

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Without wholly rejecting the contributions of psychoanalysis, some of which are productive, we will nevertheless not accept its method. First of all, we will not limit ourselves to taking sexuality as a given: that this view falls short is demonstrated by the poverty of the descriptions touching on the feminine libido; I have already said that psychoanalysts have never studied it head-on, but only based on the male libido; they seem to ignore the fundamental ambivalence of the attraction that the male exercises over the female. Freudians and Adlerians explain woman’s anxiety before male genitalia as an inversion of frustrated desire. Stekel rightly saw this as an original reaction; but he accounts for it only superficially: the woman would fear defloration, penetration, pregnancy, and pain, and this fear would stifle her desire; this explanation is too rational.* Instead of accepting that desire is disguised as anxiety or is overcome by fear, we should consider this sort of pressing and frightened appeal that is female desire as a basic given; it is characterized by the indissoluble synthesis of attraction and repulsion. It is noteworthy that many female animals flee from coitus at the very moment they solicit it: they are accused of coquetry or hypocrisy; but it is absurd to attempt to explain primitive behaviors by assimilating them to complex ones: they are, on the contrary, at the source of attitudes called coquetry and hypocrisy in women. The idea of a passive libido is disconcerting because the libido has been defined as a drive, as energy based on the male; but one could no more conceive a priori of a light being both yellow and blue: the intuition of green is needed. Reality would be better delineated if, instead of defining the libido in vague terms of “energy,” the significance of sexuality were juxtaposed with that of other human attitudes: taking, catching, eating, doing, undergoing, and so on; for sexuality is one of the singular modes of apprehending an object; the characteristics of the erotic object as it is shown not only in the sexual act but in perception in general would also have to be studied. This examination goes beyond the psychoanalytical framework that posits eroticism as irreducible.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  But that the employment of violence at the present time does not subjugate either of them, that we know from protracted experience. Indeed, how can we subjugate by force the nations whose whole education, all whose traditions, even religious teaching, leads them to see the highest virtue in a struggle with their enslavers and in striving after liberty? And how are we forcibly to eradicate crimes in the midst of our societies, when what by the governments are considered to be crimes are considered to be virtues by public opinion. It is possible by means of violence to destroy such nations and such men, as is indeed done, but it is impossible to subjugate them. The judge of everything, the fundamental force which moves men and nations, has always been the one invisible, impalpable force,—the resultant of all the spiritual forces of a certain aggregate of men and of all humanity, which is expressed in public opinion. Violence only weakens this force, retards, and distorts it, and puts in its place another activity, which is not only not useful, but even harmful for the forward movement of humanity. To subjugate to Christianity all the wild people outside the Christian world,—all the Zulus, Manchurians, and Chinese, whom many consider to be wild,—and the savages within the Christian world, there is one, only one means,—the dissemination among these nations of a Christian public opinion, which is established only through a Christian life, Christian acts, Christian examples. And so in order to conquer the nations which have remained unconquered by Christianity, the men of our time, who possess one, and only one, means for this purpose, do precisely the opposite of what might attain their end. To conquer to Christianity the wild nations, who do not touch us and who do not in any way provoke us to oppress them, we—instead of leaving them first of all alone, and, in case of necessity or of a wish to get in closer relations with them, acting upon them only through a Christian relation to them, through the Christian teaching as proved by truly Christian acts of suffering, humility, abstinence, purity, brotherhood, love—begin by this, that we open among them new markets for our commerce, with nothing but our advantage in view, seize their land, that is, rob them, sell them wine, tobacco, opium, that is, corrupt them, and establish among them our order, teach them violence and all its methods, that is, the following of nothing but the animal law of struggle, below which no man can descend, and we do everything which can be done in order to conceal from them whatever of Christianity there is in us. And after that we send to them about two dozen missionaries, who prattle some hypocritical ecclesiastic absurdities and, in the shape of incontrovertible proofs of the impossibility of applying the Christian truths to life, adduce these our experiments at the Christianization of the savages.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Men say that a Christian life without violence cannot be established, because there are savage nations outside of Christian society,—in Africa, in Asia (some people represent the Chinese as such a peril for our civilization),—and there are such savage, corrupt, and, according to the new theory of heredity, confirmed criminals amidst Christian societies; and that violence is needed for the purpose of keeping either from destroying our civilization. But those savage men, outside and within the societies, with whom we frighten ourselves and others, have never submitted to violence, and are not even now conquered by it. Nations have never subjugated other nations by violence alone. If a nation which subjugated another stood on a lower stage of development, there was always repeated the phenomenon that it did not introduce its structure of life by means of violence, but, on the contrary, always submitted to the structure of life which existed in the conquered nation. If a nation, crushed by force, is subjugated or close to subjugation, it is so only through public opinion, and by no means through violence, which, on the contrary, provokes the nation more and more. If men have ever been subjugated by whole nations to a new religious confession, and by whole nations have been baptized or have passed over to Mohammedanism, these transformations did not take place because men in power compelled them to do so (violence has, on the contrary, more frequently encouraged the movements in the opposite direction), but because public opinion compelled them to do so; but the nations that were compelled by force to accept the faiths of their conquerors have never accepted them. The same is true in respect to those savage elements which exist within the societies: it is not the increase nor the decrease of the severity of punishments, nor the change of prisons, nor the increase of the police, that diminish or increase the number of crimes,—it is changed only in consequence of the change in public opinion. No severities have eradicated duels and vendettas in some countries. No matter how much the Circassians may be punished for theft, they continue to steal out of bravado, because not one maiden will marry a man who has not shown his daring, by stealing a horse, or at least a sheep. If men shall stop fighting duels and Circassians shall stop stealing, this will not be so because they are afraid of punishment (the fear of being punished only increases the charm of the daring), but because public opinion will be changed. The same is true in all other crimes. Violence can never destroy what is accepted by public opinion. On the contrary, public opinion need only be diametrically opposed to violence to destroy its every action, as has always been the case with every martyrdom. We do not know what would happen if no violence were exerted against hostile nations and criminal elements of society.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  writings are virtually empty of what the earthly Jesus had taught – teaching (in Aramaic) which would have naturally been passed on to him by ‘flesh and blood’, if he had consulted them – and the silence contrasts significantly with the fact that he is regularly prepared to quote the Tanakh. A person, and not a system, had captured him in the mysterious events on the road to Damascus. The person was Christ and Lord: the two titles expressed slightly different aspects of who Jesus was for Paul. Jesus is Christ (the Anointed) because he has been chosen to fulfil God’s plan, and Lord because his place in God’s plan gives him eternal dominion and power.60 The distinction is not a rigid one; but Paul tended in his letters to talk of Jesus as ‘Christ’ when he was making statements and as ‘Lord’ when he was pleading with his readers or ordering them to do something. He associated the title ‘Christ’ with the work of God accomplished on the Cross – no longer a political Messiah or ‘Anointed One’ to save the people of Israel. He saw Jesus the Lord as the one to whom Christians owe obedience and so he associated the title ‘Lord’ with the obedient implementing of this work in the life of the Church.61 Paul knew much in his previous belief system about obedience to the Law, and one senses him struggling with his inheritance of Law in ways that are never wholly coherent. In his letter to the Christians in Rome, one can read that the Law brings wrath and sin, but also that it is holy.62 Most striking of all is Paul’s repeated insistence that traditional Jewish genital circumcision counts for no more than lack of circumcision, beside keeping the commandments of God. Surely he could not ignore the clear message of the Tanakh that circumcision was indeed one of the commandments of God? It seems that for him, even more than for Jesus, Law was good, Law was bad – he was as fond of a strong paradox as was Martin Luther fifteen centuries later, and perhaps that is why the two men’s minds met. But this seeming incoherence may be explained by the completeness of his traumatic Damascus road experience: he had rejected what was good, his Jewish heritage, for something incomparably better – Christ. An intimate meeting with Christ was a better way of being ‘righteous’, a word at the centre of a cluster of words which he uses with the same root in the verb dikaioun, ‘to be made righteous’ or, in the form made famous by Protestants in the sixteenth-century Reformation, ‘to be justified’. The biblical scholar E. P. Sanders has expressed the sense of a grace coming from outside ourselves by coining a memorably clunky phrase, ‘be righteoused’ – reconciled once more to God.63 Adam, the first man, sinned so completely that no law had power to deal with the universal sin that resulted; neither he nor his descendants could be ‘righteoused’ through their own efforts, however much they might feel the pain and wretchedness of the Fall away from Eden. Only Christ could repair the

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  This process takes place without cessation, and by this way men one after another pass over to the side of Christianity. But men pass over to the side of Christianity not by this inner path alone; there is also an external method, with which the gradualness of this transition is destroyed. The transition of men from one structure of life to another does not always take place in the manner in which the sand is poured out from an hour-glass,—one kernel of sand after another, from the first to the last,—but rather like water pouring into a vessel that is immerged in the water, when it at first admits the water evenly and slowly at one side, and then, from the weight of the water already taken in, suddenly dips down fast and almost all at once receives all the water which it can hold. The same occurs with societies of men at the transition from one concept, and so from one structure of life, to another. It is only at first that one after another slowly and gradually receives the new truth by an inner way and follows it through life; but after a certain diffusion it is no longer received in an internal manner, nor gradually, but all at once, almost involuntarily. And so there is no truth in the reflection of the defenders of the existing order that, if in the course of eighteen hundred years only a small part of mankind has passed over to the side of Christianity, it will take several times eighteen hundred years before the rest of humanity will pass over to its side; there is no truth in it, because with this reflection no attention is paid to any other than the internal attainment of the truth, and the transition from one form of life to another. This other method of attaining a newly revealed truth and transition to a new structure of life consists in this, that men do not attain the truth simply because they perceive it with a prophetic feeling or experience of life, but also because at a certain stage of the dissemination of the truth all men who stand on a lower stage of development accept it all at once, out of confidence in those who have accepted it in an internal way, and apply it to life. Every new truth, which changes the composition of human life and moves humanity forward, is at first accepted by only a very small number of men, who understand it in an internal way. The rest, who out of confidence had accepted the previous truth, on which the existing order is based, always oppose the dissemination of the new truth.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Psychoanalysts vehemently reject this notion of choice in the name of determinism and “the collective unconscious”; this unconscious would provide man with ready-made imagery and universal symbolism; it would explain analogies found in dreams, lapses, delusions, allegories, and human destinies; to speak of freedom would be to reject the possibility of explaining these disturbing concordances. But the idea of freedom is not incompatible with the existence of certain constants. If the psychoanalytical method is often productive in spite of errors in theory, it is because there are givens in every individual case so generalized that no one would dream of denying them: situations and behavior patterns recur; the moment of decision springs out of generality and repetition. “Anatomy is destiny,” said Freud; and this phrase is echoed by Merleau-Ponty: “The body is generality.” Existence is one, across and through the separation of existents, manifesting itself in analogous organisms; so there will be constants in the relationship between the ontological and the sexual. At any given period, technology and the economic and social structure of a group reveal an identical world for all its members: there will also be a constant relation of sexuality to social forms; analogous individuals, placed in analogous conditions, will grasp analogous significations in the given; this analogy is not the basis of a rigorous universality, but it can account for finding general types in individual cases. A symbol does not emerge as an allegory worked out by a mysterious unconscious: it is the apprehension of a signification through an analogue of the signifying object; because of the identity of the existential situation cutting across all existents and the identity of the facticity they have to cope with, significations are revealed to many individuals in the same way; symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality that is at once Mitsein and separation; and this explains that singular invention also has its place: in practice the psychoanalytical method must accept this whether or not doctrine authorizes it. This approach enables us to understand, for example, the value generally given to the penis.6 It is impossible to account for this without starting from an existential fact: the subject’s tendency toward alienation; the anxiety of his freedom leads the subject to search for himself in things, which is a way to flee from himself; it is so fundamental a tendency that as soon as he is weaned and separated from the Whole, the infant endeavors to grasp his alienated existence in the mirror, in his parents’ gaze. Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  On one important point, however, Paul does stand in agreement with the early Gospel accounts: those who initially came to understand that God had raised Jesus from the dead were some of Jesus' closest followers, who had associated with him during his lifetime. It is probably safe to say that all of these fol- lowers had accepted Jesus' basic apocalyptic mes- sage while he was still alive. Otherwise they would not have followed him. Thus, the first persons to believe in Jesus' resurrection would have been apocalyptically minded Jews. For them, Jesus' res- urrection was not a miracle that some other holy person had performed on his behalf. Jesus' follow- ers believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead. Moreover, he had not been raised for a brief period of time, only to die a second time. Jesus had been raised from the dead never to die again. What conclusions would be drawn by these Jewish apocalypticists, the earliest Christians? We have already seen that apocalypticists believed that at the end of this age the powers of evil would be destroyed. These powers included the devil, his demons, and the cosmic forces aligned with them, the forces of sin and death. When these powers were destroyed, there would be a resurrec- tion of the dead, in which the good would receive an eternal reward and the evil would face eternal punishment. Many Jewish apocalypticists, like Jesus himself, believed that this end would be brought by one specially chosen by God and sent from heaven as a cosmic judge of the earth. Given this basic apocalyptic scenario, there is little doubt as to low the first persons who believed in Jesus' resurrection would have interpreted the event. Since the resur- rection of the dead was to come at the end of the age and since somebody had now been raised (as they believed), then the end must have already begun. It had begun with the resurrection of a par- ticular person, the great teacher and holy man Jesus, who had overcome death, the greatest of the cosmic powers aligned against God. Thus, Jesus was the personal agent through whom God had decided to defeat the forces of evil. He had been exalted to heaven, where he now lived until he would return to finish God's work. For this reason, people were to repent and await his second coming. Sometime after Jesus' resurrection--it is im- possible to say how soon (since our sources were written decades later)--these earliest apocalyptic believers began to say things about Jesus that reflected their belief in who he was now that he had been raised.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  And thus the assertion of the defenders of the political structure that, if the violence of the state be abolished, the evil men will rule over the good, not only does not prove that this (the ruling of the bad over the good) is dangerous, for it is precisely what is taking place now, but, on the contrary, proves that the violence of the state, which gives the bad a chance to rule over the good, is the very evil which it is desirable to destroy, and which is continuously destroyed by life itself. "But even if it were true that the violence of the state will come to an end when those who are in power shall become Christian enough to renounce the power of their own choice, and there shall no longer be found any men who are prepared to take their places, and if it is true that this process is taking place," say the defenders of the existing order, "when will that be? If eighteen hundred years have passed and there are still so many volunteers who are ready to rule, and so few who are ready to submit, there is no probability that this will happen very soon, or ever at all. "If there are, as there have been among all men, such as prefer to refuse power rather than to use it, the supply of men who prefer ruling to submitting is so great that it is hard to imagine the time when it shall be exhausted. "For this process of the Christianization of all men to take place, for all men one after another to pass over from the pagan concept of life to the Christian, and voluntarily renounce power and wealth, and for no one to desire to make use of them, it is necessary that not only all those rude, semisavage men, who are entirely incapable of adopting Christianity and following it, and of whom there are always such a great number amidst every Christian society, but also all savage and non-Christian nations in general, of whom there are so many outside the Christian society, should be made Christian. And so, even if we admit that the process of Christianization will some day be accomplished in the case of all men, we must assume, judging from how much the matter has advanced in eighteen hundred years, that this will happen in several times eighteen hundred years,—and so it is impossible and useless to think now of the impossible abolition of power, and all we should think of is that the power should be vested in the best of hands." Thus retort the defenders of the existing order. And this reflection would be quite correct if the transition of men from one concept of life to another took place only by force of the one process where every man learns individually and one after another by experience the vanity of power, and by an inner way reaches the Christian truths.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Sexuality certainly plays a considerable role in human life: it could be said to penetrate it completely; physiology has already demonstrated how the activity of testes and ovaries is intermixed with that of the soma. The existent is a sexed body; in its relations with other existents that are also sexed bodies, sexuality is thus always involved; but as the body and sexuality are concrete expressions of existence, it is also from here that their significance can be ascertained: without this perspective, psychoanalysis takes unexplained facts for granted. For example, a young girl is said to be “ashamed” of urinating in a squatting position, with her bottom exposed; but what is shame? Likewise, before asking if the male is proud because he has a penis or if his penis is the expression of his pride, we need to know what pride is and how the subject’s aspirations can be embodied in an object. Sexuality must not be taken as an irreducible given; the existent possesses a more primary “quest for being”; sexuality is only one of these aspects. Sartre demonstrates this in Being and Nothingness; Bachelard also says it in his works on Earth, Air, and Water: psychoanalysts believe that man’s quintessential truth lies in his relation to his own body and that of others like him within society; but man has a primordial interest in the substance of the natural world surrounding him that he attempts to discover in work, play, and all experiences of the “dynamic imagination”; man seeks to connect concretely with existence through the whole world, grasped in all possible ways. Working the soil and digging a hole are activities as primal as an embrace or coitus: it is an error to see them only as sexual symbols; a hole, slime, a gash, hardness, and wholeness are primary realities; man’s interest in them is not dictated by libido; instead, the libido will be influenced by the way these realities were revealed to him. Man is not fascinated by wholeness because it symbolizes feminine virginity: rather, his love for wholeness makes virginity precious. Work, war, play, and art define ways of being in the world that cannot be reduced to any others; they bring to light features that impinge on those that sexuality reveals; it is both through them and through these erotic experiences that the individual chooses himself. But only an ontological point of view can restore the unity of this choice.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  The temptations of power and of everything which it gives, of wealth, honours, luxurious life, present themselves as a worthy aim for the activity of men only so long as the power is not attained; but the moment a man attains it, they reveal their emptiness and slowly lose their force of attraction, like clouds, which have form and beauty only from a distance: one needs but enter them, in order that that which seemed beautiful in them should disappear. Men who have attained power and wealth, frequently the very men who have gained them, more frequently their descendants, stop being so anxious for power and so cruel in attaining it. Having through experience, under the influence of Christianity, learned the vanity of the fruits of violence, men, at times in one, at others in a few generations, lose those vices which are evoked by the passion for power and wealth, and, becoming less cruel, do not hold their position, and are pushed out of power by other, less Christian, more evil men, and return to strata of society lower in position, but higher in morality, increasing the average of the Christian consciousness of all men. But immediately after them other, worse, coarser, less Christian elements of society rise to the top, again are subjected to the same process as their predecessors, and again in one or a few generations, having experienced the vanity of the fruits of violence and being permeated by Christianity, descend to the level of the violated, and again make place for new, less coarse violators than the preceding ones, but coarser than those whom they oppress. Thus, despite the fact that the power remains externally the same that it was, there is with every change of men in power a greater increase in the number of men who by experience are brought to the necessity of accepting the Christian life-conception, and with every change the coarsest, most cruel, and least Christian of all enter into the possession of the power, but they are such as are constantly less coarse and cruel and more Christian than their predecessors. Violence selects and attracts the worst elements of society, works them over, and, improving and softening them, returns them to society. Such is the process by means of which Christianity, in spite of the violence which is exercised by the power of the state and which impedes the forward movement of humanity, takes possession of men more and more. Christianity is penetrating into the consciousness of men, not only despite the violence exerted by the power, but even by means of it.

• From The Vagina Monologues (1998)

  The woman who ran the workshop saw my insane scrambling, sweating, and heavy breathing. She came over. I told her, “I’ve lost my clitoris. It’s gone. I shouldn’t have worn it swimming.” The woman who ran the workshop laughed. She calmly stroked my forehead. She told me my clitoris was not something I could lose. It was me, the essence of me. It was both the doorbell to my house and the house itself. I didn’t have to find it. I had to be it. Be it. Be my clitoris. Be my clitoris. I lay back and closed my eyes. I put the mirror down. I watched myself float above myself. I watched as I slowly began to approach myself and reenter. I felt like an astronaut reentering the atmosphere of the earth. It was very quiet, this reentry: quiet and gentle. I bounced and landed, landed and bounced. I came into my own muscles and blood and cells and then I just slid into my vagina. It was suddenly easy and I fit. I was all warm and pulsing and ready and young and alive. And then, without looking, with my eyes still closed, I put my finger on what had suddenly become me. There was a little quivering at first, which urged me to stay. Then the quivering became a quake, an eruption, the layers dividing and subdividing. The quaking broke open into an ancient horizon of light and silence, which opened onto a plane of music and colors and innocence and longing, and I felt connection, calling connection as I lay there thrashing about on my little blue mat. My vagina is a shell, a tulip, and a destiny. I am arriving as I am beginning to leave. My vagina, my vagina, me. VAGINA FACT“The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That’s a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else in the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice…twice…twice the number in the penis. Who needs a handgun when you’ve got a semiautomatic.” —from Woman: An Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier