In a 1987 essay on equality as a moral ideal, Harry Frankfurt notes that setting up equality of wealth or income as a social ideal diverts one’s attention from oneself to concern over the assets of others: “To the extent that people are preoccupied with equality for its own sake, their readiness to be satisfied with any particular level of income or wealth is guided not by their own interests and needs but just by the magnitude of the economic benefits... Read more
John Rawls’s notion of “difference principle” is an alternative to a meritocratic regime, but it is also different from equality of result. As Michael Sandell explains in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Rawls denies that the difference principle eliminates distinctions between persons. The difference principle aims at the problem of the arbitrariness of the distribution of talents, opportunities, inheritance (material and cultural). It attacks this question not by changing “the conditions under which I exercise my talents” but by transforming... Read more
Norberto Bobbio (Left and Right) claims that left and right are different because of their different evaluations of equality. He starts from the uncontroversial fact that people are equal in certain respects, unequal in others, and claims that “We can then correctly define as egalitarians those who , while not ignoring the fact that people are both equal and unequal, believe that what they have in common has greater value in the formation of a good community . Conversely , those who are not... Read more
In a 2013 essay evaluating the Parliamentary bill on gay marriage, John Milbank observes that British “legislators have recognised that it would be intolerable to define gay marriage in terms equivalent to ‘consummation,’ or to permit ‘adultery’ as legitimate ground for gay divorce.” In these decisions, “the legislators have been forced tacitly to admit the different nature of both gay sexuality and of gay sociality. But such an admission destroys the assumption behind the legislation and the coherence of what the... Read more
Almost no one knows the name of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. That is unfortunate, but may be changing as Rosenstock’s intimate friend Franz Rosenzweig enjoys a boomlet of attention and with the publication of Wayne Cristaudo’s Religion, Redemption, and Revolution. Among that tiny subculture that has actually heard of Rosenstock, it has somehow become axiomatic that he was a “neo-Hegelian philosopher.” This is misleading in at least two senses: First, because Rosenstock would have disclaimed the label “philosopher” and second because his assessment of... Read more
Yahweh chose Abram and called him from Ur. He promised a land, and enough see to fill the land and make it fruitful. With the promises came obligations. Yahweh “knew” Abram so that Abram might do something to achieve certain results. The Abrahamic obligation is laid out succinctly in Genesis 18:19. Yahweh is considering whether to tell Abraham what He is about to do in Sodom. He determines not to hide what He is about to do because Abraham will... Read more
In both Hebrew (mal’ak) and Greek, “angel” means “messenger.” At the outset, the “angels” who appear to human beings are spiritual beings. Yahweh Himself comes to Abraham as the Angel of Yahweh (Genesis 18-19), and then to Gideon and Samson’s parents. In each case, the human recipients offer sacrificial meals to the angelic messenger. As the Old Testament progresses, however, the messengers become human messengers. Elijah is like an angel to the widow of Zarephath, and receives a sacrificial gift... Read more
In an essay in A Companion to Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan, Ulrich Muller argues that “In Tristan und Isolde Wagner radically transformed the meaning and message of Gottfried’s romance, just as he had in Parsifal. As cast by Gottfried (and in all medieval versions), the lovers and their love are censored, repressed, and finally defeated by the structure and rules of the society in which they are living, which is to say feudal society. Wagner’s version on the other hand strives... Read more
Winder McConnell (Nibelungenleid, 98-99) sketches the changing uses of the epic in the mid-20th century: “During the Weimar Republic, the themes and motifs of the Nibelungenlied had been employed by authors of antirepublican persuasion to express optimism for Germany’s future, but poets and dramatists sympathetic to the Third Reich spoke in terms of the present. Siegfried was seen by some as the prototype of Nordic man, as the embodiment of the Nordic spirit. His fate was compared with that of... Read more
According to Michael Nerlich (Ideology of Adventure), “all figures of the Greek and Latin novels of adventure are ‘involuntary’ adventurers.” Mikhail Bakhtin too (Dialogic Imagination) emphasizes that in earlier adventures “an individual can be nothing other than completely passive, completely unchanging” and function as “merely the physical subject” of events. After the twelfth century, things change. In the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes and his legions of imitators, Nerlich says, “adventures are undertaken on a voluntary basis, they are sought... Read more
Leithart
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