Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Voegelin, Deninition, Humanität

Kurzinhalt: Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity, Humanität - Geschichte

Textausschnitt: () 'Humanity means then, man in a mode of understanding himself in his relation to God, world and society, and those modes change. And history then would be the drama, if a meaning in it can be found, of humanity, of this self-understanding of man.' (1967,p.12) Perhaps in these unedited remarks of Voegelin, we can trace the outline of an investigation of what is different throughout human history in terms of its drama, and of what is held in common by all the characters of that drama in terms of humanity.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Humanität, Natur, Lonergan, Aristoteles' Grundstreben, Philosophie, Mythos, Äquivalenz, Beyond

Kurzinhalt: Natur d. Menschlichkeit, heuristische Struktur, thaumazein, Frage n. Grund, Äquivalenz, Voegelin: hermeneutisches Prinzip, Erfahrung-selbstinterpretativ, Gilgamesch, Bhagavad Gita, Yoga, metaxy

Textausschnitt: § 3 A HEURISTIC/HERMENEUTIC FOR THE 'NATURE OF' HUMANITY

() ... our question now is whether in fact humanity has a nature that is definable in some way.
()
Lonergan makes a comment regarding the basic context in the physical sciences: 'The science of mathematics provides the physicist with a sharply defined field of sequences and relations and thereby enables him to anticipate the general nature of any physical theory.'(1961,p.579) Similarly, a philosophical anthropology which articulates the basic pattern of human conscious operations will provide a heuristic structure, a basic context able to anticipate all possible human contexts and sequences of contexts ...
()
Consequently, Voegelin suggests paraphrasing the first line of the Metaphysics as: 'All men are by nature in quest of the ground.'
()
What is relevant for us is that Aristotle had come to a grasp of what was in common to the two cultural forms he was acquainted with, myth and philosophy, which was that both were symbolizations of the quest for the ground, which remains an impenetrable mystery. Voegelin would thus see that Aristotle had grasped the key principle of equivalence, that is to say, 'the recognizable identity of the reality experienced and symbolized on the various levels of differentiation.'
()
Equivalence refers to this awareness, that in historical reality, each person and each society's quest for the ground is their exegesis of their experience of participation in that ground. However compactly and incompletely they may articulate that experience, and however much in need of further revision their experience and symbolization of reality may be, it has its dignity as a real person's or society's image of the mystery of reality surrounding and embracing them. And it is because of this dignity, that the fundamental hermeneutic principle for Voegelin could be stated like this:
the reality of experience is self-interpretive. The men who have the experiences express themselves through symbols; and the symbols are the key to understanding the experience expressed.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Lonergan, universal, Gesichtspunkt, Konversion, Voegelin

Kurzinhalt: universaler Gesichtspunkt, Lonergan: noetic, noematic (Voegelin); heuristische "Schere", spoudaios, Veogelin über Nikomachische Ethik, Glucksmann

Textausschnitt: () ... a noetic issue, which refers to the aesthetic/intellectual/moral/spiritual capacity of the interpreter, and a noematic issue, which refers to what the interpreter is trying to appreciate /understand/evaluate/believe in the entire range of human phenomena throughout history. The 'noetic' issue can be called, with Lonergan, the aspect of 'universal viewpoint,' and the 'noematic' aspect can be what Voegelin refers to as 'universal humanity.'
()
... It's hard to imagine that a Foucault, a Derrida or a Rorty would insist on not being attentive, on not being intelligent, on not being reasonable, on not being responsible

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Fundamentalismus, Szientismus, Komplementarität

Kurzinhalt: Fallacy of Answering the Unasked Question; Ideologie: Philosophie, Bibel - Wissenschaft, Hawking,

Textausschnitt: () If a believer, philosopher or natural scientist makes assertions which do not fall within their competence, we may speak of them as committing the Fallacy of Answering the Unasked Question-when they claim to answer a question that is neither raised nor answerable within their area of experience or discipline. Let's speak of the believer's version of that fallacy as fundamentalism, the philosopher's version as ideology, and the natural scientist's version of it can be entitled scientism.
()

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Schichten, Entwicklung, Verbindung

Kurzinhalt: Deutung des Zusammenhangs d. verschiedenen Schichten: Evolution, Aristoteles (Voegelin), Lonergan, emergent probability, material emergence, formal transformation, existence, finality

Textausschnitt: () There are several frameworks which have tried to articulate the link between the various levels. At present, the two most common are the anthropic principle and neo-Darwinian evolutionism. However, both seem to run the danger of a kind of reductionist determinism, in which the lower levels are the most real ones, and the later levels simply expressions of implications to be found within the lower levels.
()
() These tiers of the hierarchy of being are related to each other in: (a) the material dependence of the higher on the lower and (b) the [formal] organization of the lower by the higher ones. The relations are not reversible.
()
... 'emergent probability.' Its openness is due to its radically non-deductive nature, accepting as a matter of fact that lower aggregates of existence make materially possible the emergence of the next level, but neither explain it nor necessitate it.
()
Some of the most obvious 'principles' that emerge from such an inquiry are those of the principle of material emergence-the fact of matter occurring at various levels of complexity; of formal transformation-the fact that each level of matter up to the matter in human beings, is transformed in order to serve the requirements of the next highest level; of existence-the fact that each level, and the entire sequence of levels, as a matter of contingent, non-necessary and non-deductive fact, exists; and of finality-the fact that an immanent, contingent dynamism can be discerned in the sequence of higher integrations of the lower levels.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Evolution, Evlutionismus, Ideologie, Kontingenz, Notwendigkeit

Kurzinhalt: Evolutionismus-Ideologie; Mensch,Pferd-Stadien: the false iconography; Chinesische Mauer: Frage: unendliche Reihe; Brüche in d. Reihe

Textausschnitt: § 5 EVOLUTION AND EVOLUTIONISM

() I'd like to distinguish between evolution ... and evolutionism, which I would consider an ideological creed ...
()
Similarly, I would suggest, unlike the debate within biology regarding the adequacy or inadequacy of evolutionary theory, that evolutionism as an ideology was at best never more than a piece of speculative verbal magic.
()
In the history of modern scientism, as a reductionist ideology, the most flagrant attempt to suppress the questions of nature and existence, has been that of the evolutionists' version of an infinite series, expressed in the form of a 'theory' of gradual increments. Biology itself has to take for granted as its data, the fact that living things exist in the first place, and the multiplicity of genera and species. It is because they claim they are dealing adequately with questions lying on principle beyond the scope of the observational and verificational methods of palaeontology or biology that they end up doing a pseudo-science that is little more than dilletantic opining about the nature of existence. () The easiest way to illustrate this is to simply list the various breaks in the unbroken sequence.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Paläontologie, Evolution, Evolutionismus

Kurzinhalt: Daten d. Paläontologie; Hominiden, Australopithecus; Homo erectus, neanderthalensis, sapiens; DNA, mtDNA, Arche-Noah-Theorie,

Textausschnitt: () ... Perhaps the greatest obstacle to an adequate interpretation of these data has been their becoming embedded within an evolutionist ideology which asserts a gradual progression from less to more complex forms of life
()
1) The gap between all other hominoids and the hominids ()
2) The gap between australopithecines and Home erectus ()
3) The gap between all other hominids and Homo sapiens ()
4) The biochemical gap: the children of Eve ()
()
According to Neo-Darwinian theory, humans evolved in the different regions where Homo erectus was distributed. However, research on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in humans would seem to contradict this.
()
'I think one of the things that I found most personally exciting about our discovery of a single female lineage of mtDNA is that it showed how closely related all the different people on our globe are to each other, and that in fact we are really part of one human family.'
()
We have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the [neo-Darwinian] synthesis-took hold. We palaeontologists have said that the history of life supports this interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not.
49/1 Augros and Stanciu, who have quoted Eldredge, add that 'Something is gravely wrong with a theory that forces us to deny or ignore the data of an entire science.'

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Paläontologie, Daten, Evolution, Evolutionisten, Interpretation

Kurzinhalt: Gattung Mensch: fragwürdig, Kriterien d. Gattung: fragwürdig (aufrechter Gang, Werkzeug); Vorwurd d. Unwissenschaftlichkeit

Textausschnitt: () genus Homo, within which a series of species, from at least erectines, Neanderthals and early modern humans of our own species, Homo sapiens are classified. But when we examine the defining criteria used to fix membership of this genus Homo, and then of its various species, they appear dilletantic and haphazard.
()
The categories used as criteria for Homo membership were comparatively large brain-size, bipedalism and tool usage. Lewin notes ...
()
But if there is no theoretically grounded notion of man available, the question must be asked whether contemporary palaeontology is not radically unscientific in its use of the genus Homo.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Paläontologie, Daten, Evolution, Interpretation, Aristoteles, Voegelin

Kurzinhalt: Fehler der falschen Konkretheit u. Abhängigkeit; Hypostasierung d. Stufen: biochemisch, zoologisch; Gene-Menschenaffen; keine Entsprechung von DNA und Anatomie

Textausschnitt: () ... fallacy of misplaced concreteness ... fallacy of misplaced dependence
()
'Our genes are for 99 per cent of their length, the same as those of the apes. Our bodies are the bodies of infant apes. Our minds, however, which do set us a little way apart from the apes, seem unable to accept this information.'
()
Could it be that, like 'primitive' myths, theories of human evolution reinforce the value systems of their creators by reflecting historically their image of themselves and of the society in which they live? Time and again, ideas about human origins turn out on closer examination to tell us as much about the present as about the past, as much about our own experiences as about those of our remote ancestors.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Evolution, Aristoteles, Voeglein; Kosmos, Mensch, Gott,

Kurzinhalt: Moderne: Immanentisierung d. Welt, Verabsolutierung d. Teilbereiche, Lascaux - neurologischer Sprung

Textausschnitt: () In the modern period, experience of divine reality was at first rejected, then routinely eclipsed. As a result, the idea of man or of the 'world,' became radically immanentized. But since the quest for the ground may be suppressed, but not abolished, one or other of these immanentized contents were hypostatized into an absolute.
()
On this loss of balance between the partners in being, Voegelin remarks that 'if, instead of the original reality, one part of the reality is erected into an absolute, all other parts of reality must be construed as a function of the one absolute reality, which is only a part of reality.'
()
Underlying all the dilletantic criteria for Homo, is this radical presumption that human beings are completely constituted by material reality.
()
How paradoxical that the most striking archaeological signature of the full-blown emergence of our own human species [...] turns out to be not new and better hand axes but symbolic art. It is precisely non-utilitarian art that bears the greatest significance in showing that modern humans had made the leap to assigning value to objects that went beyond practical day-to-day needs.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Paläonthologie, Evolution, Interpretation, Aristoteles, Höhlenmalerei

Kurzinhalt: 1 Rasse, Larynx, Sprechapparat, Gehirn (stumm), Jonas: Eigenheiten d. Bildes: Trennung: Form-Materie, Lascaux, Ordnung - Unordnung, König

Textausschnitt: 1) Biochemical level
2) Physiological and Neurophysiological level
3) Imaginative/symbolic level
4) Intellectual level

3) Imaginative/symbolic level
() What's most interesting from our viewpoint is that these highly differentiated physiological data do not make sense considered at their own level, but require a specifically human context to be understood. ... 'the brain is dumb,' that considered on its own, without the conscious activities of the patient, no merely neurological examination of the human brain would yield an understanding of its characteristic features.
()
Hans Jonas ... properties of an image: it is a likeness; it is produced with intent; the likeness is incomplete (i.e., if something were copied in all respects, say a hammer, you would have another hammer, not its image). This incompleteness involves selective omission-the first deliberate omission is for the image-maker to select what is relevant or significant in the object represented. A second omission is to leave out all the senses except the visual. A third omission is to limit the representation to two dimensions, permitting greater expressive freedom in emphasizing what matters most.
()
The principle here involved on the part of the subject is the mental separation of form from matter. It is this that makes possible the vicarious presence of the physically absent at once with the self-effacement of the physically present. Here we have a specifically human fact, and the reason why we can expect neither making nor understanding of images from animals. The animal deals with the present object itself.
()
What the first humans convey, within the compactness of the primary experience of the cosmos, is a quest for and responsiveness to the mystery of existence equivalent to the much later philosophic and revelatory experiences. They have left behind in funerary and cultic remains powerful indices of their awareness of the bipolar nature of existence as an 'intersection of the timeless with time,

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Zusammenfassung, Newgrange, Boyne

Kurzinhalt: Kurze Zusammenfassung; ansonsten keine Einträge hinsichtlich Newgrange; s. Absätze davor

Textausschnitt: () The significance of a Newgrange in our investigation of universal humanity would seem to be twofold. On the one hand, there is the fact of a symbolic 'language' from the palaeolithic to the neolithic and beyond, which seems to express a common quest for attunement with the constant order of cosmological experience.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Tragödie, Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides

Kurzinhalt: Kurzcharakterisierung d. Linie: Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides; Niedergang, decline

Textausschnitt: () If 'the evolution of tragedy from Aeschylus to Euripides' may be seen as 'the representative expression of the political decline of Athens, ... each of the great tragedians can illuminate a different aspect of the drama of humanity. Aeschylus conveys the substance of community, even in its tearing itself apart; Sophocles exemplifies the extraordinary character required to live one's representative humanity even when community seems to be breaking down; Euripides can exhibit the awful rudderlessness of a society evacuated of any standard of humanity, individual or political.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Voegelin, Tragödie, Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: Voegelin: Ordnung d. Seele, soziale Ordnung, Geschichte erwächst aus d. Tragödie

Textausschnitt: () ... the experience of history grows out of tragedy. Only when the ideas of a completely human soul, of the reflective descent into its depth, of a decision that is drawn from its depth, and of an action that is the responsibility of man, are fully developed, can the meaning of tragic action radiate over, and illuminate, the order of human existence in society. The social order itself acquires the hue of tragedy when it is understood as the work of man, as an order wrested by man from the demonic forces of disorder, as a precarious incarnation of Dike achieved and preserved by the efforts of tragic action. The course of human affairs becomes a course of history when the order of the soul becomes the ordering force of society. For only then can the rise and fall of a polity be experienced in terms of a growing or disintegrating psyche.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Orestie, Ordnung, Seele, Aischylos

Kurzinhalt: gestörte (disordered) Gemeinschaft, unWe, Seele, Kurz-Inhalt d. Orestie

Textausschnitt: () ... Oresteia will be its dramatization both of a disordered community, or what we can call an 'unWe,' as the social expression of the disordered psyches of its members, and of the agonizing achievement of an ordered We-community through the growth in the psyches of its members.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Aischylos, Orestie, Ordnung, Plato, Anaximander

Kurzinhalt: individuelle, soziale Unordnung (disorder); unWe, Umkehr, Orestes, Plato, Apeiron (Strafe), Athen (Achse), Pathei mathos: Weisheit, Leiden

Textausschnitt: () With regard to individual disorder, most of the actors within the tragic network seem to be severely disordered. Clytemnestra and the Furies seem to be motivated largely by passion, Agamemnon by aggressivity, and Apollo by closed intellectuality ... The result of this disorder has been the unWe-s underlying the various vicious circles during the trilogy, for disordered individuals constitute disordered relationships and communities. The We-commun-ity which emerges both in Argos and in Athens after the trial and reconciliation of the Furies occurs because the individuals who were disordered have reordered themselves through wisdom.
()
Thus disordered passion, aggressivity and intellectuality, can be transformed into the ordered virtues of temperance, fortitude and prudence, whose integration in the soul of the just man Plato later in the Republic (436a-b;443d-444e) saw as the essential prerequisite for an ordered society.
()
... court of Athens. That court is the centre of the universe, the axis of intersection of heaven, earth and hell: situated on earth among men, it participates in the wisdom of Zeus through the presence of Athena, and its community-constituting work for the small We of the family and the big We of the polls is guaranteed by the protection of the underworld Furies-Eumenides.
()
Pathei mathos, wisdom through suffering, or in Fagles' translation 'suffering into truth,' is the key to the Oresteia-both the gods and men can achieve 'one common will for love'(665) only when they are prepared to suffer the exodus from their own passionate selfishness.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Sophokoles, Ödipus, Jocasta, Identität, paradeigma, Zeitlosigkeit

Kurzinhalt: Oedipus (9 Stadien), Orakel (Mensch), Protagoras, Akzeptanz d. Existenz im Horizont d. Mysteriums, Stärke in d. Schwäche, Identität durch Leid, Maß: Mensch - Gott, Transfiguration

Textausschnitt: 1) Oedipus' attainment of a successful identity (Überschriften)
2) His successful identity becomes questionable
3) Oedipus initiates a search for a truer identity
4) The answer which shatters his former identity
5) Oedipus begins to accept his new identity
6) Oedipus lives out his new identity
7) Oedipus' identity is accepted by Theseus as the identity of all Athenians8) Oedipus re-affirms his innocence
8) Oedipus re-affirms his innocence
9) The final transformation: Oedipus' identity as participation in divinity

() Oedipus ... he remains a classic example of a gradual achievement of personal identity or integration in response to the test of existence.
()
In the same century, Protagoras the sophist had given a similar answer, 'Man is the measure of all things,' and Oedipus himself symbolized this type of self-made man who seizes control of his environment and works out his own destiny, becoming in fact equated to the gods.
()
Oedipus remembers his own killing in anger of an old man who had haughtly blocked his way at a place where three roads meet: () The chorus makes explicit the inherent instability of Oedipus' first identity, an identity now in question
()
Jocasta again intervenes, this time to prevent the inquiry from reaching the awful truth. She characterizes exactly the desire to retain a safe, familiar identity, rather than face the agonizing task of breaking out into a truth which would utterly shatter that identity:
()
Finding that she has already committed suicide, he blinds himself. His true identity, in which now he and not the Sphinx is 'reduced to nought,'(cf. 1199) is of such extreme personal nothingness that he wishes to extend it to the extreme physical nothingness of blindness:
()
Oedipus had already shown that he accepted a measure of his existence greater than himself. His years of beggary have brought him to an unshakable integration of soul-not the brittle strength of the self-made man, but the enduring acceptance of an existence now lived at the horizon of mystery, where limitedness and limitlessness meet. Oedipus has learned that his strength is in his weakness ...
()
His gift of his own beaten self is being offered as the mysterious key to each man's identity. That key is that beyond the nothingness of success, capability, power and strength, there is the everything of becoming identified with the reality of an existence no longer essentially affected by the vicissitudes of failure, incapacity, deposition and weakness. Oedipus is already dead to the nothing of time and alive to the everything of the timeless. ... But the point of Sophocles' tragic paradeigma is that Oedipus' later life lived in the death of all his earlier values can teach us to integrate the death of all that is merely timebound into our own life, so that in focusing on the timeless, we too can already begin to live beyond time and death.
()
The secret of Oedipus' way, which transformed his experience of limitedness and failure, is love. This one word, which 'makes all those difficulties disappear' expresses a wisdom dearly bought by Oedipus, in which he slowly learned that man's fulfilment is in participating in the unlimitedness of God. For man, particularly for the self-made man he was, this means an agonizing transcendence of the bounds of the self. 'As Oedipus finds out in the end, man is not the measure of all things; rather, as Plato was to say much later, 'the measure of all things is-the god
()
The delay for which he is chided perhaps indicates that he had always been called, through accepting an awesome fate, to a more than human measure of existence. Only now, having answered that call at varying levels of clarity, from the opaqueness of his earlier identity to the transparence of his virtual identification with the god, does he finally transcend the measure of the self in accepting the measure of divine reality.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Euripides, Bacchae

Kurzinhalt: Dionysus, Pentheus, Athen: Sackgasse zw. Mythos u. sophistischer Rationalität, Lonergan: social surd, Einstimmung in den leidenden Gott

Textausschnitt: § 3 A TRAGEDY OF CHAOS: EURIPIDES' BACCHAE
1) Dionysus' intent: punishment of Pentheus' revolt against his divinity
2) Pentheus attempts suppression of the apparently helpless Dionysus
3) Dionysus destroys Pentheus' palace and 'escapes'
4) Dionysus tempts Pentheus to spy on the Bacchae
5) The women of Thebes, including his mother, destroy Pentheus
6) Dionysus' triumphant vindication?
()
Euripides, it would seem is so affected by the Athenian spiritual crisis that it's not easy to discern whether he was simply its most brilliant carrier or its diagnostician.
()
Pentheus shows the 'honest narrowness' of one who stands for rational civic order. For him, Dionysus is a fraud ...
()
The destruction of Pentheus is perhaps for Euripides the fate of sophistic intelligence too, an intelligence whose lack of understanding of existence, including its disorder, has led to its defeat.
()
The Bacchae is the only tragedy in which someone banished has nowhere to go. Is this part of the meaning of the tragedy? That the Greek people themselves have nowhere to go, that both their mythic traditions are shown, in Dionysus, to be spiritually bankrupt, and their sophistic enlightenment is equally incapable of providing a form of human existence?
()
The greatness of Euripides' last tragedy, I would suggest, is, that he has found a way to exhibit the cul-de-sac at which Hellenic culture had arrived, incapable of offering a way beyond the century-long impasse between myth and sophistic intelligence.
()
Euripides' greatness is to have, like Dostoevsky's Devils, conveyed the chaos of personal and communal order by exposing its inherent contradictoriness and moral lostness. More than any other work of the great Hellenic fifth century, the Bacchae illustrates the need to go beyond the [eg: sic] this impasse into a new and deeper cultural form, the form of philosophy.
()
And Euripides provides us with the diagnostic inverse insight into what Lonergan calls the social and historical surd. For all of the tragic poets, achieving our genuine humanity calls on us to lose what seems to be our humanity. That suffering brings us, in the case of Aeschylus and Sophocles, to attunement with the suffering god who is the ground of order.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Plato, Symposium, Gemeinschaft, Metaxy, Voegelin, Diotima, Sokrates, Eros, Alkibiades

Kurzinhalt: Euripides - Plato: neue Ordnung, Eros u. Liebe: metaxy, Daimon, daimonios aner, Eros: Poros, Penia, spoudaios, 3 Stufen d. Liebe, Sokrates = Daimon; Alkibiades = Dionysos, Republik

Textausschnitt: § 1 PHAEDRUS' SPEECH
§ 2 PAUSANIAS' SPEECH
§ 3 ERYXIMACHUS' SPEECH
§ 4 ARISTOPHANES' SPEECH
§ 5 AGATHON'S SPEECH
§ 6 DIOTIMA'S DIALOGUE WITH SOCRATES
§ 7 ALKIBIADES' PRAISE OF SOCRATES

() Voegelin sees the Platonic dialogue as 'the successor to Aeschylean tragedy under the new political conditions,' in which the 'drama of Socrates' replaced the dramatic struggle for the order of Dike or justice.
()
At stake in the spiritual confusion of the time was whether there could be fashioned an image of the right order of the soul and society -a paradigm, a model, an ideal-that could function for the citizens of the polis as had paraenetic myth for the Homeric heroes [...] [C]ould a new image of order be formed that would not also bear the marks of a non-binding, subjective opinion (doxa)'?
()
Plato intends to replace the orgiastic disorder represented by the Dionysus of the Bacchae 'with a steadfast and coherent pursuit of goodness and beauty that culminates in the contemplation of Beauty itself.' Rationality is understood not as repression but 'the psychological liberation of instinctive life, as leading to its completion and fulfillment.'
()
Diotima first shows Socrates that Eros, love, cannot possibly be a god. For love is something like the right opinions we have, which are neither the ignorance that cannot attain truth nor the knowledge which can explain itself, but in between (metaxy) wisdom and ignorance. Voegelin notes that 'there is no erotic tension lying around somewhere to be investigated by someone who stumbles on it,' rather it is an event of an 'experience-articulating-itself,'
()
Similarly, love is like desire, which, which is neither indifference to nor possession of beauty and goodness, but longing for these. Nor is love merely a man, mortal, nor a god, immortal, but a daimon, halfway between man and god. Such daimons or very powerful spirits
()
Such spiritual men express their longing for eternal participation in the good through the creation of interpersonal and social communities. These friendships are a communion in goodness which in some sense transcends mortality:
()
Alkibiades ends the encomium by applying the Silenus-image to Socrates' words which have the numinousness of the divine, and affirms that it is Socrates who is the mediating spirit between the human and the beyond-human:
()
The struggle has been between Socrates' Eros of reason and Alkibiades' Dionysian Eros. Alkibiades is 'a symbolic representation of Dionysus himself, very nearly the god's epiphany.'

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Aristoteles; Freundschaft: Definition, Merkmale (ob auf Nutzen, Vergnügen o. Gutheit basierend): substantiell, dauerhaft, Gemeinschaft

Kurzinhalt: Aristotle begins his discussion of friendship by suggesting that it is the concrete locus for all the preceding seven books' analysis of human virtue and happiness.

Textausschnitt: § 1 TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF FRIENDSHIP

5/5 Aristotle begins his discussion of friendship by suggesting that it is the concrete locus for all the preceding seven books' analysis of human virtue and happiness. It is within friendship that men can best perform the specifically human operations of thinking and acting: (132; Fs)

After what we have said, a discussion of friendship would naturally follow, since it is a virtue or implies virtue, and is besides most necessary with a view to living. For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods [...] with friends men are more able both to think and to act.(VIII, 1)

6/5 He lists a whole range of relationships exhibiting friendship in a broad sense, relationships between rich and poor, young and old, adults, parents and children, fellow-citizens, travellers, even among birds and most animals. Already in this preliminary description, Aristotle indicates the specific difference of human friendship-it is thought to occur between good men, and to involve character and feeling. (132; Fs)
7/5 His second chapter introduces two sets of criteria by which he can define human friendship. The first, 'objective' set, classify the objects of friendship, the second, 'subjective' set, determines which kind of human relationships can be called friendship from the viewpoint of the participants. (132; Fs)

8/5 'Objectively,' there is a scale of goods according to which we love different objects. So we love things insofar as they are useful, pleasant, or good in themselves-we will speak of these as material, emotional and specifically human goods respectively. (133; Fs)
9/5 'Subjectively,' there are the different modalities by which we relate to one another. Not all love can be reciprocated, and it is this quality of reciprocity that will characterize friendship. Even love for another for his own sake we can only call 'goodwill,' unless it is reciprocated. Nor is reciprocal love sufficient: (133; Fs)

But to those who thus wish good we ascribe only goodwill, if the wish is not reciprocated; goodwill when it is reciprocal being friendship. Or must we add 'when it is recognized'? For many people have goodwill to those whom they have not seen but judge to be good or useful; and one of these might return this feeling. These people seem to bear goodwill to each other; but how could one call them friends when they do not know their mutual feelings? To be friends, then, they must be mutually recognized as bearing goodwill and wishing well to each other for one of the aforesaid reasons.(VIII, 2) So we are conscious of one-sided relationships, but there are also relationships constituted by our mutual awareness of our relationship.

10/5 Aristotle now begins to apply these two sets of criteria, the 'objective' set dealing with the scale of goods, and the 'subjective' set dealing with the essential quality of reciprocal goodwill and knowledge, to the rough and ready range of relationships listed in chapter one: (133; Fs)

There are therefore three kinds of friendship, equal in number to the things that are lovable; for with respect to each there is a mutual and recognized love, and those who love each other wish well to each other in that respect in which they love one another.(VIII,3)

11/5 At the beginning of his Ethics, Aristotle had established that 'human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue [...] But we must add 'in a complete life.' For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.'(1,7) On the basis of his understanding of human substance and its gradual actualization over a lifetime, he can classify the various kinds of relationships in terms of (1) their personal substance, as outgoing to the good of the other; (2) their interpersonal substance as stable; and (3) their existence over a lifetime as a shared actualization of human goodness. (133; Fs)
Firstly, merely useful and merely pleasant relationships are:1

(1) not outgoing and humanly insubstantial

13/5 Now those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other. So too with those who love for the sake of pleasure; it is not for their character that men love ready-witted people, but because they find them pleasant. Therefore those who love for the sake of utility love for the sake of what is good for themselves, and those who love for the sake of pleasure do so for the sake of what is pleasant to themselves, and not in so far as the other is the person loved but in so far as he is useful or pleasant. And thus these friendships are only incidental; for it is not as being the man he is that the loved person is loved, but as providing some advantage or pleasure. (VIII,3) (134; Fs) (notabene)

(2) not stable

14/5 Such friendships, then, are easily dissolved, if the parties do not remain like themselves; for if the one party is no longer pleasing or useful the other ceases to love him. Now the useful is not permanent but is always changing. Thus when the motive of the friendship is done away, the friendship is dissolved, inasmuch as it existed only for the ends in question [...] (134; Fs) (notabene)

15/5 [T]he friendship of young people seems to aim at pleasure; for they live under the guidance of emotion, and pursue above all what is pleasant to themselves and what is immediately before them; but with increasing age their pleasures become different. This is why they quickly become friends and quickly cease to be so; their friendship changes with the object that is found pleasant, and such pleasure alters quickly [...] this is why they fall in love and quickly fall out of love, changing often within a single day.(VIII,3) (134; Fs) (notabene)

(3) oriented towards life together?

16/5 [People related in terms of usefulness]-[S]uch people do not live much with each other [...] for sometimes they do not even find each other pleasant; therefore they do not need such companionship unless they are useful to each other [...]

[People related in terms of pleasure]-[T]hese people do wish to spend their days and lives together; for it is thus that they attain the purpose of their friendship.(VIII,3) (134; Fs)
Secondly, relationships based on goodness are:
(1) outgoing and humanly substantial

17/5 Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of their own nature and not incidentally.(VIII,3) (135; Fs) (notabene)

(2) enduring

18/5 [T]herefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing. And each is good without qualification and to his friend, for the good are both good without qualification and useful to each other. So too they are pleasant [...] And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it all the qualities that friends should have.(VIII,3) (135; Fs)

(3) oriented towards life together

19/5 As in regard to the virtues some men are called good in respect of a state of character, others in respect of an activity, so too in the case of friendship; for those who live together delight in each other and confer benefits on each other, but those who are asleep or locally separated are not performing, but are disposed to perform, the activities of friendship [...] [T]here is nothing so characteristic of friends as living together, since while it is people who are in need that desire friends, even those who are supremely happy desire to spend their days together; for solitude suits such people least of all. (VIII,5) (135; Fs)

20/5 Through this judicious combination of empirical observation and theoretical insight, Aristotle is in a position to take as his primary instantiation of friendship the relationship between good persons who know and love one another as good and who share their goodness in a life lived together. 'There are several kinds of friendship-firstly and in the proper sense that of good men qua good, and by analogy the other kinds'(VIII,4). (135; Fs)

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Aristoteles, Freundschaft, Quelle, Ursrpung, nous,

Kurzinhalt: Identifikation mit seinem wahren Selbst (nous)

Textausschnitt: § 2 THE SOURCE OF FRIENDSHIP

21/5 Aristotle has the difficulty of articulating technically for the first time the shared habitual state of character which friendship is, without the linguistic developments for dealing with the specifically personal and interpersonal which we take for granted in later Western culture. In his Ethics, IX, 4 and 8, he deals with the source of friendship, which is not an abstract moral principle but a concrete good person. And since friendship is a relationship between several good persons, in IX,4, he uses the notion of the relationship of a good person with himself as a model or heuristic for deepening his understanding of this new interpersonal reality emerging into history among Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and their various disciples. Especially in IX,6, he shows its expansion into the human community, in keeping with his dictum in the Politics, 1262b7, that 'Friendship is the greatest good of the polis.' (135f; Fs)

22/5 Firstly then, there is Aristotle's notion of the good man as one who has achieved a relationship of conscious identification with his true self, which is the nous in him. He wishes to be his truest self, and to have nothing outside himself at the cost of his self: in fact the only good the good man tends towards unconditionally is participation in the divine good.1 Such a man, Aristotle continues in IX,4, wishes to live with himself, and in IX,8, he develops this notion of the good man's relation with himself, as his genuine love for or friendship with himself: (136; Fs)

[M]en say that one ought to love best one's best friend, and a man's best friend is one who wishes well to the object of his wish for his sake, even if no one is to know of it; and these attributes are found most of all in a man's attitude to himself, and so are all the other attributes by which a friend is defined [...] he is his own best friend and ought to love himself best.(IX,8)

21/5 The objection that self-love is selfishness gives Aristotle the opportunity to explain the new psychology of the self-transcendent self. He distinguishes the ordinary meaning of self-love, as closed-in and, in the terrible description he gives in IX,4, ultimately self-destructive of the true self-'a bad man seems to do everything for his own sake, and the more so the more wicked he is.' Such self-lovers 'assign to themselves the greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures.'(IX,8) (136; Fs)

22/5 In contrast to such closed-in self-love, there is the outgoing self-love of the person who loves what is most human in himself, his nous-we could call this the selfs love of the intrinsically self-transcendent self. Such a love for that part of himself by which he reaches out to the divine good and to the good in others can involve him in losing his own life for their sake: (136; Fs) (notabene)

[H]e is most truly a lover of self, of another type than that which is a matter of reproach, and as different from that as living according to a rational principle is from living as passion dictates, and desiring what is noble from desiring what seems advantageous [...] It is true of the good man [...] that he does many acts for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary dies for them; for he will throw away both wealth and honours and in general the goods that are objects of competition, gaining for himself nobility; since he would prefer [...] a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of humdrum-existence, and one great and noble act to many trivial ones. Now those who die for others doubtless obtain this result; it is therefore a great prize that they choose for themselves. They will throw away wealth too on condition that their friends will gain more; for while a man's friend gains wealth he himself achieves nobility. The same is true of honour and office [...] But he may even give up actions to his friend; it may be nobler to become the cause of his friend's acting than to act himself [...] In this sense [...] a man should be a lover of self.(IX,8)

23/5 It is hard not to be reminded of Aristotle's friend Hermias in this masterly delineation of the kind of utterly mature person who is, for Aristotle, the concrete source of friendship. (137; Fs)

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Aristoteles, Freundschaft, Modell, Vorbild

Kurzinhalt: Einheit mit dem wahren Selbst -> Einheit jeder Freundschaft

Textausschnitt: § 3 THE MODEL OF FRIENDSHIP

24/5 Secondly, there is Aristotle's use of this notion of a good man's friendship with himself not only to point to the source of friendship but to articulate the state of friendship by which good men relate to each other. The good man loves and befriends the best part of himself, his self-transcendent reason, by which he is a man. Similarly, friends love what is best in one another and for one another. Without saying so explicitly, although he comes very close to it in a passage which we shall later quote from IX, 12, Aristotle seems to indicate that the conscious unity of the different friends in their friendship is analogous to the conscious harmony of a good man with the different aspects of his personal existence: (137; Fs)

Friendly relations with one's neighbours, and the marks by which friendships are defined, seem to have proceeded from a man's relations with himself. For we define a friend as one who wishes and does what is good, or seems so, for the sake of his friend, or as one who wishes his friend to exist and live, for his sake [...] Now each of these is true of the good man's relation to himself [...] [S]ince each of these characteristics belongs to the good man in relation to himself, and he is related to his friend as to himself, for his friend is another self, friendship too is thought to be one of these attributes, and those who have these attributes to be friends [...] There would seem to be friendship in so far as he is two or more, to judge from the aforementioned attributes of friendship, and from the fact that the extreme of friendship is likened to one's love for oneself.(IX,4)

25/5 So, being ethically one with oneself is the primary concrete heuristic which Aristotle has developed as a model for understanding how one can be one with other good persons. Similarly, Aristotle develops the contrary notion, that a person who is ethically not one with himself, who is personally disintegrated, cannot be a source of friendship, but rather of its opposite, enmity. Earlier Aristotle had remarked that 'in tyranny there is little or no friendship. For where there is nothing common to ruler and ruled there is not friendship either.'(VIII, 11) We can link this with what he now says of the wicked, who through lack of friendship with their true self are incapable of forming friendships with others: (138; Fs) (notabene)

[Wicked men] having nothing lovable in them [...] have no feeling of love to themselves. Therefore also such men do not rejoice or grieve with themselves; for their soul is rent by faction, and one element in it by reason of its wickedness grieves when it abstains from certain acts, while the other part is pleased, and one draws them this way and the other that, as if they were pulling them in pieces [...] Therefore the bad man does not seem to be amicably disposed even to himself, because there is nothing in him to love; so that if to be thus is the height of wretchedness, we should strain every nerve to avoid wickedness and should endeavour to be good; for so and only so can one be either friendly to oneself or a friend to another.(IX,4) (notabene)

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Aristoteles, Freundschaft, Polis, Gemeinschaft, homonoia

Kurzinhalt: homonoia, Disharmonie, Abspaltung als sozialer Ausdruck der Nicht-Freundschaft, Alexander, Alasdair MacIntyre: Politik als Bürgerkrieg der Meinung

Textausschnitt: § 4 THE COMMUNITIES OF FRIENDSHIP1

26/5 Thirdly, the polis is a community of good people who can reach out to each other as friends because they are true friends to themselves. In his Ethics, IX, 6, Aristotle refers to this social consequence of friendship as political friendship, politike philia, giving it the technical term of homonoia. This is paraphrased by Voegelin as 'a friendship based on likeness in actualization of the nous.'(1964b,p.321;Moulakis,1973,pp.99-104) In Book III,9, of his Politics (1946) Aristotle mentions the network of relations sustained by friendship-in marriage, kinship, social and religious associations- which are necessary if the polis, as the community of such communities, is to achieve its goal of the shared realization of their humanity by its members. Such likemindedness has to do especially with the basic issues, choices and actions of the community, and guarantees the continuity of its inner substance since it springs from the friendship of good men whose real goal is the common good rather than self-interest: (138f; Fs)

Likemindedness seems to be [...] political friendship [...] [S]uch likemindedness is found among good men; for they are likeminded both in themselves and with one another, being, so to say, of one mind, for the wishes of such men are constant and not at the mercy of opposing currents like a strait of the sea, and they wish for what is just and what is advantageous, and these are the objects of their common endeavour as well.(IX,6)

27/5 Just how this extension of friendship into the political sphere might come about is at least explored in the famous scene in the life of Alexander the Great, the Banquet of Opis, which Voegelin has analysed in The Ecumenic Age. Plutarch speaks of Alexander's plan 'to gain for all men harmony (homonoia) and peace (eirene) and community (koinonia) among one another.'(cf. Voegelin, 1974,p. 156) At the Banquet, Arrian reports that Alexander 'prayed for [...] Homonoia, and for partnership in the realm between Macedonians and Persians.'(ibid.,p. 157) Voegelin comments: (139; Fs)

[T]he formula of the specific blessing transfers the categories of homonoia [...] and koinonia, which Aristotle had developed for the polis, to Alexander's creation, i.e., to the empire that embraced not only Macedonians and Persians, but also Greeks, Egyptians, Phyrigians, Phoenicians, Arameans, Babylonians, Arabs, Indians, and so forth. That such a vast agglomeration of culturally variegated peoples was in dire need of a community of the spirit (nous) to become the people of an empire will hardly be doubted.(1974,p.l58)
28/5 The unfriendliness of bad men who can only relate on the basis of immediate self-interest results in bickering at the interpersonal level and speedy destruction of the common interest. Enmity or faction is the social expression of this unfriendliness just as homonoia is the social expression of friendship: (139; Fs)

[B]ad men cannot be likeminded except to a small extent, any more than they can be friends, since they aim at getting more than their share of advantages, while in labour and public service they fall short of their share; and each man wishing for advantage for himself criticizes his neighbour and stands in his way; for if people do not watch carefully the common weal will be destroyed. The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just.(IX,6)

29/5 A modern version of this dysnomia, to use Solon's term, is referred to in Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of the breakdown of moral consensus in modern societies. His bleak comment, in After Virtue (1981,p.236) that 'Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means' has the shock value of illuminating the breakdown of the basis for an experience of homonoia and its implications for the range of life and death issues discussed in, say, John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae (1995). (140; Fs)

30/5 In the Politics Aristotle had remarked that 'friendship is the greatest good of the polis'(1262b7) and it is easy to see why Voegelin regards parts of the discussion on friendship in the Ethics as constituting Aristotle's 'little Politics'(1990a,p.67). This is because Aristotle focuses on the equivalent of Plato's anthropological principle, the core of human personal existence as oriented beyond the individual to, eventually, all others, and to the divine ground of all existence, as the core also of social and political existence.(cf. Voegelin, 1964b,p.323) (140; Fs)

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Freundschaft; Freunde: Aristoteles, Plato

Kurzinhalt: Plato, Aristoteles: Freundschaft als Aktualisierung der Teilnahme an Gott; Gedicht; gültige Standards in der Formulierung von Freundschaft

Textausschnitt: § 5 THE LIFE OF FRIENDSHIP

31/5 We can only refer to those earlier chapters in the first book of his Ethics where Aristotle unfolds his conception of the mature man as dynamically oriented towards the happiness which is the highest fulfilment of his soul, as a participation in the greatest good (I,1,2,7,12, and 13). In the last chapters of his treatise on friendship, Aristotle argues that the happy man needs friends for the fulfilment of his happiness. He is so conscious of goodness in himself, and even more so in his friends, whom he experiences as other selves, that he will want to share his life with his friend (IX,9). So the final chapter of Book IX concludes with a beautiful description of that shared life and development: (140; Fs)

[Friendship is a partnership, and as a man is to himself, so is he to his friend; now in his own case the consciousness of his being is desirable, and so therefore is the consciousness of his friend's being, and the activity of this consciousness is produced when they live together, so that it is natural that they aim at this [...] Thus the friendship of bad men turns out an evil thing, for because of their instability they unite in bad pursuits, and besides they become evil by becoming like each other, while the friendship of good men is good, being augmented by their companionship; and they are thought to become better too by their activities and by improving each other.(IX,12).

§ 6 THE FRIENDSHIP OF PLATO AND ARISTOTLE

32/5 Both Plato and Aristotle despite their quite different approaches agree on the fundamental issues of friendship, that the true friend is the good man; that the friendship of good men, even if a rare occurrence because there are not that many good men around, is the core experience underpinning and expanding into a genuinely human community; that at the heart of that experience is its being a shared actualization of man's participation in the divine good. Both writers know that an explicit awareness of this transcosmic dimension both of personal and interpersonal existence is an exceptional achievement. At the beginning and the end of the Symposium, Socrates is depicted rapt in contemplation alone, and Aristotle left his magnificent account of the good man's achievement of complete happiness, which is the mountain peak towards which his whole Ethics has been leading, to the final Book, following the treatise on friendship: (141; Fs)

If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us [...] whether it be itself also divine or only the most divine element in us, the activity of this in accordance with its proper virtue will be perfect happiness [...] If then the intellect (nous) is something divine in comparison with man, so is the life of the intellect divine in comparison with human life. Nor ought we obey those who enjoin that a man should have a man's thoughts and a mortal the thoughts of mortality, but we ought to immortalize as much as possible and do everything toward a life in accordance with the highest thing in man (X,7)

33/5 Employing Aristotle's magnificent symbol, athanatizein, 'to immortalize,' (Voegelin, 1990b,pp.87-8) we can say that in both writers friendship is the locus in which genuine persons can best immortalize, achieve their fullest happiness in deepening participation in unconditional goodness. For Voegelin, Aristotle's philia, like Plato's eros is an existential virtue, a habitual actualization of the core of our being in tension beyond its own structure. (141; Fs)

34/5 Certainly there are the differing emphases in both writers' approach to friendship pointed out by Fraisse (1974,p.227) and Moulakis (1973,p. 100). Plato focuses on the divine goodness towards which our friendship is leading and in which our love is a participation, while Aristotle in his later period attempts to differentiate the specifically human aspect of this participation in divine goodness. Plato's style in the Symposium is a blend of the dialogical with the philosophical myth, while Aristotle's in the Ethics takes the form of an empirical analysis. (141; Fs)

35/5 Rather than set them at odds, it seems closer to the reality to see them as complementing each other in their experience and articulation of friendship. Plato give us the vertical upthrust of genuine friendship; Aristotle, while not neglecting this aspect, carefully explores the horizontal determinations of a whole range of levels in human friendship. Both writers set standards of analysis below which no subsequent investigation of friendship, including its contemporary formulation as a person-centred philosophy of universal humanity, has a right to fall. It is sobering to think that the prevailing winds in contemporary investigation of human relations blow in the direction of what Aristotle would classify as the useful or the pleasant, but hardly ever in the direction of the good. (142; Fs)

36/5 If only because it indicates the substance of the experience in which such analyses were rooted, we may conclude our brief examination of the first extended articulation of the substance of human relationship as such, with Aristotle's poem to the man who was perhaps his best friend, Plato. Along with the depth of personal appreciation, Aristotle shows that he is conscious of a spiritual epoch: that with Plato, a new stage in the articulation of the meaning of human existence had been attained, if not by Plato 'alone,' at least 'first.' It was written as a dedication for an altar to the god Philia, Friendship, which had been erected in Plato's honour (Jaeger.1967, p.107): (142; Fs)

Coming to the famous plain of Cecropia
He piously set up an altar of holy Friendship
For the man whom it is not lawful for bad men even to praise,
Who alone or first of mortals clearly revealed,
By his own life and by the methods of his words,
That a man becomes good and happy at the same time.
Now no one can ever attain to these things again.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Job, AT, Hintergrund, Propheten, Jeremia, Hosea,

Kurzinhalt: 800 B.C Propheten; Universalisierung: Mensch, Gesellschaft, Gott; Differenzierung der Erfahrung contra Kult;

Textausschnitt: () That movement towards universalization can be seen with regard to man, society and God.
()
As regards man, the prophets themselves recognize that Israel as a people under God has contracted to the prophets as individuals. Jeremiah is the representative figure, who as a lone spiritual personality shoulders the responsibilities for the sake of the whole people of Israel. In him, the chosen people had become the chosen man.
()
Since mere observance of legal and cultic prescriptions could be accompanied by a life in violation of the spirit, the prophetic critique had to oppose the newly differentiated experience of the right order of the individual soul to the externals of mere behaviour. To carry out this critique, the prophets had to develop a new vocabulary for a new anthropology of personal responsibility ... Obviously, Job will, in part, turn on the fact that not even the good conduct of a man in accordance with the law and the cult is sufficient.
()
From the viewpoint of society, the older, institutional order of the kingdom was shattering under the blows of pragmatic history ... the prophets responded: for them, Israel was seen to be only one people among the nations. From now on, the new Israel would be whatever society lives in historical form in obedience to God. ... a recognizable movement towards a universalizing of the notion of a people under God.
()
And God, too, was increasingly seen as the God of the Nations as much as of the Chosen People. So that the prophetic differentiation was achieved in terms of a breakthrough from a particular people under their unique God to a universal humanity under one God, Yahweh.
()
And it is precisely because of this universalization of the Jewish experience, that their writers felt they could and should address the all of mankind that was represented by their ancient Near Eastern neighbours, in the kind of wisdom literature of which Job is perhaps the greatest expression.

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Job, Interpreatationen

Kurzinhalt: Moses Maimonides, Thomas, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dostojewskij,

Textausschnitt: () If we were to summarize the various interpretations we would find that some hold that God is evil and Job good (Wiesel, Jung, Bloch), others that God is good and Job evil (Maimonides, Kierkegaard), and others again, try to maintain the difficult balance, in regarding both God and Job as good (Aquinas, Dostoevsky).

Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Job,

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: #1 JOB'S ZERO-CONDITION AS EVERYMAN'S
#2 JOB'S REJECTION OF GENESIS
#3 THE FRIENDS' THEOLOGY OF SUCCESS
#4 JOB'S INNER GROWTH AND DEEPENING CONFIDENCE IN GOD
()
Already in the Prologue, the basic theme of the story has unfolded: the clash between two ways of relationship, one based on utilitarian calculation, the other based on the intrinsic worth of the other, for whom any sacrifice can be made. God is shown not as using Job like a plaything, but as having an unbreakable confidence that this figure, externally and physically reduced to zero, is capable of loving Him for His own sake and not at all for what he can get out of that relationship.