21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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more than death. All of our delusions hide us from this central fact.

Grace Jantzen further comments on this obsession with death:

‘…the western intellectual tradition is obsessed with death and with other worlds, a violent obsession that is interwoven with a masculinist drive for mastery… a deconstructive examination of this emphasis on death shows that it has an unacknowledged foundation, a material and maternal foundation in natality, which is precisely what is threatening to a masculinist imaginary, but without which none of the rest could proceed.’

She goes on to look at the implications of acknowledging the centrality of natality over death:

‘I suggest that much of traditional philosophy of religion (and Western culture generally) is preoccupied with violence, sacrifice and death, and built upon mortality not only as a human fact but as a fundamental philosophical category. But what if we were to begin with birth, and with the hope and possibility and wonder implicit in it? How if we were to treat natality and the emergence of this life and this world with the same philosophical seriousness and respect which had traditionally been paid to mortality and the striving for other worlds?’

Grace M. Jantzen — Becoming Divine (Author’s emphases)

Our economy of descendancy is best placed therefore to redress the balance. In particular,

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