Reinhold Niebuhr: The law of love and the omnipresence of power

2021 ◽  
pp. 175508822098588
Author(s):  
David Clinton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Heart ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Human History ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Human Need ◽  
The Law ◽  
Realist View

The twentieth-century theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr frequently employed a formulation confounding to his readers, simultaneously appealing to the loftiest altruism as summed up in his identification of the “law of love” and compelling attention to the grittiest realism as encapsulated in his recognition of a universal struggle for power. This sharp contrast was no careless error on Niebuhr’s part, but rather an insistence on describing in the most sharply contrasting tones the paradoxical character of human nature. In his Christian Realist view fear and a consequent desire for power over others to protect oneself are inescapable components of human existence within history. The human need for community and refusal to be satisfied with anything less than devotion to the wellbeing of others unsullied by self-love are nevertheless also implanted in the human heart, which recognizes that reality extends beyond human history. Niebuhr demanded attention to both.

The Problem of Paradox

The Good Kill ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 40-81
Author(s):  
Marc LiVecche
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Law

Chapter 2 helps uncover why so many warfighters hold the belief that killing is wrong. It does so by linking this belief to a particular kind of ethical paradox, commonplace in Western Christianity and the wider culture. This paradox is grounded in the twentieth-century American public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr. This chapter introduces the Niebuhrian tension placed between the Christian conceptions of love and justice, sometimes cast as contradictory obligations to a law of love and a law of responsibility. This chapter proceeds in two parts. The first part illustrates Niebuhr’s view of love, which, rooted in pacifism, illuminates his belief that killing is morally wrong. The second half, however, demonstrates how Niebuhr’s commitment, rooted in realism, to responsibility leads him to willingly suspend the law of love. After showing how the Niebuhrian paradox renders warfighting inherently morally injurious, this chapter concludes by challenging it.

“The Human Heart Is a Seat of Constant War”

2018 ◽  
pp. 252-282
Author(s):  
Nicholas Buccola
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Heart ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Political Morality ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

This chapter reconstructs what Frederick Douglass thought about human nature to deepen peoples understanding of the foundations of his political morality and to counter criticisms of liberal views of human nature. It lays out the base critiques of the liberal view of human nature in modern Western political thought and shows how Douglass viewed the competing tendencies of human beings in order to form a nuanced idea of human nature. Going into the debates in the liberal community, it cites the differing opinions of Thomas Jefferson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Locke. With a focus on the dualities that make up Douglass’s view on the subject, this chapter shows how his view shaped his experiences and the way he interacted with the world. The dynamism that makes up Douglass’s idea of human nature makes it a viewpoint to be taken seriously and reflects the tensions inherent within the subject.

The origin and development of the concept of the ‘laws of nature’

1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Milton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
The Law ◽  
Do So

TheIdea of explaining natural phenomena by appealing to laws of nature is one that is thoroughly familiar to the modern mind. This idea does not perhaps appear quite as natural as it did a century ago, when Engels proclaimed to the mourners at Marx's funeral that just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature so Marx had discovered the law of development of human history. Twentieth-century historians do not in general conceive their task as including the formulation of laws of history, and the discoveries of modern physics since Maxwell have for the most part been expressed in terms of principles and equations rather than laws. Nevertheless, despite these changes, we are still quite accustomed to thinking in terms of laws of nature; and just because it seems natural it is easy to assume that it is natural for human beings seeking to explain the phenomena of nature to do so by enquiring after the laws by which these phenomena are governed.

Studying Modern Arabic Literature

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Modern Arabic

This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.

Why Phenomenology?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Pure Intuition ◽  
The Way

This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure intuition of its subject matter, phenomenology will also be necessarily interpretative and existential. Although phenomenology is limited to what shows itself and therefore cannot pass judgement on the existence of God, it can deal with God insofar as God appears within the activity and passivity of human existence. From Hegel onward, it has also shown itself open to seeing the self as twofold and thus more than a simple subjective agent, opening the way to an understanding of the self as essentially spiritual.

Rhythm

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lexi Eikelboom
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Philosopher ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Theoretical Category

This book argues that, as a pervasive dimension of human existence with theological implications, rhythm ought to be considered a category of theological significance. Philosophers and theologians have drawn on rhythm—patterned movements of repetition and variation—to describe reality, however, the ways in which rhythm is used and understood differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological implications. This book brings those implications into the open, using resources from phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences to analyse and evaluate uses of rhythm in metaphysical and theological accounts of reality. The analysis relies on a distinction from prosody between a synchronic approach to rhythm—observing the whole at once and considering how various dimensions of a rhythm hold together harmoniously—and a diachronic approach—focusing on the ways in which time unfolds as the subject experiences it. The text engages with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara alongside thinkers as diverse as Augustine and the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and proposes an approach to rhythm that serves the concerns of theological conversation. It demonstrates the difference that including rhythm in theological conversation makes to how we think about questions such as “what is creation?” and “what is the nature of the God–creature relationship?” from the perspective of rhythm. As a theoretical category, capable of expressing metaphysical commitments, yet shaped by the cultural rhythms in which those expressing such commitments are embedded, rhythm is particularly significant for theology as a phenomenon through which culture and embodied experience influence doctrine.

Hegel's Conception of the Study of Human Nature

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 32-47
Author(s):  
H. B. Acton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Dialectical Materialism ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Dialectical Method ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Creation

It is easy to understand why Hegel's philosophy should be little studied by English-speaking philosophers today. Those who at the beginning of the twentieth century initiated the movement we are now caught up in presented their earliest philosophical arguments as criticisms of the prevailing Anglo-Hegelian views. It may now be thought illiberal to take much interest in this perhaps excusably slaughtered royal family, and positively reactionary to hanker after the foreign dynasty from which it sometimes claimed descent. Hegel was a systematic philosopher with a scope hardly to be found today, and men who, as we say, wish to keep up with their subject may well be daunted at the idea of having to understand a way of looking at philosophy which they suspect would not repay them for their trouble anyway. Furthermore, since Hegel wrote, formal logic has advanced in ways he could not have foreseen, and has, it seems to many, destroyed the whole basis of his dialectical method. At the same time, the creation of a science of sociology, it is supposed, has rendered obsolete the philosophy of history for which Hegel was at one time admired. In countries where there are Marxist intellectuals, Hegel does get discussed as the inadvertent forerunner of historical and dialectical materialism. But in England, where there is no such need or presence, there do not seem to be any very strong ideological reasons for discussing him. In what follows I shall be asking you to direct your thoughts to certain forgotten far-off things which I hope you will find historically interesting even if you do not agree with me that they give important clues for an understanding of human nature and human society.

Alien Internment in John Galsworthy’s ‘The Bright Side’ and ‘The Dog It was that Died’

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Jill Felicity Durey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Internment Camp ◽  
Bright Side ◽  
Second World ◽  
John Galsworthy

This article illuminates two short stories by John Galsworthy through examining them with the help of his diaries and letters, a handful of unpublished letters by his nephew from an internment camp and secondary historical sources. It argues that the stories, when read in conjunction with these sources, are highly revealing about human nature during Second World War and also about Galsworthy’s prescient fears concerning a second twentieth-century world war, which he did not live to see.

Guarding the Public Interest: England's Coroners and Organ Transplants, 1960–1975

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 926-946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Spare Part ◽  
Organ Transplants ◽  
Legal Requirement ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Law ◽  
Do So

AbstractFrom the mid-twentieth century, England's coroners were crucial to the supply of organs to transplant, as much of this material was gleaned from the bodies of people who had been involved in accidents. In such situations the law required that a coroner's consent first be obtained lest removing the organs destroy evidence about the cause of the person's death. Surgeons challenged the legal requirement that they seek consent before taking organs, arguing that doing so hampered their quick access to bodies. Some coroners willingly cooperated with surgeons while others refused to do so, coming into conflict with particular transplanters whom they considered untrustworthy. This article examines how the phenomenon of “spare part” surgery challenged long-held conceptions of the coroner's role.

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