The Ego-Alter Dialectic and the Conscience

Niebuhr, H. Richard

doi:10.2307/2018981

Cited by 7 publications

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“…Our thinking is an inner conversation in which we may be taking the roles of specific acquaintances over against ourselves, but usually it is with the “generalized other” that we converse. (Mead , 272; see Niebuhr , 354). Niebuhr thinks this is a good place to begin thinking about conscience but he offers the qualifications that a person does not live in one society but many and so we would do better to speak of multiple generalized others. Moreover, Niebuhr argues, it is not with whole groups that we interact at any particular moment but with particular individuals.…”

Section: Revising Conscience Out Of Existence: From Niebuhr To Hauerwasmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Loss of Judgment: The Dismissal of the Judicial Conscience in Recent Christian Ethics

Morgan¹

2017

Journal of Religious Ethics

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Christian ethicists have neglected conscience, understood as an individual's moral self-awareness before a locus of accountability and judgment, over the last few decades. The aim of this essay is to suggest how this neglect came about. I draw on the work of Paul Lehmann and Oliver O'Donovan to illustrate how ethicists in the twentieth century became suspicious of conscience because of its association with the alleged ahistorical individualism of Immanuel Kant's work. I argue that a social-historicist conception of conscience, such as H. Richard Niebuhr offered, attempts to save conscience from this suspicion. Ironically, however, Stanley Hauerwas's development of Niebuhr's historicist, communitarian approach to conscience, appears to have led to a dismissal of conscience. I conclude with a brief comment about what this dismissal has cost contemporary Christian ethics, namely the Christian tradition's basic commitment to the singularity of an individual's accountability before God.

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Section: Revising Conscience Out Of Existence: From Niebuhr To Hauerwasmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Loss of Judgment: The Dismissal of the Judicial Conscience in Recent Christian Ethics

Morgan¹

2017

Journal of Religious Ethics

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“…Such impartiality does not reside in general indifference or disinterest, but rather in “profound attachments to certain beings, values, or modes of conduct,” which include the self but also exceed it. In other words, the impartiality of the social other concerns its specific impartiality to the self, which follows from its partial interest “in a cause, in some value which is common to the self and to the other or, more frequently, in the society which it represents and to which the self belongs” (Niebuhr , 355). The language of cause here reflects the influence of Josiah Royce.…”

Section: Correcting Niebuhr's Reading Of Meadmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To conceive of the self's social constitution in terms of some generalized other understood in abstraction, is to assume either that the self lives in one society rather than multiple communities, or that these communities can be concentrically related, family nested in nation nested in humankind. In fact, Niebuhr insists, “The self does not deal with one ‘generalized other’ only but with many, and not all its ‘others’ are ‘generalized.’” Moreover, proper relations to these multiple others are contextually particular: what the self expects from and aspires to in response to particular other selves changes depending on whether these others are family members, colleagues, fellow citizens, co‐religionists, or even God (Niebuhr , 354). What is at stake here is the possibility of refiguring those moral conflicts within the self that we refer to as cases of conscience.…”

Section: Correcting Niebuhr's Reading Of Meadmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The generalized other is best understood as a set of “constancies of interaction” resulting in the enduring patterns of responsive relations that Niebuhr endorses as a description of the self‐constituting social other. Admittedly, the term generalized other suggests an abstract singular entity, and Niebuhr is right to object to the phrasing of certain passages in Mead for validating this suggestion (Niebuhr , 354). However, Mead's full account of the generalized other and its manner of constituting the self undermine his own suggestions of abstract singularity.…”

Section: Correcting Niebuhr's Reading Of Meadmentioning

confidence: 99%

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H. Richard Niebuhr's Reading of George Herbert Mead: Correcting, Completing, and Looking Ahead

Daniel¹

2016

Journal of Religious Ethics

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In this essay, I reconstruct H. Richard Niebuhr's interpretation of George Herbert Mead's account of the social constitution of the self. Specifically, I correct Niebuhr's interpretation, because it mischaracterizes Mead's understanding of social constitution as more dialogical than ecological. I also argue that Niebuhr's interpretation needs completing because it fails to engage one of Mead's more significant notions, the I/me distinction within the self. By reconstructing Niebuhr's account of faith and responsibility as theologically self‐constitutive through Mead's I/me distinction, I demonstrate Niebuhr's deep yet unacknowledged agreement with Mead: the self is constituted by its participation in multiple communities, but responds to them creatively by enduring the moral perplexity of competing communal claims. I conclude by initiating a constructive account of conscience that follows from this agreement. Conscience is more ecological than dialogical because it regards our creative participation in multiple ecologies of social roles oriented by patterns of responsive relations.

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“…For religious socialization also provides the occasion for apprehending what theologians broadly describe as revelation. That is to say, under the mellow encouragement of the community of faith, religious socialization induces selves to be conditioned from a new point of view which--following Niebuhr's (1960) useful distinction between observed and lived history-transforms the events of secular, scientifically understood history into existentially meaning-laden experiences infused with a special parabolic significance for reordering the personal biographies of selves entering the confessional community. Inner history refers to that complex of meanings which deepen superabundantly one's understanding of and relationship to the world as apprehended through the eyes of faith.…”

Section: Reference Groups and The Establishment Of The Role Of Spiritmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reference Groups and Role Strains Related to Spiritual Well-Being

Garrett

1979

Sociological Analysis

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This paper is a prolegomenon to the development of a theoretical construct of spiritual well-being. The fundamental assumption undergirding this interpretation holds that spiritual health represents one dimension of a tole-set for persons occupying the status position of member within a reli~ous organization. Thu~~, the paper treat, the interaction processes whereby believers strive to esta£ a viable definition of healthy religion in relation to three reference grou[o perspectives. These proce.~ses include the selj's interaction with the local religious fellowship, encounters with deity, and the ongoing relationships integrating a religious actor with the "official model of religiosity" carried by a denominational tradition. The central conclusion asserts that spiritual well-being represents a negotiated formula whose legitimacy is confirmed for individual actors by some coalition of reference groups operative within the religious institution.The interchangeable concepts of spiritual well-being or healthy religion are employed in this discussion in analogia to somatic health, in much the same manner as mental health serves asa metaphorical construct for conceptualizing psychological stability in relation to physical well-being. Indeed, the physical, social-psychological, and religious realms constitute three dimensions of human existence wherein the dynamics of health or illness are relevant evaluative categories. Although each of these domains mutually interpenetrate, they nonetheless remain aspects of individual biographies susceptible to analytical differentiation. The empiricaI flow of causative influence among the members of tbis triad evidences a lively reciprocity, since any one variable may function as a triggering mechanism for activating responses in the other sectors of experience.Identifying a healthy orientation among the complex interactions linking the organic, social-psychological, and spiritual dimensions of life is complicated for social scientists by virtue of the differing criteria indicative of well-being operative in each sphere. Our intent in this investigation is not to delineate in normative terms the substance of healthy religion, but rather to illuminate the social processes through which actors are able to clarify for themselves the content of appropriate religious roles. Accordingly, this analysis will treat the negotiation process internal to religious communities whereby the notion of legitimate and healthy religion is established. To flesh out the full implications of this line of analysis some consideration of the impact exerted by secular reference groups would need to be undertaken, but that enterprise falls outside the scope of this project and must be reserved for another occasion. 43

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The Ego-Alter Dialectic and the Conscience

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

A Loss of Judgment: The Dismissal of the Judicial Conscience in Recent Christian Ethics

A Loss of Judgment: The Dismissal of the Judicial Conscience in Recent Christian Ethics

H. Richard Niebuhr's Reading of George Herbert Mead: Correcting, Completing, and Looking Ahead

Reference Groups and Role Strains Related to Spiritual Well-Being

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