6 - Actualization

Summary

An act of punishment or its effects will not lead to a good life (Gr: eudaimon). Punishment as a metaphysical and rationally calculated moral equivalence to a harm done perpetuates violence. If this approach were effective in changing behaviours then the harshness of current penal systems would see the courts, prisons and probation caseloads radically reduced. The actuarial in criminal justice treats the virtual as real and through closing down the phase space of encounter (taking away rather than giving energy) ensures the locking in of failure. The teleological enterprise of rehabilitation, with its emphasis on risk and public protection, cannot actualize what is truly human; thus, the creation of a self-perpetuating pathology becomes its own frame of reference, devoid of achievement or human value (see Bettelheim, 1960). Rather than perpetuating violence, redemption is the actualization of possibility (the infinite in the finite), changes made real rather than remaining virtual and achieved by holding open what can be variously described as the ‘gate of repentance’ (Moore, 1927: 529), the initiatory dimension (Oughourlian, 2012) or the inauguration of an eschatology, where we meet and accept the person as they are within an immanent space. This space is one of love, where the gaze of truth enables an enfleshment of that which has hitherto only been imagined (virtual).

Idols and icons

Stanislas Breton (1988: 105) states:

Although it does not pose an unsolvable problem, the Greek Eikon can be translated in two different ways … image (as the theologians have decided) evokes the idea of a reproductive likeness … More discreet, less determinate, icon, accentuates the traces of a face and the contours of a figure. ‘Emanation of the glory of the Almighty, spotless mirror and reflection,’ it hearkens back to the description of Wisdom in the book of that same name. We do not have to choose. Or, if we choose both, it is because the ‘invisible God’ (probably an allusion to the ‘hidden God’ of Isaiah 45.15, who became the deus absonditus of the tradition and perhaps inspired the homo absconditus of Ernst Bloch) does not tolerate or favor one translation over another.