The Way

On Scriptnotes, a couple of weeks ago, Craig Mazin was complaining that the 'monomyth' of a suffering hero who dies and rises lacks drama if the hero is Superman (or Jesus).

I think there are two answers:
-first, there is uncertainty as to whether they are Superman (or Jesus) until they outstrip the not-to-be-outstripped. This is surface level but real drama.

-second, more interestingly, these climactic events must resolve the dramatic tension, and in Judaism the tension has always been questions 'Adam, why are you hiding?' or like Solomon's 'will God really make a home on Earth?  The highest heavens cannot contain Him.' Or 'the ransom of a life is heavy, no one can pay enough.' Or 'If there were fifty righteous people, would you not spare the city?'  How will God remain God, absolutely good, judging evil, and yet be reconciled to actually existing human life?

Heidegger's 'technological understanding of being' saw our culture in terms of recurrence of functional relationships, of activity and agency expressed and mediated in techniques.  The characteristic move of this technological understanding is 'enframing', boxing some function by its preconditions and postconditions. This is like the black box of circuit analysis - a thing is what it does, and things not expressed in what it does are arbitrary, meaningless and subject to redesign at will.  The technological understanding of being enables a real engagement with a world of people, equipment and mere physical presence. But it obscures or reduces other things, like values or transcendent meaning in experience or life. If a man or woman can be replaced in a specific function, there is no reason not to replace them. The usefulness of things levels them down to mere equipment.  It is possible to respond to your times authentically (in an original, authorial way), but it is not meaningful to assert that the times are wrong in their very fiber, or that behavior can be transcendentally wrong (or right) as well as locally wrong (or right). Much is already determined in your thrown-ness that amounts to ontological guilt (things that could have gone otherwise but did not and that commit you certain ways - being Australian at the moment commits me to a variety of things I can't get behind (heh heh)).

Heidegger didn't think that the understanding that of being was fixed, but that it developed in each culture and that people could be virtuoso developers of practices, or slavish followers. He talked about 'one' - das man - as a vast repository of convention 'one' could skillfully exercise or unskillfully be lost in. The man of skill (phronemos) is able to respond with new practices to new situations in ways that are applauded. Every so often, a crisis comes along which drives a reorganization of the culture into a new one - some cultural stressor becomes too great and a work of art sets up a new understanding of being.  The life of Jesus is an example, radically reorganizing Jewish culture and then Greco-Roman culture, not simply adding new organizing principles to Rome's power pyramid, but subverting the cross and giving it meaning from Judaism.  These innovations are  institution of new practices.  The slogan from a film (Across the Universe?) is not 'you are what you do' but 'You are how you do things.'  Clive James talks of developing a style as the core of becoming a thinker and a person. The question of being human is primarily how to be, not Hamlet's 'to be or not to be.'

Foucault's famous phrase 'technology of power' captures this in culture. In a culture, power is expressed in ways that fit or strain or violate in certain ways a background of expectations. Where the technological understanding of being holds sway, nepotism is injustice - only one person has the most merit for that job, and that person is probably not in your family.  At other times and in other places, building the apparatus of powers out of family members was both the most secure and the most profitable use of power - simple common sense, the main reason to have power in the first place.

When Christianity was beginning, it seems to have called itself The Way. It began with (the message of) the cross, foolishness to Greeks (lovers of wiseness) and blasphemy to Jews (conspicuous avoiders of anything approaching blasphemy).  It was something more than an innovation - it claimed to give an account of a union of God and Man, in which political murder could also be holy propitiating sacrifice, without the murder being validated. It said power is for love and may be given up entirely and yet retained.

I think the central move in the new understanding is repentance/penitence and that repentance is the full form of which 'enframing' is a manifestation.  The technology of the technological understanding of being is taking what is good and enacting it, openly acknowledging what is bad so it can be worked around or repaired.  Everything that can be shaken will be shaken until only the unshakeable remains. For acceptance of actually existing human beings, sacrificial atonement could be seen as an enframing move - disposing of what is worse, and replacing it with what is better.  But the direct opposition of the world and God as to worse and better is the judgment of the world.

You may not be a Christian, so let's make a Durkheimish equivalence. Martin Luther King's very recognizable style is evident in this quote, but the content is very apt to what I am saying.

When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact...that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters...

Is there a Way?  The cross says 'this is how.'

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