Meaning Beyond Heroic Illusions? Transcendence in Everyday Life

Ernest Becker's theory of human evil is as devastating as it is incisive since he identifies the uniquely human capacity for transcendence as the source of evil. Anticipating our own death, we turn to elaborately constructed heroic illusions that give us meaning and the promise of immortality while treating those with different ideologies as opponents. This article summarizes Becker's interpretation of evil and discusses how transcendence is understood by contemporary thinkers such as Karl Rahner. It concludes by examining breakthroughs in personal relationships as transcendent experiences that are deeply meaningful but do not involve the construction of others as enemies.     

A VIROCENTRIC PERSPECTIVE ON EVIL

Abstract. The coronavirus pandemic has stirred interest in viruses. This has been accompanied by a proliferation of popular works trying to explain how viruses fit into the Christian worldview. In an anthropocentric perspective, viruses are easily regarded as malicious entities. This article, however, shows that a proper understanding of the biology of viruses actually adds another level of complexity to our perception of good and evil. Interestingly, this additional layer of complexity might help us solve some of the most urgent difficulties in the discussion about good and evil, if we recognize the subjective nature of what we call natural evil. We need to be more nuanced not merely in our theological discussion about good and evil, but also in the way we talk about viruses.     

Coronavirus: does its activation of archetypes of evil cause added psychological suffering?

Fear and grief caused by the pandemic have produced a powerful unconscious narrative in the collective psyche that the coronavirus is driven by an innately evil, and possibly divine, force. The resulting archetypal dimension of fear causes an extra layer of psychological suffering in individuals. This paper discusses how and why this narrative was created and why it is so compelling by looking at 1) the myth-making nature of the human psyche, 2) the psychodynamics of fear that drive the narrative, 3) the properties of the coronavirus and the pandemic that activate negative poles of some archetypes, in particular, archetypes of evil, and 4) asking how analytical psychology can help ease psychological suffering caused by these negative narratives, where one possibility is to invoke the transcendent function. The author’s personal experiences as both biochemist and analytical psychologist elucidate how the transcendent function can promote healing.     

Surviving Evils and the Problem of Agency: An Essay Inspired by the Work of Claudia Card

Claudia Card did not live long enough to complete her work on surviving evils. Yet she left us an invaluable body of work on this topic. This essay surveys Card's views about the nature of evils and the ethical quandaries of surviving them. It then develops an account of survival agency that is based on Card's insights and in keeping with the agentic capacities exercised by Yezidi women and girls who have escaped from ISIS's obscene program of trafficking in women and sexual violence. Card holds that true survival requires not only staying alive and as healthy as possible but also preserving your good moral character. The essay maintains that while exercising agency to elude evil and protect yourself often depends on your own skills and personality traits, exercising agency to restore or develop your moral character often depends on social support.     

Review

Book reviewed in this article:
Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics     

绝对与人类自由--谢林《自由论》探析

本文集中探讨谢林的《自由论》及其在西方哲学史上的意义,作者在指出这部著作不足的同时,充分肯定谢林对自由及与之相关问题的发问,并认为这是近现代西方哲学对人类自身命运的一次重要思考。     

“Playing God? Yes!” Religion in the Light of Technology

If we appeal to God when our technology (including medicine) fails, we assume a " God of the gaps." It is religiously preferable to appreciate technological competence. Our successes challenge, however, religious convictions. Modifying words and images is not enough, as technology affects theology more deeply. This is illustrated by the history of chemistry. Chemistry has been perceived as wanting to transform and purify reality rather than to understand the created order. Thus, unlike biology and physics, chemistry did not provide a fertile basis for natural theologies. It is argued that an active, transformative role of humans is appropriate in biblically inspired religions and called for in the light of imperfections and evil in the world. When the expression "playing God" is used dismissively, as if we trespass upon God–given territory, a theologically problematical association of God and the given order is assumed. A different view of the human calling can be articulated by drawing upon the Christian heritage and by developing an antinatural religious naturalism.     

Rigidity of the far‐right? Motivated social cognition in a nationally representative sample of Hungarians on the eve of the far‐right breakthrough in the 2010 elections

We investigated the “rigidity of the right” hypothesis in the context of the far‐right breakthrough in the 2010 Hungarian parliamentary elections. This hypothesis suggests that psychological characteristics having to do with need for security and certainty attract people to a broad‐based right‐wing ideology. A nationally representative sample (N = 1000) in terms of age, gender and place of residence was collected by means of the random walking method and face‐to‐face interviews. Voters of JOBBIK (n = 124), the radically nationalist conservative far‐right party, scored lower on System Justifying Belief, Belief in a Just World (Global) and higher on Need for Cognition than other voters. Our results contradict the “rigidity of the right” hypothesis: JOBBIK voters scored, on many measures, opposite to what the hypothesis would predict.     

Theory construction and existential description in Schelling’s treatise on freedom

Despite considerable recent attention, important features of Schelling’s famous work, the 1809 treatise On the Essence of Human Freedom, remain under-explored. One of these is the methodological dualism which Schelling advocates at the very start of the text. Schelling aims to weld together into a coherent position a first-person phenomenology of freedom and an explanation achieved by locating freedom within a conceptual system articulating the basic structure of the world. Most interpretations of the Freiheitsschrift, however, concentrate on only one of these approaches, thus foreshortening their understanding of Schelling’s enterprise. The article explores this tendency towards one-sidedness by considering two sophisticated recent interpretations of the work, taking opposite tacks. One, by Markus Gabriel, focuses on the distinctive, self-reflexive metaphysics which Schelling proposes, while the other, by Sebastian Gardner, claims that Schelling’s ontology is extrapolated entirely from his account of our moral consciousness, a procedure pioneered by Kant. The article argues that neither of these interpretations can do full justice to Schelling’s project. Furthermore, although the Freiheitsschrift is not entirely successful, and hence points towards later developments in Schelling’s thinking, its treatment of freedom is superior to the ‘soft naturalism’ pioneered by Peter Strawson, and currently influential across various philosophical traditions.     

Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) and Rūmī (1207–1273) on the Question of Evil: Discontinuities in Sufi Metaphysics

This article compares and contrasts Ibn ?Arabī’s and Rūmī’s accounts of evil. Ibn ?Arabī explains the existence of evil as a consequence of both metaphysical necessity and God’s volitional act. Evil is the inevitable ‘shadow’ of existence implied by the Infinity of God, and God’s mercy existentiates the possibilities ‘hidden’ in the Infinite, allowing this metaphysical necessity to emerge. In contrast to Ibn ?Arabī’s necessitarian-cum-volitional theodicy, Rūmī presents an almost exclusively volitional theodicy. He traces the roots of evil to the Divine Will. To preserve God’s moral perfection, he frequently points to the positive compensating functions of the existence of evil in the world. Ibn ?Arabī’s theodicy enables him to accentuate the necessity of evil in order to save the act of will, and hence God’s perfection, from being directly related to the emergence of evil. Rūmī’s volitional theodicy, however, relates the Divine Will directly to evil, and subsequently attempts to preserve the purity of the Divine intention by accentuating all the positive compensations.