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 Reflections on

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H. R. Niebuhr's "Life is Worth Living"

1. The Argument

1.1. There is an implicit faith given with life itself.

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1.6. And so it is that our explicit faith requires to be made critical and rational. . Although reason can never take the place of faith, which can be given up only by giving up life itself, reason can and should criticize and improve faith. Progress, in other words, is not from faith to reason, but from an explicit faith that is inherited and uncritical to an explicit faith that is more rational because it is examined and critical.

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2.1. What Niebuhr calls "faith," in the sense of the basic faith implicitly given with life itself and without which we cannot live, seems to function in much the same way as what Maurice calls "reason" (allowing, in doing so, that  that it may be called by some other name). Just as reason, in Maurice's sense, lays hold of what is real, right, and worthy of worship, so faith, in Niebuhr's sense, does the same, laying hold of the real, the right, and the finally trust-/loyalty-worthy.

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2.3. If Niebuhr is right that "mature faith" in matters of conduct can assert, "There is a right, even though all my standards [of right] are but poor and imperfect and unrighteous approximations of its content," then, presumably, "mature faith" in the two other matters of knowledge and belief (in Niebuhr's sense) could assert something similar. Thus in the matter of knowledge, mature faith could assert, "There is a real, , even though all my standards [of the , real] are but poor and imperfect and unrighteous approximations of its content."  And in the matter of belief, it could assert, ''There is a cause or being finally worth living and dying for, even though all my.standards [of what is finally worthy in this sense] are but poor and imperfect and unrighteous approximations of its content." But, then, how would such a "mature faith" in matters of belief differ, if at all, from the belief of which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks, i.e., the belief of those who "come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought [not, as he misleadingly puts it, to get itself accepted, but to prove itself worthy of acceptance!] in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out"?

4　Ｏｃｔｏｂｅｒ ２０１０4 October 2007