Sunday, December 31, 2006

Kant and John .3: Perfection Are We


Subjectivity endure


Perfection are we



If one looks with significance on the scene of a woman in the presence of a man, Eve (Gen 3) and Mary Magdalene (John 20), to signify the relationship of the chosen people Israel to God, what is presented is the manifestation of an interested nature within the deity. By the appropriation of a system of legality in Genesis, which occurs the moment rules are introduced to the newly created humans, Christ as a deified human reveals how God becomes completely interested in human subjectivity. Israel portrayed as a woman who has somehow disjointed humanity from creation makes the mode of creation a necessary expression of the fragmented nature of the relationship between God and man because it splits the two. One can say that union or unity of man and God becomes disjointed when the fall of man happens, but what seems more underlying in the situation is the split between the subjectivity of the two. So, in some way the aesthetic representation of God, the perfect creation, through man's failure is no longer operating as a means of endowing humanity with divine subjectivity, but it in itself can only point toward that being so that while man is a part of creation he is in some way distinctly separate from it.


It is also important to note that in the Garden of Eden, one scene depicts a separated humanity and deity, a fallen man who is unable to fully be the divine manifestation to the woman Israel, and the woman Israel controlled by the subjectivity of the man. In John's garden, however, there is still a man and a woman present, but in this scene the man is the manifestation of God and so one sees that the woman Israel is redeemed through submission to the perfect unity of God and man; God, through Christ, reappropriated himself to the subjectivity of humanity. The love of God becomes much more apparently universally accepting of the flaws of men as He decides to reunite the two together so that just as after the objective creation in the Garden of Eden there is a moment on the seventh day when he and humanity are standing in the first day of a perfect creation, so too after the seventh miracle, the resurrection, Christ as God is standing in the first day of a perfectly united creation. There is a sense, in this scene, that God can no longer be disinterested in the perfection of his creation. Kant says that "[i]nterest is what we call the liking we connect with the presentation of an object's existence. Hence such a liking always refers at once to our power of desire, either as the basis that determines it, or at any rate as necessarily connected with that determining basis" (506). By combining the subjects, God has become wholly interested in the aesthetics of His creation so that He no longer stands apart from creation as a separate entity, and somehow he no longer stands aloof from that perfection but is endowed with and in it; His omnipotent desire has overpowered the entity of creation no longer allowing it to be a separate perfection.




Subjectivity endure


Perfection are we

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