Dante and Homosexuality

What happens to Christian understanding when they fuse with Aristotle? Another dimension is added. Though you should obey God’s commands (as interpreted by the Church, of course) because they are God’s command, you can also through human reason – after all, created by God, a finite version of his infinite reason – understand God’s reason. Nature is Creation, God’s ideas flowed into Nature. Human reason, finite and fallible though it is, darkened by sin though it is, can with the right education and community (i.e. the Church) be formed to a limited but real extent by Ideas in the mind of God used to create nature.

     We can recognize trees as trees and love as love because they are intelligible. Being is intelligible. This is pure Aristotle. But it becomes sublime when you consider that in apprehending nature you are thinking the thoughts of God after him (as Newton put it). That this thing and that thing are both ‘birch trees’ because they share the same intelligible structure means that an Idea of God – ‘birch treeness’ – gets translated into material reality and our reason is able to abstract at least a shadow of that Idea (a shadow is still an image of something real, even if we can’t see what is projecting it): we are in contact with the mind of God! That is an exciting thought, though hard for us to experience it as did Aquinas and those of that time. It is a thought made possible by Aristotle (and Plato).

    But it had unfortunate consequences regarding homosexuality. According to Thomas, natural law is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law of God. Human reason can grasp natural law by apprehending the natural purposes (or ends – the telos) of natural phenomena – like sex. Sexuality thus has natural ends: procreation and the unity of a man and woman within marriage. It is understood today in the Church exactly as Aquinas and Dante understood it. Anything that violates these natural ends is seen as irrational because it goes against the divinely instituted natural order. Since reason is the means by which humans comprehend this order, actions that violate it are considered insults not only to God but reason and nature. The “Sodomites” are in Dante’s Hell not only because they violated a commandment – as conservative protestants still believe today – but also nature and reason: a double-barrel sin.

  In The Inferno Dante places sodomites in the Seventh Circle, among those who commit violence against nature. This categorization reflects the view that their actions disrupt the natural and rational order established by God. The punishment of enduring a barren, fiery desert symbolizes the perceived sterility and destructiveness of their actions, contrasting with the life-giving potential of procreative sexual acts. Dante encounters his former mentor Brunetto Latini among the sodomites, which adds a personal dimension to his depiction, since he at least seems to have much affection for his former teacher. His affection and pity – some readers see this as a mean-spirited shaming of his mentor, but I don’t buy it – shows that the “sodomite” Brunetto Latini did have individual virtues apart from the sin, that he was indeed loveable from a purely human standpoint. But there he is, in Hell.

    We see this tension over and over in the Inferno: Dante has pity for those condemned to Hell and yet he should have no pity. According to Aquinas himself, to pity the damned is an affront to God, as though a microbe human with his limited mind and wisdom dare call into question the infinite wisdom, goodness, love, and justice of God Almighty! Dante later shows he is advancing spiritually when he relishes adding to the suffering of a no doubt unlikable sinner. He and his guide Virgil (symbol of human reason!) are crossing over the river Styx, which separates the carnal sinners of the flesh from the more serious sinners of the mind and spirit. The walls of the City of Dis are there to keep God (love) out. In this river the souls destroyed by wrath are punished. These souls are immersed in slimy muck, striking one another with hands, feet, and heads, as well as biting one another for all eternity. [As a symbolic image of wrath this is perfect; as an eternal punishment for a human being, sickening, though by far not the most sickening in the Inferno.]

 

And as we ran on that dead swamp, the slime

Rose before me, and from it a voice cried:

“Who are you that come here before your time?”

 

And I replied: “If I come, I do not remain.

But you, who are you, so fallen and so foul?”

And he: “I am one who weeps.” And I then:

 

“May you weep and wail to all eternity,

For I know you, hell-dog, filthy as you are.”

Then he stretched both hands to the boat, but warily

 

The Master shoved him back, crying, “Down! Down!

With the other dogs!” Then he embraced me saying:

“Indignant spirit, I kiss you as you frown.

 

Blessed be she who bore you. In world and time

This one was haughtier yet. Not one unbending

Graces his memory. Here is his shadow in slide.

 

How many living now, chancellors of wrath,

Shall come to lie here yet in this pigmire,

Leaving a curse to be their aftermath!”

 

And I: “Master, it would suit my whim

To see the wretch scrubbed down into the swill

Before we leave this stinking sink and him.”

 

And he to me: “Before the other side

Shows through the mist, you shall have all you ask.

This is a wish that should be gratified.”

 

And shortly after, I saw the loathsome spirit

So mangled by a swarm of muddy wraiths

That to this day I praise and thank God for it.

 

“After Filippo Argenti!” all cried together.

The maddog Florentine wheeled at their cry

And bit himself for rage. I saw them gather.

 

Imagine if Dante had seen his own father there. He would have been expected to show just the same sadism. He would have been praised all the more for showing it to the damned soul of his own earthly father. That’s some sick, perverted stuff.

     I saw a video showing Pope Francis – the most Christian Pope probably of all time – in an audience with the public. A young boy came up to him and told the Pope his father had died and was an unbeliever. His father was a good man. The boy obviously loved him. The boy – a Catholic – was upset by the thought of his father in Hell because he was an unbeliever. I know Christians who would have told the boy that his father was in Hell because he did not believe, and no one enters Heaven without “believing.” The Pope answered: “Do you think God would be able to leave a man like him far from Him?” If God is Love, that is the true answer. But that the Hell story so tormented this grieving boy made me angry. Dante obviously applied a different logic from a very different God to his mentor.

. . .

 

I am ambivalent about Dante’s Inferno and about Hell.

 

Even if God plays no role in your life, just suspend your disbelief as you do when you read a fantasy novel like The Lord of the Rings: image a real God as a boundless, eternal, unlimited, self-aware and transparent to itself – whose being was love, who was pure goodness. Imagine the Creation spontaneously radiated every second of its existence from this divine energy according to Ideas formed in its unlimited consciousness. Imagine that.

     That is a picture of God that is at least compatible with the image of God presupposed by the Pope in his comforting of the grieving boy. Is that compatible with the image of God in the Inferno, the Divine Comedy? Could the God who is Love use his infinite imagination to visualize symbolic punishments to such a degree of perfection, and then condemn those who fit those sins to live out these fantasies eternally, without any hope of redemption? I can’t. To me the God that condemned Brunetto Latini to Hell and that punishment is more a devil than a god.

     If the boy had come to Dante, he would have discovered that his father was in the 6th circle of Hell, in the city of Dis, burning in eternal fire while locked into a coffin. Atheism was a form of heresy for Dante. The coffins signify their spiritual death. Just as tombs separate the dead from the living, these fiery tombs symbolize the heretics' separation from the true faith and from God's grace. The closed nature of the tombs reflects the heretics' self-imposed isolation from the community of believers and their rejection of communal truths upheld by the Church. Fire often represents divine justice in biblical and medieval literature. The heretics' fiery tombs symbolize the consuming nature of God’s justice, punishing them for their rejection of divine truth.

     Unlike the purifying fire of Purgatory, the fire in the heretics' tombs does not cleanse but rather eternally torments, signifying the irredeemable state of those who die in heresy without repentance. The detail that the tombs will be sealed shut on the Day of Judgment underscores the finality of the heretics’ condemnation. Their punishment is not only eternal but also irrevocable, with no hope of redemption. This sealing symbolizes the ultimate and unchangeable nature of divine justice that will be fully realized at the end of time. Heretics, many of whom denied the resurrection of the body or other core Christian doctrines, are punished in tombs that symbolize death without resurrection. This serves as an ironic commentary on their beliefs, emphasizing the consequence of their doctrinal errors. The eternal flames within the tombs symbolize perpetual death, contrasting sharply with the Christian promise of eternal life. Thus might Dante have spoken to the boy.

     If God is love, then Hell doesn’t exist. Dante’s God is not Love but a totalitarian ruler, a divine Big Brother.

 

. . .

 

If I just focus on myself, I know that everything I do or say or think moves me either closer to love (because done in the spirit of love, and thus with God somehow present, if God is love) or further away from love. I have betrayed a good woman. I have no trouble using a Dantean image of betrayal as a symbol of the state of my soul as I betrayed her. Had I died, unrepentant (I repented even as I did it, contradictory though that seems), I would have been punished in the 9th (lowest) circle of Hell in Dante’s vision. I would be frozen in ice, a fitting retribution for my cold-hearted betrayal. (Well, it wasn’t really cold-hearted. Stupid-hearted. But I’ll run with this.) This icy imprisonment symbolizes the severity of betrayal, the coldness and the lovelessness involved in abandoning a good woman to her suffering.  The ice tomb also symbolizes the permanent rupture of the familial bonds. In remorse, I can almost feel that suffering.

      While alive, we can hope for forgiveness. Sometimes we can do things that help heal the damage. We are not absolute spirits but rather all “cracked vessels” (Donne) – some with more cracks than others. This explains the possibility of forgiveness. Were I a center of absolute consciousness, like the autonomy lovers believe, I would have to own my deed absolutely, which would indeed put me beyond forgiveness. [I suppose Hell might make sense for a fallen angel?] But had I died, say, in a car accident, I’d be in the ice, if Dante’s vision were true. My father might be in the 6^th circle. Most of us would probably be in some circle. In this sense, it is reasonable to fear “Hell” myself: to fear losing myself, to fear becoming a person that no one (except perhaps God) can find lovable, and thus whom I could not find lovable. A person of whom one could say, as far as this life is concerned: better he had never been born. A person who could curse the day he was born. In this spirit, I take Hell very seriously. Hell is part of this life. You can destroy your soul, you can damage the souls of other in this life. 

 

   

   I believe a person can be so lost that he loses all connection to what is lovable in himself, all ability to love, thus all ability to have faith in anything good, to have hope in anything good; thus all ability to care about justice. You can destroy your soul in this life: that is so obvious that I hardly need to say it. Through the deeds of those who have destroyed their souls in this life – most SS concentration camp guards, for example – the souls of other people can be destroyed. That none of this matters eternally is also a hard thought to bear. If I imagine that the soul survives this world and the death of the body – whatever that means – then I can imagine the dead soul awakening and understanding their lives on earth as God does, the God who is Love. I can imagine an unbearable remorse. I can imagine those souls feeling all the pain from all the souls they harmed in life. I can imagine a kind of Purgatory, which is to say I can imagine the suffering of those who lost their souls in life when they understand the truth of what they became. A bit like the Sean Penn character did – however imperfectly – before his execution in Dead Man Walking when his victims finally became real to him and he was able to understand the true evil of his deeds.

    I can also imagine that this life is our only life and that wasting it on sin - on making a Hell here in Heaven's despite - is to lose everything. 

I cannot imagine that if two people love one another who happen to both be men or women that they should have reason to curse the day they were born. That makes no sense to me. 

    If there is a God of Love, there is no Inferno. A God of Love might not be able to prevent us from making an Inferno of our own lives. But if there is an afterlife, a God of Love will not further punish those of us who have wasted the gift of life and damaged other lives by throwing us in the Inferno. A God of Love would open our eyes and let us understand our lives from the perspective of love, and help heal us. That is what a good father would do.

I would never condemn my children to the Inferno no matter how badly they went astray. I can’t believe God, if God is love, would send his children (his creatures) there. He would reach out and pull us back.

. . .

 

     The fear of Hell is part of the so-called conservative Catholic and Protestant discourse on homosexuality today. The belief that homosexual people are by virtue of their homosexuality alone destined for Hell. They fear their own loved ones might cease to believe that and also end up in Hell. Many probably enjoy imagining homosexuals in Hell, but others are just trying to save their souls by scaring them with that possibility.

   Hell can be a kind of spiritual toxin. It separates absolutely one soul from other. As in Dante, it puts a group of souls beyond compassion (as in Sodom and Gomorrah). As Wendell Berry wrote: he who imagines others there are there themselves.

     There is no more reason to imagine that all homosexual people are like those depicted in Sodom than to imagine all heterosexual people are like those in a porn film. A porn film - that is an image of Hell; utter degradation; utter unlovability. If our self becomes reduced to the souls in a porn film, well, that is as close to the Inferno as we are likely to get, although that would leave the soul in the upper circles. The betrayer is lower down, even if the ice is not as visible as the body degraded to a porn object. 

  Where there is love, there God is. If there is a God, I hope at least he is not like Dante’s. I would not choose to be born in such a universe.

 

 Pride Month and Superbia

For Aquinas superbia – which is translated perhaps confusingly as pride in English – is a deadly sin: that is, a sin that causes the loss of sanctifying grace and leads the soul to eternal separation from God if not repented; in other words, a sin that cuts a soul off from God’s love (“sanctifying grace” means “God’s love” as far as I can tell). This possibility is the possibility of Hell. Hell is worse than Auschwitz because Auschwitz was temporary while Hell never ends. Hell is bound to final despair in a way that even Auschwitz wasn’t (read Primo Levi and Viktor Frankel if you don’t believe me). I am just trying to understand St. Thomas.

    The sin of pride is a perversion of our nature as creatures. The prideful person seeks to elevate themselves beyond their rightful place in the hierarchy of being, beyond what they are. Specifically, pride is what we call autonomy (at least in some of its uses). It is a refusal to be bound by nature (i.e. reality) or morality (i.e. reality). The sin of pride makes the self into a little absolute, a little God that defines for itself what is good, true, beautiful; it rejects all conceptions of the good, true, and beautiful that come from outside its own will. It rejects nature (i.e. reality) and moral/natural law (i.e. reality) because it sees itself as limited by this. The prideful self is unlimited in its own self-conception. Only God is unlimited. Therefore, the prideful self sees itself as at least equal to God. Thomas, I believe, interpreted the eating of the forbidden fruit in Eden in light of pride: eating of the forbidden fruit was man’s rebellion against human limits, against being a part of nature rather than standing outside of nature and controlling it according to one’s own will.

     We see this power and the sin of pride in Milton’s depiction of Satan after the fall:

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n. What matter where, if I be still the same

The mind is not limited by reality (i.e. God’s Creation) or goodness (God’s grace). The job of the mind is not to conform itself with the real. The job of the will is not to conform itself with the good. In other words, the work of the soul is not to harmonize with God through attuning itself to the Creation, to God’s love; the task of the soul is to be as a god, to be itself creating. To accept anything less is unworthy of the dignity of being a soul – or an angel in the case of Lucifer. Having to conform to a reality we did not create, that was there before us, violates our autonomy. We are – thus the Satanic line of thinking, Satanic from Thomas’ point of view – creators, to refuse this power and bow down to God and nature is unworthy of our freedom:

Here at least We shall be free: th'Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in hell; Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n.

There you have the sin of pride expressed in pure form. This inordinate self-exaltation leads to a radical alienation from other living souls, for nature, for one’s own body and mind, and ultimately for God – that is, it leads to Hell.

. . .

If we move from the world of thought to the social world, we have to note that the Church always interprets nature's meaning authoritatively. If God wrote the Book of Nature, He gave the Church the exclusive authority to interpret it – according to the Church. Of course, while the Holy Spirit guides the Church, or would guide it if allowed to, we know that the Church is made of men; of finite, fallible, mortal men (and in subordinate positions, women). In fact, even in Thomas’ time the Church suffered from terrible corruption. Dante’s Hell is heavily populated with popes, cardinals, bishops, monks, and priests. And of course people in the Church change their interpretations of the Book of Nature, and disagree among themselves as to its meaning at any given time. We see disagreements today in how the Church understands homosexuality, for instance. I don’t want to delve into the question – and Thomas is well-aware of it – of how a Church populated by the All-too-human can authoritatively and on some questions even infallibly interpret nature. But I think even the most devout Catholic – as I know from conversations with a priest I once knew – admits that it requires some mental gymnastics to reconcile the horns of this dilemma.

    The Enlightenment - the source of autonomy thinking - was born in opposition to the authority - again, exercised in a way that often demeaned humanity. Get an unjust authority and people will rebel against authority itself. 

   Of course, autonomy fit perfectly industrial capitalism as it emerged during that time. The capitalist is the ideal of autonomy. 

. . .

So this is “Pride month.” "Pride Month" is a time dedicated to celebrating and advocating for the LGBTQ+ community, commemorating historical struggles, and promoting ongoing efforts for equality and acceptance. "Pride" in this context is about self-respect, affirmation of identity, visibility, representation, and resilience. It is a powerful counter to the shame and stigma that LGBTQ+ individuals have faced, promoting a message of dignity, empowerment, and solidarity. In what follows, I want to focus on the L and the G – on lesbians and gay men, on homosexuality.

    I have heard from more than one Catholic priest – including bishops – that the “pride” in “Pride Month” exemplifies superbia, the sin of pride. Traditional Catholic teaching emphasizes humility and the acknowledgment of one’s dependence on God – meaning respecting natural law. Some Catholics worry that Pride Month, by celebrating pride, might encourage an excessive focus on the self and personal identity in a way that conflicts with the virtue of humility. Humility here means conforming the mind and will to reality as interpreted by the Church: nature is Creation, and God’s love, God’s being flow into the Creation. Nature is like a book that reveals God, from a certain point of view, and the Church is the only authorized reader. The Church is the final literary critic, so to speak.

     Natural law is the set of moral principles and norms that are rooted in the Creation and thus also in human nature. They can be discovered through natural reason. The pagan can follow natural law. In Dante’s Hell, Limbo is where virtuous pagans exist without pain but without hope. Following natural law means grasping reality and the claims that reality makes on the will. It reflects the participation of rational beings in the eternal reality of God, directing them toward their ultimate good and proper ends.

     In the Thomist tradition – or the Catholic tradition, which has been dominated by Thomism – natural law dictates that human actions should align with their inherent purposes, which are discoverable through reason and reflect God's eternal law. This perspective views the natural ends of human sexuality as procreation and the unitive bond between a man and a woman. Homosexual acts, which are inherently non-procreative and lack the complementarity of male and female, are seen as deviating from these natural purposes. Consequently, such acts are considered a misuse of the gift of sexuality and a violation of the natural moral order established by the Creator. Thus, within this framework, homosexuality is viewed as contrary to natural law because it does not fulfill the natural ends of human sexuality. In acting against nature the homosexual also show contempt for the gift of reason, forcing reason to follow will rather than will follow reason. Sex is fertility in action; male and female complement each other – nature communicates that to a mind that has not been blinded by will, by sin.

   Thus for these priests – representing a faction within the Catholic Church – “Pride Month” exemplifies the sin of pride: making oneself the sole judge of nature, identity, morality; putting the self above everything else. Sexual acts are not the main issue here. Sexual acts themselves can be loving, venial, or when addiction takes over, deadly sinful. The pride comes from the elevation of the self over nature, one’s own nature, community, and God. The sex is just the background, one possible motivation among others, for this spiritual movement. The greedy capitalist who puts himself above nature, logs an ancient and irreplaceable forest for the wealth it makes possible for him, is also prideful – that is, elevates his ego, making it and not God the source of its own law. The beauty, the unreal beauty of the forest (nature) makes a claim on humanity: respect it, let it be, treasure it. But the capitalist puts his own desire for money above all other claims, or is blind to them from the outset. Pride is thus said to be part of all sin. Sin as such is just various forms of pride in this sense.

. . .

  Liberals (progressives and more traditional Lockean liberals) – inheritors of the Enlightenment – of course differ from Milton’s Satan in that they recognize one limit on their autonomy: respecting the autonomy of other autonomous creatures. Autonomy itself is the only limit on autonomy. The forest, having no autonomy, no self, is nothing but a resource that can be chopped down or preserved as an aesthetic object for tourists. It makes no claim on us. Its reality is just that of “raw material.” But the worst offense in this framework is for one person to impose their definitions of the real and the good onto others – to violate or take away their autonomy. (I am again trying to understand here, nothing more.)

     From this perspective, it is fine if an individual autonomously chooses to accept the Catholic reading of nature if that individual neither imposes that reading on others nor expresses contempt for others based on their different readings. For a liberal the Church wants to impose one authoritative reading on nature, just as it does (or did) on the Bible – just as Communist Parties also imposed a single correct interpretation on nature loosely based on Marx. It is like reading a difficult poem – Dante’s Inferno! – and then claiming one interpretation as authoritative, discounting all others. Interpreting also implies by its very nature at least some degree of autonomy. At its most radical, autonomy implies that every “reader” is free to come up with whatever reading that pleases them. Nature – and books – are like inkblots; we project our own subjectivity onto them. If nature is like an inkblot – if it is “indeterminate” with respect to our understandings of it – then it can only be an attempt of one mind-and-will to gain power over other minds-and-wills. This is the epitome of immorality from the liberal point of view.

    Thus “Pride Month” can be experienced as expressing a will to free the will from interpretations that demean homosexuals – like Thomism. Like Protestant interpretations, which in contrast to Catholicism exclude reason and nature from the discussion altogether, and just make homosexuality a breaking of God’s commandment (based on a selective reading of the Bible taken as authoritative).

. . .

   My view is that there is nothing inherently demeaning about having a homosexual orientation. I confess I didn't always think like that and it took some serious soul-searching to reach that. Plato's depiction of sublimated homo-erotic love certainly helped. But now that I understand it, I am certain of it. I have no idea why we have the sexual natures that we have.  Genes, family, culture, influences, traumas – all of the above. I don’t care. Homosexuality is a part of being human – apparently in every culture. It is thus natural, as part of the Catholic Church (including the Pope) acknowledges. If God created nature, God permitted homosexuality. There are all kinds of lustful, pornographic expressions of homosexuality just as there are of heterosexual sexuality. Neither kind of desiring has a monopoly on virtue. But it is equally possible to find genuine love and a responsible form of living together among homosexuals as it is among heterosexuals. I know that from experience. Sexual orientation is independent of loving commitment, of respectful affectionate partnership. In my reading of nature, that is godly. If God is love, then when we experience love in our natural lives we experience God in a way. If God is love, I cannot imagine God being so unloving, so hateful toward this group of people – a condemnation and shaming by category – as these Christians are.

    I can image a Thomist Catholic who in good faith believes L’s and G’s are in danger of being sinfully prideful, who genuinely cares about their souls, who believe that “only the truth can set you free” and believes that they have been graced with that truth and must speak out. I can imagine a good Catholic during the Counter-reformation who believed that burning heretics was necessary to save the souls of the heretic himself and the simple people who were threatened with damnation should they adopt the heresy. But you know the fruits by the tree. The doing evil to another human being – in a big way or small – is a bad fruit.

   I believe that nature does confront us with realities we in our autonomy are not free to ignore. The forest is an example. Children are another – an adult should never beat them (or drop bombs on them). I believe our sexuality imposes limits on our autonomy – I just wrote about those limits a couple of days ago. I think the Thomist – in this taking over Aristotle and translating him into Christianity – is right within limits.

     One of those limits is that if nature is a book, then like any great book its meaning is not univocal and one-dimensional. Any totalitarianism in interpretation violates nature. Traditionally, Christian churches have given a very weak interpretation of homosexuality. Some churches are beginning to improve on these primitive interpretations; others cling to them. And I think they have given a weak interpretation of scripture, too (I wrote something on this already). These are things well-meaning people need to be prepared to discuss, using all the tools of reason. But seeing the self as the source of all value and nature as a dead, meaningless thing that we can do with what we will (including our own nature) is an idea I cannot live with.

    I have my problems with Pride Month. We live in a narcissistic culture – a narcissism largely produced in a way by the social reality of a totalizing capitalist economy. Of course, that affects the way all people feel and think, and homosexuals are people. And given the options the Christian churches gave them, is it any wonder that homosexuals were almost forced to understand themselves in terms of liberal-enlightenment autonomy – which as I said I cannot live with for various reasons, some of which I have mentioned here. If nature is defined as it has been by the Church, then by definition your self, if you are to affirm it being homosexual, must be outside of nature. I reject the traditional Thomist reading of nature here. The Church itself has alienated homosexual people from itself and its teachings. It alone is to blame for this situation. (Just as it lost the working class during the first phase of industrialization.)

      Celebrations of promiscuity – orientation makes no difference – celebrate something that is deeply alienating. Some Pride month celebrations seem to celebrate a reading of sexuality that I cannot share – again, one that has nothing to do with homosexuality per se. Moreover, I cannot imagine identifying myself with a sexual orientation – with the least individual aspect of my being. But then, I have not been dumped on because of my sexuality as have homosexuals since the beginning of time. I don’t feel the need to stand out and have people notice me – by the way I dress, talk, act. But then I have never had to live in a closet, metaphorically speaking.

    I hope that one day all this just won’t be a thing, any more than interracial marriage is for most of us today.

 Aristotle Believed the Emotions Were Important Instruments of Knowing and Understanding

A contradiction? On the one hand, I believe deep in my heart that part of the human vocation on earth is to bring our minds and hearts in tune with reality. I can only believe that given that I believe reality (existence, being, ‘to be’) is at its core “good, very good,” even in the face of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” of “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” even of the pervasiveness of evil. On the other hand, I must acknowledge that such a belief cannot be reached by the intellect alone, uninformed by the heart. A belief in reality accessed through subjectivity, emotion? Is that not a contradiction?

       Indeed, I acknowledge such a belief becomes only intelligible to those who love or who have loved; to those who have therefore experienced grief or perhaps remorse; to those who have felt horror over evils that have become real to them (e.g., slavery, genocide, violence against women, etc.); to those who have been distraught over the greed-motivated destruction of natural beauty; above all, to those who have experienced moments of real joy (see below on joy). So I cannot make my belief intelligible to everyone, which would seem to be in tension with the notion that it is a belief about what is real and not just an expression of subjective emotion and wishful thinking. 

        The real, it will be thought, is objective, and what is objective the intellect can prove or support with evidence everyone would acknowledge to be evidence. And then there is the “fat, relentless ego,” the powerful, inborn narcissism that Freud bored in on – for him not the consequence of sin but nature as science understands it. Any emotion – joy, love, grief, remorse, horror – the fat, relentless ego can elicit as a counterfeit response to an idealized, constructed, falsified version of reality – the ego’s own, private Hollywood version of reality. If you cannot give objective evidence or rational proof, then it must be emotional, which is to say subjective, telling us nothing about reality but only the psyche of the person who experiences it. It can even seem a contradiction: I believe x to be real because of emotional experiences a, b, and c. And given that we all at some level know how fragile, and thus how ruthless our ego-consciousness is, we don’t trust it to reveal reality. Rightly. But in every person except for the most pathological narcissist, even in very flawed people as I am and perhaps most of us are, beats a human heart capable of the kinds of revelatory emotions I am talking about. 

        I know the reality of my children not only intellectually. Neither I nor anyone else could profoundly know them from the outside, with the intellect alone. I know them though loving them, even in the flawed way I do love them. Loving them is the conformity of reason in its fullest meaning with their reality; their reality molds the mind, or that part of their reality that can inform the mind does inform it. Without this love, my relationship to them would be like an android’s attempt to understand a poem – having all the information about the poem, being able to say all that might be intelligibly said about the poem, but actually not understanding the poem (from the inside) at all. My children are like the poems in that you can know them – access their reality – only as a whole human being, body and soul, heart and intellect. 

         I don’t claim to know them absolutely, as only God could. Admittedly, therefore, deeper understanding could change how I see them to some extent. But they are real to me, if only imperfectly so. Except for God, all understanding, all knowledge is partial, and so nothing is fully, absolutely real to us. That’s what it means to be finite, mortal. That creates space for unreality (fantasy in the Freudian sense) to colonize us. But I am engaged with the reality of my children themselves, not their mere appearances, not mere social constructs of them – unless I am sentimental or wholly consumed by my innate narcissism. Indeed, the largest wall between mortals and reality is not our finitude, our limited intellects, but our narcissism. (The one insight shared by Plato, the Buddha, Augustine, Freud, and Jesus.) The problem is not a divide between the intellect and the heart, but between a heart-intellect (i.e. reason) to some extent liberated from narcissism and its attendant sentimentality and a heart-intellect that is consumed by narcissism and its attendant sentimentality. The shadows of Plato’s cave come from the fat, relentless ego, not the wellsprings of our hearts. 

      If this subjective truth were only subjective and not truth – as it would be, were the love merely sentimental – then the love we bear our children, our grief, our remorse, our horror over evil done, our longing for justice, our joy and longings, and everything that allows us to see our lives as they really are, would be unintelligible. Life would resemble a stupid soap opera. All love, joy, grief, and horror would be sentimental lies. This is why the attempt to divide the intellect from the heart is an attempt to separate us from reality. How irrational. We would live in contradiction to ourselves. 

. . .

Academic prose and reality. At the university people write plain academic treatises, prose designed to be propositional. A judgment that non-personal, scientific prose is the best vehicle to speak (and think) truly about reality lies behind this style, which is obviously patterned on the style of natural science. So as a student I would read poetry and then in a dry academic paper would try to say what it ‘really meant,’ which to me included saying what the poem implied was true about the world. I naturally thought: why couldn’t the poet just say that truth in plain prose; why the puzzle-solving of trying to figure out the claim in my academic paper? Why all the flowery ornamentation?  I cared nothing for ornaments; I only wanted to learn about the world, about my life. I had taken over the university's assumption that truth was most clearly and appropriately expressed in propositions – plain declarative statements with clear meanings. Poetry that purported to say something true or profound about the world was guilty of using an inappropriate form for its content. 

        As my previous section has implied, that is utterly wrong. Some aspects of reality can only be disclosed through a poetic form because they can only be disclosed to the emotional responses that academic prose deems irrelevant, even a hindrance to the truth. Academic prose is designed to kill emotions, which is appropriate only if the reality being searched for (e.g., gravity) can be found by killing the emotions. As a general principle, it assumes metaphysically that reality can only be disclosed by killing emotions. What I have suggested is that the most profound dimensions of reality can only be disclosed through particular emotional responses combined with thought. In that sense, academic writing puts blinders on students and scholars alike – as it did me. 

. . .

Reality and emotion. Emotions play a different role in these two kinds of understanding. Strong emotions tell us what matters. A passionate activist feels strongly about climate change and its causes. He might get angry over the human beings behind it. He may feel desperation over the lack of action. Still, his passions can get in the way of his work as a scientist, or more positively can motivate him.  They are not part of the actual scientific conclusions. But if the same person, who is say Catholic, reads Genesis 1, he will probably understand it in a different way from an oil executive. Only in and through the concrete lives of the two men – and being men could also play a role – does the meaning of Genesis take shape. 

         This is not to say that each projects their values onto a blank page. I think the pre-judgments of man who loves the earth enable him to better understand the meaning of Creation as told in Genesis. But this is not an automatic outcome. His activism may be thoroughly sentimental while the oil executive may be torn between competing goods. In any case, emotions condition the understanding, for good or bad. Indeed, it is only through the emotion of love that the meaning of the Creation is intelligible – as pictured in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. In the former case, emotions are on the outside of the ‘cognitive content’ of the science work: like a drug, they can only stimulate or interfere. The activist may love the earth, but if he and a scientist who loves the oil companies are both good scientists, their different loves will play no role in their data and its explanation.

. . . 

 

Emotions as convictions (not beyond criticism) about what is real and good. Emotions tell us what we really think is important. We are raised to be part of a world where, among a vast multitude of such spiritual-cultural responses, we may react to pain with compassionate or cold hearts. We take on an attitude towards pain (toward other human beings or animals in pain) by being raised by parents and communities to whom we matter (or to whom we should matter, that being the normative expectation) – we would consider this a deprivation in instances where this doesn’t happen.

       Parents and others show that we matter, for example, when they take joy in us and show this joy – smiling at us, for example, or playing with us as children; also showing their concern when we hurt ourselves and are in pain. “Pity is the conviction that someone is in pain”: this sentence, unpacked, means that our language and culture of pain – our attitude towards pain – has been ingrained in us since birth. It is connected to a great variety of typical gestures, responses, and beliefs about pain – comforting behaviors, compassionate feelings, certain facial expressions, and so on – and can be escaped only with a most radical break from our lives as we know it; and even in the event of such a break in attitude, the new attitude is condition by the first as a response to it. It makes no sense, leaping into the epistemology language game, to say we ‘know we are in pain’ (that adds nothing to ‘I am in pain’; it does no meaning-work).

        The intelligible range of culturally transmitted and individually lived-through, largely emotion-laden responses to pain express convictions about pain impervious to doubt except through a most radical alienation of sense.  “Love is the conviction that the beloved person, belonging, or place is ‘good, very good’.” How one thinks about the Real, the Good, Nature, and so on – is radically different depending on whether one can think only within or only outside of the different forms of love. Emotion is at its best a kind of sonar for locating value outside the submarine-like self. And emotions get translated later into thought, philosophy, and ethics; not the other way around. 

. . . 

 

Grief and philosophy. Grief is the conviction that the beloved person who died was real and loveable. That love was a response to the reality of the loved one; that the loved one was lovable. Conviction, and not a conclusion to an argument or supported by the evidence. Conviction because it is not something we can sanely doubt. We cannot ground these convictions through science or philosophy. Without them, we would cease to be human. Reality transcends philosophy. This is what Wittgenstein believed. 

. . . 

‘True’ and ‘False’ emotions. When a friend does something kind for me, in the pure spirit of kindness and firmly grounded in needs I myself recognize as needs, and I respond with disdainful contempt (all things being equal), that would show either: 1) I did not understand what she did as kindness, a mistaken judgment expressed through my disdainful contempt; 2) There is something deficient in my character – I hear of people speak of emotional intelligence, implying such a thing as emotional stupidity, but I think the resentment could just be a sign that, as Dr. Suess wrote of the Grinch: ‘but I think the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.’ An emotion is ‘true’ when it is attuned to the reality of which it is a response; ‘false’ when out of tune with said reality. An emotion that is out of tune with reality reveals something that needs to be changed in the person who responds in this way. A crucial part of upbringing: to lovingly do whatever you can, not only to bring your children to desire what is truly good for them but to feel about things in ways that are deeply in tune with those things. (e.g. learning to want to share and not feel selfish resentment)

. . . 

 

Emotions and Metaphysics. A couple witnesses an amazingly beautiful full moon. (Imagine I have god-like knowledge of their inner lives.) The boyfriend takes notice, and then resentfully fears he will hear some sentimental ramblings from his girlfriend about how beautiful the moon is, etc., all to underscore how aesthetically sensitive she is. His girlfriend, sensing his attitude, remains silent, but thinks to herself of this moon as a blessing; she would not want to imagine her life without the moon.

       Both emotional responses are connected to a metaphysical-religious philosophy: the man’s emotional response is intelligible against this background of belief: the universe is a meaningless collection of particles, forces, and energy; all meaning and beauty are thus necessarily sentimental human projections. The girlfriend’s response is grounded in this metaphysics: she is part of Creation; all things somehow embody the beauty and love of a Creator. Perhaps she doesn’t literally believe in a Creator, but the image is the only way she knows to express the beauty and wonder that has been sown into the very fabric of Being. Their emotional responses also embody an anthropology / psychology, a ‘fore-structure’ of possible understandings based on this. The man believes human beings are basically covetous machines prone to feel-good displays to mask this truth self and others. The girlfriend believes human beings have a capacity to love what is real and beautiful in the world, and that this is actually what makes us fully human. The emotional response also implies different ways of raising and educating children; different ways of organizing society; different ways of relating to nature economically and technologically. Etc. You can have a profound philosophy, but if you are emotionally deaf-and-dumb, that philosophy will be purely an intellectual house of cards. (The girlfriend wisely breaks up with that boyfriend the next day.) 

        Now do this on your own: imagine an animal lover and a meat-industrial contemplating a lamb about to be slaughtered; a loving mother and a woman intent on an abortion contemplating images of the life in their wombs; a native American of a people who lived on the plains in the 18th century and an agro-business of today; a strip miner and Wendell Berry on a river valley; a narcissist anxious to use the death of her dog for a kitschy pet funeral to attract attention and sympathy on Facebook and a person alone with her tears at the loss of her dog. Emotional responses imply a philosophy, and a philosophy conditions emotional responses. 

. . . 

 

True Emotions are windows that open out onto Being. A man never thinks of his wife. He never does anything for her. He is indifferent to her needs. He feels nothing when she dies. But he says ‘I loved her.’ I would have great trouble making sense of this. A pet dog dies. The pet’s owner or human companion suffers “inconsolable grief.” He buries the dog with its picture on an elaborate gravestone. He visits the grave once a month, bringing flowers. Every year he lights a candle and weeps on the day of the dog’s death. He posts all this on Facebook. I would have a hard time believing the man really loved the dog rather than using the dog’s death to put himself on display. I could only think of him as sentimental. But a man could really grieve for a dog, and that real grief partly reveals what a dog is as well as the man. Emotions like grief are judgments about reality and paths of understanding what something is. They can be counterfeit but they are essential to be able to understand many things.

. . . 

 

Purity of the heart and reality. ‘I love the earth’ said by a person who never gave a thought to how their patterns of consumption impacted the earth – empty words. Veganism is the expression of a love for animals, said by a person upon accepting an academy award, say, who in reality was more interested in presenting herself as an animal-lover and contrasting herself with a bad group of meat eaters  – I could only understand that as narcissistic grandstanding, virtue signaling to use the parlance of our time. 

     The reality of animals, the earth, or anything else can only be disclosed by certain, rather rare individuals in purer forms of love. The love discloses like this: it lets us see the animals in a different light; it allows us to really feel the belief that the animals loved can be creatures that really bring out this love, and are not merely brutes on whom sentimental people project their feelings and use for their own psychological purposes. We can only know this of animals when we experience them emotionally as non-sentimental recipients of love. Love is a kind of knowing. The heart can know things, and some realities can only be known by the heart.

. . . 

 

Emotional limits. Many of us can engage with the needs of what is close: our friends, our apartment, our neighbors. But the reduction of the world through the regime of Industrialism-Science-Technology – its genuine benefits justifying the reduction – boggles the ability of a human being seriously, emotionally, intellectually to respond to it. I want to care about all the destruction in the Appalachians, the blasphemous treatment of animals in the meat industry, the cruelty to human beings in sweatshops, and much more. I can’t, except in the most limited and superficial ways. It is too far away from my core – a critique of myself and this society. The most common expression of public emotional responses to all the destruction and injustice: giving narcissists and celebrities a platform to grandstand, which only adds to the impossibility of authentic response (‘if it were really serious, people would not grandstand’).

         And social media makes narcissists – not a moral critique but a description documented by sociologists of the dominant personality structure of people socialized by capitalism – and would-be celebrities out of the masses. The vast and depersonalized nature of the evils, the ways they are superficially represented in the media and exploited for cheap effect, and the ways we are all implicated in our daily lives make genuine emotional response difficult – or only possible for saints. This is a distinctive evil of mass society. It is increasingly difficult to authoritatively speak on these matters because many like myself cannot really speak from the heart. But that is the lesson: speaking with authority comes from living authentically, and living authentically is connected to how real our emotional responses are.  Social forms may help people with emotional depth or may churn out superficiality as though on an assembly line. 

 A Reflection on Human Dignity and the Modern World

Fertility and sex. The pleasures of eating cannot wholly be disconnected from issues of nourishment and health. The potential joys of sex, analogously, cannot be wholly disconnected from the issues surrounding fertility. Nature will have its say in both. The glutton can become addicted to the pleasures of the table, and his health will suffer. He will make himself sick through his addiction to the pleasures of (usually bad, addicting) food. The pleasures of eating should never be reduced to nourishment; but nourishment should not be seen as disconnected from health. Likewise, the purely natural purpose of sex is babies. Likewise, the joys of sex – respectful sex, full of mutual attraction, care, at best love – can be spiritual joys involving the self-giving of one body-soul to another. Sex cannot be reduced to having children. The (spiritual) goodness of loving (or at least respectful) sex remains if the lovers are through misfortune infertile. I think it is present in homosexual lovers who truly love (or at least care about) one another. Nevertheless, to radically sever the cord between the joys of sex and its natural function is to court sexual addition, reduction – lust in the worst sense of that word.

       Technology often cuts the ties between man and nature. In the case of sex, birth control technologies fueled a cultural change in our attitudes toward sex. Not in reality, but under a psychic-cultural illusion we cut the tie between sex and fertility, and felt free to seek its pleasures for their own sake. The present culture of sexual addiction and pornography is largely the result. As greed is good for capitalists, lust is good for those ‘progressive’ folk who see the severing of the tie between sex and fertility as a good thing, another example of man’s conquest of nature – freeing ourselves from nature and community through technology for the sake of pure pleasure: that’s a standard capitalist intrusion.

      Our alleged freedom from fertility, from nature, is an illusion. It is a freedom from responsibility. The joys of sex can't be separated from its dangers. It is not safe. Sex is wild, can't be mined or controlled without terrible consequences. Not just fertility but the emotional power of it. Trying to control it capitalistically, technologically, destroys the meaning of sex within a responsible family and community life. Like with any addiction, sexual addicts are not happy. This supposed liberation has chained them and mines a great power – sex – for facile pleasure at each other’s expense. This culture based on an illusory liberation from nature demeans sex and people. It is significantly responsible for the destruction of the family security so needed by children through divorce. It is responsible for the culture of abortion, for the technologies are not perfect and abortion is the necessary consequence of cutting the ties between nature, sex, and love. It is a way of cutting the ties between sex, responsibility, and joy. If you say A, you must say B, as a German saying goes.

       To put it bluntly: you should never have sex with someone you are not willing to be parents with, unless no chance of pregnancy exists. That sounds like blasphemy today, but I stand by it. The alternative is abortion, a culture of sex predicated on the normalcy of abortion as birth control. Which is of course what we have from our capitalist culture. (I am not referring to difficult cases like rape, incest, health dangers, and the like. I am not referring to the legal right to abortion, which I think has to exist because the state can’t or shouldn’t force a woman to bear a child – our world depends on private, intimate decisions to affirm life and there is no way to change that without doing violence. A woman has a right to chose and with the father should chose to affirm life (all things being equal).  I am referring to cases where the illusion that technology has made sex “safe” enables people for whatever private reasons to adopt promiscuous lifestyles knowing that abortion is always there in the background. Which is crazy because abortion is not safe, neither physically nor spiritually nor mentally.)

 

. . .

 

Today these moral-cultural issues have to take a back seat. The task now is to save the possibility of democracy and an open society. Real-existing liberal (i.e. capitalist) democracies are profoundly flawed – some more than others – due largely to the power of corporations and their technologies, their culture industries and dumb-down-devices. “The economy” creates a social structure and corresponding culture that is inimical to true democracy. But Lord, they are a thousand times better at their worse than living in some pop-fascist regime like Trump would have in which all these debasing forces would be unleashed on a society that unhinged the “base” from reality by scripting it for them (with their consent) and criminalizing anything that pushed back.  I deplore the decision of so-called religious people and institutions – both the Pope-hating right-wing Catholics and the fundamentalist protestants – to embrace this dystopian fantasy as a means to silence the secular folks they hate so deeply. I have no problem aligning myself with anyone of any belief system willing to embrace toleration and rational forms of expressing disagreement to save the chance for a free society.

    But if we do ever have a political community again, a public space where we can discuss these issues using our hearts and rational minds, then I think we need to discuss how the corporate-capitalist culture we are all in threatens the very idea of human dignity. The whole culture of abortion, for example, starting with the idea that my body is my property and I have a “right” to use my property as I see fit, undermines the idea of plurality: that every person is unique, has a soul, has a series of stories unique to their life, has a biography unlike any other.

. . .

What disturbs me as well about the way the abortion debate is framed is what it means for "human dignity" - the sense, emotional and intellectual, that every person is somehow a limit to my will; that remorse would be an intelligible response to wronging anyone; that someone might intelligibly grieve their death; the belief that everyone has someone in them that makes it intelligible to see them in the light of some form of love, if even only pity. Or using a religious picture, that we are created in the image of God, who created us in love and loves us still. It is not crazy to see the unborn as belonging to the category of human creature that cannot intelligibly have any value in Aristotle's way of thinking: like the severely retarded or the incurably insane. There are no worldly categories to keep the unborn among us. 

    Imagine an American woman who is grieving over the loss of a child. Imagine that woman watching TV and observing the "grief behavior" of a Palestinian mother who has lost her child in a bombing raid. The American woman is briefly tempted to commiserate as she is also a grieving mother, then stops and says: "It is different with them. They can always have more." This is a familiar racist attitude. Our grief is genuine because our lives have the kind of meaning that can only come from feeling - more a matter of feeling than intellect - that each one of us is an individual in a special way. Sometimes we speak of a "soul" to capture this difference. 

      Animals are not individuals in this way. They are more tightly bound to their species-character. They can't love and be loved as a soul. You don't tell stories or write biographies about mice. And their lives - the Palestinians - can't mean what ours do for the meaning-blind. "They can always have more" means that they lack the kind of individuality, the kind of meaning that we have. They display grief behavior but it will pass; it doesn't go deep. We love and grieve; they can only "love" and "grieve." I think we all recognize this familiar racist way of seeing other people. "They can always have more." 

   Presumably it would mean something different if one of us - remaining in this racist world - had an abortion and one of them did. Well, the we-group have lives that matter, feelings that go deep (disclose the reality of the kind of individuality we mean with abstract concepts like "dignity"). But in the world of those who feel abortion is morally unproblematic, who believe that the unborn child is not a limit to our will in the way a newborn baby is, who believe it is purely an individual decision whether the unborn child is seen as an intelligible object of love or raw material for the pharmacy industry - in that world no unborn child is part of us, except by decision of the mother. No unborn human being has inborn dignity. At that stage, any mother can always have more. 

    Well, bodies are property, and we are sovereign over our own property, can do with it what we want. Property -whether a car, slave, or unborn child - by definition does not make claims on us to exist, does not limit our will. Who can be a person is not given by nature, is not a question of what is real; we define who can be and who cannot be a person, as long as we have the power to do so, of course. The unborn are completely powerless, like the rest of nature we dispose over. And the aborted fetus is generally raw material, given to the industries profiting from genetic technologies. Stem cells are worth quite a lot on the market. 

   The attitude I am focusing on here, I submit, is based on feelings that do not know of human dignity, feelings and thoughts which see the unborn as the racist sees the demeaned other. When we come to feel that we can always have more, when this attitude becomes the taken-for-granted cultural norm, then we have lost the conceptual space for "human dignity." This is what is at stake, culturally. I have known a woman who, after an abortion, took the body of the fetus and in grief solemnly buried her - having given her a name - in a quiet woods. No putting the stem cells on the market. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   If you think of yourself as a limit to others' wills, if you think of yourself as more than just an exemplar of an original model, a variation of the same species-theme, then it seems obvious that you were just that particular unborn child at one stage of your life. Had your mother decided to abort you and have more, someone else and not you would have existed. If it doesn't matter, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   I have know mothers and fathers who loved their unborn child. Who named the child, talked to it, anticipated its advent, seeing all the changes in the woman's body in loving ways. When our culture can only see that as an act of pure sentimentality, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. 

   And when our culture uniformly believes that we or the state, not reality, defines which lives have meaning and which do not, then human dignity will have become unintelligible to our culture. We can always change our definitions. 

  Abortion is the perfect expression of the worldview of capitalist-industrialism, of science-engineering-technology. Whoever of us has the power become the lords and masters of nature, the conquers of nature. The contempt the capitalist feels for the forest they want to log, many of us - feminists included - feel for the body. To see the body as "my property" and thus the unborn child as my property is to be blind to the reality of the body and the unborn child, a reality that only discloses itself in the language of love. This kind of feminism is one of the saddest things I know, for I cannot but see it as a form of extreme contempt for women and their bodies. That many women see capitalism-science-technology as a liberation from nature only reinforces this. 

That is what I will say if I live to see a world free of the toxins that are killing it today. 

 (Aristotle 11)  Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar... / Human dignity is inviolable 

                              The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany

 

I said the idea of keep those who fall through the cracks of the world among us as moral equals is other-worldly. I need to unpack this.

 

What kind of people am I talking about? Evil-doers, severely retarded, drunks, those who have incurable mental illnesses, those people who are unintelligible to us because they are so different (e.g. for many Germans and WASP Americans, Muslims; for many Muslims, Europeans, etc.), the homeless, and so on. Deep down we cannot pity such people without a trace of condescension – if we pity them at all: people who think like Trump  want to get rid of them; the ones they define as ‘other’ (migrants) or ‘evil’ (people who don’t vote for Trump).

   Trump is a good example. He is incapable of any selfless spirit act. He cannot be a true friend, husband, father, citizen, lover – and thus not a true human being. His narcissism is pathological. You feed it or serve it’s interests or you are nothing to him. Nothing is real except his perceived interests, and he constructs reality to fit them. His fantasy of what is real and unreal perfectly mirrors this extreme narcissism. Narcissism translates into politics as tyrant (Cicero: the tyrant is a person who is incapable of community or political community). The man – as those outside the cult of those poor, deluded people whose own narcissism, ignorance, and resentment enthrall them to his fantasy (if he found God and spoke the truth to his cult, they throw him over and find someone else) – the man, I say, is unlovable. I could find in me to love almost everyone, only not him. I cannot find it intelligible that God loves him. He seems to be burning in the fires of his own private Hell.

    Trump is a bearer of human dignity. What does that mean? Well, he is owed justice – a fair trial based on evidence. He is owed basic respect (though he denies it to everyone else). There are limits as to what a person can do to him even to save the country from his dark inhumanity. From an Aristotelian perspective, this makes no sense. [Even if you see Trump differently, the basic point remains. Come up with your own example of an utterly unlovable person, even from fantasyland. The point I am making is a conceptual one: it does not depend on a factually/spiritually true narrative. I could have taken the unenlightened Scrooge or even better, the hate-filled Inspector Javert from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Perhaps should have.]

    That it makes no sense from an Aristotelian, worldly perspective is the incentive for seeing it as other-worldly. But what can that mean? The other-worldly must be intelligible from within our world; otherwise, it would just be nonsense. Where then does the idea arise that such a wretched, dangerous human being has “dignity” just because he is a human being? It think it’s source is very human. Mothers and fathers still love their wayward children that no one else can love, and many people even want to be hung or even eliminated in the spirit of ridding the world of vermin. Such love is unconditional. Saintly love is like this. (Here I think of the love Sister Helen Prejean showed to the men whose evil deeds put them past man’s – worldly – mercy.) From that the picture of God the Creator as a Being who radiates such love for all his creatures. Seeing a fellow creature as fallen does not put that person beyond God’s mercy at least, even if such mercy remains unintelligible. Thus we cannot in this light see a Trump as vermin, as he himself sees migrants and Democrats - well, almost everyone; it is repugnant for the rest of us to have to share the world with such a contemptuous would-be tyrant. So keeping Trump “among us” depends on a religious deepening of a kind of human love we know of mothers and fathers.

    Another source is what I would call our finitude and fallibility. Or just call it our being subject to the winds of fortune. If Trump’s youth and childhood was as his cousin – a psychologist – describes it, he grew up loveless, subject to a wicked father and indifferent mother who imprinted in his soul a value system of a dog-eat-dog world, the war of all against all.  Indeed, narcissism is the soul's defense mechanism against being deprived of the love we need as children. A value system made for a certain type of narcissistic personality: my win is your loss, your win is my loss; everyone is in it for himself; everything has a price; a person’s true value is a function of his place on a power-wealth-fame hierarchy i.e. a hierarchy of external goods. The value system of Satan, in other words. Deprived of the kind of family and community whose aim is to promote the virtues that allow one to move beyond the private ego (Satan, the fat, relentless ego, the narcissistic self), his soul became a mirror of a toxic tyrant (the parallels to Hitler – also abused by a tyrant father – are striking). Now we can pity such  a man – as long as he doesn’t have his boot pressed against our throats – because we understand that he didn’t choose his life in perfect, angelic freedom. We are all products of our socialization to a large degree. Moving past the contingent circumstances of our socialization also depends on luck – e.g. access to valuable education and role models. We don’t know how we would have developed in such a toxic environment. Don’t judge a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. (Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get his boot off our throats.)

   Such attitudes arise because our ancestors were forced to deal with people who slipped through the net of humanity, as defined in different accents by particular communities. Seeing those who slip through in accents of love and pity is, however, only one response. The howling crowds relishing the burning of witches and heretics is another, one that becomes possible when God’s mercy is extinguished.  The horror many feel when even bad people are subject to such horrific treatment – the feeling that no human being, ever, should have that done to them – is the final source of what we abstractly call “human dignity.” It is other-worldly in the sense that it transcends any possible community-based, virtue-based (Aristotelian) rationality. It is absolute in a way that nothing in Aristotle can be. It flows from a sublime love that most people are not naturally capable of, but which nevertheless can move us deep down.

. . .

There is no doubt that the authors of the constitution of the Federal Republic of German felt the need to use the idea of "human dignity" because of the felt horror over all the crimes of the Nazi regime, especially the Holocaust not not only. It sounds like a caricature to say: the Nazis violated the rights of the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Sinti and Roma, and the Jews (list not exhaustive). The horror we feel when we see human beings reduced to that condition reveals "human dignity": in the stripping so many souls from their dignity, we see it through its absence, if that makes sense. But human dignity is also abstract. It lives from the kind of experienced realities I have described. When such experiences are no longer intelligible to the broad masses people, when the concept becomes purely abstract and legal, then it is dead. The idea of human dignity is as alien to a Trump or a Putin as it was to the ancient Spartans. When someone like Putin, who knows no human dignity, has to power to mold society and the state, well, the results are obvious. I am not singling out Putin. He has a lot of company. The idea of human dignity has rarely been powerful in American history. The experience of WWII, to a lesser extent of slavery, forced it into the consciousness of some Americans. 

I will include a German version.

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   Ich sagte, die Idee, diejenigen, die durch die Ritzen der Welt fallen, als moralische Gleichgestellte unter uns zu halten, sei weltfremd. Das muss ich nun näher erläutern.

    Von welchen Menschen spreche ich? Übeltäter, Schwerstbehinderte, schwere Alkoholiker, Menschen mit unheilbaren Geisteskrankheiten, Obdachlose und so weiter; auch jene, die uns unverständlich fremd sind, weil sie für uns so anders sind (z. B. für viele Deutsche und WASP-Amerikaner Muslime; für viele Muslime Europäer säkularer Prägung, usw.). Tief im Inneren können wir solche Menschen nicht bemitleiden, ohne einen Hauch von Herablassung – wenn wir sie überhaupt bemitleiden: die Menschen, die wie Trump denken, wollen sie loswerden; diejenigen, die für so einen wie Trump fremdartig (Migranten) oder böse (Menschen, die nicht für Trump stimmen) sind, werden als Ungeziefer („vermin“) gesehen.

 

     Trump ist ein gutes Beispiel. Er ist zu keinem selbstlosen Akt fähig. Er kann kein wahrer Freund, Ehemann, Vater, Bürger, Liebhaber sein – und somit kein wahrer Mensch sein. Sein Narzissmus ist pathologisch. Man füttert sein Selbstbild oder dient seinen Interessen, sonst ist man nichts für ihn. Nichts ist real außer seinen wahrgenommenen Interessen, und er konstruiert die Realität, um sie ihnen anzupassen. Seine Fantasie von dem, was real und was unreal ist, spiegelt diesen extremen Narzissmus perfekt wider. Narzissmus übersetzt sich in die Politik als Tyrannei (Cicero: Der Tyrann ist jemand, der unfähig ist zur Gemeinschaft oder politischen Gemeinschaft). Der Mann ist nicht liebenswert. Ich könnte fast jeden Menschen lieben, nur nicht ihn. Ich kann nicht verstehen, dass Gott ihn liebt. Er scheint in den Feuern seiner eigenen privaten Hölle zu brennen.

      Trump trägt jedoch menschliche Würde. Was bedeutet das? Nun, er hat Anspruch auf Gerechtigkeit – ein faires Verfahren auf der Grundlage von Beweisen, zum Beispiel, wie jeder andere auch. Er hat Anspruch auf grundlegenden Respekt (obwohl er ihn allen anderen verweigert). Es gibt Grenzen dessen, was man ihm antun kann, selbst um das Land vor seiner dunklen Unmenschlichkeit zu retten. Aus einer aristotelischen Perspektive ergibt das keinen Sinn. [Selbst wenn Du Trump anders siehst, bleibt der Grundpunkt bestehen. Finde Dein eigenes Beispiel für einen völlig unliebenswerten Menschen, sogar aus dem Fantasieland. Der Punkt, den ich mache, ist ein konzeptioneller: Er hängt nicht von einer faktisch/spirituell wahren Narrativen ab. Ich hätte den unaufgeklärten Scrooge oder noch besser, den hassgefüllten Inspektor Javert aus Victor Hugos Les Miserables nehmen können. Vielleicht hätte ich das tun sollen.]

 

      Dass es aus einer aristotelischen, weltlichen Perspektive keinen Sinn ergibt, ist der Anreiz, es als weltfremd zu sehen. Aber was kann das bedeuten? Das Weltfremde muss innerhalb unserer Welt verständlich sein; sonst wäre es nur Unsinn. Woher kommt also die Idee, dass ein so elender, gefährlicher Mensch „Würde“ hat, nur weil er ein Mensch ist? Ich denke, die Quelle ist sehr menschlich. Mütter und Väter lieben immer noch ihre fehlgeleiteten Kinder, die sonst niemand lieben kann, und viele Menschen wollen sogar hinrichten, im Sinne davon, die Welt von Ungeziefer zu befreien. Solche Elternliebe ist bedingungslos. Die Liebe der Heiligen ist auch so. (Hier denke ich an die Liebe, die Schwester Helen Prejean den Männern zeigte, deren böse Taten sie über die weltliche Barmherzigkeit hinausbrachten.) Daraus entsteht das Bild von Gott dem Schöpfer als einem Wesen, das solche unbedingte Liebe zu all seinen Geschöpfen ausstrahlt. Einen Mitmenschen als verloren zu sehen, bedeutet nicht, dass er jenseits von Gottes Barmherzigkeit liegt, selbst wenn diese Barmherzigkeit unverständlich bleibt. Daher können wir in diesem Licht einen Trump nicht als Ungeziefer sehen, so wie er selbst Migranten und Demokraten und Republikaner, die ihm widerstehen, oder Unabhängige, die ihn durchschauen, sieht. Trump „unter uns“ zu halten, hängt also von einer religiösen Vertiefung einer Art menschlicher Liebe ab, die wir von Müttern und Vätern kennen.

 

      Eine weitere Quelle ist das, was ich unsere Endlichkeit und Fehlbarkeit nennen würde. Oder nennen Sie es einfach unser Ausgeliefertsein an die Winde des Schicksals. Wenn Trumps Jugend und Kindheit so war, wie seine Cousine – eine Psychologin – sie beschreibt, wuchs er lieblos auf, ausgesetzt einem bösen Vater und einer gleichgültigen Mutter, die seiner Seele ein Wertesystem einer Hund-frisst-Hund-Welt, des Krieges aller gegen alle, einprägten. Ein Wertesystem, das für eine bestimmte Art von narzisstischer Persönlichkeit gemacht ist: Mein Gewinn ist dein Verlust, dein Gewinn ist mein Verlust; jeder ist nur für sich selbst da; alles hat einen Preis; der wahre Wert eines Menschen ist eine Funktion seines Platzes in einer Hierarchie von Macht-Reichtum-Ruhm, d. h. einer Hierarchie äußerer Güter. Das Wertesystem Satans, mit anderen Worten.

 

    Der Art von Familie und Gemeinschaft beraubt, deren Ziel es ist, die Tugenden zu fördern, die es einem ermöglichen, über das private Ego hinauszuwachsen (Satan, das fette, unerbittliche Ego, das narzisstische Selbst), wurde seine Seele zu einem Spiegelbild eines toxischen Tyrannen (die Parallelen zu Hitler – ebenfalls von einem tyrannischen Vater missbraucht – sind frappierend). Nun können wir einen solchen Mann bemitleiden – solange er nicht seinen Stiefel auf unsere Kehlen presst – weil wir verstehen, dass er sein Leben nicht in perfekter, engelhafter Freiheit gewählt hat. Wir sind alle zu einem großen Teil Produkte unserer Sozialisierung. Über die zufälligen Umstände unserer Sozialisierung hinauszuwachsen, hängt auch vom Glück ab – z. B. vom Zugang zu wertvoller Bildung und Vorbildern. Wir wissen nicht, wie wir uns in einer solchen toxischen Umgebung entwickelt hätten. Urteile nicht über einen Mann, bevor du nicht eine Meile in seinen Schuhen gegangen bist. (Was nicht bedeutet, dass wir nicht versuchen sollten, seinen Stiefel von unseren Kehlen zu bekommen.)

       Solche Einstellungen entstehen, weil unsere Vorfahren gezwungen waren, sich mit Menschen auseinanderzusetzen, die durch das Netz der Menschlichkeit fielen, das von verschiedenen Gemeinschaften in unterschiedlichen Akzenten definiert wurde. Diejenigen, die durch die Ritzen fallen, in Akzenten von Liebe und Mitleid zu sehen, ist jedoch nur eine Reaktion. Die heulenden Menschenmengen, die das Verbrennen von Hexen und Ketzern genießen, ist eine andere, die möglich wird, wenn Gottes Barmherzigkeit erlischt. Das Entsetzen, das viele empfinden, wenn selbst böse Menschen einer solchen schrecklichen Behandlung ausgesetzt werden – das Gefühl, dass kein Mensch, niemals, so etwas angetan werden sollte – ist die letzte Quelle dessen, was wir abstrakt „menschliche Würde“ nennen. Es ist weltfremd in dem Sinne, dass es jede mögliche gemeinschaftsbasierte, tugendbasierte (aristotelische) Rationalität übersteigt. Es ist absolut in einer Weise, wie nichts in Aristoteles sein kann. Es fließt aus einer erhabenen Liebe, die die meisten Menschen nicht von Natur aus fähig sind, die uns jedoch dennoch tief im Inneren bewegen kann.