christmas

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My preciously-titled posting yesterday has implicit motives related
to my implicitly prevailing Project. Yet I also had in mind the Christian originality of highlighting the extraordinary child—indeed an extra-ordinariness belonging to human potential as such, symbolized in
an initial possibility of wonderful potential, exemplified (in principle) by every birth.

Strip away all the theocentrically cultic aura and practices, we still have
a universalistic, humanistic valuing of human potential in a gift to one’s world we may presume as the gift of the child.

(That’s about the born and desired child, not a politics of “Life”
that posits theologized humanity in the unviable fetus. We all agree that the born and desired child deserves all our hopes and grants
of opportunity.)

Christmas day is an oasis in an unfortunate economy of consumption.
It’s about a retroactive sanctification of a teacher’s short life, in the folkloric Image of an impoverished birth (as Christianity as such didn’t arise for decades after the death of Jesus, didn’t become doctrinal
for centuries; and didn’t cause prevalence of this holiday until
a millennium later).

Love has become such a trite notion, bandied about by vacuous lives
that sustain vacuous economies. Finding philosophical importance
in the notion is like expecting appreciation of a great poet in a mall. Many philosophical ethicists may find dim importance in the likes
of Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, whose stellar career might be capsulated as one of finding love of reason in reasons of love—like finding a love of humanity in one’s humanity of “love.”

To love our own nature is to love our ownmost futurity,
and that’s reflected in one’s child, but not as ours—not as one’s own
(not as a child living for us—for our satisfaction, for there being fulfillment to the adult’s life, as if the meaning of life is to reproduce
and to have the result mirror our hopes, let alone our expectations).
The “our” belongs to us, all together loving the mystery of a new generation that will carry on, even forgetting us in most genuinely embodying our legacies.

The light of the child is the child of the light: time and being.

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