On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

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 something people do together rather than on their own. Ben Morgan argues that the shared practices of human identity can be understood as ways 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 to present a new approach to the history of modern identity. It surveys existing approaches to modern selfhood (Foucault, Charles Taylor) and proposes an alternative account by investigating late medieval mysticism, in particular texts written in Germany by Meister Eckhart and others in the same milieu. Reactions to the condemnation of Meister Eckharts teaching for heresy in 1329 offer a microcosm of the circumstances in which something like the modern self arises as people change their behavior toward others, toward themselves, and toward what they call God. The book makes Meister Eckhart and his contemporaries appear as our contemporaries by changing the assumptions with which we approach our own identity. To make this change requires a revision of current vocabularies for approaching ourselves, and in particular the vocabulary and habits inherited from psychoanalysis. The book finishes by exploring the parallel between late medieval confessors and their spiritual charges, and late-nineteenth-century psychoanalysts and their patients. The result is a renewed vision of the Freuds project of finding a vocabulary for acknowledging and nurturing our everyday commitments to others and to our spiritual longings. Frontmatter Acknowledgments (page xi) Introduction (page 1) PART I: CLEARING THE GROUND 1 Some Recent Versions of Mysticism (page 11) 2 Empty Epiphanies in Modernist and Postmodernist Theory (page 24) 3 The Gender of Human Togetherness (page 37) 4 Histories of Modern Selfhood (page 60) PART II: A BRIEF PREHISTORY OF THE MODERN WESTERN SELF 5 Meister Eckhart's Anthropology (page 85) 6 Becoming God in Fourteenth-Century Europe (page 101) 7 The Makings of the Modern Self (page 125) PART III: ALTERNATIVE VOCABULARIES 8 Taking Leave of Sigmund Freud (page 151) 9 Everyday Acknowledgments (page 200) Notes (page 223) Bibliography (page 277) Index (page 297) An account of modern ideas of selfhood that juxtaposes the relation between confessor and woman mystic in late medieval texts with examples from the early history of psychoanalysis (Freud/Breuer) to show the importance of taking into account human connectedness, gender and religious practices when studying the history of modern identity. 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'? This title offers an innovative approach to the history of the modern Western self by looking at human identity as something people do together rather than on their own