On Becoming God Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self

by Morgan, Ben

• ISBN13: 9780823239924
• ISBN10: 0823239926
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-14
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

Do we have to conceive of ourselves as isolated individuals, inevitably distanced from other people and from whatever we might mean when we use the word "God"? On Becoming God offers an innovative approach to the history of the modern Western self by looking at human identity as somethingpeople do together rather than on their own, as a way of managing and keeping at bay the impulses and experiences associated with the word "God." The "self" is a way of doing things, or of not doing things, with "God." The book draws on phenomenology (Heidegger), gender studies (Beauvoir, Butler), and contemporary neuroscience. It surveys existing approaches to modern selfhood (Foucault, Charles Taylor) and proposes an alternative account by investigating late medieval mysticism, in particular texts written inGermany by Meister Eckhart and others. It concludes by exploring the parallel between late medieval confessors and their spiritual charges, and late-nineteenth-century psychoanalysts and their patients, in search of a vocabulary for acknowledging and nurturing our everyday commitments to others and to our spiritual longings.

Author Biography

BEN MORGAN is University Lecturer in German and Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Clearing the Ground
Some Recent Versions of Mysticism	p. 11
Empty Epiphanies in Modernist and Postmodernist Theory	p. 24
The Gender of Human Togetherness	p. 37
Histories of Modern Selfhood	p. 60
A Brief Prehistory of the Modern Western Self
Meister Eckhart's Anthropology	p. 85
Becoming God in Fourteenth-Century Europe	p. 101
The Makings of the Modem Self	p. 125
Alternative Vocabularies
Taking Leave of Sigmund Freud	p. 151
Everyday Acknowledgments	p. 200
Notes	p. 223
Bibliography	p. 277
Index	p. 297
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