1294.Life Is Worth Living

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, Reflections on HR. Niebuhr's "Life is Worth Living"

1. The Argument

_ _1.1. There is an implicit faith given with life itself.(2) with respectto conduct, Is there any right, or any wrong? and (3) with respect to belief,. Is there any cause or being finally worth living and dying for? 1.2. This faith underlies three main domains: knowledge,conduct, and belief. ' .

1.3. The great skeptical questions are: (I)with respect to knowledge,. Is there anything real outside our consciousness?

. 1.4. Our implicit faith simply as hUIIian beings, without which we cannot live, has always already answered these questions affmnatively. So long as we engage in life, we must live by faith· in reality· and make distinctions between what is real'and what is only apparent, what is true and what is false. Similarly, so long as we live and act, we must live by faith in right and distinguish between what is only apparently right and what is . really so, and between whatis right and what is wrong. And so; too, we cannot live at all without faith that life is finally worth living and withoutdistinguishing between causes or beings :that are fmally worth living and dying for and those that are not. .

1.5. Even sO, our implicit faith may be deceived in many ways, in thatwhatwe.. take to be real beyond our consciousness may be only appearance orfiction.;whafwe take to be right or wrong may be only apparently and not really so; and what we take to be finally worth living and dying for may not really but only apparently have such worth. 

1.6. And so it is that our explicit faith requires to be made critical and rational.. Although reason can never take the place offaith, 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.

2. Some Comments on the Argument

2.1. What Niebuhr calls "faith," in the sense ofthe basic faith implicitly given with life itselfand without which we cannot live, seems to function in much the same way as what Maurice calls "reason" (allowing, in doing so, that  it may be called by some 

other name). Just as reason, in Maurice's sense, lays hold ofwhat is real, right, and worthy ofworship, so faith, in Niebuhr's sense, does the same, laying hold ofthe real, the right, and the finally trust-/loyalty-worthy.

2.2. When Niebuhr asks,,"What cause or being justifies all the pain and effort of living, the carrying on the work ofcivilization, the continuance ofthe human species?" is he notasking, in effect, what cause or being is genuinely ,worshipful, worship being understood as unreserved trust and unqualified loyalty? ,

2.3. IfNiebuhr is right that "mature faith" in matters of conduct can assert, "There is a right, even though all my standards [ofright] are but poor and imperfect and unrighteous approximations ofits content," then, presumably, "mature faith" in the two other matters ofknowledge and belief(in Niebuhr's sense)could.assert something similar. Thus in the matter ofknowledge, mature faith could assert, "There is a real, ,even though all my standards [ofthe ,real] are but poor and imperfect and unrighteous , ." approximations ofits content. " And in the matter ofbelief, it could ass~rt,''There is a cause or being finally worth living and dying for, even though all tny.standards [ofwhat, is finallyworthyill this sense Jare butpoor and imperfect and unrighteous ' approximations 01 its content." But, then, how yvould such a "mature faith" in matters,of beliefdiffer, ifat all, from the belief ofwhich Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ~peaks, i.e., the belief ofthose who "come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations oftheirown conduct that theultim;1te good desired is better reached by free trade injdeas-that the,1;>est test of truth. is the power ofthe thought{not,: as he ' misleadingly puts it, to get itself accepted, but to prove itselfworthy ofacceptance!] in the competition ofthe market, and. that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out"?

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