The Challenge of Tragedy for the Human Good: The Augustinian Proposals of Reinhold Niebuhr and Hannah Arendt

Dissertation, The University of Chicago (1997)
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Abstract

We find ourselves as morally flawed agents in a morally messy world; what should we make of our condition? This dissertation argues that the Augustinian tradition of moral and religious inquiry helps us understand and respond to our confrontation with the challenge of tragedy. It demonstrates this by critically developing the Augustinian proposals of Reinhold Niebuhr and Hannah Arendt to meet this challenge. Chapter One introduces the character of the challenge, sketches the basic contours of the Augustinian proposal in regard to the challenge, delineates four basic critiques of any Augustinian proposal, summarizes the dissertation's argument, and defends its method. Chapter Two argues that Niebuhr's work provides the rudiments of an Augustinian account of sin as human perversion, and it seeks to recover Niebuhr's complex proposal as a means of deploying just such an account. Chapter Three argues that Arendt's work offers crucial elements of an Augustinian account of evil as ontological privation, and it seeks to extract that account from Arendt's work. Chapter Four shows how elements of both thinkers' positions, especially their various subjectivist assumptions, inadvertently subvert their own constructive proposals. Chapter Five suggests that reframing their insights within a more thoroughly Augustinian account resolves these difficulties, not least as such an account is innocent of those subjectivist tendencies; this account "de-prioritizes" human agency, interpreting it as fundamentally a response to God's primary action, thereby allowing for the full ontological and anthropological power of these insights. Chapter Six argues that such a proposal offers considerable practical advantages in responding to the challenge of tragedy, as it affirms both the practical inescapability of tragedy, and the fundamental goodness of human existence even amidst the ruins of this tragic life

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