Wesley White
(Scottish Universities Theological Forum, April, 2005)
My wife and I sat through the predictable routine of the graduation ceremony not unlike many we had attended in the past. Nothing roused us from our camouflaged stupor until the keynote speaker, Seona Reid, principle of the Glasgow School of Art, began to describe the manner in which artists can or should engage the world. “Artists,” she said, “are simply people who are passionate enough to imagine things that do not yet exist.”[1] In pondering her statement, its significance has become only more profound. As art is inherently dependant on a visual experience, it requires, I suggest, among other things, an imaginative vision if it is to entertain any capacity to move us beyond the boundaries of what does or does not exist.
In this way, artistry shares properties with recent concepts of leadership which seek to reinvest in Seer qualities that condition healthy and vibrant collective direction. These properties correlate to both verb and noun distinctions of a Seer as they apply to the action of seeing and to a level of wisdomthat turns sight into imaginative vision. The leader as Seer in this sense promotes what David Michael Levin refers to as visionary thinking that is both diagnostic and critical, “attentive to closures and even the smallest opportunities for some opening.”[2] It is interested not only in what we see, but how we see, and in answering the question as to whether or not vision can motivate action. The Seer is one who is capable of exercising wise seeing that is imaginative if it is nothing else.
The need for Seers is underscored by a palatable ambiguity of vision that is the unfortunate progeny of some who want to so distance themselves from “totalized views of the world” that they end up with no view at all.[3] The fear itself is understandable. Storied histories abound with examples of how human uniqueness is easily subscribed as unnecessary whenever all-encompassing visions are espoused.[4] And yet some visual perception of the world and its future is mandatory if challenges to the status quo are to be in any way legitimised. Without it, we are not only left with a hopeless point of view, but we must likewise succumb to what Heidegger characterises as a “standpoint of standpointlessness.”[5]
On the other hand, when leaders explore again the role of Seer in a communal context they are simply making possible an expansion of what they see and what others see as well. They are encouraging a community to imagine what does not yet exist. In so doing, leaders serve as deliberate receptors of what Paul Churchland refers to as the truly vast amounts of information “contained in our sensations, that goes blissfully unexploited by our conceptually benighted selves.”[6] Perception, in other words, can either limit horizons or broaden them, and would-be Seers are called upon to reject conceptual benightedness and give specific attention to a phenomenology of optics.
Leadership and the Reality of Ocularcentrism
An acceptance of phenomenological categories begs the question of why all the fuss over visual capacities? The answer, of course, is fairly plain to see. Ocularcentrism (fascination with the power of vision, both in physical and mental or imaginative dimensions) may be challenged for its extremes, but it cannot be denied. Symbols of visual dependence are all around us. Understanding is often described in terms of seeingthe difference. Comprehension of specific concepts finds expression in the words, “I seewhat you mean.” When we gain clarity we call it insight. Even moral distinctions are frequently referred to in ways that depend on the perceptual shadings of darkness and light.
There is, no doubt, good reason to approach ocularity with a reasonable level of caution. How we see what we see does not escape subjective weakness any more or less than any other aspect of human selfhood. Appeals to the inherent objectivity of the visual sound increasingly hollow as soon as discussion ventures into the realm of the significance of what is seen. “The eye,” says Arthur Danto, “is tainted by the original sin of cognition, and we may as well be conscious of the fact.”[7] The outworking of tainted vision, so described, may account for the tendency of perception toward a mode of top-down processing in which bias for superior forms prejudices the value assigned to what is merely seen.[8]
Historical developments play a part in our sense of caution as well. Renaissance confidence allowed for an entire change of focus (gazing in a new direction) determined by the primacy of a visual metaphor that soon became known as the Enlightenment. As Levin suggests, it promoted a new way of seeing “derived from an egological and essentially anthropocentric vision of reason.”[9] The potential of a glorified self-gazing vision allowed for but another sphere of hegemony, privileged in various ways, so that suddenly or gradually perceivingdifferentlythan one sees became more and more critical to discerning reflection.[10] It was due to the fact that even sight, now, was and is under suspicion. It is little wonder, then, that Sartre should decry how human identity is born in the “objectifying gaze” of the other in ways that are invariably limiting as anything is restricted when its value is relegated by its role as an object for observation.[11]
Ocularcentrism, however, is not without reasonable accolades. Vision of various types and modes is regularly the impetus behind all manner of thoughtful reflection that eventuates in progressive ideology. Phenomenologically, it accounts for the interplay between what might be seen, what is mentally considered, and what can be dreamed. “The mind has gone,” writes Jonas, “where vision has pointed.”[12] This is born out, minimally, in human conceptions that are defined in terms of ontology, epistemology and behaviour. In other words, reality is construed on the basis of how we see ourselves and thus how we know what we know and thus why we do what we do.[13]
Furthermore, honesty compels us to distinguish between two essential modes of gazing upon the other. Sartre, perhaps, was overly pessimistic in assigning the gaze of one upon another a purely hegemonic role. Levin, for example, rightly differentiates between the assertoriclook, which is largely “ego-logical” and thus inauthentic, and the alethetic look, based in truth, and thus non-objectifying, chastened, and humble.[14] Are we so far fallen that we could not encourage the latter and discourage the former? Levin is forthright enough to suggest that vision is generally ruled over by an ego-logical subject. Even so, he raises the spectre of what vision could become “when it is committed to overcoming this rule.”[15]
Perhaps it is precisely in the midst of discourse of this kind that wilfully differentiates between the assertoric and the alethetic that Christian theology has the most to say in proffering what we might refer to as the human potential to render a gaze of grace. Is it possible to cultivate a culture that disdains the self-serving look and opts, in stead, for the look that is gift-oriented? Bakhtin suggests as much when he likens the gaze of another on “me” to “a gift, like grace, which is incapable of being understood and founded from within myself.”[16] It offers me an objective viewpoint in the interest of clarity rather than rule, and thus is empowering rather than disempowering.[17] It is the highest mode of vision which can only be selflessly entertained when it is approach as a spiritual vocation.
Ocular language, therefore, need not be prohibitive, but rather reinforcing of personhood, especially when it attests to critical theological perspectives. Jonas, for example, demonstrates how the most experiential features of physical vision inevitably suggest the broad theological concepts of eternity, objectivity, and infinity.[18] Examples from biblical narratives only make it more specific. Human suffering is rendered unacceptable (Ex.2:25) in a story that affirms how “God sawand took notice of them.” God’s seeing of Hagar (Gen.16:13: “You are the God who seesme.”) displays divine concern for the marginalised. It is Jesus’ seeing of the crowd (Mk.6:34) that inaugurates his compassion. Seeing the hungry, the poor, the stranger, the sick and the imprisoned (Mt.25:37ff), according to Jesus, is tantamount to seeing him. “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light.” (Mt.6:22) Ocularity of this sort undergirds a story in which “God’s loving gaze and his liberating action are inseparable.”[19]
Seers of Truth
Giving attention to theological perspectives ought to give rise to questions of truth. Leaders who aspire to the role of Seer as a spiritual vocation must be able to exert both wisdom and foresight (and, perhaps, hindsight) in responding to differing narratives of truth. Postmodern ambivalence toward various truth-bearing stories, while understandable, is ultimately unsatisfying and lacking in courage.[20] If, indeed, the mind goes where vision points, then the difference between assertoricand aletheticmotivations in looking at anything at all is critical. Aletheia emphasises the beneficent nature of truth, as Abraham Heschel has rightly distinguished it, by likening it to that gaze which wishes to know what it sees, rather than seeking to see what it already knows.[21] It results in a posture of humility that extols the circumspective quality of good hermeneutics.
One reason that truth in this mode is properly circumspective is that it is called upon to bring together the related questions of ontology and formation of character. Foucault maintains that, to a large degree, this a matter of those practices that shape the self and advance self-forming activities as they take place within personalised histories.[22] Seers of truth, therefore, understand the need for foresight that actually acts in ways that enlarge ontological givens via the paradox of circumspection such that character formation is actualised and ongoing.[23] In simplified terms, truth is demonstrated in character, not correctness. Correctness seeks to rule, while circumspective aletheia seeks the ongoing growth of persons.
Seers, themselves, are called upon to prove the validity of truth at work, not by their expertise with correctness, but in the demonstration of an enlarged and ever-growing character. This can hardly be accomplished apart from the ocular metaphorics that explicates what is commonly referred to as the dark night of the soul. Apart from it, the Seer herself or himself remains in the paradoxical need of having their eyes opened. Apart from it, leaders may continue in the seemingly impressive mode of performance, but eventually effectiveness wears thin because they have essentially become blind Seers. The night of the soul experience, on the other hand, rests upon the ontological significance of the absence of lightand is “open to learning from the greatness, even the terror, of the night.”[24]
It is only in the aftermath of such experiences that the more pragmatic dimensions of truth-seeking, that which aims at promoting freedom and justice, can be entertained. Seers who have been so schooled have had their own eyes opened so as to see the Transcendent in none other than the human face. This, then, illicits a vision of divine justice such that we are enabled to see in the other the biblical priority for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.[25] It calls for a renewed gaze at issues of justice that does not allow for things to go unchanged. Or, as Walter Benjamin puts it, “That things remain as they are: it is that which is catastrophe.”[26] In the end, Seers who are concerned with biblical priorities seek to answer the question, “Where is the redeeming vision?”
Eschatological Optics
Redemptive themes, when approached with optical considerations in mind, necessarily steer us theologically toward an eschatological vision. Among other things, movement toward the radically new(envisioned in Is.65:17; 62:22, and Rev.21:5, to cite but a few texts) compels us to seriously embrace the visualising capacity of catalytic imagination. This is a hopeful demand simply because, as Moltmann suggests, the world “cannot bear” the new creation.[27] It must be imagined as the preface to making it real. It is a sighting of a hopeful future which is, as Bauckham and Hart maintain, “not imaginary,” but “irreducibly imaginative.” It is, at the same time, catalytic as such imagining serves the activity of living in the here and now.[28] Catalytic imagination thus visualises the future in such a way that new ways of thinking are empowered with the intent of purposeful behaviour and action.[29]
The renewal of imagination allows us to happily entertain what others might derogatorily refer to as the fantastic. Fantasy, however, ought to intrude into eschatological visions in the manner of encouraging transgression of given boundaries that are so bounded by the limitations of fact.[30] Seers whose imaginations have been eschatologically emancipated can envision the fantastic to such a degree that they are able to deliver what the French scholar Bellemin-Noel refers to as “the rhetoric of the unsayable.”[31] They do not balk at pursuing eschatological realisation that seeks nothing less than personal and social transfiguration.[32] Fantasy thus functionally shares some of the better qualities of the artistic (creative) by providing distance and identity. It allows us to step outside of the present and identify what can be.[33]
Both fantasy and imagination call forth the childwithin us, suggesting that healthy Seers maintain childlike qualities of perception that are propelled by an abiding sense of wonder. The eschatological dimension of this kind of visionary capacity is plainly attested to by the prophet Isaiah (11:6) : “And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child will lead them.” Nietzsche was correct in estimation that there are things the reasonable man “does not see which even a child sees; there are things he does not hear which even a child hears, and these things are precisely the most important things.”[34] The leader as child is needed when eschatological optics are in view exactly because they are not refrained by common sense; they expand a vision for the future, rather than attempting to explain or reduce it.[35] Nor is this in the interest of restoring childhood utopia in guise of innocence and trust, but, as Levin suggests, it is “a hermeneutical movement in response to our present needs, both individual, or biographical, and collective, or historical: a movement which ‘goes back’ in order to ‘go forward.’”
The Seer as child exercises a joyful wisdom that Chesterton playfully referred to as “the ethics of elfland.” It is wisdom that is happy to live in the land of the nursery where both religious stricture and secular rationalism are abnormal, and the “old epics and fables” of the supernaturalists are appreciated and honoured.[36] The wisdom of nursery-land pokes fun at the whimsical laws of science rather than allowing itself to be satirised by the predictable trajectories of cause and effect. The stories of elfland are more often than not fairy tales where what is considered impossible never has the last word and which distinguish themselves by creating worlds that end up being but a step away. Not a very far or unrealistic distance at all.[37] Seers who embrace a model of childlike leadership promulgate stories that revel, with laughter and mirth, in the fabulous.
Another critical sighting that should come into view when an eschatological vision is coming more and more into focus is its communal nature and framework. It is a radical picture that deliberately butts up against what Levinas maintains is an extreme individualism premised on an ontology of self-confirmation that must be “interrupted” by a spirituality that begins “in the for-the-other.” “The great event,” says Levinas, “and the very source of of its affectivity is in the other.”[38] This vision is, in Marcel’s words, choral rather solo, and even then is not intoxicated with its own collectivity, but always seeks the other, both within and without the community.[39]
It is in this communal framework, moreover, that human beings have the sustainable opportunity to discover and create and re-create meaning. This is due to the particularly communal phenomena that Susan Felch calls an “excess of vision,” in which the give and take of perspective and insight is afforded freedom and honour.[40] Healthy eschatological community prefers exorbitant displays of the give and take in what can be envisioned, joyfully making up for what might be lacking individually. Levinas rightly offers that this kind of “ethical hermeneutic” presupposes the validity of theistic religion, for only religion, so defined, can “articulate an ethical ontology in which human existence is defined by its independent dependence on the other.”[41]
One of the benefits of communal experience of this nature and in this framework is its capacity to encourage seeing in metaphysical dimensions. The good Seer, I propose, will laud and explore this, rather than discourage it in the interest of managerial control. Such seeing, however, is more often threatening to many who find it difficult to escape the confining parameters of Western ideology. Levin, for example (though I have extolled him in most other points), advocates an “hermeneutical phenomenology, whose method trains us in the discipline of critical perception: the meticulous, exacting, discipline of attention to our life-world, to what we are experiencing in the course of our daily lives.”[42] Although our understanding of leadership can appreciate the hermeneutical phenomenology that Levin aspires to, it must still critique it as short-sighted, since Levin locates such a phenomenology in contradistinction to all metaphysical concerns. Metaphysical concerns, I would contend, need not work in opposition to the hermeneutical phenomenology that Levin espouses, but can, rather, greatly enhance it with the incalculable aid of a supernatural point of view.
The classic biblical narrative that highlights the benefit of this dimensional viewpoint is the story of Elisha and his servant boy, recorded in 2 Kings 6:8-17. The dialectic of imperial power and supernatural reality comes to bear on the (significantly) tiny village of Dothan, in which the prophet and his one servant have taken refuge. The odds, to all outward appearances, are heavily stacked in favor of imperial success and a tragic demise for the man of God and all those who adhere to him. The cry of the servant boy is the voice, perhaps, of overcome metaphysics, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” But Elisha sees what the boy cannot. Furthermore, he knows that the servant’s eyes are only half open. And so Elisha prays that he “may see” what is really real, and when the prayer is answered he is enabled to behold that the mountain was “full of horses and chariots of fire all around.” The prophet in this story, it might be said, offers us the paradigmatic picture of the Seer. He does not succumb to an overcome metaphysic, but embraces the other-worldly in all its richness.
In Pursuit of Beauty
Leadership in the current of emerging culture, I contend, has more to do with the artistic, and less to do with managerial skill or executive personality. As such it exhibits a yearning for beautyin all its many and varied forms, which is as much a part of the wisdomof the Seer as anything else and defines, in large measure, the whatof what the Seer sees. It is not blind to all that mars the beautiful in the world as it is, but nonetheless always moves toward that which can accentuate beauty and that which removes ugliness in whatever form it takes. It requires, I suggest, Seers who are wise to the holistic properties of both ugliness and beauty in the world today.
An appreciation for the multidimensional aspects of beauty (and all that transgresses it) is minimally premised on the validity of the aesthetic. This assumes, of course, a rejection of the insidiousness of Western dualism that assigns greater and lesser meaningful valueto differing modes of perception. It opts, in stead, for what John O’Neill calls, “a phenomenological psychology” that “retrieves an ontological and epistemological unity prior to the disjunctions of natural science,” and so promotes the holistic properties of beauty to include all that lends to making life more meaningful.[43] This is what Wittgenstein intended by declaring that “meaning is physiognomy,” for it is not afraid, nor embarrassed, to include the sensuous as an important conduit of meaning.[44]
Highlighting the aesthetic, therefore, advocates the discovery of broad levels of meaningfulness in life and thus is an essential part of a theological response that mitigates against a culture of death. Marcel reminds us that Western thought is overcome with various nuances of “the end of the power to be,” and how it “delimits and determines the possible completedness of Dasein.” It is epitomised, offers Marcel, in philosophical despair echoed in the starkness of the French phrase, Etre pour la mort, “You exist (are) for death.”[45]Christian theology, in particular, challenges this by revisiting, among other things, the aesthetic sensibility of Israel and its “special intolerance against all forms of the cult of death.”[46] Validating the aesthetic is one more means of reminding ourselves, and the world, that God is for life and all that enhances living.
An artistic appreciation for both the aesthetic and the sensual has direct bearing on the goal of the Seer who seeks to empower others to see everything in relation to God. Bonhoeffer has this in mind when he says, “One severs art’s vital nerve if one takes away its ultimate reference to meaning, to the Divine.”[47] In this way, the aesthetic/sensual assumes greater incarnational significance as a means of “enfleshing” the creative impulse implanted in humanity by the God who is committed to re-creation.[48] Similarly, of course, it serves a sacramental end as a tangible reminder of the moreand the beyondthat human beings instinctively long for.
However, even if the aesthetic is given more credence, I contend that our apprehension of beauty will continue to be severely limited if the role of Seer continues to suffer under restrictions prescribed by male hegemony. Heschel’s distinguishing between the desire to know what one sees as opposed to seeing what one knows is crucial,[49] and I urge that we will continue to bear the fruit of the latter unless we encourage the balance, honesty, and holism available in a vigorous feminine epistemology. Allison Jaggar characterises it as an “epistemology of care and love” that challenges the logocentric base of patriarchal knowledge which minimises erosand usually adheres to foundationalist formulas of authoritative propositions.[50]
The need, obviously, is for ecclesial cultures that encourage the strategic place of women in all levels of leadershipas Seers who so emancipate love that, as Levinas puts it, “transcending the sensible” is possible. It accentuates the beauty of relationships, says Levinas, and is translated through the “caress” as much as anything else.[51] It reminds us that the full expression of beauty requires the feminine touch, apart from which the attractive attributes of happiness and joy remain nothing more than out of reach ideals.[52] Without female Seers, the pursuit of beauty is one-sided and, in fact, bereft.
On Seeing
A phenomenology of optics, therefore, urges much more than the common and tired call for vision. It urges, rather, what John McCurdy refers to as “ocular behavior” which is a “condition” for seeing, not the “cause” of it. Vision (in most cases) is a phenomenological given. Behavior that opens the expanse, horizon and scope of vision is not. “There would be no vision if eyes did not exist,” says McCurdy, “but, given eyes and ocular functions as conditions, vision requires intentional activity.”[53] Some hints at the type of activity betoken of true Seers have been rehearsed above.
Furthermore, it is easily seen that a “panoramic awareness” is needed if leaders are to take on those qualities assigned to Seers.[54] Such a panorama will include grappling with both the good and the bad of ocularcentrism with which the West is beset. It will also need to reinvestigate approaches to truth that do justice to the narrative structures of the Bible, while at the same time moving away from simple notions of correctness and toward an aletheia of character that foments social justice as well. This panorama will be explicitly eschatological, including demonstrations of catalytic imagination, childlike models of leadership, real community, and the unique intrusion of the supernatural. And it will pursue the full realisation of beauty, heavily investing in a feminine epistemology.
In so many words, the leader as Seer will attempt to offer applied
wisdomcoupled with wrestling with those questions that revolve around
issues involved with howwe see as
much as what we see. Ocular behavior
will be more important than ocular ability and stylistic or professional
competency. Inherent in it is a significant challenge, for the dominance of the
egological gaze, with its preference for “the leisure of self-recovery” is
not easily recognised, and even less easily replaced. But leaders as Seers will
not flinch at the challenge. Rather, they will do all they can to replace it
with an “eschatologically conceived beyond.”[55]
[1] Seona Reid, Principle of the Glasgow School of Art and former Head of the Scottish Arts Council, at Graduation Ceremonies for the Glasgow School of Art, 25 June, 2004.
[2] David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation(New York: Routledge, 1988), 9. Levin is concerned with dimensions of a visionary life that do not isolate the individual, but rather place her or him squarely in a specific social context. One critical aspect of the visionary life that is essential to social imaginings that take us beyond that which currently exists, according to Levin, is approaching visionary being as a spiritual vocation.
[3] Nietzsche’s “aversion to reposing once and for all in any sort of totalized view of the world” is one example. See, Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power(New York: Random House, 1967), 262.
[4] The work of Emmanuel Levinas is seminal in this regard. As a Jewish sociologist, his overt concern is the protecting of human liberties and uniqueness against the hegemony of totalizing programs. Jens Zimmermann, in fact, contends that “the central thematic of Levinas is to shelter the unique identity of every human being against any possible totalities.” See, Jens Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 190.
[5] In this manner Heidegger criticises Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal recurrence.” See, M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol.II (New York: Harper & Row, 1982),117-18. Heidegger described the resultant lack of standpoint of any sort as an “attempt to flee from one’s own shadow.” Thereby, clear-sightedness is much preferred to no sight at all.
[6] Churchland uses the misguided terminology of “exploitable information” that is there for the taking for those who develop perception in both micro and macro categories. In spite of this, the concept is viable and challenging. It raises the question of how much we are missing when it comes to multiple categories of sight? See, Paul M. Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 7.
[7] Arthur C. Danto, Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 207. The religious concept of original sin may or may not be invoked without injury to the idea that attributing significance to what is seen necessarily incurs a variety of narrative experiences. Its use by Danto may be unfortunate in that it unnecessarily provokes religious stereotypes that can be easily discarded.
[8] Top-down processing that infects even the innocent gaze is suggested by Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, 2-3.
[9] Levin, The Opening of Vision, 3-4.
[10] Objective reflection resorts to the curious differentiation between what is seen and what is perceived.That this is so should not be uncritically accepted, for it certainly accounts, in part, for the hermeneutic of suspicion that postmodernism injects into everything. If nothing else, it suggests the importance of phenomenological considerations. For an interesting discussion of what is entailed in discerning reflection, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.2: Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1976), 8-15.
[11] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1966), 345.
[12] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 152. Jonas argues for a phenomenological scheme that insists upon a preference for vision over mental grappling in terms of which precedes which. The mind can only stretch to what is beyond based on what can be seen, either interiorly or exteriorly.
[13] For an excellent discussion of this, see Robert Paul Doede and Paul Edward Hughes, “Wounded Vision and the Optics of Hope,” in The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition Amid Modernity and Postmodernity(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 174, in which the metaphorics of vision are shown to be critical in the interest of how human beings “schematise conceptions of reality.”
[14] See David Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 116 ff.
[15] David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision, 10.
[16] M.M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 49. Bakhtin wrestles with what distinguishes the look of grace from the look of power. The former is premised on the reality that I cannot understand myself without outside help. It offers objectivity for no personal interest, but in ways that are entirely selfless and, in fact, costly.
[17] Heidegger, for example, is concerned with how Being is empowered by the metaphorics of vision. The gaze that is thus empowering moves through stages that he describes as “the moment of vision” that renders “unconcealment,” producing “circumspective looking,” and eventuating in “the clearing,” which is essentially a view from outside that offers discernment. See, Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 150-51.
[18] The concept of eternity is stimulated by the unique simultaneity of image that seeing affords. Physical vision’s capacity for dynamic neutralisation suggests the comparative capacity for objectivity. Spatial distance stimulates thoughts of infinity. See, Hans Jonas, The Phenomena of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, 136.
[19] See, The Future of Hope, 193.
[20] Levin refers to this tendency in postmodernism as a precarious mental exercise that plays with relativism under the guise of deconstruction, when in fact it is about simple destruction. “It undermines all standpoints and calls all viewpoints blind. It becomes totally self-defeating; it offers no alternative to despair, to nihilism.” See, The Opening of Vision, 26.
[21] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets(New York: Harper & Row, 1962), xi. In this mode, truth is always in a humble posture. As Doede and Hughes put it, “It is a humbled vision that is de-centered, whose clearing is a shadow-land and whose closure is never totalized.” See, The Future of Hope, 185. Aletheia is hugely beneficial as it serves both to clear and to close, but never in a coercive fashion.
[22] See, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 229-52. Foucault’s concern is to demonstrate how any display of visionary capacity, supplemented by truth in the mode of aletheia, is proved valid in the way that it enhances character and clears the way for its developmental potential.
[23] Levin alludes to this in reference to the interesting concept of “ontological responsibility.” Responsibility of this kind “becomes for us a question that demands our attention, our care, and our thought — a question, in other words, in relation to which our character is to be formed.” See, The Opening of Vision, 15.
[24] Levin, The Opening of Vision, 351. Explaining this more fully, Levin argues that there is “a wisdom in our experience with the night that we desperately need to learn: an experience with absence, with fusion and indistinctness, with ambiguity, shifting boundaries, elusive and transitory presences, insubstantial apparitions, concealments, a sense of wholeness and integration, encounters with the night which disturb our settled sense of reality and penetrate our culturally established egological defenses.” An interesting corollary to the night of the soul experience is the place of visionary dreams that are espoused in the night time experience of Seers in traditions other than avowedly Christian. North American Indian cultures are a case in point. See, for example, Lame Deer, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972) and Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks(New York: Simon & Schuster, 19720.
[25] Emmanuel Levinas, more so than most others, champions the correlation between truth and justice in Transcendent categories that demand a concentration on the other in accord with biblical priorities. See his, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995), 188.
[26] Walter Benjamin, Negative Dialectics(New York: Continuum, 1973), 359. In a similar vein, consider the implications for leadership in the suggestion of Heidegger that aletheia “promotes reification, the ability to intervene in history, and the uniting of justice and temporality.” See, M. Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” in Early Greek Thinking(New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 13.
[27] Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope((London: SCM Press, 1967), 226.
[28] Bauckham and Hart go further in suggesting that eschatological imagination not only serves as a catalyst for purposeful action, but also sets a pattern for Christian engagement with the world. It enables us “to transcend the limits of the given in one way or another. See, Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium (Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), xii, 84-85.
[29] George MacDonald offers that such imaginatively-inspired thinking “takes forms already existing, and gathers them about a thought so much higher than they, that it can group and subordinate and harmonise them into a whole which shall represent, unveil that thought.” Further, “the imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man must have been of God first.” See, George MacDonald, “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture,” in A Dish of Orts (London: Edwin Dalton, 1908), 68.
[30] The fantastic might best be explained, according to Irwin, as “a story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility; it is the narrative result of transforming the condition contrary to fact into fact itself.” See, W. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1976), x.
[31] J. Bellemin-Noel, cited in Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 38. “The rhetoric of the unsayable,” argues Bellemin-Noel, attempts to verbalise “an apprehension of something unnameable…which can have no adequate articulation except through suggestion and implication.”
[32] The way that eschatological imagination can promote transfiguration is suggested by Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysics of Hope (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1951), 67. Marcel speaks of it in personal and social categories as “an undreamed-of promotion.”
[33] Thomas Howard likens the capacity of myths and fantasy to provide distance and identity to frames around a painting. “Such and such a scene or person or event was “in there,” and you, the viewer, had leisure to regard it and contemplate it. You were free from any entaglement..Of course, part of the genius of the whole thing is that you do get involved. But it is an involvement that is not cluttered by having to attend to a thousand trifling details. You are free to get a grip on things exactly because you are at a remove from them.” See his, “Myth: Flight to Reality,” in The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing (Colorado Springs: Shaw Books, 2002), 338.
[34] F. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 83-84.
[35] Churchland argues similarly. “The demand on successful or acceptable theories—that they explain or reduce the facts as conceived within common sense (or within theories already “established”)—assigns to the framework of common sense a significance beyond what it deserves.” See, Paul Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, 44.
[36] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1994), 45-49.
[37] For an insightful explanation of the nature of the fairy tale, see Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 76-80. “Maybe above all they are tales about transformation where all creatures are revealed in the end as what they truly are—-the ugly duckling becomes a great white swan, the frog is revealed to be a prince, and the beautiful but wicked queen is unmasked at last in all her ugliness. They are tales of transformation where the ones who live happily ever after, as by no means everybody does in fairy tales, are transformed into what they have it in them at their best to be.”
[38] Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 96. Levinas relates the confirmation of self to that “gaze” which flows from an unhealthy “principle of subjectivity” that “takes things in, to the hand which takes and possesses them, to domination of beings.” Luther comments similarly. “In a perverse way, man loves himself, only himself. This perversion cannot be corrected unless he puts the neighbor in his place.” See, M. Luther, Commentary on Romans, trans. J. Theodore Muller (Grand Rapids: Kregal, 1976), 107.
[39] Gabriel Marcel, “The Encounter with Evil,” in Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, trans. Peter McCormick and Stephen Jolin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 19730, 143. Marcel considers such caustic subjectivity to be indicative of the current culture of nihilism that has produced the “triumph of evil—-triumph of death—-triumph of despair.” “The choir’s mission,” he suggests, “can be accomplished only where the choir itself becomes a propitiatory invocation.”
[40] See, Susan Felch, “In the Chorus of Others: M.M. Bakhtin’s Sense of Tradition,” unpublished paper (27 October, 2000), available through Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois. Felch urges, for example, that “your vision supplements mine, just as mine supplements yours. In order for us to understand ourselves, that is to create meaning, we must ‘fill in’ the other’s horizon, by offering our ‘excess of vision’ to the other as a gift.”
[41] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 80.
[42] See, David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision, 34-35. Levin would have us, more particularly, “disentangle the word ‘experience’ from its traditional metaphysical interpretation and retrieve its creative, enabling, life-affirming potential.” He cites Heidegger’s idea of the necessity of “The Overcoming of Metaphysics.”
[43] John O’Neill, Perception, Expression, and History: The Social Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 14. The manner in which the aesthetic is laden with meaning is likewise suggested by Goethe with his recommendation that we have constantly before our eyes some work of the best attainable art so as to learn to refuse the evil and choose the good. Cited in George MacDonald, “The Imagination” Its Functions and Its Culture,” in A Dish of Orts, 79.
[44] L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 568. The tendency to degrade the meaning value of the sensuous is endemic. For an excellent assessment of this tendency, especially as it relates to cultural hermeneutics and cultures of truth, see David Michael Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadow of Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 433-34.
[45] Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, 122-23.
[46] G. von Rad, Theology of the Old Testament, Vol.1, trans. D.M.G Stalker (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2001), 276. Moltmann, similarly, reminds us of how reprehensible dead things were in early Israelite culture, especially as outlined in contrast to the surrounding societies. Christian theology, says Moltmann, finds in it “the presupposition for understanding the resurrection of Christ as the resurrection of the crucified one and not as a symbol for the hope of immortality and the resigned attitude to life that goes along with it.” See, J. Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Suffolk: SCM Press, Ltd., 1967), 208.
[47] Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Predigten, trans. Otto Dudzuz (Berlin: Verlagshaus, 2004), 148.
[48] Incarnation as enfleshing is borrowed from Madeleine L’Engle. “The artist must be obedient to the work,” she writes. “I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.’ And the artist either says, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,’ and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses.” See, Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water : Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Random House, 1972), 51. In like fashion, Zimmermann relates the recovery of aesthetics to the incarnation. “The incarnational model redeems aesthetics from irrelevant aestheticism and gives it full existential weight. Aesthetics is, in fact, crucial for an adequate biblical hermeneutic.” See, Jens Zimmerman, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 314.
[49] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), xi.
[50] Allison M. Jaggar, “Feelings and Knowing: Emotion in Feminist Theory,” in McConnell-Ginet, Barker, and Furman (eds.), Women and Language in Literature and Society (New York: Praeger, 1980), 181. Marcel hints at the same in his call for the new enlightened philosopher whose vision is compelled by compassion rather than the “hegemony of technology.” See, Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, 150.
[51] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 257: “The caress, like contact, is sensibility. But the caress transcends the sensible.”
[52] Seers, in this broader and gender-equal sighting, see the future in such a way that applied wisdom allows for the experience of happiness in the present. Thus, Pascal’s pessimism is averted. “We never live,” said Pascal, “but we hope to live; and as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.” See, Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958), 49-50. Augustine, interestingly, is more optimistic. “With it’s light, truth gives joy to the men who turn to it, and punishes with blindness those who turn away.” See, Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), Book II, 67.
[53] John Derrickson McCurdy, Visionary Appropriation (New York: Philosophical Library, 1978), 41.
[54] M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 68.
[55] The common tendency toward “leisure self-recovery” and the expansive vision of an “eschatologically conceived beyond” are both suggested by Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, trans. Peter McCormick and Stephen Jolin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 151.
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