It All Started with A Professor, An Essay, and A Pair of Shoes
- Paul Thomas
- Jul 16, 2021
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 5, 2021
After 8 years in The Marine Corps, I found it was time for me to get out and pursue college. It was time for a new mission, a new path, a new career. What I wasn’t ready for was for all those
–isms born out of the 19th and 20th centuries and the intellectuals that belonged to them. Their genius haunts our world still, and not in some romantic, Phantom of The Opera kind of way either—those debilitating philosophers heralded as humanist heroes.
The Religious have no seat at the table?
As a student of the humanities, I was eager to get into all of the writing classes as I could. I had fallen in love with the written word and all its possibility, I was to be an english major.
But english majors must also learn about the sciences.
I wasn't opposed at first. I really enjoy science. It is a remarkable tool in which to become better acquainted with reality, there is no doubt. A great many things have been made possible because of brave science, but haughty and proud it has become.
One of the science courses I opted to attend was an Environmental Science class. It was led by a Dr. B— (This blog is no smear campaign). Dr. B was a sort of self-made man. He had traveled from overseas to get away from poverty and a bleak future and made the environment the apple of his eye. He had my respect—that was until he started to demean religious thought.
To Dr. B, religion has no place at the table of discussion concerning the environment. It was his professional opinion that religious people only trouble scientific progress, as if they are a bunch of schizophrenics communing with apparitions, it was assumed they would trouble the new dogma of sustainable development as well. He thought it best to show religion the door instead of a chair. What he had done in a single moment though was estrange many of his students from a respectful dialogue and disenfranchised their communities from a conversation that, not only concerns them, but depends on their participation. On that day I did what every other religious student did, I remained silent. Yet, the bold declarations of this man burrowed deep inside my mind like a cicada waiting for the right season to give flight to all my protest.
I read some bold and scandalous literature during my time in college (and this was well before the throws of Critical Race Theory). The name, Roland Barthes is a name that I have yet to forget.
Roland Barthes was a French literary critic during the 20th century. Literary critic... it might as well be a synonym for, "philosopher."
Roland Barthes belonged to the French Structuralism Literary Movement where he sought to analyze social trends, attitudes, and relationships towards language. As a scholar of Semiotics (of signs and their meanings), he brought a Marxist thought process to the written word and sought to indict the (L)iterary world of his day for its bourgeois view of literature, and especially if his contemporaries interfered with his hedonism.
Barthes simply wanted to enjoy a book how he wished, no
matter its originator and their prerogatives. He would deny every writer his or her authorial right to ascribe meaning to their own work so that he could stroll through the garden of another's thoughts and pluck the rose of their wit; to call the story his, and for his pleasure be allowed to prescribe its meaning, or its nothingness.
In his own words, "... refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law." Barthes was an anarchist, nothing more, nothing less.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of The Author,” The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism 2nd ed, ed.
Peter Simon (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010), 1325.
Ted Honderich, "Roland Barthes," The Oxford Companion To Philosophy 2nd ed. (Oxford University
Press Inc., 2005), 80.
The Equity-Equality Conundrum…
It has been a guarded secret, especially from my military family (many wouldn’t understand), that I self-elected into dance in college. I graduated having studied both english and dance.
I remember my first day, standing outside of the dance room, waiting for class to begin. I was met by another student and she asked me what class I was waiting for and my answer only confused her. She wasn’t expecting the likes of me to be joining her in a ballet class. Hell, a year prior to that moment and I would have told you, you were crazy to suggest that I would be pirouetting through the air wearing tights and slippers, but divorce makes people do crazy things…
I was midway through my pre-requisites for my degree when I was confronted with a decree of divorce. It is a pain I don’t wish upon anyone. At the time, I was specializing in philosophy, but I was no longer able to entertain the mad thoughts of dead men. The dialogues that invited doubt of every damn thing was not a conversation I could entertain any longer. Divorce brings all kinds of doubt: doubt of one’s past, their present, and especially their future. I was having my own personal existential crisis, I didn’t need to ponder on whether or not my pain was a figment of my imagination, or someone else’s. The immediate future required much of me, and if I was to get through college, I needed something to inspire me not to waste my days in the local cigar lounge.
Dance invigorated me. It brought new life, literally and figuratively. My limbs became more limber, my muscles more taut, my mind more engaged with the assignments to come. I’ve long wondered if some of the students I danced with thought me to be some pervert seeking to prey upon the young and beautiful, but in truth, I was there for therapy.
Dancing was a place to go to, away from my doomed relationship, away from the world I once knew. It allowed me to emote in a real and tangible, and most importantly, a healthy way. I let all my emotional turmoil rip through me and cloud about my kinesphere until my body knew joy once again. Dance became a sacred place, but places tend to have boundaries, and sometimes those boundaries shift over time.
It was the second year of dance that I ran into one of my dance professor’s boundary lines of feminism. It was another one of those isms that I fled from in order to press on towards graduation until I tripped right into a philosophical booby trap, pun intended.
I was putting together a dance which I was to choreograph and also participate in. It involved a male and female dancer who was to exhibit a playful choreography of a husband getting ready to leave for work while the wife sought to distract him from leaving and instead foster a dance that kept him home with her. The dance seemed harmless. It was to be fun and coquettish, but my professor… she only saw me as being unequitable. The reason? I was the only one wearing shoes in the choreography and this apparently deserved a conversation directed at my chauvinism, another ism among the isms.
It was after that moment that dance seemed to be a stutter-step routine. I was no longer able to exorcise the pain out of me, but instead, the exercise of diplomacy became my primary concern. I was studying philosophy after all.
All three of these moments came together in my mind to capitalize on a simple truth: Worldview determines everything. The story of humanity – its origin, its purpose, its ethics – determines our relationship to other humans, to the animal kingdom, to all biotic and abiotic entities. It even shows up in the minutia of our lives: in an undergraduate course, in our reading biases, our idealized wardrobe. It is because of our subconscious worldviews that our modern progress is buttressed up against the remnants of tradition, and the friction we feel from it presents a dilemma: Do we refine our traditions or do we supplant them wholesale? Imago Dei seeks to present the scenario of the world choosing a complete disregard of tradition. It asks questions like, what would the world look like without religion? Can the world do away with religion in the first place? The story of Imago Dei poses a theory.
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