Theological Ethics and Moral Value Phenomena by van den Heuvel Steven C. Roothaan Angela. Nullens Patrick

Author:van den Heuvel, Steven C.,Roothaan, Angela.,Nullens, Patrick.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

(Rousseau 1903, Book I)

Rousseau writes as a cartographer to map himself out as an island, and is chez soi from the beginning until the end. Augustine, however, writes “driven by the unrest of the search for himself’ and understands himself less and less, the more he curves over his self” (Luther 1992, 132; cf. also ibid., 133–149).4

In his inner dialogue with God, Augustine leaves behind the self he thought himself to be, and sets forth to reach for a self he has never known before. The self is a trajectory and he does not know where it will lead him. He never knows exactly who he is, nor does he know exactly who or what the God is whom he desires.

Augustine does not get a clear picture of his self. He reminds his readers that there are so many daily experiences in which we seem to escape to ourselves—the abyss of our memory, the weakness of our will—that we let things happen that we don’t want to happen; we turn insane; are unable to support the truth; have character traits that we judge to be unimaginable; cannot master our lust; have no compassion though we want to; can’t forgive, though we would like to. All this belongs to the ‘night’ side of ourselves, the self we don’t want to or don’t dare to face. By self-reflection, Augustine then concludes, we don’t get ourselves together. “I became a great riddle to myself”, he has to admit after he descends into his interiority. “Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio” (Augustine, Confessiones 4.9.9, italics added). The more he reflects on himself, the more he escapes himself. He regards himself a terra difficultatis, “a heavy soil requiring over much sweat of the brow” (Augustine, Confessiones 10.16.25). From Augustine comes the well-known aspiration that, if someone asks him what time is, he knows, but then, if he wants to explain it to the one who asks it, he does not know (“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not,” Augustine, Confessiones 11.14.17). He might have said the same with regard to the human self: as long as we don’t ask who we are, we think we have self-knowledge; as soon as we start to answer that question, however, we are lost.

Instead of considering Rousseau as Augustine’s secularized successor, an Augustine without God, Emmanuel Housset observes a deep abyss between the modern concept of the transparent self, exemplified as it is by Rousseau, and Augustine’s self as a mysterious trajectory. According to him, the postmodern experience of liminality opens up the possibilities for a fresh reading of Augustine’s description of the self, and for a reappraisal of the metaphor of pilgrimage for the course of human life.

Housset places himself in the tradition of twentieth-century phenomenology, which started with Husserl and Heidegger, a philosophical approach that wants to stay close to concrete, bodily experience and perception, as exemplified in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

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