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From Narcissus to Tantalus
by Dr. Emanuel Paparella
2009-02-20 09:14:59 |
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Lately we have seen analyzed in the pages of Ovi both the myth of Narcissus and the myth of Tantalus as they apply to human nature and human personality. The greatest disagreement seems to revolve around the issue of man’s freedom vis a vis certain pre-determined characteristics of human nature as revealed in our very genes and the desirability to manipulate those genes to produce a more viable human nature. The issue invariably sparks a spirited rational debate but ultimately those mysteries of human nature, despite the scientific and psychological data behind it, begin and end as myths. Here is the presentation of another book on the subject which may clarify some of the issue’s perplexities.
The Myth of Tantalus: A Scaffolding for an Existential and Ontological Theory of Personality by Shlomo Giora Shoham.
Shlomo Giora Shoham has been awarded the Israel Prize for 2003, for his contribution to the study of criminology. He is a widely published author on crime, deviance, philosophy, religion, psychology and the human personality. He lectures worldwide, and has recently been resident at the universities of Oxford and Harvard, and at the Sorbonne.
“This is the work of a man who has undergone a crisis, who in effect tells us that the crisis opened his eyes to scientific and human truth. Shoham is an adventurer among ideas and one takes pleasure in his mixture of daring generalization and empirical exactness.” Professor ben Ami Shaarfstein, author of A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant, reviewing the first edition in The Jerusalem Post.
This fully revised and expanded second edition provides a detailed explanation of personality developmental dynamics, taking into account mysticism and religious experience as psycho-sociological phenomena, and using empirical anchors ranging from the topical issue of Arab–Jewish relationships to the divergent personalities of the founders of the Hassidic movement.
These psychological dynamics are presented by way of the developmental and relationship experiences we have with the outside world – alternations between conflict and a striving to revert back to earlier developmental phases. At any given moment of our lives there is a gap between our desires for participation and our subjectively defined distance from our participatory aims. This gap is denoted the Tantalus Ratio, after the Olympian demigod. Transcendental longings and quests are explored in their actual structuring of the human personality. This new Theory of Personality also explores the mytho-empirical manifestation of the normative sacrifice of the young, denoted as the Isaac Syndrome.
The author pays homage to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus by recognizing the absurd drudgeries of man’s existence, the maddening routines, the pointlessness of being, the silence of God, and the cruelty of man to man. Examples from literature and myth demonstrate that if man can find a creative modus vivendi with his pitiful “stone” burden, then the vicissitudes of existence can become punctuated with meaning, satisfaction and even happiness. Like Camus, the author concludes that it is only through creative rebellion that man can find authenticity. In that respect he echoes Dostoyevsky’s Man from Underground who proclaims that were we to place man in a wholly deterministic universe, he would blow it up simply to prove that he is free.
Links or some significant recent articles related to the issue:
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10687/Default.aspx
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10685/Default.aspx
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10686/Default.aspx
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