Affective Life in Pannenberg and Human Openness to the World
We need to explore the theme of our
identity and non-identity in the context of affective life. My attempt here is
to provide an ontology of feeling. This notion moves against the tradition that
offers the distinguishing mark of humanity as being rationality. As important
as rationality is, we have good reason to suspect that the interior, affective
life of humanity reveals far more than we think. The tension between identity
and nonidentity is a theme of affective life. It shows itself in the antagonism
individuals experience toward society. The quest for wholeness subordinates to
the particularity of the individual, distorting social relations. It spoils
relations between persons and institutions. Conflict and brokenness become
becomes the essence of social relation. Yet, even here, we see the hope people have
for wholeness and fellowship.
Most people today
make a distinction between feeling and mood. Feeling refers to momentary
arousals while mood is more lasting than is feeling and touches individuals at
a deeper level. Mood discloses our being as a whole, constituting our openness
to the world. Yet, even feelings point toward the future, a way I want
something to be. Feelings always occur in a personal field, an experience of
one's self as personal and an imagining of others even if no one else is literally
present. Feeling has a regressive aspect in revealing the past and especially
childhood experiences; it also has progressive aspect.
Before we go too
far down this path, we need to consider the positive expression of feeling that
we find in our experience. We will see that they reveal the tension in identity
and nonidentity. They reveal the temporal dimension of the growth of identity.
One positive
dimension of the affective life is the aesthetic experience. What people
describe as an aesthetic experience is simply a dimension of common human
experience available to us all. Aesthetic experience typically relieves tension
and quiets destructive impulses. It resolves lesser conflicts in the self and
assists toward interpretation. It refines perception and discrimination. It
develops the imagination and the ability to put oneself in the place of others.
It is an aid to mental health. It fosters mutual sympathy and understanding. It
offers an ideal for human life. Aesthetic experience is momentary. The original
emotion disrupts normal consciousness, experience, and behavior. What occupied
our attention before is not as interesting. We abandon occupations. Our
situation is disoriented; it checks our daily experience. Eventually, we must
resume daily experience, we must return. It satisfies our desire to see the
object of reflection. We satisfy the hunger with this experience. Yet, it
contains within it the beginning of a new longing or desire. In an aesthetic
experience or love experience, the self does not disappear, even though one may
direct one's attention so fully outside the self that it feels as if the self
disappears. Such peak experiences have their own intrinsic value. Truth,
goodness, and beauty form into a unity in such moments. Peak experiences bring
momentary loss of fear, anxiety, inhibition, defense and control, a giving up
of renunciation, delay and restraint. As a peak experience, one feels more
integrated than at other times. The greatest attainment of identity is a
transcending of self, a going beyond and above selfhood. We feel ourselves to
be at the peak of our powers, using all our capacities at the best and fullest.
People feel lucky, fortunate, and graced. Joy surprises us. Aesthetic
contemplation is for the sake of enjoyment. We would not continue to attend to
the object of contemplation if doing so were not enjoyable. We savor the
experience, rather than classify and identify it. Although analysis may enhance
such savoring of experience, it often stifles it. The object of contemplation goes
beyond practical use as well. We often quickly determine the utility of an
object. When something in our world overwhelms us, forces itself upon us,
disrupts us, we have gone beyond utility. Aesthetic experience brings us to the
surplus of human experience.
A second positive
dimension of the affective life is beauty. An occasion of beauty incites and
requires an act of replication. An occasion of beauty prompts the begetting of
children; it prompts a copy of itself. We are willing to revise our own location
in order to place ourselves in the path of beauty is the basic impulse
underlying education. We cannot conceive of a beautiful thing that does not
have the quality of replication as an impulse toward creation that results in
both the famous painting and in the mundane act of staring.
Beauty takes place
in particulars - a painting, a symphony, a poem, a novel, etc. Beauty has a
sacred and unprecedented character. Beauty saves lives and confers the gift of
life; it quickens adrenalin, making the heartbeat faster. It makes life
increasingly vivid, animated, living, and worth living. The beauty of a
phenomenon captures our attention, puts us out of gear with practical life, and
forces us to view it on the level of aesthetic consciousness. The object focuses
our attention outside self. Beauty also incites deliberation; it fills the mind
and invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger with which
we need to bring it into relation. Beauty causes us to gape and suspend
thought; while also causing us to reflect upon precedents and parallels and
move forward toward new acts of creation. It causes us to bring things into
relation with a kind of urgency as though one's life depended upon it.
Beautiful things have a forward momentum, inciting the desire to bring new
things into the world. Beautiful things also incite us to move backward, to the
ground out of which we may rediscover and whatever new thing is made.
What can we hope
to bring about in ourselves when we open ourselves to and actively pursue
beauty? As those who behold beauty, we seek to bring new beauty into the world
and may become successful in this endeavor. We become increasingly beautiful in
our interior life. Further, beauty is life-saving and life-restoring. We
receive the gift of life in our perception of beauty, as well as bestow life.
A third positive
dimension of affective is that of love. André Comte-Sponville (A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, 2002)
and Eric Fromm (The Art of Loving,1956)
have been helpful to me here.
Love has a
neurotic dimension, as Freud point out. Yet, human beings in their loving point
to something in which they hope. Love stimulates moral reflection, and is, in
fact, the beginning and goal of all moral reflection. Apathy is the withdrawal
of feeling. Love suggests that something matters. Caring for another is the
opposite of apathy. Love embraces another in the world. In a negative mood, we
have the nagging suspicion that nothing matters. We become apathetic and
uninvolved. Caring leads to a healing of this sickness. Love is responsibility
for another in caring for their needs. Love is respect. Love implies knowledge
of the other. Love is the escape from the prison of our aloneness. In
discovering the other, love helps us discover who we are. We love people we
naturally like, but Jesus recommended that we love the neighbor and even the
enemy. Love recognizes our incompleteness. Love is a quest and desire. Yet, the
quest is not really for oneness. The proper aim of love, as well expressed
lovemaking, is intimate responsiveness. What the lover wants is to be extremely
close to the person he or she loves, to be close enough to perceive and respond
to every movement and every perceptible sign. In that closeness, the lover
wants to achieve the pleasure of the other person and his or her own. Lovers
also seek to kind of knowledge of the other person, the sort of knowledge that
consists in awareness and acknowledgement of every perceptible portion of that
person's activity.
We express love in
our friendships. This love extends to universality of humanity and the totality
of the person. It introduces into the sphere of human relations that distant
goal of universality that we find suggested compassion and justice. This love
joyfully accepts the other of the other, as the person is and will be. This
love includes oneself, but not in a preferential way. To love is to find one's
riches outside oneself. This is why love is poor, and yet the only wealth. We
experience both the poverty and wealth of love through want (passion), through
received and shared joy (friendship), and through joy that is given and given
up (agape). The absence of this love makes virtues necessary. When the love of
friendship and agape exists it frees us from the law and makes it enter our
hearts. That love is more absent than not is what justifies our education in
the virtues. Even Augustine said that a true definition virtue is a due
ordering of love. Love commits us to morality and frees from it. Morality
commits us to love, even in its absence, and must yield before it. Love is
primarily an attitude, an orientation of character that determines our
relationship to others in general, not to specific persons. To love one person,
and not love others, is to have an alienated kind of love. Such love is egotism
and magnifies their alienation with others they do not love. We become loving
people. If we love one person genuinely, we love all persons, we love the
world, and we love life.
Self-love is an
extension of our general love to human beings; after all, we are human beings
as well. Our love for ourselves needs to reflect what we have already said
about being loving persons: care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. The
basic affirmation contained in love is directed toward the person loved. Our capacity
to love is the affirmation of our own life, happiness, growth, and freedom.
A fourth dimension
of the positive role of the affective life is that feelings reveal that at
which one's life aims. They reveal the orientation of the tendencies that direct
life toward the world. Feeling reveals its meaning by contrast with the more
refined form of thinking proper to what we commonly call knowledge. Feeling
makes interior what we objectify. In these tensions, we experience something of
the misery of human life and the separation we experience within it. Yet,
religious experience closely connects with the concept of feeling
(Schleiermacher) in that feeling indicates the totality of life.
Schleiermacher was
correct in indicating that the heart of religious feeling was receptivity and
dependence. Feelings have their place in self-transcendence and in the temporal
flow of life. Feeling relates ecstatically to the world and the people around
us. The orientation of human beings to a fullness of life that transcends them
and manifests itself especially in the community of their fellow human beings
finds expression in the positive feelings and passions, especially in feelings
of sympathy but also in joy and hope. We participate in the forming of the
future by virtue of our capacity to conceive of and respond to new
possibilities, and to bring them out of imagination and try them in actuality.
New possibilities motivate us; goals and ideals attract and pull us toward the
future, even while our past pushes us; the present brings together the push and
the attraction, the past and the future. Feeling is the basis for certainty of
the external world and for the presence of the ego. Feeling as receptivity
unites itself to the totality of the finite and thus relates itself to the
infinite as distinct from the world, although only reflection reveals all of
this. Every experience is embedded in a complete whole. In feeling, we find the
theme of the wholeness of human life. In its reaching out to the totality of
life, feeling anticipates the distinction and correlation effected by the
intellect, even though because of its vagueness feeling depends on thinking for
definition.
I
have been exploring the affective life as the region of our lives that relates
us ecstatically to the world and people around us. The depth psychology of C.
J. Jung has shown how the prior orientation of the individual to the community
is significant for the constitution of the self. The orientation of human
beings to a fullness of life that transcends them and manifests itself
especially in the community of their fellow human beings finds expression in
the positive effects and passions, especially in feelings of sympathy, but also
in joy and hope. Such feelings draw individuals out of their isolation. However,
a characteristic of negative moods and feelings, such as fear, anxiety,
arrogance, sadness, envy, and hate, is to isolate individuals within
themselves. The positive effects are expressions of an anticipatory
expectation.
If
we stopped here, it would feel as if humanity were just wonderful. Yet, we know
that not to be the case. Human beings have a profound misery that the affective
life reveals. This discussion will serve as our re-thinking of the notion of
humanity as sinful.
To make the
transition to a discussion of the negative dimension of the interior, affective
life, Hegel and Freud may well provide us with some help.[1]
Freud will stress regression in that the symbols of adult life derive from the
infancy of the individual. Hegel will stress the emergence of new figures that
anticipate our spiritual adventure as individuals. Regression and progression
understood in symbols are the tension of the emerging identity of the
individual. Present behavior disguise and reveal. Symbols in dreams, myths, and
fairy-tales are vestiges of childhood but they also contain creative meaning.
We are spirited beings that sometimes sides with reason and courage and
sometimes with aggression. Our spiritedness suggests a restless heart that does
not have satisfaction or rest. Spiritedness suggests desire that arises from a
lack and a drive toward. The fragility of humanity shows itself in the capacity
for evil. At the same time, feeling will anticipate more than it can give.
To reflect with
Hegel, then, feeling will center on having through the realities of scarcity
and work, power and its alienation, and worth as culture recognizes it. Having
anchors that which is mine in economic relation. Any having also suggests a
power relation in the appropriation of economic goods. Yes, it can lead to
subjection and domination. Yet, in properly constructed social relations,
having and power will lead to proper worth and dignity of individuals. Of
course, worth or esteem come from our belief about self and world. I believe
that I am worth something in the eyes of another who approves my existence.
Insofar as I the worth in the eyes of the Other affects me, this belief, this
credence, this trust, constitutes the very feeling of my worth. This
appreciative affection or this affective appreciation, is the highest point to
which one can raise self-consciousness in spiritedness (thymos). As a belief,
worth may be little more than self-delusion or arrived upon through the
deprecation of others. Such esteem is fragile and easy to wound. Further, as I
have suggested, spiritedness suggests the restless heart. When is having
enough? When is power properly exercised and received? When will I feel
properly recognized? The point of feeling is to unite us to people and things,
even while alienation (Marx) is a counter movement in our relation to the
world. The cultural world and its institution disguise and disclose this
uniting and alienating tension that pervades human experience.
Thus,
humanity is a broken presence in the world. Human beings could accept their
responsibility in answering the question of themselves, their question as to
the totality of the world, their question of human destiny, and the operation
of mastery over nature, by expanding their self-interest to include
responsibility for others and for nature. Yet, exploitation and oppression to
the advantage of private self-interest is another direction of human behavior.
Egocentricity makes its appearance and determines the way in which people
experience the world. The relatedness of everything to the ego is in the form
of self love. Such brokenness is part of the natural condition of humanity. The
misery of humanity is evident to us all. However, the emphasis on sin in
Christian teaching is in need of re-formulation. The discussion has led to
inauthentic guilt feelings. The notion of “original sin” is one that moves
against our sense of individual responsibility. Yet, the decay of this teaching
led to a focus on acts of sin and therefore moralism, life-denying rigidity,
and extended feelings of guilt. The neurotic result provided fertile ground for
Nietzsche and Freud. Their unmasking exposed the potential oppressive nature of
Christian belief in God. The notion of sin is now property of the church,
rather than a reference to a universal human condition. The light-hearted use
of sin in the public sphere (the devil made me do it or sinfully good) makes
the credibility of the Christian view of sin in question.
In
order to understand the misery of humanity, we need to balance the social nexus
of sin with individual choice. Sin will show itself in the idolatry we see in
the excess of self-affirmation, in lust as a refusal to mature our love, in
injustice as we make others serve us and in the despair that leads us to the
failure to risk creative action. Yet, we cannot separate ourselves from sin.
Thus, the roots of sin are not in society. Sin has its root in the heart, as
Romans 7 makes clear, and thus, the social nexus fails to explain the
universality of sin. Sin represents our alienation from God, an alienation that
comes through our cooperation with it. We engage in sin because of its
deceptive character. If we are grateful for the independence that God has
granted us, then its “cost” is the permission of sin.
The notion of the
misery of humanity refers to the corruption in the structure of human conduct.
The loss of meaning is the place where modern consciousness begins. Awareness
of evil remains part of the modern discussion, as movies and television series
show. The problem secularity has, however, is that evil human beings are
responsible for evil and for victory over it. The tendency is to place blame
for evil on anonymous structures and pressures on the social system. It tends
to localize evil in others or groups. Another way to think of this is the basic
“game” that people play of victim-persecutor-rescuer. Modernity has gotten
itself into a sick game and simplistic game that, as with individual lives,
will lead to sick political culture rather than a healthy one that will solve
legitimate problems of a free society. If evil could find its localization in a
group (the rich, the capitalist, a race, a gender) then all one has to do is
single out, isolate, or destroy the group. Of course, if we step back, even if
we could destroy the group, evil would remain. As I see it, George Orwell told of
this issue in his parable Animal Farm, and
it remains a powerful reminder of this truth. Evil pierces deep into the human
heart.
The
first negative dimension of the affective life is anxiety.
Kierkegaard said
that self-fulfillment based on our subjectivity and finitude is a perversion of
the basic relation to the Infinite and Eternal. When we refuse to consider the
Infinite and Eternal, we may not even properly understand the issue that faces
human beings. The result is the desperate character of our strivings for
self-fulfillment, resulting in anxiety and despair. Excessive focusing on the
self and our identity is deforming the theme of human life.
Anxiety
becomes the source of despair, care, and aggressiveness. Need and desire
characterize human life. However, the step to excessive desire that sins takes
in anxiety leads to attempts to ensure the self by possession of what we
desire. Anxiety and the related fixation on the self also are behind the search
for confirmation from others. We want recognition by others. When we seek it at
any price to secure own identity, the search springs from an anxiety about the
self that expresses a self-fixation. Uncertainty of the future and the
incomplete nature of our identity feed the anxiety. Anxiety makes us cling to
the self. The alternative is confidence in the future. Our lives are a gift for
which we can be thankful and with which we can move confidently into the
future. Anxiety keeps us from this confidence. Such everyday manifestations of
sin are its true nature, which remains concealed for the most part from us.
Here is the basis of its seduction.
The mood of
anxiety is the point of departure in the question of the wholeness of human
existence. Anxiety reveals the tension between the temporal moment and the
whole of life. It confronts the possibility of the void and emptiness. Our
experience of “everydayness” can express boredom with life and our alienation
from the world. Our talking can articulate our life in the world, but it also
indicates our alienation from it in idle talk. We fall from the true
possibility that resides within each of us. True life hides from us. Yet, the
choice of living life authentically and in freedom leads to genuine joy.
The second
negative dimension of the affective life is alienation that arises out of
anxiety.
The depth of the
term “alienation” is that it allows one to bring into a single theme the
brokenness of human existence in the self, to other human beings, to society, and
to any sense of human destiny and meaningfulness. Given the alienation that
individuals experience, the shared world they create will also reflect
alienation.
Anxiety has a
paralyzing power. People devote much of their lives in dealing with others, to
avoiding more anxiety than he already has and to getting rid of this anxiety.
Anxiety often arises out of anticipated unfavorable appraisal of one's current
activity by someone whose opinion one values. The state of alienation makes
itself known to us in feelings of malaise, discontent, anxiety, and general
depression; alienation makes its presence by means of such feelings. Dreams
often reflect these alienating forces, dealing with unsatisfied needs that
waking life of which waking life does not take care. Alienated individuals are
thrown back upon their egos and reduced to them; they remove themselves from
their true selves and question their identity. The process of alienation may
begin as a separation from a specified counterpart; it tends to a generalized
state of estrangement and apartness in which the ego falls back upon itself.
This indeterminacy is essential to the feeling of self-alienation in
particular. The feeling of personal nonidentity means that the identity that is
lacking is not grasped; for this reason, the nonidentity too remains vague.
Here is the point.
Human beings who are trying to find their identity have a primary concern with
themselves. They lack their authentic identity. When human beings who are
concerned about themselves think that they come closest to their own identity
through this kind of preoccupation with themselves, then they are alienated
form their true destiny and their true selves. The awareness of alienation can
lead to many efforts to overcome it. However, no human action can alter the
condition of alienation if what they consider to constitute their alienation is
not the think that really makes them alienated. A false identification of the
source of alienation that leads to changed behavior will lead to increased alienation.
The
third dimension to the negative dimension of the affective life is guilt, keeping
in mind that this entire discussion concerns the tension that we find in
identity and nonidentity of the person. Guilt is a specialized feeling proper
when one has transgressed an established norm. The concept of conscience had
its origin in the experience of guilt. Being guilty is an expression of an
ought, the content of which is the authenticity of our self. Guilt as
transgression becomes intelligible in this sense. The concept of action
presupposes the concept of responsibility. The capacity for action is grounded
in the call to authentic selfhood.
Alienated
individuals experience being thrown back upon their egos and reduced to them.
Feelings of malaise, discontent, anxiety, and depression express such
alienation. The consciousness of guilt presents itself as a heightened
expression of the alienation of the ego from itself. Feelings of alienation are
indeterminate. On the other hand, guilt is occurs in a quite determinate
objective situation, a transgression of a norm. One can also experience
neurotic guilt that would be indeterminate. It would be the result, according
to Freud, of an excessively strict superego. Guilt presupposes an authority,
whether legal or moral. Paul Ricoeur[2] has made
this clear. Culprits are to answer for their actions.
A fourth dimension
of the negative dimension of the affective life is the prospect (fear) of death.
We cannot leave these considerations without a brief reflection on time,
eternity, and death.
Human life occurs
within limits. We are discussing the primary limit. Life and death have a
certain mystery to them. True, everything has its season, a time for birth, and
a time for death. They are the simple beginning and end of a life. They are
facts. What we do with the pages between them is what matters. Yet, in the type
of lives we human beings have, we wrestle with the meaning and purpose of it
all. We live forward. We often understand it backward. While we are often
busily engaged in living, we rarely give the gift of a pause in order to
reflect upon the picture we are painting with our lives. The purpose of our
lives often arises slowly in the course of our having lived. We may not see it
with relative clarity until we develop a retrospective lens on our lives. We
are what we are in this time. The time ahead is not yet and the time behind is
no longer. Our lives begin and end, and therefore, our lives have a history. We
have responsibility for this time. We have no responsibility for what came
before or what will come after our end. The story of our lives arises out of
the conflict and cooperation of these two forces. Our lives occur under the
sign of our finitude. We have an allotted time that will define the character
of our lives. We do not
receive the gift of time so that everyone could follow the same path – the easy
path, the straight and narrow one – to arrive safely at its end. We
received the loan of this allotted time. Those who rebel against the limit will
not experience pleasure with life. The offer of this loan will not come again.
The loan is full of meaning. We experience goodness, as we are young, grow old,
and die. We live with others and, with some good fortune, die with others. We
have no right to belittle it as fleeting and transient. We must take the loan
seriously and joyfully. The beginning of life is a gift. The end of life is
removal of that gift. The beginning of life raises the question of whether we
will respond to the calling or vocation that will arise in the course of our
lives. Response to the calling is our share, as small as it may be, in the
cosmos and the formation of human history. The end of life involves leaving
that response behind. We have time as an opportunity that occurs under the sign
of the promise and goal. For now, in the present time of human beings, they
have their unique opportunity, and since they do not know how long it will last
they must seize and use it. They have no time to lose, and so must make time to
take time. The power of the calling is that it occurs within the interval of
time and its limit. Time
goes on. Our time on this earth is still ticking. We cannot change the past.
Everything we do will change the future. Time moves forward in such a way that
every decision we make regarding our lives has an open quality to it. We can
always make changes in another direction. Time is a precious gift in which the
challenge is to use it fully. The beginning of life is the necessary
foundation of what will become the structure of our lives. The end of life is a
completion of that structure. Your life is like a building under construction
and your end is its completion. Think of your life like a play with several
scenes and acts. As with any play, it must begin and it must end. If we did not
have an end, it would not be history; it would not be a story. Understandably,
many human beings focus upon the end. Many approach it with dread. Somewhere
ahead of us is the term of our lives, the frontier of our time toward which we
approach with every day and hour. At that point, we shall be no longer. Yet,
the beginning is every bit as real. We also come from a term and frontier. We
move further away from the beginning frontier every day and hour. The question
posed by our beginning seems less urgent while the question posed by our end
seems to become more so. Yes, our being in time will end one day. This reality
is disquieting. Our present will one day have no future. This seems more
disquieting than the other reality, that our lives once began as a present
without past. What looms before us is the approaching end rather than the
receding beginning. Our beginning seems to have no urgent or pressing cause to
consider. After all, the beginning is behind us. We tend to look ahead, of
course, so our end is what we see and contemplate. Our beginning is behind and
receding further into the past. The nearer our end approaches, the less the
beginning claims our attention. Yet, life strives and calls for further life.
Every moment, even at our end, we are living out the calling out of which we
have lived our lives. Taking life seriously and seizing the opportunity of the
allotted time suggests a lack of fear in the presence of death. Now is the time
to express our gratitude for the people who have made our allotted time
meaningful and joyful. Waiting until such persons are in the grave will create
regret. Grief is present, in part, because we do not end this life at the same
time. It is unpleasant to think that someday I shall be a corpse whom others
will leave and go home chatting after they have heaped wreaths and flowers and
poured out kind words and music upon me. It is indeed unpleasant to think that
my place will then be in a coffin or urn a few feet below the surface of the
ground. It is indeed an unpleasant thought that for a time people will miss me
up above in the daylight, but that time will finally extinguish me from human
memory when the last of those who knew me has gone the same way. This
unpleasantness is the kind of death that awaits us with absolute certainty.
This unpleasantness is the form of the end of our existence in our time and the
conclusion of our transience. To consider that we shall die means to accept
oneself; to admit that one day we shall no longer exist, but will stand before
a final “too late.” I in my uniqueness have to do this one allotted time. [3]
Yes, the time may grow short for us. Such knowledge may set us free to prevent
mourning its end or letting the fact of our end depressing us. Grief and joy
may deepen in our quiet desire for the day when we realize that the many kisses
and embraces we receive today were simply incarnation of the eternal embrace of
eternity.[4]
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