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Clearly, the distinction Luther makes between "the First Commandment" and "all
other commandments, divine and human," either is or is something like the distinction I
make between "transcendenta1" and "categorial"-just as he evidently also needs either
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it or something like it to clarify his corresponding distinction between "faith" and "all other works." The First Commandment is a commandment, but it really is thefirst commandment because, paradoxically, nothing is commanded in it. It is, in reality, "the promise that is the source of all promises and the head of all religions and wisdom \[se. philosophy\!\]." Similarly, faith as the work corresponding to the First Commandment is and is not a work because it is "the head and the power of all other works," without which they neither are nor can be good.
Nor could Luther be clearer that the First Commandment also includes within itself "the gospel and Christ"l
27 December 2009
I obviously use "action" in lnore than one sense.
I use it in a proper, if not a narrow, sense, when I contrast it with "selfunderstanding," or "existence," or use it synonymously with "life-praxis" (as I do, for instance in Doing TheologtJ Today: 116144, 148).
But I also use it-or clearly imply I would use it-in a broad sense. This is evident simply from my talk of "actualizing" (or, occasionally, "enacting") self understanding, or self-understanding "actualizing existence" in the emphatic sense of human existence, or existence that understands (see, e.g., ibid.: 111, 145). But it becomes explicitly clear in the summary of my view in Notebooks, 13 November 1993, where I define "the broadly moral" as "having to do with human action in relation to, or in the context of, reality," and then go on to say that my further distinction between "the categorial" and "the transcendental" applies to "the broadly moral" as well as to "the broadly natural," because "life-praxis" refers to the categoriallevel of human action, even as "self-uderstanding" refers to its transcendental level.
\-Tracking Notebooks, 23 March 2001
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To understand myself in a certain way is to behave in a certain way. This is true not only in the sense that how I behave expresses how I understand myself, but also in the sense that understanding myself is itself already a form of behavior. It is, one may say, the primal, or transcendental, form of behavior in which all other categorial forms have both their point of origin and their abiding principle.
\-Tracking Notebooks, 5 January 2009