Paul Ricoeur and Philosophical Anthropology

 

Philosophical Anthropology: Freedom and Nature, 1950; Fallible Man, 1960; Symbolism of Evil

            Paul Ricoeur explored his philosophical anthropology in Freedom and Nature (1950), Fallible Man (1960), and Symbolism of Evil (1960). The design of this essay is to think along with him on these matters. I will include some reflections based upon my reading of Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Chapter 8, Anthropology from a Theological Perspective, and Moltmann, God in Creation, which overlap with the concerns of philosophical anthropology. The experimental aspect of this essay is to see if philosophical anthropology has something to learn from the notions of human fallibility, evil, sin, and guilt, that we find in religious texts. It may well be that religious texts, properly meditated upon, can provide the philosophers with insights into humanity that are as valuable as the psychological and sociological texts modern philosophers will use to express develop their philosophical anthropology.

            All these authors have religious and theological interests. What I am sharing here is one way in which philosophy can set the stage for a religious and theological discussion. This is not a small thing. It can even help the atheist understand how some intelligent people can be religious. It can help a secular society understand that the religious community is a rational community, expressing desire that all human beings have. However, it will do less than what many religious persons would like to see. It does not prove there is a religious dimension to which human beings can relate. 

 

            Spatial-Temporal Reality

            We begin at the basic level of space and time.

The nature of voluntary motion and consent create the possibilities, the undifferentiated keyboard, that is the human being. We need to explore how this is the case. We can pursue this theme best if we bracket the domain of human fault. This bracketing allows a focus upon the will. 

We can begin with our sense of space. Intentionality, which is a decision we make that relates us to an object or project in the world, means that humanity is not reducible to elementary actions in the brain or to genetics. Such a decision is a judgment, designating one project or object and not others. Deciding is taking a position in relation to the world. We adopt a project to bring change in our world. We take responsibility for this position and for the project we adopt. I can do what I decide. This voluntary motion suggests that we have power. We become the agent of our intentions. The acceptance of responsibility is the basis of the consciousness of being cause, agent, or author. The concept of action in the sense of authorship presupposes the concept of responsibility.[1]

We can then consider our sense of time. Each decision moves us toward a project that has a temporal structure, so to decide is to anticipate. Our intentionality moves us toward the future. Perception itself occurs in anticipation, through glimpses and clues. Anticipation retains the past. The future is the fundamental situation for the decision and project. The future is a condition for action. Future contingencies open possibility. The presence of consciousness means that the possible precedes the actual. Possibility requires the project and the power or ability to do it. Further, presence to my self is a condition for deciding and intentionality. I project myself into the action to be done. I throw myself ahead in anticipation of the completion of the project. I meet myself in my project. I cannot exile or isolate myself from the power of acting and willing. The self I will be is not already given from the past but opens before me as a possibility in action and decision.

This discussion of motion in space and time and consent leads us to consider the nature of the human will. 

To reflect on the motivation of willing is to suggest that willing has its reasons. To give a reason is to justify or legitimize and thus make a value judgment. Values appear to me as I act and involve myself in projects. A space opens in the possible, a gap appears in history. While the body has many involuntary drives, I do not give up my responsibility to take a stand toward it, to evaluate it, and exercise control. Wisdom is at the intersection of will and bodily need. We even sacrifice need for other ends. Pleasure occurs in perception, and thus hardly involuntary. It is an achievement. Pleasure identifies “this is good.” The demand for justice recognizes that the Other counts as against me, that the opinions and values of the Other proceed from a perspective and valuation that has equal dignity to me. This de-centering is both obligation and attraction. I humble the self. This intersubjectivity becomes a way of practicing values that become attractive rather than simply obligatory. I find myself completed in community.

            Hesitation suggests the capability for choice. Hesitation is seeking a choice. Choice becomes fixing one’s attention among various projects. Deliberation follows. Then one makes a choice that completes a process and breaks it off at the same time. Choice resolves deliberation (classical) or irruption of a project (existential). The latter emphasizes discontinuity and irrational. The act itself reconciles the two. The act is both resolution of a deliberation and thus brings one into agreement with oneself and irrupts into a decision involving risk.

            Assumed in such considerations is the tension between subjectivity and society.

Personhood and sense of self arises out of relatedness. Implicit in the mutuality of the personal is a principle of personal growth and the rhythm of withdrawal and return. The original field of interpersonal relatedness, the withdrawal of the individual from the field into the self to develop identity and individuality, in the return of the individual to the interrelation of persons to enrich it with the fruits of individuality and to endow individuality with its fullness and significance, is central to this rhythm. This suggests that we are first acting and engaged agents of relatedness, and thus, thinking follows this activity, which may well be rational, even if our action arises out of feeling and faith more so than conceptualization. Our withdrawal from relatedness provides the opportunity to reflect rationally upon our activity and thereby either verify or amend that behavior. Rational activity is self-transcendent in that it is both free and it reacts to the drives, impulses, and instincts of the other. Our capacity to act irrationally is part of our human rational nature, which in turn implies an agent who is free, finite, and fallible. Still, irrationality is a subordinate aspect of reason. For rationality ought to predominate over irrationality, keeping the latter in potency, we should always act rationally rather than irrationally. We apply rationality to matters involving action/behavior and the practical, feeling/emotion, and the intellectual/conceptual. Science is the obvious mode of conceptual rationality, the aesthetic is the mode of rationality in feeling, and morality is the mode of rationality in action. [2]

We consider self and world from the standpoint of our shared world. As a social being, human beings form self in a field of social relations, a process that develops self-consciousness and subjectivity. Identity formation involves the formation of trust toward the outside world and development of emotional life. These reflections will lead us to a hermeneutics of the shared world, and thus, to an ontology of the shared world. The world human beings share has never been a natural world. Their world is nature as they have interpreted it, shaped it, experienced its limits, and felt frustrated in their efforts. The shared world is the world of human relations. Although other forms of animal life have societies, the specifically human form of common life is culture.

The social world is the place where the exocentric destiny of individuals becomes a reality and where they establish their identity. The process of the development of the ego takes place in the social world. Subjectivity develops even while oriented toward cultural environments. Identity formation occurs in stages and through expanding social environments as one ages. Identity makes reliability and accountability. [3]

Self-identification occurs as we modify our social identity and integrate it into our projects that will become our identity. Our identity is something we create and define during social interaction. Basic trust opens us to the world. Self-identification involves us in trustful self-opening to the world. Identifying oneself always requires courage, appealing to Tillich’s notion of the courage to be. We do not decide to have basic trust; basic trust emerges from a process, the opposite of which is mistrust and anxiety that will lead to deformation of identity. Basic trust directs itself toward the wholeness of the self. Such wholeness is the goal of our development and therefore has a temporal structure. Freedom is the real possibility of being myself. Personality arises out of social interaction. The self arises out of the mirror of the expectations of others. Personal wholeness suggests transcendence of the self and the freedom involved in engaging the social setting. This relation frees us to be critically independent to any given social relation. The self-assertion of the individual against others and society may be the expression of a call to a more perfect fulfillment of the human destination to community. The person is not at the disposition of others.[4]

 

From Innocence to Fault

            However, we need to reconsider this discussion when we introduce the notion of human fault.

We best begin with a philosophical reflection on myth in religion, for this allows us to consider the passage from innocence to fault. The history of religions contains myths of fall, chaos, exile, and divine blinding. The philosopher cannot immediately insert them into philosophical discourse. Exegeting such myths prepares them for an insertion into human self-knowledge. Exploring the symbolism of evil is the initial step toward bringing myths nearer to philosophical discourse. Exploring the theme of fallibility, the constitutional weakness of humanity, allows us to explore how such fallibility is the path by which evil becomes possible. With the concept of fallibility, an understanding of humanity becomes intelligible. 

            The symbol gives thought. Any notion of guilt, for example, needs to pass through an encounter with psychoanalysis, criminology, and political philosophy. The theme of alienation we find in Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx is connected to the accusation made by the prophets of Israel. If thought starting from symbols unfolds by its encounter with these modern disciplines, philosophical discourse needs to lead to the speculative equivalent of the mythical themes of fall, exile, chaos, and tragic blinding, the notion of a free will that is bound and finds itself already bound. Such will be the theme that results in the philosophical consideration that the symbol gives to thought. 

This philosophy begins with belief and through reflection leads to knowledge. It is nourished on the fullness of language. Language and rationality are important to human existence and give humanity a distinct advantage over other creatures. Our possession of a rich system of consciousness, intelligence, capacity for language, capacity for extremely fine perceptual discriminations, capacity for rational thought, are all biological phenomena. To put a finer point on it, as Charles Taylor put it, the desire for cosmic connection, for an experience of joy, significance, and inspiration, suggests a higher and deeper than the everyday world around us. It hints that there is something more, that a well-lived human life is more than the abundance of the things one possesses. Such an approach opens the door for a religious conversation, although it cannot prove such a dimension to reality exists. The scientist who wants to close that door would not be pleased. This does away with the concern for finding a starting-point for philosophy. It recognizes the narrow perspective of modern science and technology as forgetting something important about humanity and the sacred. Some persons will find the flatten and purposeless nature of the world described by science and technology as enough. For such persons, all we need to know in ontology is that atoms and cells exist. Such a naturalist and materialist view of ontology assumes that science is the only arbiter of truth. However, there are good reasons to think its precise, univocal, and technical language needs to be recharged with the fullness of language. The symbol gives, but what it gives is something to think about.[5]

            The grandeur and limitation of an ethical vision of the world becomes the theme of this portion of philosophical anthropology. Truth, goodness, and beauty direct our attention away from self. They represent human aspiration. Yet, in focusing our attention on that which is beyond self, we return to the self, hopefully expanded and deepened by the journey. In all hypotheses, evil manifests itself through the constitutional weakness of humanity. Freedom that assumes the responsibility for evil is freedom that comes to a self-understanding filled with meaning. In this ethical vision, freedom is the ground of evil. The confession of evil is also the condition of the consciousness of freedom. In this confession one can detect the delicate connection of the past and the future, of the self and its acts, of non-being and pure action, which are at the core of freedom. Such is the grandeur of an ethical vision of the world. Reflection on the symbolism of evil reaches its peak in the ethical vision of the world.[6]

 

            Myth of the Fall: Grandeur and its Limits

            The myth of the fall is the matrix of all subsequent speculations concerning the origin of evil in human freedom. The exegesis of this myth brings out a tension between two significations. Evil comes into the world as far as humanity posits it. However, to it must be added the powerful myths of chaos, tragic blinding, and of the exiled soul. thus, humanity posits evil because humanity yields to the siege of the Adversary. 

            The task of philosophic reflection is to recapture the symbolism of evil, to extend these reflections into all the domains of human consciousness. What the symbolism of evil gives to thought concerns the grandeur and limitation of any ethical vision of the world. Humanity is as much a victim as it is guilty.

            Philosophical reflection considers the concept of fallibility as part of the innermost structure of human reality. Humanity is fragile and liable to evil. This means a certain non-coincidence of the human being with oneself. This disproportion of self to self would be the explanation of fallibility. To be clear, this way of considering the human condition allows us to avoid placing humanity in a fanciful domain, an intermediary place, such as between being and nothingness, between angels and animals. This suggests that humanity is the only being so unstable in ontological constitution that it is capable of being both greater and lesser than itself. The value of looking at humanity this way is that the existing individual is intermediate within oneself. Humanity is bounded by unlimited rationality, totality, and beatitude on the one hand and limited to a perspective, consigned to death, and riveted to desire on the other. This pathos of humanity involves a pre-comprehension of human misery. 

            The origin of evil and wickedness is in the passage from the structure of human finitude to actual living through decisions of the will. The structure of human finitude includes the possibility of fall. Its irrational character means that only symbolic language makes it accessible. This is true because of the process of abstraction in which we have engaged, in which we have bracketed the notion of fallibility to develop a philosophy of the will. A structural element of the human form of life and behavior is marked by a tension between the centralist organization that human beings share with all animal life and the exocentric character that is peculiar to human beings. The human situation is characterized by the disproportion in the life of a being that is finite and oriented to an infinite destiny. This non-coincidence of humanity with itself is not yet evil, but points to fallibility of the condition. This suggests that the failure to achieve one’s destiny is inherently connected with the factual natural conditions of human existence. This modifies the notion that evil originates in an act of human freedom.[7]

 

            The Finite and the Infinite

            The first stage of an anthropology of disproportion is the passage between our finitude and infinite possibility. “Infinite” is the way in which we express our awareness of the interconnected quality of reality. Individual things participate in this wholeness, and this participation is what we mean by “Infinite.”^[8]

All this occurs despite so much random, meaningless suffering. Any discussion of human life begins with the reminder of the finite and therefore ambiguous quality of human life. Finite life has hurdles, riddles, unresolved problems, potential for growth, falling and so forth. Such a life has physical limitations, the most dramatic of which is the ultimate disintegration of our lives toward death. We have obvious external limits. The ambiguity of human existence includes the presence of natural and moral evil. Any attempt to express notions related to human flourishing is inseparable from the ambiguities of every-day life. One who passionately engages life will also experience the pain of life. The more one gives oneself in faith, hope, and love, the more intensely one experiences life and death.^[9]

Amid all this, human beings desire the truth in the sense of wholeness of life, the good in the sense of morality, and the beautiful in the sense of profound aesthetic experience. We express this desire in our personal lives in how we think and live. We also express the desire in the institutions we build. Behind such desires and the expressions in personal and corporate life is a type of love for life. We want to see the flourishing of life in general and of human life in particular. Each of these desires has a darkness as well, of course, and we will need to explore that darkness. Such is the nature of the dignity and misery of humanity. We have the capacity to turn that which is our gift into a curse we inflict upon self and others. Our experience, as reflected in philosophy and psychology, discloses both the dignity and misery of humanity. Our experience reveals both our quest for wholeness and the brokenness that plagues our personal and corporate lives. Our human experience of openness to our world, which shows itself in our capacity to learn across time to improve the human condition, meets its counterpoint in our tendency to close ourselves off from world. The infinite horizon of life meets the resistance within us to close off questions and think we have reached the end of such explorations. 

Such reflections on the orientation of humanity may provide some basis for agreeing with Descartes (Meditations III) when he offered that the Infinite is the condition for the apprehension of all finite objects, including the self. We carve out our experience of finite things from within the context of the Infinite. Yet, our grasp of the Infinite is unthematic and confused. The finite has its limit in the Infinite. If so, he is thinking of an intuition of the Infinite that precedes the contents of consciousness. We might think of this experience as a transcendent mystery or silent Infinity of reality beyond our control, but which also constantly presents itself to us as a mystery. We may think of the experience as unthematic and primordial, originating in our relation to the mother, but steadily expanding toward our openness to the world and to the Infinite. Humanity wrestles with a reliable basis in life, the Infinite as the basis for finite experience, awareness that our finite life is part of a universal or whole, openness to the world and questioning of human existence, and the use of language as ultimate disclosure.

We next need to examine the power of human knowing, especially as it allows us to reflect upon the human characteristics of action and feeling. My body opens me to the world by everything it can do. The world is a correlate to my existence. Human receptivity constitutes the openness of this finite one to the world. Our primary relation to the world is to receive. Such receptivity consists in our openness to the world. 

The emergence of individual identity out of social relations means that our “center” is outside of us. We see this social nexus in the family, the interaction of male and female (sexuality), and in the character of the political order. Personality has its ground in the destiny that transcends our empirical reality, especially in our experience of the other. The ground of our existence meets us in the person of the other. The body is the original “here” for us. This primal finitude consists in perspective or point of view, which affects our primary relation to the world. In recognizing that all perception is perspectival, I escape my perspective in my recognition that others have their perspective as well. I am so immersed in the world that I lose any attempted aloofness that is the principle of speech. The objective character of the objects in the world results from their ontological mode of things. The objects are thrown before me, given to my perspective and communicated in language. The objective character of the object consists in its expressible character. Thus, using imagination, I become a synthesis of speech and perspective. This synthesis between meaning and appearance, between speaking and looking, is consciousness, which has unity only outside of self in its reflection on the world. All this keeps us from simply beginning with a philosophy of the person, which will lead us to falling into the fanciful ontology of being and nothingness.

 

Life-world

            The second stage of an anthropology of disproportion is the passage from the theoretical to the practical, from a theory of knowledge to a theory of will, from “I think” to “I will, I desire, I can.” Our philosophical reflection leaves the abstract, bare, and empty, and becomes practical in dealing with limitation of our life-world, dealing with values and counter-values, and thus make it difficult. The allure of a total philosophical reflection on the life-world is strong but deceptive, but we need to be willing to linger between what is and that total vision. 

First, character is how we will arrive at a practical finitude that we can understand based on the notion of perspective. All the aspects of finitude can be regrouped under the idea of finite perspective. By beginning with the affective perspective, we begin with things that appear interesting to me, through which we grasp the lovable, the attractive, the hateful, and the repulsive, which are the anticipatory stages of the project. In this case, desire brings clarity, for it brings intentionality that arises out of a lack of and becomes a drive toward, suggesting the elective character of desire. Desire illuminates its aim through the representation and elucidation of the absent thing, as well as the obstacles that block its attainment. It anticipates pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, in being joined to or separated from the object of desire. To find oneself in a certain mood is to feel one’s individuality as inexpressible and incommunicable. Every desire for an object involves a feeling, love, and choice, of oneself. The practical perspective leads recognizes that habit fixes our tastes and aptitudes and shrinks our field of availability, but that such hardening of life bids us to look for the new mode of finitude intermingled with the spontaneity of life and will. Character arises out of perspective, desire, the choice of self, and habit. Character is the finite openness of my existence to the life-world. Character is a limitation. In one sense, nothing human is foreign to me. I am capable of every virtue and every vice. Character is how I see humanity from somewhere, from a certain angle, and a partial wholeness of the life-world. In this sense, character does not change. No spiritual movement or radical conversion will not make us into different individuals, even if our lives may be oriented by a new constellation of fixed stars. 

Second, happiness is how we will arrive at a practical infinitude that we can understand based the notion of meaning. All the aspects of infinitude can be regrouped under the idea of meaning. A disproportion arises between character and happiness. A theoretical concept of meaning considers the supreme good, that for whose sake everything else is done. Happiness is a termination of destiny and not an end of desire. The encounters of our life that are most worthy of being called events indicate the direction of happiness. Happiness removes obstacles and uncovers a vast landscape of existence, an excess of meaning. Happiness directs me toward the very thing that reason demands.

Third, the constitution of the person by means of the moral feeling of respect is how we will arrive at the practical mediation that extends the mediation of the imagination. Respect is the fragile synthesis that constitutes the form of the person. The synthesis of happiness and character is found in the person, first of oneself and then of others. The forming of person is a life-long project. Human fragility arises again, which will lead to a phenomenology of fallibility. I set before me the formation of me as a person, and this becomes my project. This project is the formation of our humanity. Desire is directed toward happiness as a totality of meaning and contentment. The project of forming a person is an end that at the same tome be an existence. The self is given as an intention. Being human, learning to be human, is a path of treating oneself and others as human. The person is the synthesis of reason and existence, of end and of presence. All this suggests the fragile experience of forming a person. An ethical vision of the world presupposes a fallen sensibility of humanity. This suggests a loss of innocence that we can name as a lapse, a loss, or a fall. I am divided against myself, a disproportion that underlies the practical existence of human beings. The structure of fallibility makes this possible. Respect is rooted in a desire for rationality. 

 

Myth, the Affective Life, and Fallibility

All this will lead to a new analysis that shows the fragility of this practical mediation of respect for which the person is the correlative. An important aspect of this philosophical reflection is that myth in religion anticipates a philosophical reflection on the misery of humanity.

Philosophically, the affective life relates people ecstatically to the world and the people around one. The orientation of human beings to a fullness of life that transcends them and manifests itself especially in the community of their fellow human beings finds expression in the positive effects and passions, especially in feelings of sympathy, but also in joy and hope. Such feelings draw individuals out of their isolation. However, a characteristic of negative moods and feelings, such as fear, anxiety, arrogance, sadness, envy, and hate, is to isolate individuals within themselves. The positive effects are expressions of an anticipatory expectation.

A philosophy of feeling leads us to an investigation of human fallibility. With feeling, we have the moment that reveals a new sense of human disproportion. Passion may well be the transition through which human beings must pass to move from physical life to a life of reason. Passion both unites and separates vital affectivity or desire with Eros. Modern philosophy needs to recover this insight of Plato (Symposium, Republic). This represents a move from the theoretical to the practical to the affective, developing a philosophical anthropology that is more inward and fragile. The restless heart would be the fragile moment of disproportion that culminates in the reflection on happiness and character. The paradox involved is that a philosophy of the heart needs to bring passion to the level of reason that faces the demands of our life world. It is a movement from an abstraction to the real. Philosophy needs to step out of the ivory tower and into life as human beings live it. A philosophy of feeling will express the fragility of the intermediate nature of our lives, deal with the gap between the intellectual sense of disproportion and the lived experience of misery. 

One question we must face is that of method, of whether a philosophy of feeling is possible. The primary point here is that feeling and knowing explain each other. They reveal themselves in intentional analysis. Feeling involves love or hate of something, which makes it intentional. The paradox of feeling is how the same experience designates a thing-quality and at the same time reveal the inwardness of the “I.” Knowing sets a cleavage between the object and the subject, while feeling manifests a relation to the world that restores our complicity with it. Feeling manifests itself through affective tones in the things our desires move us toward and from which we withdraw. Here are the lovable, the hateful, the easy, the difficult, the desirable, the loathsome, the sad, and the joyous. This shows the privileged status of feeling, as shown in both behavioristic and depth psychology. Feeling is the unity of an intention toward the world and an affection of the self. Feeling reveals the connection of my existence with beings and being through desire and love. 

A second question is that of substance, of a completion of the meditation on disproportion in the dimension of feeling. If feeling manifests aims, it adds a new dimension to human reality. Feeling manifests its meaning by contrast with the work of knowing, for its function is to interiorize the reality of the life-world we experience. Feeling divides in two through the mode of inner conflict. The reflection on disproportion comes to center itself on passion, which situates itself between desire and reason and whose specific desire is Eros. The disproportion of feeling is that of vital or sensuous desire and intellectual love, which we might call spiritual joy. The heart feels the discrepancy. A psychology of feeling is blind without the philosophy of reason. The infinitude of feeling gains clarity in a philosophy of discourse. The Heart is the realm of the interpersonal schemata of being-with as well as the super-personal schemata of being-for and the intention of being-in, which would express itself as greed without the polarity of Care, which is the openness or availability to the life-world. Feeling anticipates more than it gives, it promises more than gives an actual possession. Mood is the proper designation of such feeling. Schematized as delight, joy, exultation, serenity, they have formless character that denotes feeling and denotes the openness of the human being to the life-world. Heidegger focused upon the mood of anguish, the underside of absence and distance, while neglecting the power of beatitude and joy in and through anguish. In this gap we are confronted with the disproportion in the dimension of feeling and the source of human affective fragility. 

A trilogy of passion (Kant, Anthropology) shows how passion shows itself. 1) In the passion for possession or having. Having adheres to me through feeling. We can see the disproportion of the innocent quest for having, by which the “I” constitutes itself by designating that which is mine, with greed, avarice, envy, and so on. The mediation of the “we” and the “our,” the “I” joins itself to a “mine.” 2) The passion of domination or power shows itself in work and economic arrangements under the reflection of the human spirit we find in political realm. Feeling becomes human by making itself coincide with the objects of high order in which human relations crystallize. 3) The passion for honor or esteem is the quest for worth in the eyes of another. The deranging passion is vanity and pretension. The self is constituted at the limits of economic and the political spheres, and at the outer bounds of those feelings of belong to a We, and of devotion an Idea wherein we earlier distinguished a kind of affective schematization of philosophic Eros. In the quest for esteem is a desire to exist through the favor of the recognition of another.  The fragility of this experience is that the esteem that establishes it is merely opinion.  An esteem experienced in a belief is what can err more than anything. Because one believes it, the worth of the self may be sham, feigned, or alleged. It also may be neglected, contested, disputed, as well as scorned, belittled, choked back, and humiliated. The lack of esteem may be offset by a self-overestimation or by a deprecation of others and their values. Esteem is incredibly fragile and easy to wound. 

We have been pursuing disproportion through knowing, acting, and feeling, this last revealing human fragility. The heart is what is restless in me. When will I have enough? When will I adequately ground my authority? When will another sufficiently appreciate and recognize me? The universal function of feeling is to bind together. It connects what knowledge divides. Feeling binds me to things, to others, and to self. Knowing sets a world over against me, while feeling unites intentionality to the affection through which I feel myself existing. It binds me to things, to beings, to being. Whereas the whole movement of objectification tends to set a world over against me, feeling unites the intentionality, which throws me out of myself, the affection through which I feel myself existing. Quite simply, the desire of desire has no end. 

Feelings reveal that at which one's life aims. They reveal the orientation of the tendencies that direct life toward the world. Feeling reveals its meaning by contrast with the more refined form of thinking proper to what we commonly call knowledge. Feeling makes interior what we objectify. In these tensions, we experience something of the misery of human life and the separation we experience within.

Feelings come and go quickly.  Moods dominate a person's life.  We can even imagine ourselves in certain circumstances and generate certain feelings.  Pleasure and desire play a large role in the terminology of moral philosophers and of some schools of psychology. 

Our moods reveal, whether good or bad, our own sense of alienation and separation from the world in which we live, as well as our submission to it. Our moods are ways we evade ourselves as we submit to the world and let it matter to us.  Though we may tend to see moods as delusions, they reveal the world.  Among the ancients, this was viewed as feelings. Fear is one way mood shows itself. We feel ourselves threatened; it then matters to us.  Alarm, dread, and terror are ways fear reveals itself. As long as one remains in daily life, the experience of dread is submerged.  We cannot always experience life in this way.  A voice within makes one aware of how little it all matters.  Fear is a part of life, but dread takes us beyond those fears.  The burden of dread leads one to escape into the mass of society.  Yet, this very dread reveals that humanity is concerned about its own being, is concerned about the meaning of things.

The horizon of feeling is the original familiarity within which we live our personal lives. Feeling fills our interior lives; it will bring to our awareness the social relations in which individuals live their lives. Schleiermacher connected religious experience closely with the concept of feeling. His discussion of feeling anticipated many of the insights of modern psychology. For him, feeling indicates the totality of life. 

 

From Fallibility to Fault

We have been moving toward an understanding of humanity as fallible, which means that the possibility of moral evil is inherent in the constitution of humanity. This possibility does not exist simply because human beings are finite (Leibniz), nor does it exist simply because of human weakness of bridging the gap between the possible and the real. The philosophical anthropology elucidated thus far has stopped short of taking the leap from fallibility to recognizing that humanity has already fallen. To catch sight of this leap we will need to explore the symbolism of evil. Fragility is the capacity for evil. To say that humanity is fallible is to say that the limitation peculiar to the human being, who does not coincide with oneself, is the primordial weakness from which evil arises. Evil arises from this weakness only because it is posited, a paradox we must explore.

We now need to consider the transition from the possibility of evil in humanity to its reality, and thus, from the reality of human fallibility to whether human fault is reality. We travel this path by re-enacting in ourselves the confession of human sin and evil that occurs in the religious consciousness. The reason that it is the most inarticulate expression of the confession of evil, and therefore, it is of philosophic interest. The experience of which the penitent makes confession is a blind experience embedded in the matrix of emotion, fear, and anguish. Confession expresses the emotion that without it would be shut within in itself. Language is the light of the emotions. Through confession the consciousness of fault is brought into the light of speech. The confession of sin reveals several layers of experience. Feeling of guilt points to the experience of sin, which includes all human beings and indicates the real situation of humanity before God, whether individuals know it or not. The original sense of sin is that of defilement, conceived of as a stain or blemish that infects human beings from the outside. The acknowledgement in the confession of sin is an experience of being oneself while also alienated form oneself. Sin is an alienation from oneself, an experience that is more astonishing, disconcerting, and scandalous than the spectacle of nature. Guilt, defilement, and sin is the living experience of fault put into language. Guilt arises as we focus upon a segment of truth, closing off ourselves from truth in its wholeness. Yet, this language, as primitive and as devoid of myth as it may be, is already symbolic language. The consciousness of self constitutes itself through symbolism. The elementary language of confession will be an important contribution to a philosophy of human fault. 

Three dimensions of symbolism are cosmic of nature, nocturnal dreams, and the poetic word. They are present in every authentic symbol. The philosophic significance becomes intelligible only if it relates to these three dimensions of symbols. The work of Eliade is helpful in the cosmic dimension. Freud and depth psychology of Jung is helpful in exploring symbolism in dreams. The poetic imagination is close to the word in that it puts language in a state of emergence. Symbols are signs. Every sign aims at something beyond itself. The literal meaning constitutes the symbolic meaning. Symbol precede interpretation, while allegories are already interpretation. Symbols are analogical meanings that form spontaneously and are significant. Thus, an analogue of stain is the symbol of defilement, the analogue of deviation is symbol of sin, and the analogue of accusation is the symbol of guilt. Such symbols give rise to thought. The religious consciousness discloses relations in depth, the thickness and the transparency of present motivations. The conception of fault as defilement is a good example of this. The lateral relation focuses upon likeness and unlikeness with other ways of thought, the retroactive relation re-considers the past, which can lead to restoration of lost intermediaries and later suppression of distance. 

Accusation is presumed in the Kantian ethical imperative. At the center of this symbolic system is the dominating figure of the paternal or Oedipus complex. The agency of accusation is the superego, representing the external world. If we are to demystify this dynamic, it will move from the morality of obligation to an ethics of the desire to or effort to exist. Obligation is not the primary structure of ethics. In locating ethical reflection in the identity of effort and desire, we acknowledge self-dividedness, lack, desire for the other. This desire would not project value into the heavens, where it becomes an idol. The kerygmatic moment of ethics needs to be recovered, and it can do so by focusing upon desire in ethics. Theology deals with relations of intelligibility in the domain of witness. Philosophy organizes in terms of the human desire to be. Philosophy recognizes at this point the ethical function of religion and the representative content of religion in the good principle as an archetype. The philosophical question is how human desire is oriented by this representation. This leads us to think of evil as a kerygmatic problem. Guilt is the result of accusation that occurs in the light of the promise in the kerygma. The religious dimension of evil is not transgression. Demystifying accusation leads us to the feeling of guilt. Guilt progresses over the threshold of injustice and the sin of injustice. This removes the sexual from the center of a reflection on guilt, away from the parental agency, and toward the figure of the prophet who is outside the family. Wisdom rectifies the guilt, taken up again and transposed into reflective thought. Behind accusation and consolation is the anger of love, a grieving the Spirit.[10]

 

The Servile Will

The symbolism of evil in humanity results in the philosophic concept of the servile will, and in turn represents the concept of fallibility. It tries to raise the symbolism of evil to the level of speculation. It does so through the symbols of defilement, guilt, and sin. The attempt here is to re-enact in imagination and sympathetically the experience of fault.

Here is where an interaction with psychoanalysis can challenge us toward an insight regarding the symbolism of evil.[11] Psychoanalysis has a functional approach to symbols, it views the symbols as an illusion that deals with the harshness of life, which leads to understanding the symbols only in relation to their origin. It is a genetic explanation of religion. Religion is the reappearance of forgotten images of the human and individual past. This return of the forgotten, in the form of fantasy, is like the return of the repressed in the obsessional neurotic. In contrast, a phenomenology of religion will focus on the interpretation of its objects, it will explore the fullness of the symbols to reveal their truth, and it orients itself to a recollection of the sacred. We need to find our way toward the legitimacy of both approaches within their context. Exploring the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious might be one way to do this. Psychoanalysis is right in saying that we must arrive at consciousness, which demystifies the privileged status of consciousness. We do not know ourselves immediately, and the pretension that we do is a sign of our narcissism. Consciousness is a task in which we become increasingly conscious. The question becomes how the self emerges from childhood and moves through the successive stages of a human life. The best way to pursue this movement is not through the reductionism of Freud but through the phenomenology of Spirit we find in Hegel. This is a synthetic and progressive movement toward Spirit. Every figure receives its meaning from the one that follows it. The truth of one moment resides in the subsequent moment. Intelligibility proceeds from the end to the beginning, which supports the idea that consciousness is a task. The task of philosophic reflection is the work of deciphering symbols. For philosophy to discover itself, it must pass through an exploration of representations, actions, works, institutions, and monuments that are the works of the ego. The ego must lose itself in its works to find itself. considering that reflection is a reappropriation of our effort to exist, it is practical and ethical rather than epistemological. Philosophy is ethical as far as it transforms alienation into freedom and beauty. We desire to be by means of works that testify to this effort and this desire to exist.  Such effort and desire are affirmed only by works whose meaning remains uncertain and revocable. We must conclude that the exploration of symbols immerses us in a hermeneutic conflict, for reflection both an archaeology and an eschatology of consciousness. Reflection requires a reductive and destructive interpretation because consciousness is at first a false consciousness. Yet, reflection also must also take the form of a restoration of the sacred. The meaning of consciousness is not in itself but in Spirit, in the succession of figures that draw consciousness forward away from itself. In contrast to Hegel, however, the end of reflection is only a promise, for the problem of evil will always form an obstruction for philosophical reflection. 

 

Sin, Guilt, and Myth

Sin involves a violated relation, such as missing the mark, deviation, rebellion, straying from the path. It suggests error. Pardon leads to return or restoration of the relation. It leads to redeeming the narrative. One held captive by sin means the problem of human existence will be that of liberation, of salvation and redemption. 

Sin is treated lightly in culture, as in something being “sinfully delicious” or “the devil made me do it.” What theology speaks of as sin needs to be known apart from revelation. The loss of meaning as experienced by many secular society is a place to begin. An awareness of evil is also part of the culture, as evidenced in the attempt to track down “evildoers” and even the “Walking dead” series, which recognizes that things are so evil that they can only be dealt with by killing them. 

A secular culture places responsibility for evil and its defeat upon human beings. It places the blame for evil on others, especially on anonymous structures and pressures in the social system. It localizes evil in others or in groups. In the process, it exonerates the group to which one belongs. If evil could find its localization in a group (the rich, the capitalist, a race, a gender) then all one must do is single out, isolate, or destroy the group. Of course, if we step back, even if we could destroy the group, evil will remain. George Orwell told this parable in Animal Farm, remaining a powerful reminder of this truth. 

One can try thinking of evil as monstrous and inhuman. In reality, evil is very human. The subterranean stream of Western history finally came to the surface and usurped the dignity of western tradition. That subterranean stream of western civilization includes slavery, the suppression of women, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and imperialism, all of which arose with liberal democracy and capitalism. This shadow or darkness within western civilization gave birth to communism and fascism. The horrors of Hitler and Stalin were not accidents or monstrous abstractions. Rather, most who worked with them and implemented their policies were ordinary conformists and followers; the kind of people we can find all too easily in any time, leading to the controversial observation on the banality of evil. While we conveniently portray evil in monstrous ways, morons and imbeciles can embody evil just as well. One may be a diligent yet banal bureaucratic criminal. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful. Hannah Arendt saw the moral and intellectual shallowness of Eichmann. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. Others had emphasized the discrepancy between the personal mediocrity of monsters like Hitler or Stalin and the horrendous evil they unleashed on the world. That is the banality of evil. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. In this sense, thoughtlessness and evil are interconnected. That is the banality of evil. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.^[12]

What biblical myth does, and Christian theology that arises from it, is clarify that sin and the resulting evil resides in each of us. The solidarity of humanity in evildoing blocks any path toward moralism, adherents wanting to stress their separation from sinners while denying they are at one with them. If one is looking for genuine evil, one is likely to find within synagogue and church, for evil hides among the good. Satan masquerades as an angel of light. One may recognize sin first as an act, but we have not seen it truly until we see it as influencing the structure of human existence. The structure of human desire is rooted in the over-valuation of self that wills. Our desperate striving for self-fulfillment results in anxiety and despair. Excessive focusing on our own identity is a deformation of the theme of human life. Anxiety becomes the source of despair, care, and aggressiveness. Need and desire characterize human life. However, the step to excessive desire that sin takes in anxiety leads to attempts to ensure the self by possession of what we desire. Anxiety and the related fixation on the self also are behind the search for confirmation from others. We want recognition by others. When we seek it at any price to secure own identity, the search springs from an anxiety about the self that expresses a self-fixation as we find in the self-love in Augustine. Uncertainty of the future and the incomplete nature of our identity feed the anxiety. Anxiety makes us cling to the self. Such everyday manifestations of sin are its true nature.

Are some people so broken they become evil? If we understand that healing is still possible for the evil person, I am not afraid of that designation. If we can assume that some human beings reach a large degree of wholeness in this life, we can assume that others may reach the maximum degree of destruction and failure. If so, such persons would have a remarkable degree of consistency in this destructiveness, largely because they would not tolerate a sense of the degree to which they are broken. They would scapegoat, lashing out at anyone who might confront them. They would sacrifice others to preserve their image of self-perfection. Since they are without fault, the world with which they are in constant conflict must be at fault. Such evil is destructive, even while they might attempt to destroy an evil in the world. Refusing to see the sickness of their lives, they project the sickness onto others or toward society. Hating evil outside themselves, they do not hate the evil within. They will want to maintain the appearance of moral purity, since it provides a cover for the evil lurking within them. Such concern for public image will contribute to respectability and stability in their lives. They would have a strong will to get their own way. Such persons take advantage of those they perceive to be weak and innocent. They use the power they have to prevent others from fulfilling their potential as human beings in order to defend their broken self. They cause suffering wherever they go. They would be narcissistic in a way that does not allow them to experience empathy. This is why such persons are dangerous. Empathy provides the healthy person with a normal restraint in times of stress and anger, a restraint the evil person would lack. They can ignore the humanity of the other person. To maintain it all, their intellectual deviousness will become clear.^[13]

Human behavior in groups can become strikingly evil. Groups are too often less than the sum of their parts. The specialization that occurs through refining our individual gifts and passions in a role we find within the group can lead to the fragmentation of conscience. People in a group can pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. Individuals can forsake their conscience. Groups can have an almost nonexistent conscience. Under stress, even as individuals, we tend to regress to a childish state of desiring others to serve us. Under stress, groups can regress as well. In certain types of stress, groups can anesthetize themselves from truly seeing the horror in which they may be complicit. Evil in groups is also a form of immaturity or regression. Yet, stress is also a test of goodness. Groups will also tend to depend upon a leader. Most people would rather take the comfortable and easier path of following the leader. The follower becomes like a child. Adults hand their choices and destiny over to a decision-maker. The adult becomes psychologically dependent upon the leader. By contrast, a healthy group encourages everyone to be leaders. Groups tend to be cohesive. Groups develop pride in their group. They also create enemies or even hate those outside the group. They become cliques. The group can easily deflect attention away from its deficiencies by focusing upon the far worse sins of those outside the group. Evil groups will flee self-examination and guilt, while healthy groups will see self-examination and criticism as a stimulus toward greater health and wholeness. Nations organized by democratic institutions, undergirded by basic respect and tolerance, have a regular opportunity to re-evaluate at every election. Such nations have also always had their enemies, such as communism, fascism, and Islamism.^[14]

The solidarity of humanity in dealing with sin and its resulting evil highlights the social nexus of sin and evil. Sin will show itself in the idolatry we see in the excess of self-affirmation, in lust as a refusal to mature our love, in injustice as we make others serve us and in the despair that leads us to the failure to risk creative action. Yet, we cannot separate ourselves from sin. Thus, the roots of sin are not in society. Sin has its root in the heart, as Romans 7 makes clear, and thus, the social nexus fails to explain the universality of sin. Our anxiety leads us to prioritize self, which we disclose in the choices we make. The alienation that results is with our cooperation, even if sin usually arrives in an alluring and deceptive clothing. Sin promises a richer and fuller life, but it always leads to death. Our end threatens each moment of our living self-affirmation with nothingness. We lead our temporal lives under the shadow of death (Luke 1:79 and Matthew 4:16). Yet, our self-affirmation of life is an antithesis to our end in death. Fear of death pierces deep into life. It motivates us to unrestricted self-affirmation. It robs us of the power to accept life.

The deep root of egocentricity is clear in our natural organization and in our sensible perception. Our perspective shows itself in the actions of human life, including self-love, being an expression of human finitude that must be distinguished from actual fault. This position would be justified if the ego were constantly mindful of the limitations of its perspective at any given moment and thus, by the fact of admitting these limits, were at the same time to transcend them. The transcendental synthesis of object-perception the ego does at the same time transcend the limits of its perspectives in that it is set among the things of the world. This means that egocentricity makes its appearance in human life long before we can consider moral behavior. It determines the whole way in which we experience the world. Perspective and transgression are the two poles of a single function of openness. However, in its anticipation of things as well as in its reaching out to happiness the finite go is constantly taking as definitive reality what is in only a finite perspective, and this self-enclosed perspective, which is not aware of its own finitude, is an expression of human fault. Therefore, sin is intricately connected with the natural conditions of our existence.[15]

Guilt points us to the paradox of the idea of human fault in which one is responsible for being captive, which is the definition of a servile will. Guilt expresses itself through the indirect symbol of captivity, a symbol of derived from a theology of history in which a people are made prisoner through their sins. The symbol of the enslaved body in Romans 6 is an act and a state, which makes all human beings without excuse. In Plato (Phaedo, 82d-e), the bodily captivity is a sign of the servile will, the prison of the body being the work of desire and one cooperates in putting on the chains. To be lost is to be in the self-captivity of the bonds of desire. 

The principle that the concept of guilt presupposes a transgression of a norm is also documented in the history of culture, where the perception of this relationship precedes the development of guilt consciousness and the internalization of this consciousness. This origin for the guilt idea is important for the structure of its themes. The internalization of guilt is important, but the objectivity of the stain is retained in the idea of sin and is presupposed in guilt as well. Defilement and impurity are close to the Old Testament representations of sin and guilt, suggested in a continuity from act to consequence and from crime to disaster and death. Sin as a violation of provisions of the divine law is not everywhere as intensely personalized as it seems to be.[16]

Guilt places oneself before an invisible tribunal that measures the offense, pronounces condemnation, and inflicts punishment. It does so within the realm of the moral consciousness that watches, judges, and condemns. This interior tribunal incriminates the consciousness, mingled with the anticipation of punishment in the form of self-observation, self-accusation, and self-condemnation. Guilt arises with a scrupulous consciousness, which is a delicate and precise consciousness enamored by increasing perfection. I declare myself as being one who could have done otherwise. I recognize my obligation in my awareness that I should have done otherwise. It recognizes the obligation contained in the ethical demand upon my life. At this point, however, the freedom and obligation reflected in the experience of guilt receives an answer to resituate my existence in the light of hope, which becomes the passion for the possible (Kierkegaard), which strengthens the imprint of the promise on freedom. Freedom in the light of hope is a freedom that affirms itself despite death and is willing to even deny death. Repentance is already directed toward this future. Evil is not simply transgression of a law but a pretension of humanity toward being master of one’s life. Faith incorporates the hope of the end of evil, in the law of superabundance, that where sin abounded, grace abounded even more. Thus, faith leads to a benevolent view of humanity and its history. It takes the step from condemnation to mercy and enters the perspective of coming rule of God.[17]

Guilt also expresses itself through the indirect symbol of infection and lead to the notion of the servile will. Defilement is a power of darkness that needs to be taken way or expiated. Defilement is an objective event, for it infects by contact. This is why sexual expression is so prominent in discussions of purity legislation and in ethics. Purity and virginity have a deep connection for this reason. However, an ethics of justice and love will need to be pursued and then circle back to sexual expression. The point of expiation is to reaffirm order. Expiation aims at the restoration of the personal worth of the guilty person through a just punishment. Defilement is external to humanity and thereby freedom is taken captivity. Fearing defilement, humanity fears the negative judgment of the transcendent before which humanity cannot stand. This something that infects is a dread that anticipates the unleashing of avenging wrath. The infection is a symbol of the servile will in that it is a bad choice that binds itself. The seduction comes from the outside and is an affection of the self by the self, a self-infection, by which the act of binding oneself transforms into the state of being bound. Both symbols turn inward to express a freedom that enslaves itself. They are symbols when they reveal a situation that is centered in the relation of oneself to oneself. The symbol expresses the paradox of a captive free will. Deliverance from this situation is the central theme of salvation. Yet, to infect is not to destroy. It tarnishes but does not ruin. Regardless of how powerful and seductive evil may be, it cannot make humanity something other than itself. Evil may well be a radical evil (Kant), but it cannot undo primordial goodness. 

The externality of evil is important for the moments when human beings identify themselves with the good, which is likewise something objective in their eyes. The difficulty is that the identification is not a stable one. The image of contagion or contamination is vague at this point, for it surrenders too much to the thesis of the externality of evil, thereby suggesting that apart from this contamination human beings are in themselves healthy. We need to clarify at this point by affirming the power of the lie that says good is evil and evil good and deceptively offers us life as the reward for sin, when in fact the outcome of sin is death. This deceitful character of sin enables us to understand how human beings can nonetheless choose what is objectively evil by compulsion. This means the servile will consists in that human beings regard as good what is objectively bad for them and therefore choose it. This situation makes it clear that human beings are the kind of beings who can find pleasure in what is objectively evil.[18]

Punishment itself is a moment in the process of the cancellation of the stain or pollution of sin. In the judicial realm, punishment arises out of the idea of the free will and acknowledges the validity that one ought to be a person and respect others as persons. It acknowledges the contractual arrangement of the political order in which one lives. The violation of the rule is an injustice to which punishment responds. This punishment recognizes the criminal as a rational being who as acknowledged the ethical demand even while violating it. It separates the judging consciousness and the judged consciousness. This separation reveals the judging consciousness as hypocritical and hard, and it is the judging consciousness that must find its way out of the hell of punishment. This conflict can thus be resolved only as we move toward reconciliation and pardon. However, this means we are moving from the judicial sphere of the political order to the realm of morality and religion. This is why we cannot moralize or divinize punishment. Punishment sanctions distance between the judge and the judged, but transcending punishment leads to reconciliation and the language of forgiveness in religion or to community in the language of public morality. This leads to the law of superabundance (Kierkegaard). The late notion of covenant in ancient Israel can lead us to this law. The legal dimension of this covenant in Torah does not exhaust its meaning, as we can see in Hosea and Isaiah, as both prophets could refer to the conjugal metaphor for this covenant. The notion of justification in Paul reveals the absurd logic (Kierkegaard) of the gospel at this point. The law pretends to give life gives only death. The concept of law destroys itself and the whole cycle of notions that govern it: judgment, condemnation, and punishment, which are now under the sign of death. The logic of punishment contrasts with proclamation of the gospel, for the justice of God is manifested without the law (Rom 3:21). It is still justice, but the justice that gives life. Of anger, condemnation, and death we know that in Jesus Christ we have been delivered from them. When we have crossed the border into grace, we can look back on what we have been exempted from. This is the logic of superabundance. The logic of punishment is the logic of equivalence, for the wages of sin is death, but the logic of grace is a logic of surplus and excess shown in the folly of the cross. The gospel itself finishes the myth of punishment. Punishment is a memorial of a transcended past which does not have the status of illusion or that of an eternal law of truth. The theologies of vicarious satisfaction remain theologies of punishment rather than gift and grace. Punishment marks an epoch that remains a memorial in the preaching of the gospel, even while its myth has been shattered.[19]

What we can see is that the internalization of guilt consciousness means that the diminution of the value of existence that culprits experience calls by its nature for punishment in the sense of penance, or expiation that educates. Punishment acquires a new function in that of restoring the identity of the culprit. Conscience as a solitary experience becomes the measure of evil. However, we need to modify this with the notion that culprits must answer for the consequences of their actions. Blame is attributed to them independently of whether they admit their guilt and acknowledge their actions as faulty. Consequently, guilt in the sense of an attribution of blame exist prior to and independently of the development of a subjective consciousness of guilt. The history of Israel shows this, for it could distinguish between deliberate an undeliberate act in the Book of the Covenant, among its earliest documents, and the subjective internalization of the consciousness of guilt as a break in the relation to God coming only with the preaching of the prophets centuries later. The assignment of blame is for the sake of the community and its purification. Guilt consciousness is based on the readiness to answer for its consequences. The culprit accepts guilt, a process that begins in confessing fault, thereby becoming the author of the act. Analogous motives are present in Greek tragic poetry, which initiated the development leading to the formation of the idea of an individual conscience.[20]

The struggle between actualizing our true self and finding a reliable basis for trust on the one hand with our anxiety and alienation from the world on the other, reveals another facet of human life that calls for our attention. The emergence of the self out of the web of social life carries with it the rise of conscience, indicating that moral awareness is an important aspect of the formation of self. Moral awareness is the realm of conscience, out of which arises the call to become our true self and the shame and guilt we experience when we fall short of that calling. Conscience shows the conflicts between individuals and social forms and expectations. Conscience reveals shame and guilt. It also reveals the call to our potential or possibility. Such a call to action from the conscience presupposes a sense of responsibility for our lives. Our calling is toward authentically living our lives, while guilt reveals our failure to live authentically. Conscience arises out of our social connections, while maintaining independence from the social world.^[21] Conscience is awareness of fault, especially as we fall away from our true self and lose the self in the crowd. Guilt is awareness of obligation and our failure to fulfill the obligation. Guilt is the result of our anxious preoccupation with self, for we have failed to respond to the call toward the authenticity of self. Guilt is a specialized feeling proper when one has transgressed an established norm. The concept of conscience had its origin in the experience of guilt. Being guilty is an expression of an ought, the content of which is the authenticity of self. Guilt as transgression becomes intelligible in this sense. The concept of action presupposes the concept of responsibility. The capacity for action has its ground in the call to authentic selfhood.

The emergence of self and the rise of conscience suggest that we are agents of our lives and are therefore free to accept or reject the circumstances of our lives. As we act, we make ourselves. We accept responsibility for our act. Guilt is our failure to be the true self that would bind us in a healthy way to the community. The rupture between the community and us gives birth to anger and sorrow. The path to healing of this relation involves a discussion of repentance and forgiveness, which are important to the formation of the anticipated true self.^[22] Despair can lead to isolation while joy can unite us to the community.

We are examining the broken character of human existence. Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger have helped us see in a philosophical way this brokenness. The result may well be that guilt is pervasive and persistent. It may give birth to a sense of worthlessness or existential dread. The conscience may writhe in its pain as it struggles toward self-fulfillment. We struggle with mediocrity, conformity, and the unfulfilled potential of our lives. We are part of the herd or crowd (Nietzsche). We imagine we could do more with our lives. Yet, we follow the safe and quiet path of respectability rather than actualizing our potential true self. In our secular culture, isolating ourselves from the wisdom of tradition and embracing moral relativism, many have this vague sense of guilt in setting aside such wisdom. Thus, they embrace a newer moral ideology that carries with it its own authority from which one can judge others. If anything, setting aside tradition has opened the door for a new form of moralism without the humility that genuine morality and spirituality seeks. Far from becoming a moral wasteland, secularity has become full of itself in a new form of moralism and puritanical that arises out of the finitude of political ideology. It seeks to shame those who do not agree with the absolute demands of their newly discovered enthusiasm for an ideology. Having proclaimed the death of God (Nietzsche), they have embraced a new god of the political ideology of the moment.^[23]

Human destiny as exocentric or open to the world leads to a discussion of humanity as a broken presence in the world. I want to direct attention to the general ambiguity of human behavior. Human beings could accept their responsibility in answering the question of themselves, their question as to the totality of the world, their question of human destiny, and the operation of mastery over nature, by expanding their self-interest to include responsibility for others and for nature. Yet, exploitation and oppression to the advantage of private self-interest is another direction of human behavior. Exocentricity continues to constitute the ego, but its presence to the other now becomes a means for it to assert itself in its difference from the other. Presence to the other becomes a means by which the ego can dominate the other and assert itself by way of this domination. When the setting of the ego against the other becomes total and everything else becomes a means to the self-assertion of the ego, the break of the ego from itself and its exocentricity becomes acute. The ego endeavors to implement this arrogant claim in its relation to the world. In all of this, the ego distorts its own makeup. The ego does all of this, when it could find its unity in the exercise of its exocentric destiny and allowing its particularity to be canceled out and rediscovered at a higher level in the process. In its anticipation of things and in its reaching out to happiness, the finite ego is constantly taking as definitive reality what is in fact only a finite perspective.  At that point, it becomes the expression of human fault. Egocentricity makes it appearance determines the whole way in which people experience the world. This relatedness of everything to the ego is in the form of self love. All of this suggests again that human brokenness is part of the natural condition of human existence.

The developed language of myth will make an important contribution of a modern understanding of human fault. Myth is already logos, although it is a false logos. Myth is a traditional narration that relates to events that happened at the beginning of time, and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of people of today and establishing all the forms of action and thought by which humanity understands itself in this world. Myth cannot be an explanation for the modern person. Modern humanity can recognize the myth as myth because this culture has reached the point where history and myth separate. However, myth reveals its exploratory signification and its contribution to understanding, which is its symbolic function, since it has the power to discover and reveal the bond between humanity and what humanity considers sacred. When myth is demythologized through contact with scientific history, and elevated in the dignity of a symbol, it can become a dimension of modern thought. Thus, mythical time can no longer be coordinated with the time of events that are historical as established by historical method and historical criticism, and mythical space can no longer coordinated with the places of our geography. As modern persons, we lose the myth as immediate logos, but we rediscover it as myth. The philosophical exploration of myth creates the possibility for a new reversal of circumstances out of which logos may reappear for the modern person. Myth does so through the way it speaks of the beginning and the end of evil. 

 

Symbolism of Evil

Given our topic is the symbolism of evil, we will limit ourselves to a group of mythical symbols that concern human evil. Evil, defilement, or sin is the sensitive point, the crisis of this bond that myth makes explicit in its own way. Evil is the crucial experience of the sacred in which the threat of the dissolution of the bond between humanity and the sacred makes us most intensely aware of human dependence on the powers of the sacred. The myth of this crisis is that it places before human beings a complete understanding of humanity, giving both the orientation and the meaning of humanity from its narration. The completeness of the narration is that myth narrates a reminiscence and an expectation. Thus, it must embrace humanity in one ideal history, as does the Hebrew notion of Adam and the Christian understanding of the significance of Adam in Paul. One can refer to humanity as a unity because myth sums up the human type. This universality has the character of movement by narration, in recounting the beginning and the end of fault, thereby conferring upon this experience an orientation, a character, a tension. The narration encompasses beginnings and eschatology. Myth discloses essential history of humanity from its perdition to its salvation. The most significant aspect of myth is that it seeks to get at the enigma of human existence, the discordance between original innocence and the existence of human beings as defiled, sinful, and guilty. Myth accounts for this transition by its narrative. It points to the relation, the leap and the passage, between the essential being of humanity and the historical existence of humanity.

Myth is pseudo-rational for the modern person, but that is not fatal to myth, although it is fatal to knowledge. Plato provides an example in that he inserts myth into his dialogues without confusing myth with knowledge. The problem of evil is the occasion of the passage from myth to knowledge. The problem of evil presents a considerable challenge to think and a deceptive invitation to talk nonsense. In this case, the ends of reason exceed the means. The contradiction felt between the destination of humanity and the actual evil situation of humanity is acknowledged and confessed, giving rise to the gigantic question of why at the center of human existence. It was out of this question that the narratives of myth arose. 

The symbol opens and discloses a dimension of experience that would remain closed and hidden without it. It occurs in language and the symbol takes the form of narration. It expresses an inclusive mode of behavior relative to the life-world of human existence. It is in the rite rather than in the narration that this behavior is expressed most completely. Ritual action and mythical language point beyond themselves to a model or archetype that they imitate or repeat in gestures and verbal repetition, becoming the broken expressions of a living participation in the mythical time and space narrated. The significance of this mythical structure is that those participating in the ritual acknowledge the lost wholeness of human existence and seeks its recovery through re-enactment and imitation of the myth and the rite. Myth-making is an antidote to distress and anxiety that reflects the unhappy consciousness. The narration has the character of a drama because the mythical consciousness does not experience fullness to which the myth relates in its narration of the beginning and the end of this mythical history. The characteristics of the myths of evil include the universality conferred upon human experience through archetypal personages, the tension of an ideal history oriented from a beginning toward an end, and the transition from an essential nature of humanity to an alienated human existence. The myth performs its symbolic function by narration because it wants to express is already a drama. The totality of meaning and the cosmic drama are the two keys that will unlock the myths of the beginning and the end.

The primary myth is the Adamic myth and the eschatological vision of history, for the Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition still proclaim this myth. We do not consider this myth as if it is a mime of rationality, a rationalized symbol, rejecting the temptation of a dogmatic mythology that would interpret it is history or science. Such fundamentalism has done a great disservice to exploring the meaning of the myth. Such a view pursues the intellectually inconsistent idea of combining two universes of discourse, that of ethics and biology.[24] It represents the origin and the end of evil. The idea of a fall of humanity arises in an irrational event in a completed creation. It presents a cleavage between the irrational event of the fall the ancient drama of creation. Salvation becomes historical and presented as a temporal drama. Salvation is the sum of the initiatives of the divine and of the believer tending toward the elimination of evil. The eschatological representation means that the work of salvation is still pending until the Last Day. The fall supervened upon a perfect creation, meaning the event of the fall carries the weight of this mythology. As an etiological myth, it relates the origin of evil to an ancestor of humanity whose condition is similar with our time and space, which is why speculations about a supernatural perfection of perfection before the Fall are alien to the intent of the original narrative. It is the most extreme attempt to separate the origin of evil from the origin of the good. The radical origin of evil is distinct from the primordial origin of the goodness of things. The Adamic myth portends an evolution toward a speculation of a higher degree, in which freedom will be the power of humanity to defect, to undo, and to unmake itself after creation. It narrates the passage from innocence to sin as the status of humanity destined for good and inclined to evil. This drama has already happened. The Adamic myth subordinates to Adam some other figures that decentralize the story. The meaning of the myth resides in its power to evoke speculation on the power of defection contained in freedom. The symbol gives rise to this thought. The myth anticipates such speculation. The Adamic myth is the fruit of the prophetic accusation directed against humanity, for it makes God innocent and accuses humanity. Sin is located at a deeper level then the individual act or transgression. Repentance is not only for actions, but for the root of actions.[25]The way Israel recounted its history was the alternation between threat and promise, a dialectic of judgment and mercy. The ambiguity in humanity, created good and become evil, pervades all the registers of human life. The result is that the human condition is subjected to the rule of hardship. The hardship of being human makes the fallen state of humanity clear. The greatness and the guilt of humanity are mingled. The goodness of humanity is the result of creation in the image of God. The likeness appears as an absence of guilt, and therefore as innocence. I am created in a moment, and I fall in a moment. The event of sin terminates innocence. It is the discontinuity, the breach between my having been created and my becoming evil. The depth of the myth s in its telling of the fall as event, springing up from an unknown source, providing anthropology with the contingency of that radical evil that the penitent is always on the point of calling an evil nature. The myth proclaims the purely historical character of that radical evil. Innocence is older than sin. This one primordial event spreads out among other characters. In particular, the Serpent raises the evil infinite of human desire that animates the movement of civilizations, the appetite for pleasure, for possessions, for power, for knowledge. The restlessness that makes us discontented with the present is our true nature. The myth is the symbolic form of the critique of the illusion of appearance. The serpent is a part of ourselves which we do not recognize. The serpent represents the seduction of us by ourselves, projected into the seductive object. Each of us is tempted by our own lusts (James 1:13-14). The serpent is also outside, for evil is already there, ready to show indifference to the ethical demands of human relationships. And it symbolizes the chaos in me and among us, even though we remain destined for goodness and happiness. Human beings are not absolute evil, and thus, evil has this external quality, and to sin is to yield to its seduction. In the Bible, the Adamic myth is connected to the myth of the Son of man, a Messianic figure destined to end evil. He is the one who is coming, the Human One at the end. A savior establishes a new world. The interest is turned toward the future, toward the second creation, which will surpass the first creation even as it completes it. The eschatological judgment broadens and deepens the meaning of the notion of pardon in justification. Pardon is gracious initiative, movement from transcendence toward immanence. Humanity is acquitted. The symbolism of the judgment says that humanity is pardoned in the collective adventure of the history of salvation. The fulfillment of humanity is linked to a redemption of bodies and to the entire cosmos. The soul cannot be saved without the body, the inner cannot be saved without the outer, the subjective cannot be saved without the totality. 

The drama of creation is another mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. The divine creative act must struggle with chaos. Salvation is identical with creation, so the act that founds the world is also the liberating act. Ritual re-enactment of the combats at the origin enable participation in that liberating event. This type identifies evil with chaos, salvation with creation.

The tragic vision of existence is a third mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. Greek tragedy is the full manifestation of this type. Such a tragic vision of humanity shows that the fault is indistinguishable from the existence of the tragic hero, for he is guilty even though he commits no fault. Salvation consists in an aesthetic deliverance issuing from the tragic spectacle, internalized in the depths of existence and converted into pity with respect to oneself. Yet, the Adamic myth receives a new insight when one looks at it through tragedy. The Adamic figure is tragic. He thematizes a mystery of iniquity that is not reducible to the clear consciousness of an event act. It points to enduring dread. The tragic appears in the enigma of the serpent. The tragic theology that emerges because suffering is not explainable simply by ethical lapses. The book of Job is the supreme example of this enigma. The tragedy of the suffering servant goes beyond Greek tragedy.

The exiled soul is a fourth mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. This myth has played a considerable part in western culture because it presided over the growth of Greek philosophy. It divides the human being into soul and body and concentrates on the destiny of the soul. the soul comes from elsewhere and strays here. This myth could merge with the myth of the fall and blend their influences in an indistinct myth. 

With these symbols, we can reflect upon the meaning of the theological work crystallized in a concept like original sin.[26] To reflect on its meaning is to deconstruct the concept. The concept will need to be destroyed as a concept to understand its meaning. The reason is that as a concept, original sin is false knowledge, a pseudo-concept. Yet, false knowledge is at the same time true symbol. This process can retrieve the orthodox meaning of original sin, which is nothing less than the concept that evil is the work of freedom. This concept is faithful to the biblical tradition, resisting the enormous pressure that Gnosticism would present to turn evil into substance. Evil is not world. Rather, evil comes from us. The orthodox tradition did this through the story of the Fall. Humanity is the point where evil emerges into the world. Augustine would formulate this view against both the Manichaeans and the Pelagians. Evil is the inclination of what has more being toward what has less being. It is an existential and negatively oriented consent, the opposite of conversion. However, when Augustine took the concept of original toward meaning a guilt of a personal character which juridically merits death and a taint inherited by birth, took it in the direction of indicting humanity for evil and exonerating God. The concept of original sin becomes a quasi-Gnostic concept because it became a rationalized symbol for reason. This train of thought does not differ from the friends of Job, who exonerated God from the evil that had fallen upon Job by presenting the suffering of Job as a just response to his act of sinning. As a rationalized symbol, original sin refers to analogous concepts that have their excess of meaning. It refers to the confession of sin. 

The symbol of the fall is irreplaceable because it makes it possible to combine the voluntary character of evil with its quasi-nature, which consists in the fact that evil is already there before we produce it. In the teaching of the church the failure to attend to the symbolic character of the biblical story of the fall has led to a monstrous combination of a juridical concept of imputation for evil to be voluntary, and a biological concept of inheritance for it to be involuntary, acquired, and contracted. [27]

The penitential experience of which original sin is the rational symbol has three traits. First, the realism of sin, for sin is my true situation before God, my wandering course of being. Second, the sinful condition of the individual has a communal dimension. The collective confession of sin expresses a trans-biological and trans-historical solidarity of sin that constitutes the metaphysical unity of humanity. Third, sin is a power that binds humanity and holds humanity captive, reflecting human impotence, and therefore the misery of the human condition. 

Thus, the story of the Fall has symbolic power because it condenses in an archetype of humanity everything that the believer experiences in a fugitive fashion and confesses in an allusive way. It universalizes the tragic experience of exile that Israel passed through historically and gave it universal application. The myth has a power to reveal the human condition. Something is discovered that would have remained covered and concealed. In this case, in the story of the Fall, each of us discovers evil, finds it already there in us, outside us, and before us. Christianity has harmed itself by a literal and historicist interpretation of the Adamic myth, plunging Christianity into an absurd history and into pseudo-rational speculations on the quasi-biological transmission of a quasi-juridical guilt for the fault of an early ancestor.

 

Conclusion 

This course of philosophic reasoning has the character of a wager. It presumes that the participant will gain a better understanding of humanity and of creation if I follow the indication of symbolic thought. The intelligibility of the interpretation will verify the wager through coherent discourse. The symbols of deviation, wandering, and captivity, of chaos, mixture, and fall, all of which lead to the servile will under the guidance of a mythology of evil existence, then we have deduced the symbolism of human evil. The task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to end the prerogative of self-reflection. The symbol gives reason to think that the “I think” is within being, so the being that posits itself in the “I think” has still to discover that the very act by which it abstracts itself from the whole does not cease to share in the being that challenges it in every symbol. The symbols of guilt found in deviation, wandering, and captivity, as well as the myths of chaos, blinding, mixture, and fall, speak to the situation of the being of humanity in the being of the world. The philosophical task is to start from the symbols and elaborate structures of human existence. The symbols are elevated to existential concepts.

            

            

 

 

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[1] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 302.

[2] Walter G. Jeffko, “A Personalist Concept of Human Reason,” International Philosophical Quarterly XIV (June 1974), 161-80. 

[3] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 191-242.

[4] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 224-42.

[5] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,”, 287-8.

[6] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” 300.

[7] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 104-5.

[8] Nicolaus Malebranche (The Search for Truth, Book Three, Part Two, Chapter 6, 1674-75).

[9] (Karkkainen, Creation and Humanity: A constructive Christian theology for the pluralistic world 2015), Section 16, location 12855ff

[10] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), The Demythization of Accusation,” 335-353.

[11] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” 315-324,

[12] (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil 1963, 1977).

[13] (Peck 1983), 36-84.

[14] (Peck 1983), 212-53.

[15] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 106-7.

[16] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 289.

[17] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Guilt, Ethics, and Religion,” p. 425-439.

[18] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 118.

[19] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment,” 354-377.

[20] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 291-3.

[21] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 295-312.

[22] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 301-3, 308-10.

[23] Publishers Weekly, Cahners Business Information, Inc., posted on amazon.com. Retrieved January 19, 2002, concerning Paul Oppenheimer, in Infinite Desire: A Guide to Modern Guilt

[24] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” 299, 306.

[25] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 120; (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 1998, 1991), Vol 2, 239.

[26] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Original Sin: A Study in Meaning,” 269-286.

[27] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 104-5.