January 2, 2011
Over the centuries, there have appeared two great conceptions of freedom. The first vision, which one can call “epic freedom,” is freedom as Hegel or Marx understood it, the freedom of messianists and of revolutionaries. The meaning of freedom, on this view, is the progressive emancipation of man: step by step, battle by battle, mankind is supposed to break with its alienations and become the creator and absolute master of its fate. Epic freedom is the assumption of a cosmic mastery, more and more aware of itself. Crises become mere historical stages on the way to the final achievement of human emancipation.
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The other position, very different, regards crises as intrinsic to freedom. This more modest conception can be called “tragic freedom.” It is liberty understood in doubt and anxiety about the fate of man. Tragic freedom works in uncertainty, sailing toward no glorious destiny. Man is free, yes—free to learn from his mistakes. Or not. Socrates, who exemplifies this second view, ceaselessly puts freedom to the test; he questions it, explores it, experiments with it. His famous daimon, his interior voice or intimate conscience, is a negative spirit, one that offers only interdictions. Recall that the majority of the Socratic dialogues end in aporia, at an impasse; they do not lead anywhere. They must be perceived as exercises of free thought, not as stages on the way to a human epiphany.
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So to write the history of the idea of freedom is to navigate between two shores, one tragic and critical, the other epic and euphoric. Each epoch cultivates its own relation to freedom. Each, moreover, imagines its own Greece, for it was ancient Athens that first enacted—in the public square, the agora—our relation to freedom, or rather our conflicting relations with freedom. Epic ages (the early Renaissance and the Enlightenment, for example) picture a Greece of original harmony. Times of chaos (such as sixteenth-century Europe, the twentieth century, and probably the dawn of the twenty-first) see Greece as the mother of all crises. This tragic vision—of freedom and of Athens—is surely the wiser of the two.
[City Journal]
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January 2, 2011
In high school, see, she would do anything to be taken for a boy, so much so that she says, “If someone had tortured me back then and asked me if I had these feelings about gender, I think I could have successfully resisted giving up the secret.” Does this mean that Paul’s confusion about gender dates to his earliest memory? According to Kim, that’s exactly what it means, that when he looked in the mirror, he worried that he saw a girl, and when he made movies with his brothers—”The Mad Doctor” and “Rocky,” for example—he made sure that he never played the ingenue parts (these roles, almost invariably called “Lady,” were assigned to the youngest brother, Todd). Beneath the surface of Paul’s seemingly placid Rocky Mountain life was the feeling that, though he was attracted to girls, he wasn’t anything like a boy and had never been. In the rural West, this can’t have been a frequently encountered complaint, this discomfort with one’s sex, and Kim refers to Renee Richards, the 1970s transgender tennis pro (born Richard Raskind), as one of the few public examples of sexual reassignment that she knew anything about. Faced with so much uncertainty, so much discomfort, Paul did assume the one kind of drag, the one kind of masquerade that would loft him above scrutiny in the matter of gender. Paul joined the high-school football team.
[Details]
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January 2, 2011
Attachment theory designates three main styles or manners in which individuals perceive and respond to intimacy in romantic relationships, which parallel those found in children. Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving. Anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back. Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.
Every person, whether he or she has just started dating someone or has been married for 40 years, falls into one of these categories—or, more rarely, into a combination of anxious and avoidant. Just more than 50 percent are estimated to be secure, around 20 percent are anxious, 25 percent are avoidant, and the remaining 3 to 5 percent fall into the mixed anxious/avoidant category. During the past two decades since Hazan and Shaver’s seminal paper on romantic adult attachment, hundreds of scientific studies in a wide range of countries and cultures have carefully delineated the ways in which adults behave in close romantic ties. Understanding these styles is an easy and reliable way to understand and predict people’s behavior in any romantic situation.
[Scientific American]
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January 2, 2011
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