On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self by Ben Morgan (review)

It is refreshing to be reminded that the philosophers whose work we so often appropriate themselves belong to traditions of thought and developed their theories by analyzing source texts. Ben Morgan's On Becoming God provides a critique of many popular theorists, belonging primarily to the tradition of psychoanalysis, by pointing out the extent to which the philosophers fail to question modern assumptions about identity and the self, thereby missing important aspects of their objects of analysis. Morgan does not propose any alternative himself.

The book comprises three parts, each devoted to a different subject, but each helping to establish the importance of "connectedness" as a fundamental category of human identity. Part 1 argues that the failure of twentieth-century philosophy was due to a general inability to overcome the Cartesian subject, the autonomous and private self, despite the recognition that such a step was necessary. In the introduction, Morgan identifies three ways in which our conception of human identity must change to rectify this shortcoming. We must acknowledge that the experience of dependence and coexistence precedes individualized identity (2), we must take into account not only the effects of biological sex on human experience but also the mutual contribution of men and women to each other's gendered identity (3), and finally, we must accept religious vocabulary as a valid mode of speaking about human connectedness (4).

The first chapter outlines the failures of psychoanalysis and feminism to undergo these necessary shifts in perspective even when reading mystical texts. Morgan shows that both Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray founder on gender difference, Lacan by defining feminine identity only as the negative to a masculine model and Irigaray by denying the self-empowerment of feminine divinity to male subjects. Amy Hollywood recognizes the shortcomings of Lacan and Irigaray, but Morgan criticizes her in turn for valuing George Bataille's mysticism, which assumes that the subject is naturally isolated and describes opening to the other as violent self-destruction. None of the three thinkers are successful at overcoming modern assumptions about the human subject in order to grasp how the medieval mystics understood the self. In a short second chapter Morgan establishes that these failures are not particular to psychoanalysis through similar and disappointingly perfunctory readings of Jean-François Lyotard, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, and Theodor Adorno.

The third chapter lays out a number of approaches to identity that more usefully handle the problem of "connectedness." Morgan begins with Heidegger's Mitsein, which "unites a sense of connection with an awareness of the meaningful activity through which we live out the connection" (44), although (after a thoroughly unnecessary detour through mirror neuron theory) he quickly acknowledges that Heidegger never fully developed the concept. Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler provide Morgan with expanded models of Mitsein that account for the contribution of both biological experience and learned behavior to the construction of identity, although Morgan criticizes both philosophers for sharing with Hollywood and Bataille the assumption that exposure to the other is fundamentally wounding to the subject (51, 54). Part 1 concludes with a chapter that reviews several histories of the modern self. Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Peter and Christa Bürger, and Jerrold Seigel are all subjected to the by now familiar criticisms. They do not sufficiently account for human connectedness or are unable to provide a neutral description of gender dynamics.

Although the brevity with which Morgan dismisses complex thinkers can be frustrating, the greatest weakness of part 1 is Morgan's habit of criticizing the founder of a discourse for failing to pursue a certain line of inquiry and then ignoring later thinkers who have taken up these very questions. Despite the convincing criticisms and careful redrawing of the field in part 1, Morgan's failure to engage with expected theorists leaves the unfortunate impression that he is setting up straw men rather than joining a scholarly...