Marriage & the Bible

Marriage & the Bible. So… it seems that a Big Question on many minds at this moment concerns Marriage.  How often do we hear the term, the “biblical view of marriage,” in the various media? Is Marriage really only for one man and one women? It just seems that among all the variety of interesting social possibilities for Human Coupling, there should be more than just this one single possible biblical marital model that we Moderns might consider.

            Other possible cultural and religious models abound – among which is polygamy or polygyny (multiple wives); polyandry (more than one husband—really! …imagine the dirty socks! This is apparently something of a Buddhist thing, practiced in India, Bhutan, and Tibet, and legally recognized in Thailand until 2010); then there is always bigamy (two distinct marriages at the same time… count them both!); polyamory or group arrangements; endogamy, which might sometimes begin to look like incest, but which some might think of as simply keeping a close-knit family (cf. Egyptian pharaohs) -- this was the conception of marriage, in fact, that frames the Jesus parable (Matthew 22:25ff, Mark 12:20ff, & Luke 20:27-40) concerning the one woman married to the guy who had seven brothers, her husband dies, etc., etc., etc., etc.); and then, finally, there is of course the really hip “open marriage.”

Or, alternatively, there are also social Coupling practices taken from the world of Pure Nature, which we might consider adopting for our Human societies. Consider, for example, the bonobo ape, which, it seems, “is the closest extant relative to humans.” Just think, the Wiki-god suggests that there may actually be some advantages for humans seeking to couple if they would imitate the Coupling Culture of their more remote, native bonobo cousins, for whom “Sex functions in conflict appeasement, affection, social status, excitement, and stress reduction. It occurs in virtually all partner combinations and in a variety of positions.” What is not to like in this model from Nature?

            That said, however, this little reflection is not especially about the bonobo or Left Bank Ape; but I cannot resist one last little thought -- our “extant relatives” in Nature also have been seen to do all the good stuff that humans seem to obsess about sexually, if pornography (for humans) and empirical observation (for bonobos) is any indication; but these latter also use sexuality socially, as a form of greeting, as a “means of forming social bonds, a means of conflict resolution, and post-conflict reconciliation.”

            I personally think sex as a form of social greeting has special comedic promise… but I must not let my imagination stray around loose in Nature’s playground.

Western Society could be simply reeling with the multi-dimensional diversity of possible expressions of Social Coupling and Uncoupling, if, of course, it were not so fixated on what the biblical narrative has to say about Marriage. So… what does the Bible “say” about marriage? Is there any actual biblical “teaching” that is particularly meaningful in contextualizing the question of Human Coupling? And, of course there is the entirely different question: Is there a Christian ideal for marriage for which an argument could be made using the biblical texts?

First, before entering into le vif of our subject, it seems to me that a caveat is in order: To use the Bible to substantiate any type of argument at all, reasonable or other, is not terribly reasonable. If, for example, we in the 21^st century have questions concerning with whom to “join” in the coupling act, and how the ceremonial ritual for that Coupling might possibly be practiced in this modern social context, in what way is it reasonable for us to limit our search for guidance and possible social Coupling models to those that might be found in the Bible; for this Bible only narrates the history of very specific and minor inhabitants of ancient Near Eastern time and space, and does not allow us to open up our search to include any, or all, of the other and diverse Coupling Models peppered around the countless nooks and crannies of this planet of ours?

            Did you notice what just happened? In a very slick logical move regularly used by philosophers and other well-reasoning folks, I simply turned around the slippery slope charge, which is one of the favorite arguments used by zealots protecting “the traditional institution of marriage,” and I counter-charged the zealots with cherry-picking! Because why in the world should we limit our search for possible Coupling Models to a single specific document of antiquity, which is not even culturally relevant to us Westerners? This type of zealotry argument is a nec plus ultra illustration of the fallacy of special pleading at its very best; for why not pick the Sumerian culture for guidance instead, or the Bantu cultural traditions, or even in a moment of complete desperation, heaven forbid, the bonobo ape society?

            All right… maybe not the bonobo ape society. Because despite all the interest and social promise of their sexual-social interactions, it seems obvious that the natural model provided by the bonobos must inevitably fail as a model for their less sociosexually progressed human cousins (that would be Us), because it seems that “Bonobos do not form permanent monogamous sexual relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual activity between mothers and their adult sons.”

            It goes without saying, of course, that with our ongoing proclivity for moralizing and religious-ifying our Social Coupling practices, we 21^st century Western humans just will not stand for anything that smacks of non-monogamous Coupling. Which brings us around full circle to our first little caveat in this reflection: that using the Bible to justify any type of Cultural Coupling is clearly special pleading and therefore unreasonable.

That first little caveat aside, though, perhaps we should also explain that some biblical arguments might actually be better than others. In general, if the intent is to win arguments instead of alienating every reasoning person on the planet, then it is better to use the Bible with contextual sensitivity, rather than to use it literally. For example, Pastor Guyton, a culturally contextualizing reader of the Bible, recently reflected on another American pastor, a literalist, who wrote a book in which he defended slavery in Civil War America, because the Bible tells him so!

            So goes the literalist argument: “the abolitionist movement was wrong and the Civil War should never have happened, because if Southern slave-owners had been allowed to implement the Bible's teachings on slavery, then a more humane transition would have taken place through ‘gospel gradualism.’” And there you have it, straight [almost] from the literalist’s mouth.

            The point of this little distinction between a culturally contextualized and a literalist reading of the Bible illustrates the problem one has when using the Bible to defend or argue any given position—it is almost always impossible to determine convincingly whether, in its capacity as historical witness, the Bible simply contains illustrations of specific ancient cultural usage, or whether, in its capacity as moral authority, the Bible is actually trying to teach us, in a timeless here and now, also to go and to do likewise.

Do you want the good news first or the bad news? First, there is just a little bit of bad news, which is that the good news about sexuality and Coupling in the Bible is not all that good.

Bestiality & the Bible. Some good news is that the Bible is not very positive toward bestiality. Germany can soon rest easy, because its Agriculture minister is set, soon, to introduce a new ban on bestiality, which will reverse a 1969 decision to legalize zoophilia. I am not quite sure how best to respond to zoophiles, German or other, “who argue that they treat animals as equals and never force them to do anything against their will.” I have also just learned that it is not illegal to rape an animal in Denmark. Really?

            Also noteworthy on the question of animal sex in the Bible is that men and women are treated with absolute equality—everybody and anybody who does it with an animal “must be put to death.” Perhaps it needs to be clarified that the injunctions against animal love are only in the Hebrew Bible; the Christian Testament is silent on this question. At this point, we are left to determine whether the Bible’s attitude toward animal love is simply a reflection of specific ancient cultural usage, or whether it is actually trying to teach us also to go and to do likewise. This may not be good news for zoophilic groups in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and Sweden—user beware!

Incest & the Bible. More semi-good news is that incest of one sort or another is generally frowned upon in the Bible, although it is not always frowned upon. It seems clear, after all, that if things really started from one man and one women, an Adam and Eve type of story, then it could not have taken too long before the sociological situation evolved into “family fun games” (an expression that I borrow from my grandmother).

            So, on the question of incest and the Bible, as the tempus has fugited [tempus fugit = times flies], so have definitions of incest—one man’s incest is another man’s endogamy, and that sort of thing. Abraham, to name perhaps the most famous/notorious example in the Bible (Genesis 12:10-20), marries his half-sister, Sarai/h. So when famine drives Abraham, Sarai, et al into Egypt, and the princes of Pharaoh see the very beautiful Sarai, Abraham had a really nifty built-in excuse when the Egyptians threaten to kill him for the girl: that he is willing to trade Sarai, his sister, to the Pharaoh in return for safe-passage. Pharaoh, though, nobody’s fool, “Upon discovering that Sarai was a married woman, Abram's wife as well as his sister, […] demanded that they and their household leave immediately, along with all their goods.” Does this narrative teach us about incest, or about badly lying about incest?

            In the Deuteronomic texts, there is a rather straightforward list of forbidden relationships, which forbids intercourse between male [implied] members of family, and daughter/sister, father’s wife, and mother-in-law. However there are also some notable exceptions in the Bible to this general rule of thumb, such as, again, Abraham who shares a common father with his wife Sarai, and Jacob, who married Rachel, the younger sister of his first wife, Leah.

            More on Incest & the Bible. (This information is derived from Wiki sources, but has been verified for accuracy.)

·      Noah and his son Ham (Genesis 9:20-27), who was checking out his father’s nakedness. The Babylonian Talmud suggests that the son may have sodomized the father (Sanhedrin 70a).

·      Nahor, Abraham’s brother, marries one of his nieces (Genesis 11:29).

·      Lot’s two daughters (Genesis 19:32-35) got their father intoxicated in order to sleep with him. Both girls conceived sons, who became sons/grandsons, and half-brothers. This is certainly one-up on old Oedipus!

·      There are numerous examples of cousins, 1^st, 2^nd, and so on, marrying in the Bible – Isaac to Rebekah, Esau to Mahalah, Jacob to Leah and Rachel.

·      Reuben, eldest son to Jacob (Genesis 35:22), slept with Bilhah, Jacob’s concubine/mistress.

·      Judah, another of Jacob’s sons, “went into” Tamar (Genesis 38), his daughter-in-law.

·      Amnon, eldest son to King David, raped his half-sister Tamor (II Samuel 3).

            Just a wee bit more on Incest & the Bible. I was comforted to learn from a Christian website that incest in the Bible was not wrong before God issued his command against incest in Leviticus 18:6-18. “Until God commanded against it, it was not incest. It was just marrying a close relative.” Nothing more need be said.

            

 Perhaps it again needs to be clarified that when there are injunctions against incest in the Bible, it is only in the Hebrew Bible, and that the Christian Testament is again silent on the question. And that again we are left with the interpretative question – which is how to determine whether the Bible’s somewhat inconsistent attitude toward incest is simply a reflection of specific ancient cultural usages, or whether the Bible is actually trying to teach us also to go and to do (and/or not do) likewise.

Polygamy & the Bible. Now the bad news for the Bible debate team on the question of Marriage & the Bible: polygamy is the normative biblical relationship for the period. Besides all the evidence from the Hebrew Bible, which is coming up in the following little section, there is also New Testament evidence (finally) to consider in the form of Paul’s 1^st letter to Timothy. A first comment: the consensus of most modern scholarship is that the Letter to First Timothy is pseudepigraphical, which is to say that most scholars are pretty sure that Paul did not write the letter. Make of this what you wish.

            The text of interest in First Timothy is 3:1-13. The author, “Paul” if you will, is speaking to Timothy of those who would aspire to the offices of church bishop (pastor) and church deacon, both of which the author considers noble callings. For either of these offices, Paul counsels Timothy that the candidate should be the husband of (only) one wife (3:2 & 3:12), and that how the candidate rules his own family is a reflection of how the candidate will rule the flock of faithful. Again a caveat: some translations, such as the NRSV, translate our passage of interest as “married only once.” But the Greek clearly reads for both candidates that they should be a “man of one woman (mia◊ß gunaiko\ß a‡ndra).” Read and weep.

Two conclusions are patent. Primo, the author’s recommendation that the candidates should be men of only one woman extends only to those seeking to fill certain offices in the church, and is not in any way advanced as a general or normative family standard for all men of that day. The author is not trying to start any kind of social revolution in the family. Secondo, the reminder that the candidate should have only One woman (+ attendant children) clearly suggests the following hypothetical situation: that church overseers with the more normative type of polygamous families would have a much harder time keeping “order in the roost”; and it is precisely this quality of orderliness in the roost which the candidate is supposed to be able to demonstrate in order to qualify for the overseeing offices of the church. Therefore only one woman.

            This is clearly one of those “oops” moments in modern and populist biblical interpretation—sic transits the glorious “biblical” argument [sic transit gloria mundi = thus passes the glory of the world], because the “biblical” view of marriage that everyone is talking about, that the Bible teaches a one man, one woman model of marriage, falls in the face of actual textual evidence. The dominant model for Social Coupling in the ancient biblical period, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, is one man and many women. 

(Much of the following information comes from www.biblicalpolygamy.com/)

·      Perhaps a first occurrence of an extreme form of alternative Coupling in the Bible is in Genesis 6, where sons of God, commonly thought to be angels, took human wives to themselves. As you read further along in the story, you will see that this did not do much to impress the Deity, and resulted in gigantic offspring, floods and rainbows. It is not quite clear whether this Coupling was in fact polygamous.

·      Abraham, father of the Hebrew nation, had 3 wives.

·      Jacob, father of the twelve patriarchs of the tribes of Israel, had 4 wives.

·      Esau had 3 wives.

·      Moses, of Pentateuch fame, had only 2 wives.

·      Saul, king, had only 2 wives.

·      David, king of Israel and man after God’s own heart, had 18 wives and 10 concubines.

·      Solomon, son of King David, had 1,000 women at his disposal, which included “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart." (1 Kings 11:3) Because Solomon was tolerant in his choice of women, choosing from among Sidontans, Tyrians, Ammonites, and Edomites, it appears that he began to wander from the religion of his Fathers, whence his later problems.

·      Ezra, of Ezra and Nehemiah fame, had only 2 wives.

·      Gideon (Judges 6-8), one of the judges of Israel, "had threescore and ten sons of his body begotten: for he had many wives." Case closed.

Other biblical illustrations of ancient cultural usage. Remember another one of the favorite arguments used by zealots protecting “the traditional institution of marriage,” is that in Genesis God brings “them” together, Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. The too-convenient-to-forget part of that clever language rhyme is that Marriage was not part of the equation. There was no ritual performed – Adam wakes up from the nap, naked Eve is snoozing right next to him, and the rest is history.

            There is also the biblical illustration from the life of Hosea, one of the twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible. In and of itself, the Book of Hosea can rightly be read as a metaphor, which is certainly plausible; but the story line is, nonetheless, that God commands the prophet Hosea to go out and marry a “working girl,” which, in the metaphor, would represent the world gone whoring after other gods. This is when biblical interpretation, and the to-contextualize or to-literalize question becomes interesting. Because if the biblical literalist is to take his sacred text seriously, then based on Hosea’s story he should go out and marry a working girl, and advise others of their moral imperative to do likewise. If, however, the Hosea story is simply to be contextualized, because it seems clear that the story is not simply a reflection of normative ancient cultural usage, nor is it to be interpreted as some sort of moral imperative, then the story looses all meaning to today’s world. 

Which brings us to the question of Gay Marriage & the Bible. I have written elsewhere in the Nonimprimatur blogspot about homosexuality and the Bible. The biblical texts, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, are explicit, and seconded by a long and consistent interpretative tradition in the Church Fathers. The answer is no. Get over it.

            Fortunately, though, we have once again come full circle to the original caveat of this essay – that using the Bible to justify any type of Cultural Coupling is clearly special pleading and therefore unreasonable. The Enlightenment in Europe, which oversaw the birth of a Land whose governing body is an Idea called We the People, and whose governing principle is an Idea called Human Reason, called this People out of Tyranny, both political and religious, and into the public arena of reasoned debate and consensus.  In this New World of ours, the informed opinion is informed precisely by debate and reflection, and not by religion. If this is to remain true about America, then the public conversation about Gay Marriage, and any other type of social change that will occur in the dynamic future of this Land of the Free, may only and ultimately hinge on the question of guaranteeing for all citizens equal standing before the Law. Religious opinions, although freely guaranteed to all men as part of their inalienable rights in this Land, are inadmissible as evidence in the courts of American Public Debate.

Freedom in the Land of the E Pluribus Unum.

Sometimes it is difficult to know whether what you are thinking and writing is a thought-provoking philosophical accounting, or simply a crazed intuition transformed into rant-gone-wild. In this respect, sometimes philosophers are like crazed Dutch hairdressers (or at least the one that I know). This might be one of those equivocal times for all of us, for me the author as well as for you the reader.

            It also comes to mind that this reflection might be destined primarily for American readers; so if you are among those who find this ‘thought-provoking philosophical accounting’ cum ‘rant-gone-wild’ to be only of marginal interest, chances are good that you are a European who has government-organized and sponsored health care. Freedom, in the American sense of the term, does not concern such as you.

‘Freedom’ is the most abstract of concepts, even in moments of extreme philosophical lucidity. The Greek philosophers, for example, did not make the philosophical case for freedom… (Elevtheria!!!! I can still hear the cynical battle cry of one of my former racquetball partners ringing in my ears… he taught romantic literature, of course, in addition to beating me on the r-b court!); because Greeks of the ancient sort did not believe themselves to be free. Rather, they lived in a world tragically conceived, where powerful Gods dominate and control, as invisible and formidable causal forces. In such a tragic world the actions of Gods and men are inextricably intertwined, and although men like Achilles and Socrates understood themselves to be ethically autonomous, i.e., masters of their own choices within the confines of their restricted human knowledge, they did not conceive of themselves as ‘free’ players on the Divine Chessboard. In antiquity, Autonomy tempered by human ignorance as to what the Gods were up to, was not equivalent to this contemporary notion of Freedom.

            In that ancient world, which is explicit in the epic poetry of Homer and elevated to a metaphysical principle in the great tragic poets, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the actions of men could never be free of that external and all-determining causal environment created by the very presence of the unseen, active, and very powerful external causal Forces who/which necessarily controlled every aspect of the world of men.

            Freedom was a value created rationally by philosophers of the world become Christian (post-B.C.E.). In the Christian argument, Freedom is the keystone concept wedged in-between the idea of a God who, unlike any of the other Gods of Antiquity, is good, i.e., moral, and the idea of human moral accountability vis-à-vis this God. For this philosophical conceptualization and argumentation to work, the God can only make morally weighted demands on men if men are meaningfully free—i.e., uninfluenced by the God in their judgments and choices. This (new world) obviously isn’t Kansas anymore, Socrates!

So the philosophically minded in contemporary America might ask, what does it actually mean to be free? In the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave we believe in this Big Idea; we strive for it (because we tend to equate ‘it’ with happiness); we fight for it; we suffer for it; we die for it; and even more cynically, we encourage others to die for it. Yet what does Freedom mean in the good old (unofficial) E Pluribus Unum?

            I suppose it is best to start conversations such as this by asking the question, what can be known clearly about the idea of Freedom?, a question that is, in turn, perhaps best pondered by asking precisely the opposite question: in what ways are Americans not free? (For a justification concerning this convoluted approach to understanding the Universe at large, please see the above reference to sometime philosophers and crazed Dutch hairdressers…).

            In this American ‘Home, Home on the Plains’, which declared its Independence from British despotism in terms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we know for example that, while we may be free with respect to our own life, we are not personally ‘free’ to own our own death, yet. However, the ‘freedom to own our death’ discussion in America, which has the formal and somewhat pejorative tag, Assisted Suicide, is now fairly consistently on the national radar thanks to a variety of initiatives.

            There was Dr. Jack (a.k.a. Doctor Death) Kevorkian’s willingness to risk doing jail-time in the battle for Americans’ right to die. After multiple corpses began showing up at the entrances of Detroit area hospitals, in 1999 Dr. Kevorkian was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison for 2^nd degree murder for physician assisted suicide, and he did 8 years of that sentence before being eligible for parole. Beginning right around the same time there was the national saturation coverage of the Terry Schaivo, case (1998-2005), which highlighted the Nation’s philosophical free-for-all in a desperate search to define what types of principles should be given priority in cases of prolonged life-support, where a third party, e.g., the husband in this case, but it could equally have been a doctor, or the State, or the insurance company, or…, makes a life/death decision on behalf of (read: in the place of) a person, who is no longer capable of making decisions for herself (e.g., who is in a persistent vegetative state). The husband won on the principle of legal next of kin; the parents lost, and the State lost.

            There have also been a variety of right-to-die organizations, such as the Hemlock Society (although its name has since been changed), whose stated mission is to inform about the rights of the dying, as well as to back any type of legislation that will advance the right to die of Americans.

            Finally, it might come as some relief to some to know that straightforward, self-determined suicide in the United States no longer carries the Common Law penalty of ‘Forfeiture of all the goods and chattels of the offender.’ This piece of information, however, would not have relieved the narrative tension in the reasoning of Arthur Miller’s disheartened Death of a Salesman protagonist, Willy Lomen. For purposes of theatrical tension, Lomen decides not to commit suicide because this would not help his family, but would instead simply invalidate his life-insurance policy—no breadwinner and no life-insurance money would not be an improvement for the family finances. For purposes of real-life tension, this also happens to be generally true about life-insurance.

In the Land of Independently-minded Americans we also know without a shadow of a doubt that we are not ‘free’ to act outside the structures provided by the Constitution and the Laws of the Land. So, for example, it would come as no surprise to normally reasoning Americans that the Bush Administration should come under scrutiny by legal minds for issues regarding torture, which has been illegal for a very long time now, both by US law and by a variety of UN conventions, from 1948, 1975, et al, to each of which America affixed her signature. If we recall that the individual who assumes the mantel of the office of the President of the United States swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, the conflict of ethico-legal interest becomes obvious.

            Constitutional constraint (non-freedom) in America also takes the form of Selective Service, or the draft, the legality of which has repeatedly weathered a variety of legal challenges (1918, 1919, 1920, 1968, 1971, and 1981). Idem the persistently sustained legality of the American government’s right to impose an income tax upon its free citizens, a fact in which all Americans undoubtedly rejoice.

More abstractly, in this Land-of-the-Free we Americans can also know clearly, if we just think about it for a little while, that we are not ‘free’ not to conform to social demands (ok… a double negative, but at least the infinitive is not split!). This type of non-freedom is a bit more philosophically lofty, so we can turn to Friedrich Nietzsche for clarity on the question – Kultur is like a prison, he might say, or a cookie-cutter. Following through on this second simile, when we are born we are dropped like so many pieces of dough into a (cultural) baking bowl (called America); and from the very first day we enter into the bowl we are all pressed together and kneaded into a homogenous ‘plop’ of American dough. From this sameness, the various cultural cookie-cutters, i.e., family, language, friends, school, etc., transforms individual bodies into an enculturated entity called An American human. Within a demonstrable range, we Americans all dress similarly (because we all have access primarily to the same clothing stores); we all speak similarly, having the same range of vocabulary (12-20 thousand words, depending on the source), which is actually pretty limited (read: restricting, constraining, non-freeing) when one considers that by most counts English has about three-quarters of a million words at its disposal; we all read roughly the same books, use the same money, think within the same value parameters.

            In other words, we are not ‘free’ to ‘be’ without culture (a-cultural), because Kultur defines the very thing each individual is beyond its human-ness—this is an American human, this a Dutch human, this a French human, etc. And although former President Bill Clinton reminded us in a 2000 White House speech that 99.9% of Human Genome is the same, which is to say that there is statistically speaking no significant racial or material difference among the peoples of the world, there are nonetheless very real cultural differences between them.

           

In another example of non-freedom, we can also know clearly that we are not ‘free’ to choose to live without an economic framework of some sort, whether money or barter or trade. We may be free to own cars, if we can afford to buy them, but we are not free not to pay the local Secretary of State for the license plates, or not to have insurance, or, perhaps, depending on the state, not to have regular inspections that the individual must pay for. Idem for our homes, guns, education, and any other of our possessions that we may ‘freely’ own, albeit in a regulated sort of way, if we can freely afford such things.

We can also know clearly that we are not ‘free’ to function outside the confines of our biology – remember in the film Birdy the protagonist was so distressed by the world of men with their insane wars that he wanted to join the world of his beloved, and peaceful, birds; but his own biology did not allow him that freedom, and in the face of his insistence, his society locked him away in a lunatic asylum. Our only freedom from our biology, and this has little to do with being culturally American, would be for us to understand the use of technology, perhaps in an Avatar kind of way, and the (new and different) constraints to our freedom that they carry with them. P.S.- Scuba divers tend not to forget to take underwater breathing apparatuses on their dives!

            It is clear that Americans, and perhaps one or two others as well, struggle culturally and philosophically with the question, what does it mean to be free? That this is a generalized question in culture, American and other, is clear from such film phenomena as The Truman Show, or The Matrix (1999), this latter of which, according to the Internet-God, received a number of awards and achieved a number of record-breaking financial objectives, thereby demonstrating its importance culturally and philosophically. The premise of the film, of course, is that the entire framework of our perception of reality (and not simply our enculturation) is an artificial environment—that we are everything (someone Else wants), except Free.

So, we have been reflecting on some of the ways in which we Americans are not free; and yet all who are America-minded continue to be deeply stirred by Reverend King’s famous words reminding us of our historical calling to American Freedom:

“This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"”

These are moving American words about the promissory note of Freedom in the Land of E Pluribus Unum, and they continue to speak to our guts when we hear them anew. But the ‘job’ of the citizens in contemporary American does not end in inspired feelings of Freedom—the task has now become ours to discover how these words of Freedom might speak to the minds of this generation of American people, so they might be translated into real-world actions.

American Freedom v. Martin Heidegger & The State

Heidegger

It’s a charming idea, to think of America the Beautiful as America the Philosophically Beautiful.

Of late I have been thinking much about the philosophical foundations of these United States, and of the difficulties 'We The People' have, to steer a straight course that follows the North Star of State Secularism. The recent condemnation in Russia of the punk-rock group, Pussy Riot, in which State Religion legally overwhelmed Individual Freedom, serves as a timely object lesson for me, and reminder, that the course of liberty needs two anchoring ideas that seem to be lacking in the Russian state, but that the America philosophes did not neglect in their thinking some 200 years ago -namely, the philosophical commitment (1) to keep free from State control individual speech and the press, and (2) to keep separated AT ALL COSTS the church, Religion, from the State. Founding Father philosophes, one; Perestroika technocrats (?), nil.

            The American philosophes, in addition to separating Religion from the State (following an idea from Jefferson), borrowed an idea from the 16^th century French humanist philosopher Montaigne, which also involved keeping separated the various powers of government – the legislative from the executive and the judicial. By framing the Constitution in this way, these philosophes reasoned that it might just be possible to fragment the institutionalization of power so thoroughly that it becomes nigh unto impossible for any group or individual to consolidate power into one place in order to create a social tyranny. This last/previous link harks back to an article posted August 15 on the Phrontisterion website, which refers to Putin’s new dictatorship, the one that is, arguably, being presently constructed on the foundations of Perestroika. All I can say is that, from this philosopher’s modest point of view, the “philosophers” of the Russian Perestroika should have perhaps re-ferred and de-ferred to Mr. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia in the course of their human events.

All of which has brought me around again to the question of philosophical underpinnings for nations and states. When we think about politics we should think about ethics – so says Aristotle anyway. And in the study of ethics there is one question that is rather more important than all the other questions, which is THIS question: will men (of both the girl and boy persuasion) generally, (i.e., usually, normally, routinely, customarily, mostly, largely, regularly, habitually, recurrently, commonly, repeatedly, and/or ordinarily) fail to live up to high moral standards? A Heidegger biographer, Hugo Ott, answers in the affirmative, calling this attribute Menschliches Versagen (human failing). Let it be said, though, that Ott is specifically thinking about, presupposing, and nominally referring to the great German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, when he asks, if I may presume to render in my own phrasing, whether the human animal (including the great MH) isn’t just designed by nature to be an ongoing social screw up. (Human failing, after all, is not really applicable to the isolated hermit out living on some remote mountain top; but bespeaks human thoughts and action in the social realm). Carlin Romano, himself a philosopher who clearly has little to no use for the great MH, nonetheless observes that MH is considered by some to be the greatest German philosopher of the 20^th century; similarly, MH is regularly listed by philosophers of all ilk to be among the top 20 philosophers, all nationalities combined, of the 20^th century.

So how did I get from the American Founding Fathers to this philosopher whom Romano has unpleasantly, but not necessarily inappropriately, called the “pretentious old Black Forest babbler”? In an Aiken Musing in which I was thinking Big Thoughts about Socrates and Heidegger, particularly with regard to how they viewed the relationship between the individual and the state, I made the following remarks. Take them for what they’re worth.

            Socrates’ philosophical paternalism, especially in the Crito, seems to compare with Heidegger’s notion of man’s new/true Ontologie, viz., his existence in terms of the State, his für-den-Staat-sein (“existing ‘for the State’”, in Being and Time). Emmanuel Faye, [the French philosopher who has written the currently definitive work on Heidegger’s commitment to the Nazi philosophy], does in fact say, in writing and in person (both on p. 694 of the French edition, Poche 2007, and in a public lecture held at Notre Dame University, which I was fortunate enough to attend), that Heidegger cannot be considered a philosopher because Philosophy, as an intellectual discipline, has the vocation of serving the evolution of man, and is incompatible with any 'philosophy' that seeks the destruction of man. Now, no matter what we might think personally about Heidegger's State-based ontology as a potential political structure in the abstract, from the non-abstract point of view articulated and argued by the American philosophes in the Constitution, any philosophy that argues for the dissolution of Man into the machinery of the State is at odds with the American philosophy of Individualism and the fragmentation of State power.

            An additional assumption of Emmanuel Faye's is entirely French in nature, which is that he is, predictably, the faithful child of the Cartesian cogito; so he is naturally hostile toward Heidegger's fundamental (and fundamentally Hitler-era German, i.e., Blut [blood]-based) Ontology, which dissolves (conquers/annihilates) the subjectively knowing individual (cogito), and dismisses it as a philosophical (ontological?) untruth—a conviction which in turn must, of necessity, invalidate the philosophical underpinnings of a liberal democracy. According to Faye, Heidegger seeks to replace by means of his philosophy the impoverished cogito (i.e., Thinking Individual) with a new ontological value for man: a für-den-Staat (for the State), collectivized existence -- at which point Heidegger's thought weds wonderfully well with Nazi political thought, and, frankly, with any other type of political theory that seeks to dissolve the Individual into the grinding cogs of State existence. This is how Faye already reads Heidegger 's 1927 Being and Time; and I find Faye's reading not only plausible but extremely persuasive. I am also very sympathetic to Faye's loyalty to a truly existential and individualized cogito, which continues to speak out from the heart of the American and French revolutions, and which, I think, must ultimately constitute the redoubt against which the permutation of power into tyranny must finally fail (which is Jefferson's argument for education in this liberal democracy). The cogito also has the virtue of justifying, both politically and philosophically, the devolvement of a centralized Führer power principle in the State (Heidegger) onto the shoulders of simple citizens (Jefferson).

So, obviously, this philosophical notion of man as man-in/under-the-State, where the State is the significant entity and the individual is subservient to and sacrificed FOR the State, is a notion that lies at the heart of both Heideggerian Ontology and Nazi thinking. Furthermore, if truth be told, this philosophical inversion is also at the heart of almost any type of patriotic sentiment that seeks to dissolve the Individual and fuse him/her/it into a State-defined whole.

            But this idea of man-in/under-the-State is precisely what the American philosophes found unacceptable, thus provoking their philosophical fury and frenzy in separating everything that could possibly lead to a consolidation or centralization of social power in America. Power to the Individual!!!!