Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity

Abstract

Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity. By Fergus Kerr. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. x + 123pp. $18.00 (paper). Our culture is full of ironies. One of richest has to be peculiar way in which late twentieth-century thought has become both more detached from Christianity and more explicitly and deeply preoccupied with what might be loosely called life. Publishers rush to satisfy our culture's seemingly insatiable desire for spiritual books. Secular thought seems to be less and less Christian and more and more religious. This tinge is not simply a popular phenomenon, cultural residue of a bygone era. Philosophy, literary and social theory, and other disciplines which had for centuries labored under shadow of theology, dutifully discharging their responsibilities as handmaidens to theological queen, are now fully confident of their independence. The upshot is not dry rationalism or pinched evidentialism. Instead, as Fergus Kerr's survey of some representative twentieth-century thinkers makes patently clear, even though serious secular thought will not make it onto metaphysical shelves of local bookstore, religious concerns loom large. It seems that those Enlightenment Deists who claimed that their criticisms of Christian orthodoxy and ecclesiastical authority were not irreligious have been indicated two hundred years later. Far from a way station on long march to a purely scientific or materialist philosophy-an assumption long shared by polemicists both Christian and secular-the modern tradition in philosophy continues to incorporate religious themes. As a study of religious themes in a group of contemporary thinkers, Immortal Longings is wide-ranging. Kerr covers a great deal of intellectual territory. He has chapters on Martha Nussbaum, Karl Barth, Martin Heidegger, Iris Murdoch, Luce Irigaray, Stanley Cavell, and Charles Taylor. But value of book is not its breadth. Its greatest strength and most important contribution is sharp thematic focus which unifies this quite eclectic array of thinkers. That focus might be termed the question of Are our bodies-our desire, instincts and emotions-a terrible burden to be overcome, or a blessing to be cherished, or a complex combination to be carefully negotiated? Should we think ourselves unfit and ill-formed creatures who need radical surgery, or should we cast out such feelings of shame and inadequacy as unnecessary and unhealthy repressions, or should we seek a mixture of surgery and therapy? Should we desire to transcend our finitude, or should we suppress that desire, or should we pursue a modest strategy of transcendence? These are questions which Kerr finds animating twentieth-century thinkers he surveys. From Stanley Cavell's translations of classically modern epistemological worries into strategies of discipline to Luce Irigaray's attempts to capture exstasis of sexual difference, Kerr is able to identify and explicate theological themes. As he reports, these so-called secular thinkers have much more interest in religion than fashionable philosophers are supposed to have in our supposedly post-religious age (p. 123). The initial chapter on Martha Nussbaum exemplifies interpretive value of Kerr's focus on transcendence. Kerr charts Nussbaum's numerous (and seemingly contradictory) suggestions about how we should approach our finitude. On one hand, Nussbaum advocates a purely immanent view which treats desire for transcendence as self-destructive and de-humanizing (p. 1). The hope for some different form of life, some higher state of existence, some pure thought untainted by vagaries of emotion and feeling, leads us to self-hating patterns of life. This line of thought culminates in Nussbaum's profoundly anti-theological maxim: We can be redeemed only by ending demand for redemption. …

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