Concern for the Other: Perspectives on the Ethics of K. E. Løgstrup

Human Nature and Human Dependence: What Might a Thomist Learn from Reading L

Human Nature and Human Dependence What Might a Thomist Learn from Reading Løgstrup? Alasdair MacIntyre Thomism does not confront its philosophical rivals as a completed system of thought, and not primarily even as a set of propositions, but rather in the first place as a set of questions, questions that do indeed presuppose the truth of certain assertions and the soundness of certain arguments, but that nonetheless are important as questions. They are questions with a history, the questions successively of Socrates, of Plato, of Aristotle , and of medieval Islamic and Jewish Aristotelians, before they ever became Aquinas’s questions; and at each stage they were refined and reformulated, so as to take account of a wider and wider range of relevant considerations. This process did not come to an end with Aquinas’s articulation of that theological and philosophical whole to which these questions turned out to be contributory parts. In the last hundred years, for example , Thomists have learned a great deal to their profit from the development of logic since Boole and Frege, from Wittgenstein , and, perhaps most importantly from the phenomenology of Husserl and Ingarden. And it is, I am going to suggest , from Løgstrup as a phenomenologist that we now have much to learn. 147 C H A P T E R E I G H T Andersen-08 10/19/07 2:17 PM Page 147 It is important to emphasize that I speak only as “a” Thomist. There are numerous issues on which Thomists are divided, both on the interpretation of Aquinas’s texts and on substantive philosophical questions , some of which are relevant to the dialogues between Thomists and protagonists of other standpoints. Thomists have, for example, differed widely among themselves in their attitudes to phenomenology. So that in writing about Løgstrup and in thinking about the phenomenological aspects of his work—although not only about these—I unavoidably enter disputed territory, bringing with me much that is shared with other Thomists, but also a good deal less widely shared, including my view of how the kind of psychoanalytic understanding that we owe to D.W. Winnicott is to be integrated into a Thomistic understanding of human nature. In phenomenological claims it is important to distinguish between what is reported as given in experience of the object of phenomenological attention and what derives instead from the theoretical framework in terms of which particular phenomenologists present their reports and interpret the experience. The point that I am making here is similar to that made by Løgstrup, when he warned moral philosophers of the dangers involved in not distinguishing adequately between what belongs to the phenomenological description of the moral act and what is a matter of the logical entailments involved in statements of general principles and moral arguments (SGCN, 104). This danger has two dimensions. Sometimes, when we share the phenomenologist ’s theoretical presuppositions, we may too easily accept as an account of the object itself what is in fact an account of the object as interpreted from that theoretical standpoint. And sometimes, when our theoretical standpoint is at odds with that of the phenomenologist, we may be insufficiently receptive to what does in fact belong to the account of the object as it presented itself, as it disclosed itself to phenomenological attention, and therefore to the account of the object as it is. An important precaution therefore is to begin by identifying possible obstacles to genuine receptivity, both obstacles that may rise from shared agreements and those that may be the result of difference and disagreement . For a Thomistic reader of Løgstrup these are not difficult to catalogue. Alasdair MacIntyre 148 Andersen-08 10/19/07 2:17 PM Page 148 SOME IMPORTANT AGREEMENTS The agreements are of at least three kinds. First, Løgstrup as a Lutheran theologian shared an Augustinian inheritance with Aquinas. And it was one of Augustine’s central theses that our lives are given to us by God and that we only perceive and understand ourselves rightly insofar as we perceive and understand our lives as gifts. It is of course possible to experience one’s life as a gift without recognizing that it is God’s gift. Katherine Mansfield described in one of her letters a surge of gratitude for her existence without being able to say to whom she was grateful. But insofar as one finds oneself unable...