BA VV56 Philosophy, Religion and Ethics,
BA VV58 Philosophy, Religion and Ethics (Including Foundation Year),
BA VV59 Philosophy, Religion and Ethics (Including Foundation Year and Year Abroad),
BA VV5P Philosophy, Religion and Ethics (Including Year Abroad)
(Updated September 2017)
In the twentieth century, a number of significant philosophers and religious thinkers argued that to think of God as a kind of being (even, in the traditional language of metaphysics, as the ens summum, or supreme being) involves a fundamental mistake in our reflections on the human relation to the divine. For these thinkers, at the centre of religion stands the relation to the other – in the first instance, to the human other. Insofar as we can make sense of the notion of God at all, we must consider first of all what it means to be an ‘I’ encountering a ‘you’, and not be misled by the model of thinking about an entity of any kind.
These thinkers also suggest that the key to ethics is to be found in our relation to the other, and not in some formally rational or consequentialist principle, or in a theory of the virtues. Consequently, the experience of the encounter with the human other, the practical claim of ethics upon us, and the notion of God are closely bound together in their work. However, despite these broad commonalities, there are important philosophical differences in the way these this general approach is formulated by different authors. In this module, we will therefore be comparing the work of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Knud Ejler Løgstrup.
Martin Buber (1878-1965) was an Austrian-born Israeli Jewish thinker who, in 1923, published one of the most celebrated works of twentieth-century religious thought – I and Thou. Buber is sometimes characterized as an existentialist. He is certainly critical of the objectifying view of the world and of human beings which is a common target of existentialist thought. However, rather than focusing on the freely self-choosing or self-making ‘I’, Buber focuses on the fundamental role of the ‘Thou’ (the intimate ‘you’ of the second person singular), arguing that one first becomes an ‘I’ only in relation to the ‘Thou’. The world of the ‘I-it’ relation, Buber argues, in which the knower becomes detached from a world of objects which are known, is secondary.
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), was also a Jewish thinker, born in Lithuania, but spending most of his life in France. Levinas’s most famous work, Totality and Infinity, was published in 1960. However, rather than extracts from this work, we will study some of his most important essays. Throughout his career, Levinas tried to show, though his penetrating phenomenological investigations, that encountering the human Other opens us up to an unconditional ethical demand – one which philosophy often tries to shield us from with its objectifying procedures. Levinas argues that the only way to God is through the ethical encounter with the human other. He would resist Buber’s suggestion that we can find hints of the ‘Thou’ in our relation to the natural world, since he draws an absolute distinction between the domain of ‘being’ and the ‘transcendence’ we glimpse in the human other. Furthermore, he would regard Buber’s conception of the encounter as too relational – not stressing the one-sided, ineluctable character of the ethical demand sufficiently.
In The Ethical Demand (1956), the Danish philosopher and Lutheran theologian Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905-1981) argued that ‘our life is so constituted that it cannot be lived except as one person lays him or herself open to another person, and puts him or herself into a person’s hands either by showing or claiming trust’. For Løgstrup our fundamental dependence on one another, revealed by trust, gives rise to an ‘ethical demand’ which is ‘silent, radical, one-sided and unfulfillable’. This sounds like Levinas, and – like his counterpart – Løgstrup suggests that this demand can be elucidated philosophically, but cannot be grounded by any philosophical theory. However, unlike Levinas, he argues that our ethical response to the other is connected with our sense of life as a gift. He does not share Levinas’s negative demotion of being in favour of a purely transcendent ‘alterity’ or otherness.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the module students should to be able:
* to explain and discuss the basic ideas of three prominent twentieth-century religious thinkers: Martin Buber, K. E. Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas;
* to explain and discuss the significance of the differences in the ways in which these three thinkers describe philosophically the relation to the ‘Thou’ or the ‘Other’;
* to reflect philosophically on the ways in which the ethical dimension of human life may be rooted in the basic structure of interpersonal relationships;
* to have a good understanding of the ways in which some prominent twentieth-century thinkers have connected the ethical relation to the Other and the notion of God.
General Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the module, students should also have acquired a set of transferable skills, and in particular be able to:
* define the task in which they are engaged and exclude what is irrelevant;
* seek and organise the most relevant discussions and sources of information;
* process a large volume of diverse and sometimes conflicting arguments;
* compare and evaluate different arguments and assess the limitations of their own position or procedure;
* write and present verbally a succinct and precise account of positions, arguments, and their presuppositions and implications;
* be sensitive to the positions of others and communicate their own views in ways that are accessible to them;
* think 'laterally' and creatively - see interesting connections and possibilities and present these clearly rather than as vague hunches;
* maintain intellectual flexibility and revise their own position if shown wrong;
* think critically and constructively.