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    Abyss of The Will

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    32044010319572 ‘ave ene HARVARD LIBRARY Borrower: HLS Lending String: HLS Patron: Koenig, Amy Journal Title: Philosophical essays from ancient creed to technological man /Hans Jonas, Volume: Issue: Month/Year: 1974 Pages: NA 5 & anice author: 4 ZS rticte Title: the abyss ofthe Wilk Philosophical © = Meditations on the Seventh Chapter of Paul a Epistle to the Romans s Im Via Scan and Deliver Service 7 ca and Deliver Se § Special Instructions: a ILL Number: 4601238 AOE A d TN: 4601239 Printed: 10/26/2015 8:49 AM OCLC In Process Date: Call #: WID WIDLC B29 J595 1980 Location: WID ODYSSEY ENABLED Charge Maxcost: Billing Category: Exempt Borrowing Library: Harvard University - Widener Library Email: Notes Transaction Date: 10/26/2015 8:10:45 AM $& D Processing Notes: Notas cited Duplicate Multiple articles Exceeds 10% of work Not on shelf On Reserve Too fragile Checked out/on hold Exceeds 100 pages 900000000 Initials: HARVARD LIBRARY Resource Sharing - Scan&Deliver ILL@HARVARD.-EDU. O Best copy available OItem has tight binding OBibliography exceeds page ONo Table of Contents scan limit available ONo accompanying ONo accompanying notes A available images/plates O Other: Copyright statement: In providing the Scan & Deliver service, the Harvard University Libraries will responsibly administer Section. 108(d) of Title 17, United States Code, and related subsections, including Sections 108(a) and (g). ‘Scan & Deliver requests should be for no more than: * One article or other contribution to a periodical issue or copyrighted collection; ‘+ One chapter or other small part of any other copyrighted work. Consistent with Section 108, the purpose of the service is to provide a patron a copy of the requested material for private study, scholarship, or research. The service applies only to the isolated and unrelated reproduction of a single copy of the same material on separate occasions. It does not apply to the related or concerted reproduction of multiple copies of the same material (whether made at one time or over a period of time, and whether for use by one person or multiple people). Nor does it apply to the systematic reproduction of single or multiple copies. ‘This scan may not he used for course materials, including course reserves, a ™M ~~ JOfa6hls TN: 18. The Abyss of the Will: Philosophical Meditation on the Seventh Chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans In 1930 I dedicated my first publication, Augustin und das pauinische Freihetsproblem,” to Professor Rudolf Bultmann “in heartfelt gratitude, The gratitude of the student was later joined by the friendship of ma turity and the solace of loyalty. This bond has lasted through a lifetime during which many another was broken and irretrievably lost in the dark abyss of our times. But apart from the personal bond which has thus trown through the years, there also stretches from that earliest witness of it to the present occasion a still unredeemed theoretical obligation, snd I cannot honour the occasion better than by redeeming that obli- tation at last. What I had obligated myself to was an existential analysis Of the Pauline self-experience which finds expression in Rom. 7.7-25, The interpretative history of this chapter in the course of the Pelagi Struggle served the study of 1930 as a key to the clarification of| This is the author's translation and revision of the German original, published in Zeit und Geschichte. Dankesgabe an Rudolf Bultzrann zum 80. Gerburtsteg, ed. ich" Dinkler, Tubingen, 1964. The English version was frst published with the sophical Meditation on the ‘Seventh Chapter of Paul's Epistle to the 1” in The Future of Our Religious Pact: Essays in Honour of Rudolf Bult- ‘an, ed. James M. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1971, and S.CM. Press, sd edition was published in 1965 (Géttingen: Vandenhoeck & troduction by James M. Robinson, and with the present study ‘uded as an appendix. *Bultmana’s 80th bethday anniversary, August 20, 196 as PART THREE: Easey 18 ‘Augustine's conception of certain crucial aspects of the Christian life, aspects that meet in the problem of free will. Two considerations de- termined the choice of just this key. One was the plain historical fact that this text more than any other happened to serve as the focus and ‘exegetical paradigm of the debate between the combatants themselves; the other was the conviction that this happened by rights, ie. thatthe Pauline statements in question are indeed entitled to such a key position. But they are so only if what they express are not contingent but neces sary truths The statements would be contingent, in the sense here used, if the speaking about itself were Paul's own empirical person, ic, if we were dealing with an autobiographical report (of which one part would describe the past, another the present). They would also be contingent Jf the speaking ‘I’ were meant to represent a psychological type—sueh 4 type of person, e.g. for whom the forbidden, when and because iti forbidden, gains irresistible attraction: widespread as the fact may be (but how is irresistibility ascertained?), its generality would be merely empirical {and as such admit of exceptions fom the rule, which then would also be excepted from the consequences of the rule, such as the need for grace. And again the statements would be contingent if the ‘T’ were historical mankind (or the people of Israel as its prototype), which ‘must’ pass successively through the phases ‘before the Law’ and ‘undet the Law’ in order to reach the phase of Grace ‘after the Lav’: necessaY as this sequence might be for the progress of history, the individuals belonging to a particular phase of it would be contingent and, for hs perspective, would make the contents of the others inactive—for the post-Pauline Christian, e.g, a matter of mere historical retrospect. Contrariwise, the statements would be necessary if the speaker were Man as such, so that what is said in this Ieform about the failure ofthe attempted fulfillment of the Law holds for the Christian no less that for the Jew and the pagan, and precisely for this reason constitutes * valid argument for the Christian alternative, even an integral moment its own inner movement. This last assumption { made and expressed in the study of 1930, without proving it. I rather declared its proof '© be a still outstanding task. Now ‘proof’ can here only mean: explication of the modality of existence where a plight like that described in Rom. 7 is intelligibly at home and is bound to emerge from its radical acting-ovt ‘The phenomenologically demonstrated necessity of such a plight in such a life would lend support to the thesis that it could be what Paul meant [No proof can go further where in the nature of the case, ie. according 19 the condition of all hermeneutics, we work with a hypothesis of empathic understanding, The Abyss of the Will a Plan and draft? of such an analysis indeed preceded the publication of the Augustine study and still provide the basis for the present, re- newed attempt. Itis the attempt at a structural analysis of that mode of human being in which the “primal sin” spoken of by Paul and Augustine is inevitably commitie wed. The analysis aims at SFowing the genuine and dialectical nécessity of the structure which here operates—genuine because rooted in the manner of movement of the human will as such, and dialectical because even as necessary it is. yet the will’s own deed, and thus the self-decreed fate of a freedom delivered up to itself. The philosophical analysis, tracing the necessity back to its existential ground, must show how the operative dialectic, Which issues into the experience of insufficiency, in turn springs from the fundamental ontology of man’s being. Only on this condition do the Pauline statements have the validity they claim. The essay thus experi- ments with a specific understanding of those statements, according to ‘which they ought to have such a validity. For the purpose of this expert- ment we must dare to translate the content of Paul's statements into the language of existential form description—we might say ‘translate back into’ in so far as our preconception is correct. We preface the analysis with the passage from the Epistle to the Romans to which it refers. What follows upon the quotation, however, {is not an exegesis of the text but a freely philosophical reflection or reditation on the general existential phenomena which by hypothesis may be those that underlie the entire Pauline statement as its premise in the human constitution. Rom. 7.7-25. (7) What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By 20 means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. Tshould not have known covetousness, had the law not said ‘thou shalt not covet’. (8) But sin, receiving impulse from the commandment, wrought in me all kind of covetousness. For without the law sin is dead, (9) and I once lived without the Jaw: but with the advent of the commandment sin came alive, and I died, (10) and the very command ment given for life proved to be death to me. (11) For sin, taking impulse from the commandment, tricked me and through the command ment killed me. (12) Now the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good: (13) di, then, what is good bring death to me? By no means! Rather it was sin, so that it might come to light as si which wrought death in me theough the good, so that sin through the Fiat Id dow in a 1929 letter to Rado Batman, a copy of which, wi feat god lick, stayed th me through ll the wanderings of my Hes that {hityive years later and with some Inenng of the gal dfdence abet $id ata he et of ay nthe daly fom a thse, Cs therefore T believe, the' piece with the Tongedt Tncbaton of any’ have eve Published.) 7 | PART THREE: Essny 18 very commandment might become sinful beyond measure. (14) For we know that the law is spiritual: but T am carnal, sold under sin. (15) For my own actions are beyond my ken: for not that which I will this I do, bat what I hate this I perform. (16) Now if T perform that whick I do rot will, then I consent to the law and own that it is good. (17) But by that token it is not I any more who acts but the sin which dwells within me. (18) For I know that within me, that is, in my flesh, there wells no good. For willing what is right is in my power, but doing it isnot. (19) For T do not perform the good which T will, but the evil will not, that Ido, ... (21) S0 1 find in me, who wills to do right, 2 law by which evil les close at hand. (22) For I delight in the law of God with the inner man, (23) but I see in my members another law at war ‘with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which wells in my members. (24) Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver ime from this body of death? (25) Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with the mind, but the law of sin with the flesh, Man is that being who not only relates himself to the world in ‘intend- ing’ acts (cogitationes) but in so doing also knows about these acts and therewith about himself as performing them. Thinking is always and simultaneously an ‘I think that I think’ (cogito me cogitare): thus a being essentially self-related, and ‘constitutively’ so, because only in and through such self-relation it constitutes itself as an I. This most formal characteristic_of ‘consciousness’ being always_self-consciousness,_i

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