The Moviegoer

A thought experiment occurred to me the other day.

Suppose you were marooned on a tropical island. After getting your bearings and enjoying a few papayas you decide to explore the island to see if it's deserted. While walking along the beach you discover a stopwatch in the sand. You know it must have belonged to a human because:

a) It has many small intricate parts that all work together in harmony to tell the time. These parts couldn't have developed gradually over time - each is interdependent with one another. Therefore, it must have been produced by an intelligent agent. Perhaps you're not alone on the island?

b) You know it's a human artifact because it's a stopwatch, and as a stopwatch it's part of a referential totality of significance which ultimately finds it's ground in a Dasein's that-for-the-sake-of-which.

If you chose 'b', does this mean all comparisons of living creatures with human equipment is, in the end, a fatally flawed analogy? Can humans really ever be like a potter's jar?

I find that often times when I talk to other Christians about homosexuality and related topics I have an exteme difficulty conveying what I regard as important subtleties surrounding same-sex eroticism. In particular, I find that most folks take it for granted that our identity must be largely informed by our sexual desires - that is, that sexual desire forms a principal determination of who and what we are. On such a view there are heterosexuals and homosexuals, bi-sexuals and transgendered people. Sexual desire dichotmizes the social field as one of the most important discriminators informing who we are and the social roles we inhabit.

However, there's another view, which is neither conservative nor liberal, Christian or non, which sees the foregoing characterization of identity as a recent historical phenomenon. Foucault's view, which I think falls into this category, is just one example. From Wikipedia's "biopower" article:

Sexuality, he [Foucault] argues, far from having been reduced to silence during the Victorian Era, was in fact subjected to a "sexuality dispositif" (or "mechanism"), which incites and even forced the subject to speak about his sex. Thus, "sexuality does not exist", it is a discursive creation, which makes us believe that sexuality contains our personal truth (in the same way that the discourse of "race struggle" sees the truth of politics and history in the everlasting subterranean war which takes place beneath the so-called peace).

So what is the upshot? If sexuality doesn't contain our personal truth, if it isn't disclosive of who we are, what does this matter?

Beyond the immediate revelation that our historical self-interpretations might cover over the more important truths about our identity, I'm not exactly sure how to apply this. It doesn't mean that there will ever be a time without same-sex eroticism. But it might mean that there will be a time without identities informed by sexual preference, just like there will probably be a time when people have trouble understanding what money or commodities are (just as most Americans have trouble comprehending the economic structure of past societies who do not have commodities).

And perhaps recognition of the non-deliberative, historical mutability of identity might offer hope to those who seek a new identity in Christ (and jostle the complaceny of those who think their "thrown" identity baptized by God).