Fighting for Life

By Walter J. Ong

Book Overview

What accounts for the continued popularity of the macho image, the fanaticism of sports enthusiasts, the perennial appeal of Don Quixote's ineffectual struggles? Walter J. Ong addresses these and related questions as he offers new insights into the complex ways in which human life is affected by contest. Ong argues that the struggle for dominance, which he feels is crucial among higher animal species, is more immediately critical for males than for females, helping males to manage persistent insecurity and to establish sexual identity. The male agonistic drive finds an outlet in contests as diverse as football, cockfighting, and chess--the last, the ultimate intellectualization of formalized territorial combat. Demonstrating the importance of contest in biological evolution and in the growth of consciousness out of the unconscious, Ong shows how adversarial today's shifting patterns of contest in such arenas as spectator sports, politics, business, religion, academe, and the history of rhetoric. Human internalization of agonistic drives, he concludes, can foster the deeper discovery of the self and of distinctively human freedom.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1610978307
• ISBN13: 9781610978309
• Release Date: December 2011
• Publisher: Wipf & Stock Publishers
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Exceptional Insights

This book is truly remarkable. If you read it, he will give you many insights into masculine identity that you will never forget. He has a very cross-cultural approach and draws many examples from biology, which adds weight to his thesis. He sheds new light on all sorts of social phenomenon, from baseball to elementary education. For Christians, he also a brief and very interesting discussion of Jesus as a model of redeemed masculinity. One of the best things about this book is that he shows how the masculine impulse to contest and combat is essential the male identity and a call not to domination but to inner harmony and sacrificial living. This book is indispensable for anyone examining the question of whether sexual identity comes from nature or nurture. One piece of advice: the first chapter is the least interesting, most difficult to read part of the book and isn't very important. Start on Chapter 2 and come back to Chapter one if you decide you like what he's saying and want to learn everything thing you can. A great book for any man or woman trying to understand one.