Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit: Wahlfreiheit, Definition Chesterton,Redemptor Hominis; MacIntyre - Emotivismus, emotivistisches Selbst; d. moderne Mensch: zw. absoluter Wahrheit (die er nicht annehmen kann) und absoluter Freiheit (die im Nichts endet)

Kurzinhalt: ... this self, because it has no particular reason for choosing any particular course of action, finds itself in the absurd position described by Rieflf of "being free to choose and yet having no choice worth making"

Textausschnitt: THE EMOTIVIST SELF

110b Nowhere is this practice of freedom more apparent today than in matters of morality. As Alastair MacIntyre notes, in his recent and already classic work, After Virtue, "we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality."1 Morality has been replaced by what he calls "emotivism", i.e., "the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character."2 The result is quite what one would expect it to be:

The specifically modern self, the self that I have called emotivist, finds no limits set to that on which it may pass judgment for such limits could only derive from rational criteria for evaluation and, as we have seen, the emotivist self lacks any such criteria. Everything may be criticised from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including the self's choice of standpoint to adopt.... Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located.3 (Fs; tblStw: Freiheit)

111a This, of course, is the imperial self already discussed, naming good and evil for itself, without recourse to pope, priests, parents or anyone else. This is the autonomous self which will not allow anyone else's "values" to be "imposed" upon itself. This is the egalitarian self whose voracious appetite for "rights" knows virtually no limits. Consequently, "in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature."4

111b Unfortunately, this self, because it has no particular reason for choosing any particular course of action, finds itself in the absurd position described by Rieflf of "being free to choose and yet having no choice worth making".5 The reason is not difficult to discover, as MacIntyre has observed. "This democratised self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing."6 This is man the "cipher" who can choose to be anything he wants to be only because he has rejected the notion that God has already chosen something for him to be. (Fs)

111c As George Trow has remarked, "The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing."7 Unhappily, however, the idea of choice cannot but be debased by the modern emotivist self, if only because that self has rejected all criteria by which one could make any judgments about the success of one's choices. In order for me, for example, to gauge the success of a choice I have made, let us say, in taking a right turn instead of a left, I have to know where it is I am going and where I am in relationship to that destination. Absent such information, right turns are as meaningless as left turns, because I have no reason for making either turn—or even for going straight ahead. In fact, I have no reason for moving at all. G. K. Chesterton once defined liberty as "the power of a thing to be itself"8 But to the modern self, which has rejected the very notion that it has any "self", any "nature", such a notion of freedom seems confining at best and illusory at worst. In short, the modern self is caught between the rock of an absolute truth it cannot accept and the hard place of an absolute freedom of meaningless choices which can lead to no ultimate destination and can signify nothing but personal preference. It may well be that modern secular humanists, neopagans and such can be excused for having gotten themselves into this dilemma. But when Catholics begin to think of freedom of choice as the only kind of freedom and as an end in itself, something has gone radically wrong with their Christianity. When they begin to think that God gave us freedom of choice so that we could make up our own minds about who we want to be and what is right for us, we can only conclude that their democratic karma has run over their Catholic dogma.9 For, as Pope John Paul II, in Redemptor Hominis (RH), pointed out,

Jesus Christ meets the man of every age, including our own, with the same words: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." [John 8:32] These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world (10). (Fs)