This book attempts to articulate some of the inadequacies of the 20th century Western theological anthropologies and pursue the possibility of one that is more attentive to the conditions of life that still dictate the non-Western world. As professor Seo points out the question of theological and philosophical anthropology has characteristically been framed as the question of the self rather than the question of the other. The radicality and creativity of this project can be seen in the attempt to lay the groundwork for ...
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This book attempts to articulate some of the inadequacies of the 20th century Western theological anthropologies and pursue the possibility of one that is more attentive to the conditions of life that still dictate the non-Western world. As professor Seo points out the question of theological and philosophical anthropology has characteristically been framed as the question of the self rather than the question of the other. The radicality and creativity of this project can be seen in the attempt to lay the groundwork for just such a reversal of the most basic and seemingly self-evident character of philosophical and theological anthropology. What would it mean if the most basic question were that of the other rather than that of the self?The impetus for raising this sort of fundamental question is the realization that the basic categories for reflection upon the self have also been implicated in the West's project of colonial expansion and domination in the modern period. The notions of subjectivity and responsibility, of freedom and temporality have all been bound up not only in the way of thinking about the "subject" but also in the global project of subjection. Thus European enlightenment is not only a subjective accomplishment, and modernization not only an achievement, but also something done to others or to the other of the West, who become thereby what Professor Seo calls "othered selves". What would it mean to think of the human, as human, from the position not of the triumphant self but that of the othered self, the one made other and constructed as other? This is the daring and provocative question which this treatise raises for the reader. One of the most remarkable features of this essay is that it does not begin with a simple repudiation of the Western tradition, or in simple characterizations of that tradition, or indulge in caricature. The author is one who is deeply steeped in the philosophical and theological traditions of the West. Indeed the breadth and depth of his sympathetic reading of this tradition is evident on every page. Never resorting to simple dismissal of the multitude of thinkers who enter into his argument, Seo's discussions of thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Kant, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre and Wittgenstein, Rahner and Pannenberg, Rosenzweig and Buber, reveals a generous and probing intelligence that goes to the heart of the positions and perspectives that are to be engaged. At the same time, positions with which he is deeply sympathetic like those of Anselm Min, Enrique Dussel, Walter Benjamin or, especially, Emmanuel Levinas, are not simply offered as models to be emulated but are carefully and critically engaged. The first chapters of the book offer what may be termed, following Foucault, a genealogy of several of the most basic concepts of philosophical and theological anthropology. The emphasis upon the freedom as constitutive of the subject opens the discussion. Moving from the theological perspective on the bondage of the will in Augustine and Luther Seo shows how the modern conception of the rational freedom of the will was constructed in the work of Kant and Hegel. But this freedom of the will, he also shows, has become the will to power that can make reason the instrument of genocide. The theological tradition has taken up, in Rahner and Pannenberg, the idea of freedom as an essential openness to the world, or in Tillich and Niebuhr the idea of a finite freedom. But what has not been fundamentally interrogated is the very character of this supposedly self-grounded freedom, a freedom that strains against the limits posed by the other and regards the world to which it is open as the field of its own expansive operation. Similarly the idea of history or of the subject as embedded in and as productive of history is subjected to a close genealogical investigation. These investigations are not unrelated since the openness to the world is at the same time openness to the future, and hist
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