The Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman

Listened to this on CD while driving the family on vacation.

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

This book is out of the ordinary for a Christie work, and one of her better efforts. Christie is not great literature, but there is more depth to her better books than she is usually given credit for, and this book is a case in particular.

Besides being a decent mystery, the book is also a meditation on the nature of evil. Is evil flashy and flamboyant, or small and mean, or perhaps both? Does supernatural evil really exist in the universe? Is the occult genuinely evil and is it effective? These and other similar questions are theme of the work.

Sickness Unto Death Notes, First Part I.

That Despair is the sickness unto death.

"Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis."

Man has an eternal aspect, his intellect, through which he knows the eternal aspect of being. He has a temporal aspect, including his senses, through which he knows the temporal aspect of being in its changing, material nature. Man is a union, a "synthesis", of these two elements, of body and soul. But this is not the deepest account of man, for man is not merely the union of body and soul, for he knows of that union and has the freedom to take a stand with respect to it. Man has the freedom to submit or rebel against the truth of his own nature. Yet this possibility of rebellion is itself a reflection of the nature of man. Man's nature is such that he has the capacity to accept or reject himself. "The self is a relation which relates itself to itself." It is a relation of body and soul (among others) that takes a stand (relates itself) to that very relation.

Now did man create himself or was he created by another? This means more than we generally think it does. For the creation of man not only involves creating body and soul, for animals also have body and soul. It means creating the specific difference of man, which is the peculiar ability to relate himself to himself, to take a stand with respect to himself. A bear does not grow anxious about the fact of being a bear, and sometimes wish he were some other bear or another animal altogether. Even less does the bear wonder if it would be better if he were never born. The bearness of the bear is something about which he is altogether unconcerned. But man is very concerned about his own humanity; he may sometimes wish he were another man or another sort of being altogether. It is this peculiar fact, that he relates himself to himself, that is the specific difference of man.

Kierkegaard acknowledges but two possibilities: The relation that constitutes man was constituted by man himself, or the relation was constituted by another, who Kierkegaard takes to be God. What about the possibility that man was constituted not by himself or by God, but by nature? Such a possibility is, well, not possible. For the relation that relates itself to itself transcends nature altogether. Nature may provide the elements of a relation, as she grounds essences, but she is powerless to provide the relation itself; for a relation is not another essence but transcends the order of essences; just as the relation force equals mass times acceleration transcends force, mass, and acceleration, the elements of the relation. This, by the way, is the short answer why science will never fully explain man. For man is constituted in part by the relation he takes to the science he conducts, and in that relation he necessarily transcends science. (For to any science that attempted to account for the relation man takes to science, man will further relate himself to that "last science," in a way not possibly accounted for by that science.) 

So man either constituted the relation that is himself by himself, or that relation was constituted by God. If man created himself ("constituted itself"), then the problem of life for man is merely to fulfill the meaning that he has created for himself. The problem of life becomes the problem of being "authentic" or of being "true to yourself", whatever one takes that truth to be. It finally doesn't matter what you think the truth about yourself to be, for you have constituted yourself in your own truth. The truth about yourself is what you think that truth to be. This seems to be the prevailing opinion in elite American culture.

But suppose that man is not the creator of his own truth, that he is a relation constituted, not by himself, but by another Power? Then the problem of life for man becomes relating himself to the power that constituted him. No longer is life about being "authentic" for whatever truth or authenticity a man has cannot be found in himself, but only in the power that constituted him.

The vulgar version of the opinion that man constitutes his own self is found in the exhortation to "follow your dreams." Dreams are of subjective origin and bear no necessary relation to objective reality; "following your dreams" means imposing your own self-created meaning on reality. The vulgar version of the opinion that man's self is constituted by a higher Power is the counsel that "God has a plan for you." (By the way, vulgar does not mean false. It only means common opinion as opposed to sophisticated opinion.) What your dreams are doesn't matter; what matters are the "dreams" of the Power that holds the secret of your being.

On my main blog, the post about Lee and McClellan is relevant. McClellan was a man who "followed his dreams" and thought that his own self constituted its own meaning; in his case, the meaning of "savior of the Union." Lee was a man who knew himself to be constituted by a higher power, and the meaning of his life was to be found in dedicating himself in service to that higher power.

Kierkegaard finishes by showing that despair (the sickness unto death) is not just a "problem" like any other. It is a disruption of the very self; the self has no uncontaminated resources from which it can fix itself. The self cannot "stand outside itself" and repair itself. The hardier it tries to do this, the worse it makes the situation. In fact, this is the pattern for the deepening of despair.

Marriage and Caste in America by Kay S. Hymowitz

The subtitle says it all: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.

This is a collection of Hymowitz's essays over the last 10-15 years, describing the destruction of the family in our culture.

Sickness Unto Death Notes, Introduction

Kierkegaard uses the raising of Lazarus to explain the difference Christianity makes in the life of man. In the raising of Lazarus, Christ showed that death is not the ultimate evil it appears to be, "the last thing of all." But Christianity not only takes the sting out of death; it introduces a new evil even more fearful than death, and in light of which death is relativized. This evil is the "sickness unto death."

The general concept of evil is that evil is the deprivation of the good. Death is the evil of the deprivation of the good of life. By revealing a new good - eternal life in Christ that transcends mortality - Christianity necessarily reveals a new evil, the deprivation of the good of eternal life or, in other words, eternal death. The Christian must work out his salvation in fear and trembling because the stakes have gotten higher for him than they are for the "natural man" (i.e. the man for whom mortal death is the ultimate evil and an end.) The natural man can opt out of the game of existence through death; if he has suffered too much or been shamed or dishonored, he can destroy himself through suicide like a Roman consul or Japanese samurai. There is no opting out of existence in Christianity; the question of whether he will exist is no longer one asked of man. The only question he is asked is the nature of his existence. In this respect, Kierkegaard tells us, the relationship of the Christian to the natural man is like that of an adult to a child.

Christianity introduces a peculiar mode of existence, the possibility of which was previously unknown: The state of eternal death. In Christianity, just as a man can be eternally alive yet mortally dead, so can he be eternally dead yet mortally alive. This latter state is the "sickness unto death", in which death is not the result of the sickness, but is the sickness. The horror figures of vampires and zombies are vulgar interpretations of the state of living death, and are therefore at bottom Christian figures (which is why the horror genre always has a latent relationship to Christianity, and loses its potency when the Christian element is expunged.) The sophisticated understanding of the state of living death is the sickness unto death, to be explored by Kierkegaard in this book.

Sickness Unto Death Notes, Preface

Kierkegaard spent his career trying to communicate one main point: Christianity is not primarily a theory or an idea or even a way of life; it is an existential communication between the God-man Christ and the individual man. This means you.

The man who approaches Christianity as a matter of merely academic interest may be correct according to the canons of the academy, but he is involved necessarily in what Kierkegaard would call "subjective falsehood." He has mistaken himself for someone to whom the challenge of Christ has not been directed, or at least as someone to whom the challenge of Christ may be subordinated to the abstract, intellectual pursuit of truth. The academic calling is taken as a higher calling than the call of Christ, as though the intellectual demands of the academic are self-evidently the highest demand that can possibly be.

But Christ has directed his call to discipleship to intellectuals as well as common men. This is the source of the "anxious concern" that characterizes the true Christian intellectual, or even an intellectual who , though not a Christian, recognizes that Christianity is a possibility for him. Whether Christianity is immediately taken to be objectively true is beside the point. Kierkegaard's point relates to our existence as individuals with respect to the possibility that Christ is indeed the Son of God. If He is not, then Christ has no meaning and places no demands on me now or in the future; if He is, then He has infinite meaning for me and places demands on me now, not at some far off time in the future when my intellectual investigation of Christianity reaches a satisfactory completion. The intellectual who understands his subjective relationship to the possible truth of Christianity will naturally feel anxiety with respect to the predicament in which it puts him.

This predicament is not an artificial creation of Kierkegaard or radically out of character with the rest of existence. For example, the man who is told the building he is in is on fire is in a mundane, less significant form of the predicament. He will leave the building because of the subjective truth of his relationship to the possible objective truth that the building is on fire. Were he not in this particular building, he could take the proposal that it is on fire as one for leisurely academic study. He could take as long as he likes, let the evidence accumulate, and render a judgment only when he finds a scientifically defensible conclusion can be made. The man in the building has no such luxury; more significant to him than the actual objective state of the building is his subjective relationship to the possibility that it is on fire. The dire consequences that would follow were the building to actually be on fire and he inside it dictate his course of action. He leaves off idle speculation about the building and gets up and leaves it.

Kierkegaard's point is that, with respect to Christianity, we are all like the man in the (possibly) burning building. There is no place in existence "outside the building" from which a man may investigate Christianity with academic indifference, as though its flames could not possibly touch him. The man who takes this approach to Christianity, whatever his merits as an objective scholar, has already made a far more serious subjective mistake with respect to Christianity.

Kierkegaard is not saying that this "subjective logic" should compel all reasonable men to become Christians. He viewed his career as merely a corrective to the notion that Christianity can legitimately be approaches in an attitude of academic detachment. Any consideration of Christianity that grasps its essential nature, whatever the ultimate objective truth of Christianity, will involve some anxiety and "fear and trembling" on the part of the investigator.

When Kierkegaard writes in an "edifying" mode, he writes for the "man in the burning building," not for the disinterested, leisurely academic. Thus the Sickness Unto Death is not written in the abstract, subjectively indifferent form we expect of academic discourse, but in a form that reflects the existential predicament in which Christianity places all men. Since with respect to Christ, we are all in the possibly burning building, "From the Christian point of view everything, absolutely everything, should serve for edification." Therefore, with respect to the opinion that the Sickness Unto Death is "too edifying" to be strictly scientific, Kierkegaard "has no opinion," for such an opinion can only be made from the place of academic disinterest, just the place Kierkegaard denies is available for the investigator aware of subjective truth. By refusing himself to have such a "scientific opinion", Kierkegaard signals to the reader that he has taken his own writing subjectively and to heart.

Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson