Beyond the Common Good: The Priority of Persons
This essay is about God. It is not a paper on religious matters. At least, this is so if one understands religious concerns to be about how properly to worship God and/or about the nature of revealed divine commands and truths. The notion of a God’s-eye p
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Beyond the Common Good: The Priority of Persons H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
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Introduction: Reflections on the Common Good Lead Beyond the Common Good
This essay is about God. It is not a paper on religious matters. At least, this is so if one understands religious concerns to be about how properly to worship God and/or about the nature of revealed divine commands and truths. The notion of a God’s-eye perspective is addressed in this essay because of its cardinal moral significance as a final, unconditional perspective: a viewpoint unshaped by particular, socio-historical circumstances. Nevertheless, reflections on the importance of a God’s-eye perspective, indeed of the idea of God, are often mistakenly taken ipso facto to be religious reflections, given the significant impact of secularist and laicist ideological movements. This confusion prevails widely, despite the circumstance that appeals to God were made by philosophers ranging from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), René Descartes (A.D. 1596–1650), Benedict Spinoza (A.D. 1632–1677), and Gottfried Leibnitz (A.D. 1646–1716), to Immanuel Kant (A.D. 1724–1804) independently of any religious concerns.1 These philosophers in different ways recognized the necessary place of a God’s-eye perspective in developing a coherent account of reality and/or morality. This essay speaks to the necessity of a God’s-eye perspective for a coherent attempt to speak of the common good. Indeed, G.W.F. Hegel (A.D. 1770–1831) understood that without a transcendent God’s-eye perspective, the significance of morality changes, as when he recognized that the vanguard secular culture of his time had come to act as if God were dead, 1
Kant appreciated the necessity of engaging the idea of God, even though he was likely an atheist. As Manfred Kuehn puts it, “Kant did not really believe in God” (Kuehn 2001, pp. 391–392). H.T. Engelhardt Jr. (*) Department of Philosophy, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. Solomon and P.C. Lo (eds.), The Common Good: Chinese and American Perspectives, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 23, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7272-4_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
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that it was characterized by “the feeling that ‘God Himself is dead’” (Hegel 1968, pp. 413, 1977, pp. 190).2 Hegel replaced the God’s-eye perspective of Western culture with the surrogate “God’s-eye perspective” of philosophical reflection.3 The final perspective for Hegel, beyond which there is no other, is the perspective of philosophers. Morality, Hegel recognized, should also be accepted as normatively plural, as socio-historically conditioned.4 The result was that there is no final, canonical, firstorder5 perspective on reality or morality. As a consequence, Hegel was willing to accept the implication that, as the categories affirmed by philosophy changed, reality and morality changed.6 Against Hegel and on the side of Kant, whose view in these matters Hegel opposes and whose
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