#interior self

The Soul of Freedom

If I did not believe in God I think I would be bound in conscience to become an anarchist. Yet, if I did not believe in God, I wonder if I could have the consolation of being bound in conscience to do anything.Conscience is the soul of freedom, it eyes, its energy, its life. Without conscience, freedom never knows what to do with itself. And a rational being who does not know what to do with…

We too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that our choices are really the ones we want to make…Our choices are too often dictated by our false selves.Hence I do not find in myself the power to be happy merely by doing what I like. On the contrary, if I do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable almost all the time.Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, “Conscience,…

Living on the Doorstep of Hell

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration, centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god.Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, “Conscience, Freedom, and Prayer” This from Thomas Merton brings…

  To find “ourselves” then is to find not only our poor, limited, perplexed souls, but to find the power of God that raised Christ from the dead and “built us together in Him unto a habitation of God in the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22). — Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (more…)

As Judith Butler puts it inBodies That Matter, “in the sense that the ‘I’ has no interior secure ego or core identity, ‘I’ must always enunciate itself: there is only performance of a self, not an external representation of an interior truth.”  Or, there isn’t some coherent interior that we must faithfully  ‘represent’ through our ways of being and speaking/ lifestyle/ jobs/ consumer choices/ haircuts etc, though this is largely what the ‘authenticity’ promise of consumer capitalism traditionally traded on. (altho personally, I do always aim to fully express my true self through my hair).

As Rob Horning says,  “consuming authentically could seem to prove fidelity to our “real self”’, a self that was built on the foundations of what Katherine Hayles has called “possessive individualism, the idea that subjects are individuals first and foremost because they own themselves”.  Instead, it’s through these choices and actions that the self- and gender, as Butler famously argues- is enunciated and created, that is, through its performance, which gains coherency and legitimacy through its reiteration, rather than fidelity to any intrinsic, essential quality.