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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 1: A better man, through being better, is more lovable; but through having more perfect charity, loves more. He loves more, however, in proportion to the person he loves. For a better man does not love that which is beneath him less than it ought to be loved: whereas he who is less good fails to love one who is better, as much as he ought to be loved. Reply to Objection 2: As the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii, 8), “men wish to be loved in as much as they wish to be honored.” For just as honor is bestowed on a man in order to bear witness to the good which is in him, so by being loved a man is shown to have some good, since good alone is lovable. Accordingly men seek to be loved and to be honored, for the sake of something else, viz. to make known the good which is in the person loved. On the other hand, those who have charity seek to love for the sake of loving, as though this were itself the good of charity, even as the act of any virtue is that virtue’s good. Hence it is more proper to charity to wish to love than to wish to be loved. Reply to Objection 3: Some love on account of being loved, not so that to be loved is the end of their loving, but because it is a kind of way leading a man to love. Whether to love considered as an act of charity is the same as goodwill?Objection 1: It would seem that to love, considered as an act of charity, is nothing else than goodwill. For the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 4) that “to love is to wish a person well”; and this is goodwill. Therefore the act of charity is nothing but goodwill. Objection 2: Further, the act belongs to the same subject as the habit. Now the habit of charity is in the power of the will, as stated above ([2571]Q[24], A[1]). Therefore the act of charity is also an act of the will. But it tends to good only, and this is goodwill. Therefore the act of charity is nothing else than goodwill. Objection 3: Further, the Philosopher reckons five things pertaining to friendship (Ethic. ix, 4), the first of which is that a man should wish his friend well; the second, that he should wish him to be and to live; the third, that he should take pleasure in his company; the fourth, that he should make choice of the same things; the fifth, that he should grieve and rejoice with him. Now the first two pertain to goodwill. Therefore goodwill is the first act of charity.

• From How Propaganda Works (2015)

  My father does not solve the difficult problem of distinguishing legitimate versus illegitimate deference to experts, of drawing on knowledge without being subordinate to it. But he is clear about the dangers of technicist culture.4 Technicism was a central mechanism liberal democracies employed when the illegitimate subordination of others took place. For example, it is the mechanism so ably described by Khalil Muhammad in his work on the role social science played in the first half of the twentieth century in the subordination of American citizens of African descent.5 Muhammad there shows how social scientists convinced of their own objectivity used statistical methods to give an objective covering to racial bias. Patricia Hill Collins has drawn our attention to the way that “knowledge validation processes” that privilege quantitative methods also obstruct our access to social reality: “[i]individual African-American women’s narratives about being single mothers are often rendered invisible in quantitative research methodologies that erase individuality in favor of proving patterns of welfare abuse.”6 Even if statistics are accurate, they nevertheless can serve a propagandistic role in domination and oppression, by obscuring the narratives that would explain them. This is a use of the ideals of scientific objectivity and the common good in pursuit of social control. In this book, I define political propaganda as the employment of a political ideal against itself. Someone who presents subjective values, or self-interested goals, as the embodiment of objective scientific ideals is therefore producing paradigm examples of propaganda. My father’s academic work is thus clearly a large influence on my own. In sociology and democratic theory, the mid-1980s included the great German political theorist Jürgen Habermas’s universal pragmatics turn. Habermas sought to describe the ideal speech conditions for democratic deliberation, and turned to analytic philosophy of language for help. Heading to my freshman year at the State University of New York at Binghamton in the fall of 1986, I knew that I was going to study philosophy, and had the vague sense that the democratic project centrally involved the philosophy of language and Kant. Via a circuitous route, I was led to the intensive study of philosophy of language, logic, and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I earned my PhD in 1995.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Even the data that do exist in print are difficult to interpret as evidence of adaptationist views. For example, there is consistent evidence that females do not prefer the most “masculine” facial features, which have been characterized as prominent square jaws, wide prominent brows, thick eyebrows, and thin cheeks and lips. Numerous studies have shown that women instead prefer intermediate or even what some researchers call “feminine” facial features in men, and one study has shown that females prefer a light stubble over a more masculine full beard. According to a handful of disparate studies cited by Gangestad and Scheyd, these facial preferences seem consistent with the evidence on what women like to see in male bodies. They tend to like lean but somewhat muscular male bodies with broad shoulders and V-shaped torsos the most, and men with larger, more muscle-bound bodies the least. These findings create a conundrum for adaptationists because masculine features are proposed to be indicators of strength and dominance, which every right-thinking, fitness-pursuing female should prefer. Of course, one possible explanation for why masculine features exist despite the fact that women do not prefer them is that they evolved through male-male competition for mates and social status, rather than through female mate choice. Evolutionary psychologists have also proposed that females may prefer men with less masculine features because such features signify men who will make bigger parenting investments in their children. However, they never explain why high-testosterone males with broad brows and prominent jawbones would make bad dads. It is just seen as obvious. One reason evolutionary psychologists have so much trouble explaining away the apparent inconsistencies in female preferences is that they have drawn the concept of mating value too narrowly to capture the actual complexity of human mate choice. In a way, the very concept of mating value is a scientific expression of what cultural theorists have called the “male gaze”—a point of view that depicts women and women’s bodies solely as the object of male erotic pleasure and control. Indeed, evolutionary psychology investigations of female mating value are almost universally conducted by having young men actually gaze at computer-generated images of women’s faces and bodies. Is it really that surprising that the concept works so poorly as a tool to understand the sexual preferences of women? By reifying the male gaze as an adaptation, evolutionary psychology has enshrined sexist bias into human evolutionary biology, and notably failed to explain the mate preferences of the other half of the species.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Diversifying Your OpportunitiesCoach Neighbors made the choice to give his players an extra day off because he was trying to reduce injuries, but what came along with that was that his players were able to use that time to diversify their interests, skills, and opportunities. This is similar to what the ants are doing. The ants, by continuing to explore, are diversifying the portfolio of food sources for the colony. That diversification helps mitigate the effects of bad luck. If a food source dries up, they have other options already available to them. The power of diversification is, of course, well known in the investment world. Investors want a diversified portfolio for the same reason the ants do, to reduce the impact on their bottom line in case any one of their investments craters. That’s not just true for investors or ants. For any of us, having a diversified portfolio of interests, skills, and opportunities helps to protect us from uncertainty. If there were no uncertainty and you knew, for a fact, how everything would turn out, then you wouldn’t need to be diversified. Your food source would always be there for you, and it would always be the best one. One investment, the one certain to have the highest expected value, would be all you’d need in your portfolio. You’d only ever pick the best job and you’d never lose it. But, of course, that’s not the way the world actually is. And that’s why you want to take the call from the recruiter. Because that exploratory conversation might protect you in case the company you work for goes out of business, or there are layoffs, or you just decide that you don’t like your job anymore. Even though unintentional, having poker in my portfolio allowed me to have something to turn to when my academic career was put on hold. Having Flickr and Slack in his portfolio afforded Stewart Butterfield a quick recovery after Game Neverending and Glitch didn’t pan out. One of the goals for all of us should be to, as much as possible, maximize the diversification of interests, skills, and opportunities in each of our portfolios. There are all sorts of ways you can execute on that in your own life. For example, in your job, it’s a good idea to explore other functions by asking to participate in any onboardings or trainings that might be available to you, as long as that doesn’t have a negative effect on the work you’re primarily responsible for. Exploring those other functions benefits you in several ways. It will maximize the number of jobs that you’re qualified for and it allows you to sample other careers you might not have otherwise considered. Then, if your job goes away for some reason, you will have more things that you can move on to. Sometimes, you might discover that you like a different function better than the one you’re currently doing.

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  Now compare Wendy’s reaction to that of Brenda’s. Shortly after I met Brenda and her husband, Bill, also in their early thirties, Brenda admitted that if it were up to her, they would have sex once every four weeks or so. She said, “I need time between sexual encounters to feel charged up again.” To Brenda, this sexual downtime was not a problem. When Brenda and Bill made love, she thoroughly enjoyed it and had orgasms easily. She felt that Bill was a very good lover. Although Bill would have enjoyed more frequent sex, he was not particularly troubled by their lovemaking schedule. If Wendy and Brenda had taken a standardized questionnaire assessing low sexual desire that asked about their ages, the number of years they were married, health considerations, and the number of times they engaged in sex each week, Wendy would have passed with flying colors. Brenda, on the other hand, might have set the low-desire alarm ringing. Yet, Wendy, not Brenda, was the one whose life had been affected negatively by her level of desire. Although Brenda wasn’t the world’s most sexual person, Bill wasn’t either. That’s why, despite the fact that Brenda and Bill’s sex life was less active than that of most other couples their age, Brenda’s sex drive was not a problem. So, the first thing you should know about low sexual desire is that it really doesn’t matter what your friends or neighbors are doing or what it takes for other people to feel sexually satisfied. It’s not about statistics. It’s about you and your spouse. If you think there’s a problem, there’s a problem. If your spouse is unhappy, there’s a problem. Even if you’re okay without sex, if your spouse is miserable and you want to stay married, you’ve got a problem. You don’t need to know much more than that. So throw away your surveys. Stop looking for validation. Time to turn up the heat in your relationship. I assume that my telling you to become more proactive if you’re unhappy makes perfect sense to you, but my second piece of advice—that whether you’re concerned about your low desire or not, you take your spouse’s feelings into account—may not be as easy to digest. After all, decisions about your own sexuality are so personal, they should be based strictly on your own feelings and needs, right? It’s your body. If you’re not in the mood, you’re not in the mood. Is that how you have been thinking about all of this? If so, fasten your seat belt because I’m going to whisk you away from this kind of thinking as quickly as possible.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  To reduce the orthodox commitment to free will to an adjunct of zealous heresy hunting is to miss the fact that these conversations were part of a much wider fascination with cosmology and the essence of human freedom. Cosmological speculation was the formative crucible of a new concept of the will, and not just for Christians. It is also easy to miss the centrality of sexual ethics to the development of a novel model of moral agency. Sex represented a domain of action uncannily suited for debates over the causation of human behavior. Sexual morality not only became a standard paradigm, almost instantly evoked in debates over the will. The peculiar characteristics of sexuality—at once so externally determined and so existentially consequential—drove the terms of the discussion about human agency. In the process, the sex drive became the core feature of human identity, tensed between a robust sense of human freedom and our deep embeddedness in the world. In a provocative recent study, Michael Frede attributes the invention of the concept of free will to the Stoic Epictetus. There is certainly a case to be made for the former slave who would become the most important thinker in the Stoic tradition during the Roman period. In the notes of Epictetus’s teaching that have come down to us, questions about “what is in our control” and the freedom of our internal “will” loom larger than ever before. The tensions inherent in Stoic determinism—which held that the purely materialistic universe unfolded from the moment of its creation through an unbroken chain of causes—had been an open problem since the Hellenistic period. The compatibilist theories of the great Stoic Chrysippus held the field for nearly three centuries. Although Epictetus follows Chrysippus, the dynamics of freedom are far more pronounced in the Roman Stoic. On the one hand, man was a creature of fate. The threads of his being were spun by Zeus and the Fates. Thus, much of life consisted of things “not under our control: the body, the parts of the body, possessions, parents, brothers, children, country.” Epictetus was far more interested in the one faculty absolutely “under our control”: our “will and all the acts of the will.” Man always retained the power of the will, if he “cared” for it. Epictetus’s “chief care” was to make his will “free.”61

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

  The Soul’s Comfort, which appeared in 16 editions,1474–1523,1252 takes up the 10 Commandments, 7 sacraments, 8 Beatitudes, 6 works of mercy, the 7 spiritual gifts, 7 mortal sins and 7 cardinal virtues and "what God further thinks me worthy of knowing." Most useful as this little book was adapted to be, it sometimes states truth under strange forms, as when it tells of a man whose soul after death was found, not in his body but in his money-chest and of a girl who, while dancing on Friday, was violently struck by the devil but recovered on giving her promise to amend her ways. The Path to Heaven contains 52 chapters. The first two set forth faith and hope, the joys of the elect and the pains of the lost and it closes with 4 chapters describing a holy death, the devil’s modes of tempting the dying and questions which are to be put to sick people. Dietrich Kolde’s Mirror of a Christian Man, one of the most popular of the manuals, in the first two of its 46 chapters, took up the Apostles’ Creed and, in the last, the marks of a good Christian man. The first edition appeared before 1476; the 23d at Delfft,1518.1253 Many of the manuals expressly set forth the value of the family religion and call upon parents to teach their children the Creed, the 10 Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, to have them pray morning and evening and to take them to church to hear the mass and preaching. The Soul’s Guide says, "The Christian home should be the first school for young children and their first church." The Path to Heaven,1254 written by Stephen von Landskron or Lanzkranna, dean of Vienna, d. 1477, presents a very attractive picture of a Christian household. As a model for imitation, the head of a family is represented as going to church with his wife, children and servants every Sunday and listening to the preaching. On returning home, he reviews the subject of the sermon and hears them recite the Commandments, Lord’s Prayer and Creed and the 7 mortal sins. Then, after he has refreshed himself with a draught, Trinklein, they sing a song to God or Mary or to one of the saints. The Soul’s Comfort counsels parents to examine their households about the articles of faith and the precepts the children had learned at school and at church. The Table of a Christian Life1255 urges the parents to keep their children off the streets, send them to school, making a selection of their teachers and, above all, to live well themselves and "go before" their children in the practice of all the virtues. Of the penitential books, designed distinctly as manuals of preparation for the confessional, the work of John Wolff is the most elaborate and noteworthy. This good man, who was chaplain at St. Peter’s, Frankfurt, wrote his book 1478.1256 He was deeply interested in the impartation of religious instruction.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  If, from the earliest age, the little girl were raised with the same demands and honors, the same severity and freedom, as her brothers, taking part in the same studies and games, promised the same future, surrounded by women and men who are unambiguously equal to her, the meanings of the “castration complex” and the “Oedipus complex” would be profoundly modified. The mother would enjoy the same lasting prestige as the father if she assumed equal material and moral responsibility for the couple; the child would feel an androgynous world around her and not a masculine world; were she more affectively attracted to her father—which is not even certain—her love for him would be nuanced by a will to emulate him and not a feeling of weakness: she would not turn to passivity; if she were allowed to prove her worth in work and sports, actively rivaling boys, the absence of a penis—compensated for by the promise of a child—would not suffice to cause an “inferiority complex”; correlatively, the boy would not have a natural “superiority complex” if it were not instilled in him and if he held women in the same esteem as men.3 The little girl would not seek sterile compensations in narcissism and dreams, she would not take herself as given, she would be interested in what she does, she would throw herself into her pursuits. I have said how much easier puberty would be if she surpassed it, like the boy, toward a free adult future; menstruation horrifies her only because it signifies a brutal descent into femininity; she would also assume her youthful eroticism more peacefully if she did not feel a frightening disgust for the rest of her destiny; a coherent sexual education would greatly help her to surmount this crisis. And thanks to coeducation, the august mystery of Man would have no occasion to arise: it would be killed by everyday familiarity and open competition. Objections to this system always imply respect for sexual taboos; but it is useless to try to inhibit curiosity and pleasure in children; this only results in creating repression, obsessions, and neuroses; exalted sentimentality, homosexual fervor, and the platonic passions of adolescent girls along with the whole procession of nonsense and dissipation are far more harmful than a few childish games and actual experiences. What would really be profitable for the young girl is that, not seeking in the male a demigod—but only a pal, a friend, a partner—she not be diverted from assuming her own existence; eroticism and love would be a free surpassing and not a resignation; she could experience them in a relationship of equal to equal. Of course, there is no question of writing off all the difficulties a child must overcome to become an adult; the most intelligent, tolerant education could not free her from having her own experiences at her own expense; what one would want is that obstacles should not accumulate gratuitously on her path. It is already an improvement that “depraved” little girls are no longer cauterized with red-hot irons; psychoanalysis has enlightened parents somewhat; yet the conditions in which woman’s sexual education and initiation take place today are so deplorable that none of the objections to the idea of a radical change are valid. It is not a question of abolishing the contingencies and miseries of the human condition in her but of giving her the means to go beyond them.

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

  "But why should we wage war?" asked the elder. "How can we permit France to manage our affairs?" "But you say yourself that things are better arranged with them than with us," the elder said, quite seriously. "Let them arrange matters in our country, too." My friend told me that this reflection so startled him that he was absolutely at a loss what to say, and only laughed, as laugh those who awaken from a deceptive dream. Such reflections one may hear from any sober Russian labouring man, if only he is not under any hypnotic influence of the government. They talk of the love of the Russian masses for their faith, their Tsar, and their government, and yet there will not be found one commune of peasants in the whole of Russia, which would hesitate for a moment, which of the two places to choose for its colonization,—Russia, with the Tsar, the little father, as they write in books, and with the holy Orthodox faith in its adored country, but with less and worse land, or without the little father, the white Tsar, and without the Orthodox faith, somewhere outside of Russia, in Prussia, China, Turkey, Austria, but with some greater and better advantages, as indeed we have seen before and see at present. For every Russian peasant the question as to what government he will be under (since he knows that, no matter under what government he may be, he will be fleeced just the same) has incomparably less meaning than the question as to whether, I will not say the water is good, but as to whether the clay is soft and as to whether there will be a good crop of cabbage. But it may be thought that the indifference of the Russians is due to this, that any other government under whose power they may come will certainly be better than the Russian, because in Europe there is not one that is worse than the Russian; but that is not so: so far as I know, we have seen the same in the case of the English, Dutch, German immigrants in America, and of all the other colonists in Russia. The transference of the European nations from the power of one government to another, from the Turkish to the Austrian, or from the French to the German, changes the condition of the nations so little that in no case can they provoke the dissatisfaction of the working classes, so long as they are not artificially subjected to the suggestions of the governments and the ruling classes.

• From The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

  The urge to respect hierarchical relationships is so deep that many languages encode it directly. In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they’ll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn’t embed status into verb conjugations, embeds it elsewhere. Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones), whereas intimates and subordinates were called by first name. If you’ve ever felt a flash of distaste when a salesperson called you by first name without being invited to do so, or if you felt a pang of awkwardness when an older person you have long revered asked you to call him by first name, then you have experienced the activation of some of the modules that comprise the Authority/subversion foundation. The obvious way to begin thinking about the evolution of the Authority foundation is to consider the pecking orders and dominance hierarchies of chickens, dogs, chimpanzees, and so many other species that live in groups. The displays made by low-ranking individuals are often similar across species because their function is always the same—to appear submissive, which means small and nonthreatening. The failure to detect signs of dominance and then to respond accordingly often results in a beating. So far this doesn’t sound like a promising origin story for a “moral” foundation; it sounds like the origin of oppression of the weak by the powerful. But authority should not be confused with power.28 Even among chimpanzees, where dominance hierarchies are indeed about raw power and the ability to inflict violence, the alpha male performs some socially beneficial functions, such as taking on the “control role.”29 He resolves some disputes and suppresses much of the violent conflict that erupts when there is no clear alpha male. As the primatologist Frans de Waal puts it: “Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree.”30 This control role is quite visible in human tribes and early civilizations. Many of the earliest legal texts begin by grounding the king’s rule in divine choice, and then they dedicate the king’s authority to providing order and justice. The very first sentence of the Code of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BCE) includes this clause: “Then Anu and Bel [two gods] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.”31

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (1976)

  The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation. For centuries, the truth of sex was, at least for the most part, caught up in this discursive form. Moreover, this form was not the same as that of education (sexual education confined itself to general principles and rules of prudence); nor was it that of initiation (which remained essentially a silent practice, which the act of sexual enlightenment or deflowering merely rendered laughable or violent). As we have seen, it is a form that is far removed from the one governing the “erotic art.” By virtue of the power structure immanent in it, the confessional discourse cannot come from above, as in the ars erotica, through the sovereign will of a master, but rather from below, as an obligatory act of speech which, under some imperious compulsion, breaks the bonds of discretion or forgetfulness. What secrecy it presupposes is not owing to the high price of what it has to say and the small number of those who are worthy of its benefits, but to its obscure familiarity and its general baseness. Its veracity is not guaranteed by the lofty authority of the magistery, nor by the tradition it transmits, but by the bond, the basic intimacy in discourse, between the one who speaks and what he is speaking about. On the other hand, the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not supposed to know. And this discourse of truth finally takes effect, not in the one who receives it, but in the one from whom it is wrested. With these confessed truths, we are a long way from the learned initiations into pleasure, with their technique and their mystery. On the other hand, we belong to a society which has ordered sex’s difficult knowledge, not according to the transmission of secrets, but around the slow surfacing of confidential statements.

• From Goddesses in Everywoman

  14. The Heroine in Everywoman There is a potential heroine in everywoman. She is the leading lady in her own life story on a journey that begins at her birth and continues through her lifetime. As she travels on her particular path, she will undoubtedly encounter suffering; feel loneliness, vulnerability, uncertainty; and know limitations. She also may find meaning, develop character, experience love and grace, and learn wisdom. She is shaped by her choices, by her capacity for faith and love, by her ability to learn from experience and make commitments. When difficulties arise, if she assesses what she can do, decides what she will do, and behaves in ways consistent with her values and feelings, she is acting as the heroine-protagonist of her own myth. Although life is full of unchosen circumstances, there are always moments of decision, nodal points that decide events or alter character. To be a heroine on her own heroic journey, a woman must begin with the attitude (or even at first act “as if”) that her choices do matter. In the process of living from this premise, something happens: a woman becomes a choicemaker, a heroine who shapes who she will become. She either grows or is diminished by what she does or does not do and by the attitudes she holds. My patients have taught me that it is not just what happened to them that shaped who they are, but what happened in them that made the difference. What they felt and how they reacted inwardly and outwardly determined who they became, much more than the degree of adversity they encountered. For example, I have met people who survived childhoods full of deprivation, cruelty, beatings, or sexual abuse. Moreover, they did not become (as might be expected) like the adults who abused them. Despite all the bad they experienced, they felt compassion for others, both then as well as now. Traumatic experience left its mark; they were not unscathed, yet an essence of trust, a capacity to love and hope, a sense of self survived. As I surmised why, I began to understand the difference between heroine and victim. As children, each of these people somehow saw themselves as protagonists in a terrible drama. Each had an inner myth, a fantasy life, or imaginary companions. A daughter who was beaten and humiliated by her abusive father, and was not protected by her depressed mother, recalled telling herself when she was child that she was not related to this uneducated, backwoods family, that she was really a princess who was being tested by these ordeals. Another beaten and sexually molested child, who as an adult did not fit into the mold (that battered children eventually batter their children), escaped into a vivid fantasy life where life was far different. A third thought of herself as a warrior. These children thought ahead and planned how they could escape their families when they were old enough. They chose how they would react in the meantime.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  It’s true that one sees the theme of virginity, in the strict sense, emerge little by little from a prescription of sexual abstinence that is recommended to everyone with a varying intensity, without being obligatory for anyone. But if it emerges from that, it also differentiates itself from it. Because the continence principle does have the negative form of a rule or at least a general recommendation, whereas virginity, as Methodius of Olympus’s dialogue already shows, designates a positive and complex experience, which is reserved for a few and takes the form of a choice. A choice that doesn’t involve just one aspect of human behavior but all of life, and which is capable of transfiguring it. From continence to virginity, a negative and general recommendation is turned into a positive and particular experience. The virginity mystique is connected with a conception of the history of the world and the metahistory of salvation. An important change relative to an ancient perspective: in effect, the latter linked sexual relations, desire, and procreation to the natural world, of which they were a component. Clement of Alexandria remained faithful to this vision by establishing a whole set of close relations between procreation and Creation. But with the theme of paradisiacal virginity, one sees a break assert itself between Creation and procreation—a break enabling sexual activity to play a role in the history of the world: its purpose is to prevent death from completely triumphing; it has to populate the earth, before disappearing in its turn when, with the Incarnation, the time of redemption has come. The age of virginity, which is also that of the world’s completion, brings to an end a time when the Law, death, and the union of the sexes were linked to one another. And the practice of virginity thus assumes a completely different meaning from that of the relations between individual abstinence and the mechanisms of nature. Finally, the mystique of virginity [introduced into the domain of acts]*2 a caesura that projects in the form of spiritual figures a set of movements, unions, ties, and generations that correspond term by term to sexual desires, acts, and relations. The valorization of virginity is therefore something very different and much more than the pure and simple disqualification or prohibition of sexual relations. It involves a substantial valorization of the individual’s relation to their own sexual conduct, since it makes this relation a positive experience, which has a historical, metahistorical, and spiritual meaning. To make things quite clear: it is not a matter of saying that there was a positive valorization of the sexual act in Christianity. But the negative value that was clearly attributed to it is part of an ensemble that gives the relation of the subject to their sexual activity an importance which Greek or Roman morality would never have dreamed of. The central place of sex in Western subjectivity is clearly marked by the formation of this mystique of virginity.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  These asymmetrical positions cannot be understood to follow from the “nature” of men or women, for, as Beauvoir established, no such “nature” exists: “One must understand that men are not born with a faculty for the universal and that women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics.” 34 Although Irigaray argues that “the subject is always already masculine,” Wittig disputes the notion that “the subject” is exclusively masculine territory. The very plasticity of language, for her, resists the fixing of the subject position as masculine. Indeed, the presumption of an absolute speaking subject is, for Wittig, the political goal for “women,” which, if achieved, will effectively dissolve the category of “women” altogether. A woman cannot use the first person “I” because as a woman, the speaker is “particular” (relative, interested, perspectival), and the invocation of the “I” presumes the capacity to speak for and as the universal human: “a relative subject is inconceivable, a relative subject could not speak at all.” 35 Relying on the assumption that all speaking presupposes and implicitly invokes the entirety of language, Wittig describes the speaking subject as one who, in the act of saying “I,” “reappropriates language as a whole, proceeding from oneself alone, with the power to use all language.” This absolute grounding of the speaking “I” assumes god-like dimensions within Wittig’s discussion. This privilege to speak “I” establishes a sovereign self, a center of absolute plenitude and power; speaking establishes “the supreme act of subjectivity.” This coming into subjectivity is the effective overthrow of sex and, hence, the feminine: “no woman can say I without being for herself a total subject—that is, ungendered, universal, whole.” 36 Wittig continues with a startling speculation on the nature of language and “being” that situates her own political project within the traditional discourse of ontotheology. In her view, the primary ontology of language gives every person the same opportunity to establish subjectivity. The practical task that women face in trying to establish subjectivity through speech depends on their collective ability to cast off the reifications of sex imposed on them which deform them as partial or relative beings. Since this discarding follows upon the exercise of a full invocation of “I,” women speak their way out of their gender. The social reifications of sex can be understood to mask or distort a prior ontological reality, that reality being the equal opportunity of all persons, prior to the marking by sex, to exercise language in the assertion of subjectivity. In speaking, the “I” assumes the totality of language and, hence, speaks potentially from all positions—that is, in a universal mode.

• From The Work of Theology (2015)

  In the letter to Bethge that accompanied this poem, Bonhoeffer distanced himself from those who stressed the importance of introspection for discovering “who we really are.” He had little use for such inwardness because he thought the creation of an “inner domain,” a space hidden from view, to be a strategy to displace God from the world by creating a sphere of the “personal,” “the inner,” or “the private” where God might still be found.29 Michael Northcott, however, argues that Bonhoeffer is not critiquing all appeals to “inwardness,” but reconfiguring what the “inner” entails by employing liturgical forms such as the lament psalms to exemplify the language of the heart.30 Northcott’s insight is confirmed by the last line of the poem, which suggests that Bonhoeffer did not think, apart from God, we have the means to know the truth about ourselves. As Northcott observes, Bonhoeffer believed that we only acquire a true narrative of the self through incorporation into the body of Christ. That is why in the poem there is a balance or even a tension between the account of the self as that “which other men tell of” and “what I know of myself.” “Any lack of fit between these two is not so much resolved as set in perspective by the concluding recognition ‘O God, I am thine.’ ”31 That recognition, that is, the recognition that we are God’s even more than we are ourselves, comes through spiritual disciplines that make possible an ownership of our lives in such a manner that we are left with nothing to hide from God and even from ourselves. To have nothing to hide is the condition that most nearly makes possible the correspondence between what we do and who we are. Where Has This Gotten Us? Above I stressed MacIntyre’s contention that a narrative history is required for an account of human agency. That claim I take to be but an implication of the point that intelligible action is a more basic concept than action. I should like to think what I have done in this essay supports that contention. But if that is right, the problem then becomes what genre best exemplifies or expresses that crucial insight. The contrast between MacIntyre’s J and my account of Bonhoeffer was meant to highlight that question, but the challenge remains to create the kind of reflection that not only formally helps us see the intrinsic relation between agents and action but practically helps us to be what we see. Of course it is not simply a matter of reflection. If our agency is determined by our character and our character names the habits and virtues that make our lives our own, then questions of formation cannot be avoided.

• From An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)

  All such views of Christianity imply that there is no sufficient body of historical proof to interfere with, or at least to prevail against, any number whatever of free and independent hypotheses concerning it. But this surely is not self-evident, and has itself to be proved. Till positive reasons grounded on facts are adduced to the contrary, the most natural hypotheses, the most agreeable to our mode of proceeding in parallel cases, and that which takes precedence of all others, is to consider that the society of Christians, which the Apostles left on earth, were of that religion to which the Apostles had converted them; that the external continuity of name, profession, and communion, argues a real continuity of doctrine; that, as Christianity began by manifesting itself as of a certain shape and bearing to all mankind, therefore it went on so to manifest itself; and that the more, considering that prophecy had already determined that it was to be a power visible in the world and sovereign over it, characters which are accurately fulfilled in that historical Christianity to which we commonly give the name. It is not a violent assumption, then, but rather mere abstinence from the wanton admission of a principle which would necessarily lead to the most vexatious and preposterous scepticism, to take it for granted, before proof to the contrary, that the Christianity of the second, fourth, seventh, twelfth, sixteenth, and intermediate centuries is in its substance the very religion which Christ and His Apostles taught in the first, whatever may be the modifications for good or for evil which lapse of years, or the vicissitudes of human affairs, have impressed upon it. Of course I do not deny the abstract possibility of extreme changes. The substitution is certainly, in idea, supposable of a counterfeit Christianity,--superseding the original, by means of the adroit innovations of seasons, places, and persons, till, according to the familiar illustration, the "blade" and the "handle" are alternately renewed, and identity is lost without the loss of continuity. It is possible; but it must not be assumed. The _onus probandi_ is with those who assert what it is unnatural to expect; to be just able to doubt is no warrant for disbelieving. 4.

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

  Chr. H. Sixt: Petrus Paulus Vergerius, päpstlicher Nuntius, katholischer Bischof und Vorkämpfer des Evangeliums. Braunschweig, 1855 (pp. 601). With a picture of Vergerius. 2d (title) ed. 1871. The labors in the Grisons are described in ch. III. 181 sqq.—Scattered notices of Vergerius are found in Sleidan, Seckendorf, De Porta, Sarpi, Pallavicini, Raynaldus, Maimburg, Bayle, Niceron, Schelhorn, Salig, and Meyer (in his monograph on Locarno. I. 36, 51; II. 236–255). A good article by Schott in Herzog2, XVI. 351–357. (Less eulogistic than Sixt.) The evangelical Reformation spread in the Italian portions of the Grisons; namely, the valleys of Pregell or Bregaglia,231 and Poschiavo (Puschlav), which still belong to the Canton, and in the dependencies of the Valtellina (Veltlin), Bormio (Worms), and Chiavenna (Cleven), which were ruled by governors (like the Territories of the United States), but were lost to the Grisons in 1797. The Valtellina is famous for its luxuriant vegetation, fiery wine, and culture of silk. A Protestant congregation was also organized at Locarno in the Canton Ticino (Tessin), which then was a dependency of the Swiss Confederacy. This Italian chapter of the history of Swiss Protestantism is closely connected with the rise and suppression of the Reformation in Italy and the emigration of many Protestant confessors, who, like the French Huguenots of a later period, were driven from their native land, to enrich with their industry and virtue foreign countries where they found a hospitable home. The first impulse to the Reformation in the Italian Grisons came from Gallicius and Campell, who labored in the neighboring Engadin, and knew Italian as well as Romansh. The chief agents were Protestant refugees who fled from the Inquisition to Northern Italy and found protection under the government of the Grisons. Many of them settled there permanently; others went to Zürich, Basel, and Geneva. In the year 1550 the number of Italian refugees was about two hundred. Before 1559 the number had increased to eight hundred. One fourth or fifth of them were educated men. Some inclined to Unitarian and Anabaptist opinions, and prepared the way for Socinianism. Among the latter may be mentioned Francesco Calabrese (in the Engadin); Tiriano (at Coire); Camillo Renato, a forerunner of Socinianism (at Tirano in the Valtellina); Ochino, the famous Capuchin pulpit orator (who afterwards went to Geneva, England, and Zürich); Lelio Sozini (who died at Zürich, 1562); and his more famous nephew, Fausto Sozini (1539–1604), the proper founder of Socinianism, who ended his life in Poland. The most distinguished of the Italian evangelists in the Grisons, is Petrus Paulus Vergerius (1498–1565).232 He labored there four years (1549–1553), and left some permanent traces of his influence. He ranks among the secondary Reformers, and is an interesting but somewhat ambiguous and unsatisfactory character, with a changeful career. He held one of the highest positions at the papal court, and became one of its most decided opponents.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  “Now the reason why all those whom we have mentioned hold false opinions or make impious or ignorant assertions about God appears to be nothing else but this,” Origen explains, “that scripture is not understood in its spiritual sense, but is interpreted according to the bare letter” (IV. i, 2). Like all created being, and like the incarnate Christ himself, scripture, too, is tripartite, its levels of meaning corresponding to body or flesh (literal or historical meaning), soul (moral meaning), and spirit (its most profound and mystical meaning; IV. ii, 4). Mistakes accrue when one reads in only one way, or when one misreads a passage that should be read in another way. And even a spiritual reading will be incorrect unless it is guided by the apostolic teachings of Origen’s church. Origen does not discount or dismiss “bodily” meaning. After all, it was at this most empirical, this-worldly level that Christ became truly incarnate, and his church became known to the nations (IV. i, 6). The Bible is a book of history, containing “a record dealing with the visible creation, the formation of man and successive descendants, . . . stories of wars and conquerors” (IV. ii, 8). It holds many more passages that are both historically true and spiritually revelatory than ones “with purely spiritual meanings” (IV. iii, 4; passages of purely spiritual meaning do exist, however, IV. iii, 5). The “soulish” level of understanding is also very valuable, communicating important ethical teachings. (Origen points particularly to Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments, “useful quite apart from any spiritual interpretation,” IV. iii, 4.) But only the spiritual meaning unveils the mystery of salvation, only spirit can reveal that “Israel is a race of souls, and Jerusalem a city in heaven” (IV. iii, 8).11 Origen’s perspective from eternity cannot but foreshorten elements of earlier Christian tradition. Christ redeems from sin, but he does so not primarily by his incarnation as such nor by his death and bodily (though not fleshly) resurrection. “Sacrifice” as such is not the mechanism of, or prime metaphor for, salvation. Rather, Christ “saves” through his pedagogical function. He serves as a the ultimate example to believers of what soul absolutely untarnished by evil can accomplish in terms of intimacy with God (IV. iv, 4). “Death,” in Origen’s reckoning, also takes on metaphorical meaning, since the sinners who are now “subjected to death” are in essence immortal. So too “eternal fire” as sin’s punishment: this is actually the sinful soul’s self-torment, its own accusing conscience (II. x, 4). The “outer darkness” where sinners gnash their teeth is actually the darkness of deep ignorance (Mt 18.10; On First Principles II. x, 3). Scripture’s punitive language masks the self-reflexive quality of these torments. God himself, the perfect and loving teacher, disciplines; he does not “punish.”

• From The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (2008)

  Thus, for Feuerbach, ‘sexual love finally becomes one of the highest forms, if not the highest form, of the practice of his new religion’ (Engels, 1976: 29). Feuerbach’s sensualism was thus dismissed as cognitive, subjective and individualist. For Marx, the subject of the interchange between man and nature is the social collectivity which has a history and a specific form; it is not the individual sensuous being but the structured social collectivity within which individuals labour and reproduce (Hanfi, 1972). As many commentators have since observed, the break between Marxist materialism and Feuerbachian anthropology was never as clean and neat as Engels wanted to suggest; furthermore, the break between Marx and Feuerbach diminished Marxism by eliminating any conception of people as sensual, emotional beings, as entities which paradoxically have bodies and are bodies. Marx’s concept of praxis and dialectic as the solution to the mind/body dichotomy as expressed in the sterile opposition between mechanical materialism and active idealism, grew out of Feuerbach’s project to liquidate the rationalist prejudice of Cartesianism which suppressed the emotional and passionate dimension of human existence. There is something odd in the view that Feuerbach’s solution to the alienation of human essence in abstract theology was merely cognitive, given Feuerbach’s view that thinking and experiencing are united in sensuous practices. In part, this rejection of Feuerbach can be associated with an implicit asceticism, particularly in Engels, which rejected any argument in favour of the centrality of desire in human relationships as an example of the decadent utopianism of Charles Fourier (Beecher and Bienvenu, 1972). The idea that any revolutionary reconstruction of society would also have to entail a fulfilment or enhancement of human sensual satisfaction, particularly sexual enjoyment, largely disappeared from later Marxism: revolutionary asceticism became opposed to bourgeois corpulence (Schmidt, 1971). The body, to employ an Althusserian metaphor, ceased to be an object of Marxism’s theoretical labour. The principal exception to this observation can be found in the work of Sebastiano Timpanaro (1970) for whom the frailty of human existence is represented in death as the final triumph of nature over history. The attempt to retrieve the passionate life of the body in modern social theory has occurred through neo- Freudianism in critical theory (Marcuse, 1969) and through Nietzsche in structuralism (Benoist, 1978). My argument is that neither Marxism nor sociology has in recent times attempted to produce a theory of the body; it is unfortunate that this absence in social theory has been seized upon by the proponents of sociobiology which is largely reductionist in approach. To some extent, this is an oddity since both Marxism and sociology can be said, at a metatheoretical level, to have been constructed on the attempt to resolve the philosophical problem of mind/body. We have seen that the young Marx set out, via Feuerbach, to transcend mechanistic materialism which ultimately reduced conscious activity to physiology.

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  The biblical texts were written long ago in languages that are no longer spoken in their ancient form. A reader who wishes to read the Bible competently needs to master those languages and their ancient contexts or rely on others who have that mastery. In effect, the reader needs to know not only his or her own interpretive tradition but the linguistic world in which the text was produced.8 Texts are products of human authors and editors and arise in specific historical contexts. A text may take on new meanings in new contexts, but the meaning as determined by its original context remains an essential point of reference.9 So, for example, Isaiah 7:14 had to make sense, first of all, in the eighth century BCE, when a reference to Jesus would have been unintelligible, whatever other meanings were later attached to it. Meaning is a negotiation between author and reader. Readers inevitably bring new perspectives to a text and see it differently in different generations, a point that is readily obvious from the history of interpretation.10 But the validity of any new interpretation must still be assessed by its ability to account for the words on the page in a way that does not do violence to their grammar and their ancient context. In short, interpretation does not yield meanings that are objective in the sense of being timelessly valid, but they are not simply indeterminate either. In the words of the literary critic Robert Alter, “The words of the text afford us at least a narrow strip of solid ground in the quagmire of indeterminacy, because the words a writer uses, despite the margin of ambiguity of some of them, have definite meanings, and no critic is free to invent meanings in order to sustain a reading.”11 A text, biblical or not, may have more than one meaning, but we can at least set limits to the range of acceptable interpretations. ETHICAL INTERPRETATION The argument is not just about objectivity but also about the ethics of reading. Those who appeal to what the Bible “says” can mask or deny their responsibility for their interpretations: “It is not I who am saying this, but the Bible,” or even “It is God who says this.” This kind of appeal to the authority of the text is called “textual foundationalism.” The Bible is taken as a relatively firm foundation for certain kinds of knowledge, just as nature is thought to be for scientific knowledge. Critics of biblical foundationalism argue that the Bible, historically interpreted, “cannot be depended on to deliver secure, ethical interpretations of Scripture.”12 By this they mean that the Bible, historically interpreted, has provided support for unethical positions. The debate about slavery in nineteenth-century America provides obvious examples.13 Defenders of slavery pointed out that neither Moses nor Jesus outlawed slavery or proposed that the institution should be abolished. In this they were indisputably right. The Bible, historically interpreted, condones slavery and many other practices of questionable morality besides.