University College of Wales, Aberystwyth

Department of International Politics

A brief intellectual history of Early Realism in IR: a Critical Realism?

Niebuhr, Morgenthau, Phenomenology and Critical Realism

Essay Paper for the International Association of Critical Realism,

International Relations Panel, Rio de Janeiro, July 2009

Guilherme Marques Pedro

(Ph.D. Candidate)

Introduction

This article seeks to differentiate the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) from the quasi-scientific Realism of Hans Morgenthau (1904-1980) on the basis of their reading of phenomenology and of critical realism. I argue that a closer reading of their reception of these philosophical traditions shows how they derive from them different understandings of Reality, human and social, and of the role of science. In turn, this reception history is expected to explain the different epistemological conceptions that they deploy in their work – in spite of the overwhelming set of commonalities. By comparing their reception of phenomenology – namely Morgenthau's reception of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Niebuhr's engagement with Max Scheler (1874-1928) – I want to claim that, contrary to Niebuhr, Morgenthau’s later Realism came to replicate a very similar epistemological framework to that of the early Critical Realism of Roy Wood Sellars (1880-1973). Due to time restraints I will not go into the differences between Sellars and other major figures of early Critical Realism such as Arthur Lovejoy (1873-1962) and George Santayana (1863-1950). I will rely mostly on Sellars self-understanding of Critical Realism - which invokes these three names as its key proponents and shows close links to the phenomenology of Husserl. I will also use the terms Critical Realism and Scientific Realism interchangeably and for the sake of making the argument clearer I will temporarily suspend their differences.

I argue that Morgenthau’s has a different take on 'the problem of Reality' than that of Niebuhr, one that is due in part to Morgenthau's more analytical mode of thinking the real, which contrasts with Niebuhr’s mythological and existential understanding of it. At the epistemological level, Niebuhr grounds his realism – in his major work The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941, 1943) – in Scheler's theological departure from Husserl's phenomenology and in Heidegger’s Nietzschean revolt against it. Furthermore, Niebuhr accommodates his reflections on the nature of truth and reality in his broader reception of Kierkegaard and Augustine and demarcates himself from the essentialism of Santayana, the rationalism of Lovejoy or Bertrand Russell and the Critical realism of Sellars. Contrary to Niebuhr, Morgenthau’s epistemological realism remains, in spite of his occasional Nietzschean moods, less prone to the sort of theo-ontological skepticism of Niebuhr and would, over time, become more analytical, more positive and perhaps less normative and prophetic than that of his mentor. I contend that this is due to Morgenthau's early engagement with the legal positivism of Kelsen which he had sought to compensate with Husserl's understanding of phenomena. For the purpose of demonstrating the links between phenomenology and critical realism, I will rely mostly on Gary Gutting’s (1978) demonstration of the proximity between Husserl’s ideas and Sellars's own. The affinities between Sellars and Husserl will in turn show where Morgenthau approximates critical realism and where Niebuhr departs from it. I want to claim that where Morgenthau differs from Niebuhr is in that his realism is not only non-theological but ultimately scientific, phenomenological (in the Husserlian sense) and therefore critical in the sense suggested by Sellars.

In order to demonstrate Niebuhr’s and Morgenthau’s understanding of Reality, the epistemological status they attribute to the social sciences, how they react to phenomenology and how they relate to Critical Realism, I will recall the fundamental tenets of phenomenology and Critical Realism. I will highlight Morgenthau's gradual approximation to this sort of scientific approach and describe Niebuhr's demarcation from it. Indeed, as Lovejoy's critique of Niebuhr's pessimism demonstrates, right in the beginning of his Reflections on Human Nature (1961), critical realism was not entirely indifferent to the development of neo-classical realism in Interwar and Post-War America. After all, it was already a well-known method of knowing with scientific, although non-rationalistic, aspirations. As an epistemology, it represented a critique of American Pragmatism and of the so-called direct Realism (or New Realism) – which believed in direct correspondence between reality and rational description of it and sought to equate the objectivity of natural sciences with that of the social sciences. Morgenthau held similar views to those of critical realists, namely regarding the role of rationality and the status of science – especially in regard to social sciences and the possibility to objectively know the human being. Nonetheless, his suspicion towards science, which became clear in his critique of John Dewey in his first publication in American soil – Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946) – would tend to decline throughout the Post-war years. I want to argue that this move towards an increasingly scientific account of International Relations would bring him closer to the kind of scientific realism that Niebuhr sought to criticize. Hence, Morgenthau, together with some critical realists of the period, presents strong affinities with Husserlian phenomenology. A closer look into one of his early articles, entitled La Realité des Normes, which appeared in 1934, clearly reveals them. Finally, from it we will be able to discern how Niebuhr's theologically mediated understanding of transcendence allows for an epistemological critique of rationality and of science that is not founded in Morgenthau even if both of them remain politically skeptical.

1

Critical Realism and Phenomenology

1.1. A brief introduction to Critical Realism and Phenomenology

Critical Realism was a reaction against a direct form of realism that, throughout the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, identified the external world with the knowledge that we, as subjects, produce of that world. This type of direct realism can also be seen as a kind of pure positivism in that it conceives of the human mind as a tabula rasa that passively receives experience, neither changing it nor mediating it. Critical Realism wanted to dispute this. It was founded by Roy Wood Sellars who published a book with the same title in 1916. But since then he has also sought to extend the scope of the category so to include other names such as those of Arthur Lovejoy, George Santayana, Broad or even Bertrand Russell –

although not without some reservations.

Phenomenology had emerged as a philosophical approach to human experience from the writings of the German logician Edmund Husserl in the beginning of the twentieth century (namely from his Logical Investigations -1901). Indeed, his aspiration was a scientific one in the sense that he sought to establish in the consciousness of experience the ultimate source of truth. The key argument of phenomenologists is that only through the experience of the surrounding reality does the subject become conscious of himself – he is a subject because he is subjected to the world. In this sense, intentionality does not only precede cognition – it actually determines the subject qua subject. In experiencing its environment the subject reacts intentionally not because he freely chooses too, but because his body and mind cannot perceive and absorb everything. So intentionality towards the world is what underpins the subject’s consciousness of things and of himself. Therefore intentionality can be defined as the given organization and conduction of otherwise chaotic perceptions into a stream of consciousness that is both coming from and directed at an object.

Critical Realism concerns itself, together with the broader philosophical movement of phenomenology, with the nature of knowledge. In short, both phenomenology and critical realism – or, for that matter, scientific realism – seek to question the mode of knowledge that science entertains so to aver of its possibility. In this sense, besides opposing to positivism, both phenomenology and critical realism also reject the kind of perspectivism in which the knowing subject can determine the reality of the object through interpretation as well as the kind of direct naturalism (or new realism) according to which knowing the object of perception corresponds exactly to the presence of the object. In this regard. Roy Sellars highlighted the outstanding role of Husserl ‘in his stress on logical description’ (Sellars, 1961: 331). Sellars saw it has an important contribution in the context of the rather vague and unverifiable theories that originated in Continental Europe after the existentialist turn. For critical realists such as him, and for more traditional phenomenologists such as Husserl (the father of phenomenology), knowledge must lie somewhere in between these two poles. For this reason it can neither be considered as radical cognitive critique nor as an extreme realism. Critical realists further stand against this dualism which ultimately leads to monism: knowledge is conceived as lying completely in the object known or depending strictly on the subject’s consciousness. They claim that ‘it is the mediateness of knowledge that is stressed’ (Sellars, What is the correct interpretation of critical realism?, 1927: 238). Much as in phenomenology, consciousness becomes the centre of the experience of knowing. However, since consciousness is always consciousness of something and ‘we always think of a concept as a ‘concept of’ (Sellars, Referential Transcendence, 1961: 3), the mind cannot be taken in isolation from experience nor can experience be taken separately from the mediating role of the mind. This is the case even if the object exists without the experience of it being perceived by consciousness:

‘When knowing is made explicit, it is found to be interpretative of objects, themselves not given in consciousness, toward which the organism and its mind are directed in accordance with a technique which has a realistic basis in the nature of things. The structure of this knowing must be carefully and empirically worked out. It will then be found that psychological structures and

distinctions make possible a reference to that which transcends consciousness existentially. It will be seen, then, that critical realism makes much of consciousness and its categories. Here we have an emergent level without which knowing would be impossible. It is, however, a level intrinsic to the highly evolved human organism with its use of communication and symbolism’ (Sellars, 1927: 238-9).

The problem then becomes one of defining accurately what the ‘characters, meanings, and propositions in terms of which the knower interprets the selected and meant object’ (Sellars, 1927: 239). This is why critical realism can at this stage also be understood as a form of representationalism – even though the representation of objects does not affect in any way their existence outside the realm of consciousness. This is an important point to keep in mind when we come to deal with Morgenthau’s conception of Law vis-a-vis Reality. Sellars is, in his own description of critical realism, very aware of the danger of generalization and calls attention to the possibility of some disagreement between critical realists regarding the nature of the objects once they are given in experience: ‘one group may hold them to be Platonic universals and complexes of universals, while another takes a more conceptualistic and empiricist view’ (Sellars, 1927: 239). He criticizes Santayana for holding on to an understanding of objects of representation as corresponding to ‘essences’ – a view from which he departs along with Arthur Lovejoy and others. This type of Critical Realism has, however, many problems. I shall highlight one of them so to facilitate the bridge to the following part which is devoted to Morgenthau’s reception of Edmund Husserl.

For critical realists of this period, the medium of any cognitive experience is what Sellars calls the ‘psycho-physical organism’ (Sellars, 1927: 239). He stresses, against Calkins, that critical realists do not have to conform themselves to the idea that ‘meanings are non-mental’ (Sellars, 1927: 239). However, if this is true, it is also true that these entities cannot be mere mental states, otherwise nothing would authorize me to ascribe them to external objects (ibid.). Sellars responds to this with the typical phenomenological recipe: when the subject attempts to know an object he or she rarely intends to know it absolutely and in all its possible features. In this regard, Sellars seems to open the possibility – which had been the historical landmark of Husserl’s own enterprise – that knowledge is always selective from the start. What is it that makes it selective? What is the criterion of selection? Sellars and Husserl would agree in that knowledge is mediated by intentionality - even though they place it in different realms of experience. Intentionality is understood here as a sort of mind-directedness towards some objects rather than others or some parts of the same object rather than other parts; therefore a holistic conception of knowledge is impossible, proving wrong the proponents of direct realism. To quote Husserl, ‘intentionality involves our individuating objects in consciousness’ (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, (1936) 1995 : 381). In this sense, Phenomenology can indeed be compared with a sort of solipsism and it is not coincidence that Sellars ends his analysis by admitting to have ‘pondered Berkeley long and carefully’ (Sellars: 241).

1.2. Critical Realism as phenomenological Realism

Before explaining how this can help us understanding and distinguishing Niebuhr's and Morgenthau’s own versions of political Realism, it is important to clarify the strong affinities between Husserlian phenomenology and Critical realism. In an article written in 1978, Gary Gutting starts by stressing the differences between the two. Gutting wants to show how Phenomenology and Critical Realism are commensurate and can open the way for a correct version of scientific realism that can compensate for the faults denounced by phenomenologists (Gutting, ‘Husserl and Scientific Realism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1978: 43). In a passage which already signs some commonality between critical realism and phenomenology - under the label of a ‘critical phenomenological approach to science’ - Gutting affirms his purpose: ‘to join with the critical phenomenological approach (…) for the “subversive” end of providing a basis for a critical justification of scientific realism’ (Gutting, 1978: 42-3). To this he adds a ‘caveat’ of fundamental importance:

‘Certainly there are texts in Husserl (e.g., Logical Investigations and Ideas I) that seem much more congenial to a realistic view of science. I have bracketed these interesting and important historical issues for the sake of a more forceful and unambiguous formulation of the phenomenological challenge to scientific realism’ (Gutting, 1978: 43).

Gutting succinctly summarizes these differences by focusing briefly on Husserl’s understanding of science as a process of ‘idealization’ where ‘concrete empirical phenomena are thus of interest only insofar as they approximate idealities – i.e., insofar as we can posit “beneath” the empirical phenomenon an exact mathematical entity (e.g., an ideal triangle) to which the empirical phenomenon approximates’ (Gutting, 1978: 44). Against this Gutting points out that the emphasis of modern science has been exactly the opposite: ‘Idealizations are of interest to the scientist only insofar as they provide a convenient way of approaching the complexities of empirical reality’ (Gutting, 1978: 44). Furthermore, Gutting will also argue that in Husserl it is mostly the life-world that determines the content of ideas – a formulation summed up in the concept of ‘eidetic ontologies’. Indeed, Husserl hesitates throughout his life, when it comes to claim some essential predicates to all life-worlds – and therefore to all forms of human cognition. As Gutting sees it (or wants to see it),

‘his primary emphasis is on the need for any possible object of experience to exhibit, spatiotemporal location, causal connections, and irreducibly qualitative properties. Such requirements clearly do not determine the specific first-order predicates that describe the world and so are not inconsistent with a properly formulated rejection of the myth of the given’ (Gutting, 1978: 55).

Gutting thus notes that scientific realism is in opposition to Husserl only if we take his phenomenology to mean that there are first-order predicates (like colors or a particular determined shape) which are essential to certain environments and objects. However,

‘if the essential features were limited to such general characteristics as having some kind of qualitative predicates (like but not necessarily identical with our familiar colors) or having some

sort of geometrical structure, then there would be no contradiction with scientific realism (…). Husserl’s actual discussion of the essential “ontology” of any life-world seems to support an interpretation along the latter lines (cf. Crisis, pp. 139ff)’ (Gutting, 1978: 55).

Gutting concludes by stating that the work of Wilfred Sellars – Roy Sellars’s son and an important figure in more recent forms of Critical realism – ‘the similarity to Husserl is striking’ (Gutting, 1978: 56). One could indeed say the same thing about his father. Indeed, Husserl’s intent to make of philosophy a rigorous science was not irrelevant to (Roy) Sellars, whose objective was to define, under the banner of critical realism, a ‘referential transcendence’ where the subject is conceived as transcendent only in relation to a life-world referent. As we will see this conception of transcendence as relational also appears in Morgenthau and, in a very different way, in Niebuhr. Their views on science appear in the midst of an existential approximation between philosophical critical thinking and the reality of facts. In the same way, Sellars observed that ‘it is here that science and philosophy can make contact' (Sellars, 1961: 2). And in a another very eloquent demonstration of this life quest, Sellars would claim that

'I can, myself, feel the hot breath of science on my neck as I deal with it’ (ibid.).

So it is in the cleavage between science and philosophy that the question of intentionality gains a new meaning. The American scholar Hubert Dreyfus has referred to Husserl’s understanding of intentionality has beyond mere intentions. In an interview made available online, Dreyfus stresses that by intentionality Husserl was referring to an essential ‘mind-directedness’ present in every subject, irrespective of his life-world (see Dreyfus, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaGk6S1qhz0). Indeed, he also refers to the term ‘aboutness’, a concept which Sellars himself would use later on to spell out his own understanding of what he referred to as ‘referential transcendence’ (Sellars, 1961: 3):

‘To speak for myself, I was a direct realist but regarded perceiving as a mediated operation, guided by sensations but concerned with things in the framework of response. Cognizing evolves from a disclosing use of sensations to a stage in which reference and characterization have developed with the growth of concepts and language. The framework is now that of aboutness with a strong sense of physical things, their manipulation, and the applications of concepts to them’ (Sellars, 1961: 6).

The idea that objects are in control of our own perception of them meant a revolution in traditional metaphysics and philosophy of mind which placed the subject in the centre of the world. However, in both Phenomenology and Critical Realism this did not mean the exclusive determination of the subject by its environment but rather a more complex implication: ‘The visual field is causally controlled in us by the things we are looking at. It is a circuit of return’ (Sellars, 1961: 3). Indeed, the intentionality of the subject is partly imposed by the environment’s input upon the mind; but without the mind the action that responds to that environment could never be formulated. ‘After all, our sense organs were not evolved without a function to perform, that of a guided adjustment to the environment’ (Sellars, 1961: 6). Since it is this ‘directedness’ that founds consciousness, intentionality can thus also be understood as the leap of the world upon the subject: ‘in looking at a thing, or manipulating it, we are acting under

its control’ (Sellars, 1961: 2). In other words, if we want to understand how knowledge works than we must try to apprehend the way in which our environment calls us, that is, how it configures us according to its own needs and final ends. In short, how we are part of our environment and yet above it. Whilst Morgenthau sought a scientific formulation of this problematic, Niebuhr opted for a theological understanding of it and this meant, as we will now see, a totally different understanding of relationality and transcendence.

Sellars ideal of a ‘Referential Transcendence’ allowed him to do away with the kind of theological understanding of Transcendence that Niebuhr endorsed, one that sought to circumscribe science and physical knowledge to a higher form of belief: that of faith. In one passage of the same article Sellars would claim that ‘we do not need to get mystical about transcendence’ (Sellars, 1961: 6). For the remainder of this paper I will attempt to show how Morgenthau adopted this line of scientific realism precisely to escape the traps of forms of realism that were beyond science, unfalsifiable, more prone to mysticism and to theological imagination. Contrary to him, Niebuhr took transcendence in a totally different direction and therefore became very critical of the type of epistemological realism propounded by Sellars or Lovejoy. Indeed, Niebuhr did 'get mystical about transcendence’ (Sellars, 1961: 6).

2

Morgenthau, Phenomenology and Critical Realism

2.1. Morgenthau’s reception of Phenomenology: towards a Critical Realism?

The skepticism of Morgenthau towards social sciences and a technocratic Modernity would not be surprising were it not for his later incorporation of them. In America, Morgenthau clearly adopts the same vocabularies he had critiqued, and of which he seemed strongly suspicious, at least in his early phase – the result of which was the publication of Scientific Man vs. Power Politics in 1946. Patomaki very eloquently shows Morgenthau’s intellectual revolt against the reformist idealism of social scientists and what he saw as the takeover of ‘rational scientism’ in the academic fields of international relations and political science during the war years:

‘Just listen to him in his most Nietzschean moment, contrasting idealizations of ‘scientific man’ to the brute ‘realities of power politics’ (…):

“Aristotle anticipated this modern problem, as so many others, when he remarked in the Nicomachean Ethics: ‘Intellect itself, however, moves nothing. When rationalism was reaping its philosophical triumph Hume could say: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve

and obey them” (Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, 1946 quoted in Patomaki, After International Relations, 2002: 154).

Having recently arrived in America, Morgenthau was able to mobilize American pragmatism to denounce Reason as the most obedient server of power, ‘carried by the irrational forces of interest and emotion to where those forces wanted it to move, regardless of what the inner logic of abstract reason would require’ (Morgenthau, 1946: 155). He quoted William James, who, possibly caught in one of his Kierkegaardian moods, had written that

‘Reason is one of the feeblest of nature’s forces (…). Appealing to reason as we do, we are in a sort of forlorn-hope situation, like a small sandback in the midst of a hungry sea read it to wash it out of existence’ (William James in Morgenthau, 1946: 154).

It would not take much time though for Morgenthau to change the tone as well as the content of his message. Indeed, ‘the Morgenthau of Scientific Man vs. Power Politics was extremely skeptical about finding any scientific knowledge about the world, because, ultimately, the world is romantically tragic and Nietzschean’ (Patomaki, 2002: 36). However, he might have thought that the American audience had little patience for this kind of romantic moaning which it applauded or tolerated only when coming from theological circles – of which Niebuhr still hold the intellectual monopoly – but that would certainly sound very suspicious if uttered by a social scientist; or, Morgenthau probably thought that he needed, first and above all, to establish his reputation as a Scholar in an Academia populated by social and political scientists, many of whom undoubtedly corresponded to the kind of positivist ‘experts’ he abhorred. For this purpose, Campbell Craig offers a good description of his work after suffering the impact of American audiences:

‘Morgenthau altered his position fundamentally after 1946. His Nietzschean philosophy was too extreme for American sensibilities, not only because its extreme pessimism, bordering on nihilism, collided so directly with the traditions of American liberal optimism, but also because its moral relativism with respect to the United States and the Soviet Union was simply unacceptable to a nation – perhaps any nation – searching for meaning in its new and active role in foreign affairs. Keen to introduce his European writing on power politics to an American audience, Morgenthau toned down his grim philosophical understanding of that tradition, emphasizing instead how modern political and technological realities defined the emerging Cold War’ (Craig, The Glimmer of the New Leviathan, 2003: 71).

Patomaki, in turn, describes Morgenthau as ‘a twentieth-century stoic’ who, after having arrived to the United States, had chosen ‘to adopt a position of quasi-scientific neutrality’ for the rest of his career.

‘Here we have the later Morgenthau, who claimed that political realism is the scientific theory of international politics, and the neo-realists, who have become faithful followers of a modern, scientist Hume by borrowing their methodological ideas from positivist economics’ (Patomaki, 2002: 35-6).

One wonders however if such radical shift was not instead a return to a more conservative and

intellectually less vibrant, albeit still prolific, time. Indeed, Morgenthau had been a pupil of Hans Kelsen in Europe and as a law student he could hardly have devoted many lines to Nietzschean philosophy – even though he was a great admirer of Nietzsche and as soon as 1930 had published an article on Sigmund Freud. Instead, the early and continental Morgenthau seemed very much attuned, at least in style and method, to Kelsen’s juridical positivism and to his internationalist Kantianism whose aspiration to universal and normative objectivity did not seem to bother the young student. In fact, Morgenthau had started one of his first essays entitled La Realité des Normes, by praising Hans Kelsen’s work as ‘the most profound oeuvre of contemporary normative science’ (Morgenthau, 1934: 1). But his adherence to Kelsen's ideas would only go this far. Indeed, Morgenthau wanted to maintain the kind of argumentative (almost syllogistic) rigor and terminological and logical precision of scientific enquiry whilst critiquing the idealistic tendencies he saw in Kantian political ontology as well as in Kelsen. As we will see in what follows, he deployed for that purpose an understanding of Reality which he drew from Husserl and which strongly approximates that of scientific critical realism.

2.2. Morgenthau’s dialogue with Husserl

The title of that small monograph was clear in its intent: Morgenthau wanted to fill in what he saw as a gap in contemporary legal thinking which focused in the logical structure of norms, its content and its application. That gap had to do with 'the Reality of Norms' – the title of the piece. In this regard, he noted, the Neokantian school was responsible for making the relative categories of what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’, absolute – as if they had a correspondence with actual reality and, in this case, with actual human behavior. For Morgenthau, humans could not be divided into these categories, unless for the heuristic purpose of a legally guided ethical conduct, the legality of which had to be derived immanently from the reality of human relations - a reality of power. In this sense, similarly to what happened in the case of Critical Realists, Morgenthau was unsatisfied with the naturalization of mental representations as if they could actually correspond to something real.

‘In misunderstanding the relative character of the opposition between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ and in treating the domain of ethics according to the methods of the Kantian critique of Pure Reason, they [Neokantians] created an unbridgeable rift between the two domains’ (Morgenthau, 1934: 4).

In what is another reminiscent passage of a critical realist point of view Morgenthau would add that

‘the conception according to which the opposition between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ is of absolute nature, presupposes that we can consider the two domains as absolute ones, as being the sole phenomena that exists in the world’ (Morgenthau, 1934: 6).

As Reinhold Niebuhr would write 10 years after, Morgenthau poses ‘the problem of reality’ as

the central problem with which we have to deal if we want to reach some, if limited, understanding of life as well as of ourselves. This problem is threefold (as in the case of Sellars): it concerns our consciousness or ‘concept of’; the existence of objects out there; and, finally, how both we and those objects appear as phenomena. In what follows, Morgenthau achieves a brilliant synthesis between phenomenology and the concerns that were at the core of Anglo-American critical realism by exploring those three dimensions of the problem of reality.

Firstly,

‘the problem of reality is above all the central problem of any theory of knowledge that poses the question as to how we can be certain that the content of our consciousness corresponds to an objective reality and under what conditions the knowledge of that reality is possible’ (Morgenthau: 9).

Secondly, Morgenthau remarks that the problem of reality is a ‘problem of ontology’, that is, the unveiling of the ‘objective structure’ of things (Morgenthau: 9). Thirdly, this problem can still be posed as the problem of the relation between the subject as it appears, that is, as phenomena and the objects as they appear to us, as pure phenomena’ (Morgenthau: 9). Regarding this understanding of reality, Morgenthau acknowledges Husserl’s originality in having defined ‘reality’ as what is valid:

‘Reality here means validity, that is, a sort of abstract validity, i. e. logical, instead of normative validity’ (Morgenthau: 9).

By saying this he wants to stress that that reality can be understood as what the immediate perception of the subject ‘validates’ as real – even before it can question such reality:

‘it is this third aspect that Morgenthau sought to engage with: following Husserl’s distinction between real and imaginary definitions, Morgenthau argues that ‘reality’ in such a pure-phenomenological approach signifies abstract (as opposed to normative) ‘validity’. It is this equation of ‘reality’ with ‘validity’ that is key to Morgenthau’s approach, and also completely in line with the work of Kelsen’ (Jutersonke, ‘The Image of Law’ in Williams, Realism Reconsidered, 2007: 105).

As in critical realism, Morgenthau reaches a comprehensive characterization of a phenomenological understanding of truth and reality and, unlike Niebuhr, re-affirms transcendence on the basis of a scientific realism that can rescue science from scientism as well as safeguard legal and social science from a radical rationalism. Morgenthau’s scientific vocation – to use a Weberian expression that was familiar to him – comes out curiously in his early phase and in his later years which adds credence to my point that his mid-phase of the Scientific Man vs. Power Politics corresponded to a popular, although inconsequent, temporary romantic mood. Morgenthau wanted to critique the obsession of modern societies with the reformist and emancipatory power of technique and technology but this did not mean that we could dispense with science altogether. Indeed, Morgenthau agreed with Max Weber demarcation between values and facts and would hold on to it regardless of his criticism to

social scientists. He had criticized Carl Schmitt in the early thirties for loosing sight of a referential point that only science could provide. In regard to Schmitt, Morgenthau remarked, in an essay from 1933 entitled Theorie des Differends Internationaux, that his doctrine

‘is a metaphysics that only loosely resorts to historical or psychological reality. And in face of a doctrine that unquestionably carries a metaphysical character, we can only adopt one of two attitudes: either that of opposing to it a different metaphysics and of critiquing it from the viewpoint of a transcendental principle – which would lead us to abandon the fields of science and to move into that of metaphysics. Or we can try and discern some logical contradiction in the principles or in the deductions of the doctrine in question, thus showing that the ends that the author had proposed could not be achieved by those means he adopted or that the conclusions he drew were in contradiction with his premises. And in the latter case, the critique [to Schmitt] would be immanent, grounded on the theory as such and not in any other unverifiable principle. That critique would therefore have a scientific character, because it would rest in general principles of logic’ (Morgenthau, Theorie des Differends Internationaux, 1933: 46-7).

Morgenthau would adopt the same logical inflexibility and analytical impatience towards Carr. He presents Carr’s political thought as ‘unfortified by a transcendent standard of ethics’ which his rational and logical ethics still allowed (‘The Political Science of E. H. Carr', 1948: 134). Basically, Morgenthau saw Schmitt and Carr as too vague theorists for their contributions to carry any credibility - and it would not be surprising if he privately held the same idea of Niebuhr. Theirs was an unreliable romantic intellectual project and hence one that could not support a proper political ontology, let alone a trustworthy epistemology of international affairs. Morgenthau thought that the kind of desperate romanticism that both Schmitt and, to a lesser degree, Carr demonstrated were a consequence of their realization that the ought was, by definition, unachievable. As for the critical realists and Husserl himself, ‘the question of the specific reality of the psycho-physic act by which the idea, in this case, the ‘ought’, realizes itself, does not exert any influence whatsoever upon the reality of the ‘ought’’ (Morgenthau: 10). The ‘ought’ contained in a norm is grounded in a mode of being and this mode of being cannot do without the ‘ought’. In short, the ought is part of being. Therefore laws will always have to take into account the power arrangements that make those laws necessary and yet possible too. In this sense, he was in agreement with Niebuhr who used Heidegger to spell out his understanding of the human situation as a constant oscillation between 'actuality and potentiality' (Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1941: Ch. VII) where the actuality of power informs the potential for transcendence and vice-versa. But Morgenthau was also manifestly against the revival of a theological world-view that sought to compensate for the faults of modern science. He sought to change social science from within, with the resources that Reason itself provided. Against Niebuhr, he observed that ‘there is no third domain to which we can ascribe a reality that does not belong to either the psychic or the physic and therefore there exists no ideal reality specifically normative that is not a particular variant of the psycho-physic reality’ (Morgenthau: 11). Niebuhr would, as we will see, never have agreed to this and would enroll in a search for a transrational form of transcendence.

As is turned out, Morgenthau was indeed in a rather isolated position: skeptical, but not an anti-Enlightenment thinker as Schmitt or Heidegger or, to a lesser extent, Niebuhr; pessimistic,

but neither a romantic nor surrendered to the wonders of Christian theology; philosophical, but not enough to restrain his belief in science. Indeed, a bit like Weber before him – and indeed owing much to him too. His conception of Law which Morgenthau calls ‘pluralistic’ (Morgenthau: 16) would also stand against Kelsen’s idea of a ‘fundamental law’ from which all others could be derived regardless of their reality. Morgenthau’s realism was therefore totally within the scientific and legal demands of logic and Reason. It made its way through Kelsen’s legal idealism and Schmittian romanticism but partly also against them. In this sense, Morgenthau achieves, in his early years, a critical turn vis-à-vis one of the most succeeded theoretical legal systems by forcing law and ethics to be derived from reality: ‘For Kelsen, the juridical quality of a norm emanates from the fundamental norm; for us, it results from the formal structure of the law as such’ (Morgenthau: 17). This movement against transcendental law was obviously a consequence of his existential sensibility and his concern with international relations – understood as relations of power and conflict of interest. Under the banner of a reviewed balance of power, Morgenthau thought that a system of immanently-derived rights and duties would work better in the context of an already given and therefore real custom-ruled competition between states than in a purely rationalistic and procedural system of law operating from top to bottom:

‘The pure theory of law poses the question of knowing what are the norms of the juridical order of the State and the International Community. We admit, on the contrary, the existence of juridical norms in the formal structure of the juridical norm itself, regardless of the fact that they can be part of a given juridical and national or transnational systems, that is to say, irrespective of their legitimacy as part of those systems’ (Morgenthau: 17).

In critiquing Kelsen, Morgenthau was already introducing his reader to a very particular understanding of international politics where power and a set of rules prudentially built to balance that power could be the main factor of stability and order instead of trying to impose a generalized system of laws with no correspondence whatsoever with the reality of power politics; or, instead of trying to raise ‘the political’ above all other categories of modern culture – including the legal one – as Schmitt had attempted. In this sense, Morgenthau’s faith in logical reasoning led him to adopt what Michael Williams has designated as a ‘strategy of limits’ where each sphere of life (economic, political, cultural) prudentially and progressively negotiates its jurisdiction upon human ethical conduct (Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, 2005: 160). This strategy was not present in Schmitt who placed the political as the overall framing category; or Niebuhr for whom faith and religion should, as I will show in the next part, constitute the fundamental yardstick of human experience, individual and collective. In this sense, Morgenthau was truly much more analytical and scientific than Scientific Man would suggest. Morgenthau’s realism started to emerge both as an epistemological project and then also, and most importantly, as an ontological disposition, privileging a conception of law that could correspond to its object (hence Sovereign Laws would correspond to Sovereign Powers). Naturally, Morgenthau’s vision of political and juridical regimes was already, at that stage, a negative one where states ought to seek protection and defend themselves instead of trusting in abstract systems of law that would guarantee nothing – as the example of the League of Nations had demonstrated.

Morgenthau’s phenomenological (and critical) realism was therefore in his attempt to understand what the world requires from the human subject, what is the exact nature of the world's call upon the subject – instead of putting the subject in a position of constant demand for what the world cannot give – a subject-centered position common to idealists and, in particular, Woodrow Wilson. This implied some understanding of what Husserl defined as the 'life-world' even though Morgenthau never refers to it directly. He undoubtedly demonstrated a constant concern for the (international) environment as constituted by more or less vulnerable power arrangements. He wanted to know how the world is inescapable in its effects upon the human being – and subsequently also upon the states – inexorably leading them to conflict. Furthermore, he believed, against Niebuhr, that these relations could indeed be studied in detail and measured even in spite of all the difficulties. In a later article entitled ‘The Limitations of Science and Social Planning’ Morgenthau concludes with a rather ambiguous claim which however was very representative of his position towards the social sciences and also very revealing of his Husserlian background:

‘Viewed with the guidance of rationalistic, blueprinted map, the social world is indeed a chaos of contingencies. Yet it is not devoid of a measure of rationality if approached with the expectations of Macbethian cynicism’ (Morgenthau, in Ethics, 1958: 184).

Given this background and Morgenthau’s attention to the interplay of agents with their environment, the intellectual fate of Realism could not have been other than that of an intensification and expansion of its scientific tools and analytical scope. It would reach its height with the structural realism of Kenneth Waltz thus moving away from the theological transcendence of Niebuhr which would tend to disappear more and more.

3

Niebuhr, Phenomenology and Critical Realism

3.1. Against Scientific Realism, for a Theological Realism

We have seen how Morgenthau’s legal pluralism was grounded in a rather classical and very sophisticated understanding of knowledge and reality: one which could privilege both consciousness and transcendence and yet preserve the objects of existence outside the sphere of consciousness. In spite of holding roughly the same views about international relations, Niebuhr came from a totally different background. In the case of Morgenthau, the attempt to build up a complex epistemology with objective cognitive ends – especially towards the end of his career – resulted in some indifference towards great transcendental ideals (such as that of the Imago Dei) that could ground a higher morality. For Niebuhr the fundamental doubts that critical realism presented – as any other theory of knowledge for that matter – were just one

more sign of man’s constantly frustrated attempt to subordinate his self-knowledge to Reason instead of attempting to establish an internal conversation with God that could transcend Reason.

Niebuhr thus compensated the lack of sophistication when it came to his philosophy of knowledge with an ethical and mythological substance he drew from Christian theology and especially from the Bible, one that could evaluate our knowledge of reality in strictly moral consequential terms. In that sense, he was hardly concerned with scientific or legal truth - and he has indeed been accused of some relativism. For Niebuhr man's appropriation of truth serves the corruption of individuals and subjects them to pride and group interests. Thus the only authentic truth is, by definition, in the hands of God - and hence unattainable, albeit discernable. As long as our understanding of reality was capable of revealing what Niebuhr thought was the key paradox of the human condition, between creation and destruction, sin and grace, tragedy and hope, doubt and certainty than it could hardly matter what reality really is. To see in the scientific method an end to the quest for truth is to loose the opportunity, or to relinquish the responsibility, of thinking an end for human action and knowledge that can be truly ethical, that is, beyond good and evil.

It should be noted that for an existential theologian such as him reality could not simply be – and in this Niebuhr was certainly with the critical realists in their critique of direct forms of naturalism as well as of solipsistic models of consciousness. Indeed, as we will see, for Niebuhr reality is always mediated and even manipulated for certain purposes – mainly purposes of power. And it is precisely because it cannot be left untouched that it should offer itself to interpretation and judgment. This capacity to transcend reality and history was anyway what characterized the human being and granted him the necessary vantage point from which to look beyond his self-interest. Simultaneously however that same capacity was often used to project that self-interest. Niebuhr’s theological Realism can therefore be summarized in the idea that it is not Reality that matters but what we do with it. And this means to place real experience in the world in a degree of significance then it would otherwise have. It is by focusing on his understanding of reality that we can again spot the differences between him, Morgenthau and the Critical Realists.

The differences between Niebuhr and the critical realism of Sellars can be explained in terms of the latter’s dismissal of existentialism, in particular of Heidegger’s and Jaspers’ versions of it – even though they disliked the label. In an article published in 1961 entitled ‘Existentialism, Realistic Empiricism and Materialism’ Sellars alerted to the fact that ‘Existentialists pay little attention to the empiricist tradition’ and ‘yet it should be plain that empiricism has long opposed essentialism’ (Sellars, ‘Existentialism, Realistic Empiricism and Materialism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1961: 315). In an implicit reference to Niebuhr he applies that judgment to ‘the overtly religious and theologically-inclined existentialists, those who [like Niebuhr] affiliated themselves with the Dane, Kierkegaard’ (Sellars, 1961: 317). Indeed, Niebuhr owed his conception of truth to Kierkegaard (see part 3.4. below) and through it sought to oppose to a scientific understanding of truth. Sellars recognized in Heidegger the philosophical achievement of making clear the reflective nature of human being:

‘Existentialism is a movement to be appraised judicially. It has its own dimensions in human life. Perhaps the question, so widely asked these days, of the “meaning” of human life defines its center of interest. (…) Man is an animal who can ask questions. That is a point that Heidegger makes’ (Sellars, 1961: 318).

But he presented us however with a rather narrow reading of Heidegger so to facilitate the dismissal of his thought later. ‘Of course, these are not new questions’ Sellars claims in the next paragraph. Later on he would complain that

‘While I have made great efforts to appreciate Heidegger and Jaspers, I find their modes of thought a little alien. There is a tendency to call on intuition. Heidegger is making a tremendous effort to penetrate to the revealable depths of Being. He turns his back on representational, or correspondence, theories of truth, something which, I think, is tied in with scientific achievement’ (Sellars, 1961: 318).

Sellars’s critical realism therefore depicts existentialism as the modern turning point where philosophy and metaphysics have ‘turned their back’ at Reason and Science. In this sense, his was a very accurate description of how this sorts of anti-scientific and very skeptical existentialism easily lend itself to theological transcendence - as it did in the case of Niebuhr. For the purpose of this article this passage helps showing how Niebuhr’s undertaking of a Christian Realism would therefore take a similar approach to knowledge and truth and therefore become distant from earlier versions of scientific realism or phenomenology – which has we saw, had been rather influent on the early Morgenthau.

3.2. Niebuhr's critique of Scientific Rationalism and the meaning of Transcendence

Niebuhr charges Arthur Lovejoy for his a blind belief in rationality or ‘rational intelligibility’ as the criteria to measure progress and the social and civilizational achievements of humanity. He observed that

‘Professor Lovejoy does not seek to account for the remarkable persistence of the thesis of the world’s rational intelligibility. But it is not too difficult to see in this effort a typical instance of man’s tendency to overreach the limits of his powers and thereby to obscure the ambiguity of his situation as both a creature of time and a creator of history in time. In so far as he transcends the temporal process he can discern many meanings in life and history by tracing various coherences, sequences, causalities and recurrences (…). But in so far as man is himself in the temporal process which he seeks to comprehend, every sequence and realm of coherence points to a more final source of meaning than man is able to comprehend rationally’ (Niebuhr, Faith and History, 1949: 55).

Lovejoy stood against the always dark picture which Niebuhr constantly painted of the present. He stressed the pointless character of such pessimistic outlook and answered it with the equally sober moderation of critical realism:

‘The main fact is evident. We all find the spectacle of human behaviour in our own time

staggering to contemplate; we are all agreed that the world is in a ghastly mess, and that it is a man made mess: and there is no theme of public discourse now more well worn than the tragic paradox of modern man’s amazing advance in knowledge of and power over his physical environment and his complete failure thus far to transform himself into a being fit to be trusted with knowledge and power’ (Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, 1961: 8).

Therefore Niebuhr’s major issue with Santayana, Lovejoy or Sellars was in their attempt to subordinate religion to a scientific account of reality – even if their conception of science was not as rationalistic nor as naturalistic as Niebuhr painted it. In this sense, Niebuhr's disagreement with critical realists revolved around their understandings of history, transcendence and reality. For Niebuhr, the problem with the belief in science was that it oscillated between a too strong empiricism or a very accentuated utopianism. His belief that ‘there are no essences in history’ led him to accuse Santayana of a certain idealistic foundationalism whose Platonism insisted too much on a strict division between body and mind. Niebuhr saw this as a much more fluid relation, the fixed polarization of which was the primary condition of a scientific world-view. His drawing upon the existentialism of Scheler, Heidegger or Jaspers was very symptomatic of his affinities with major criticisms of the devastating effects of science upon human thinking. Their focus on worldliness would allow theologians to appropriate existentialism for the purpose of stressing man's creatureliness and hence his incapacity to stand outside himself fully as social sciences would have us believe – for why would we need God in that case? Niebuhr would have undoubtedly agreed with Heidegger's claim that 'science does not think'. Like Nietzsche, he was very suspicious of what he saw as modern forms of Platonism and its infiltration in Christian theology. Overall, he was, unlike Morgenthau, an anti-Enlightenment thinker adn this would explain his critique of scientific critical realism.

Christian Realists such as Niebuhr were very concerned with the ethical, political and theological consequences of any form of rationalism. Indeed, the age permitted such a skeptical attitude towards Reason – but also a very narrow understanding of it. It is usually forgotten that American political Realism starts off as an existential theology against Rationalism, also strongly opposed to Romantic nihilism but more sympathetic to its ethical naturalism than to scientific naturalism of cognitive realists. Niebuhr was deeply concerned with the pernicious effects of rationalistic/scientific discourses upon human sociability – in particular, the sociability amongst large human groups and collectives. In fact he saw Fascism and Communism as a combination of the two. Against Sellars, Niebuhr claimed that

‘One of the mistakes of modern naturalism is that “it vibrates as sensitively as idealism” (quoting Sellars) to the foolish idea that natural evolution changes the essential human situation and finally places man in a position of freedom and power in which he can negate the conditions of his creaturehood’ (Faith and History: 84).

Niebuhr's problem with any form of rationalism or knowledge of the mind and the environment of the kind propounded by Critical Realists was that it put forth an emancipatory agenda and a belief in progress. Championed by Sellars or Lovejoy, it sought to override man's worldliness – on, in theological parlance, his creatureliness. For Christian realists, scientific

knowledge was seen as having great affinities with liberal narratives regarding history, the possibility of progress and human perfection. In particular, they were critical of the fact that liberalism naively indulged the 'enlightened' belief that social sciences could improve man morally and politically in the same way that natural sciences had improved man's technical knowledge. Morgenthau had also spotted this problem and was very aware that cognitive progress at the level of natural sciences had not provided any basis for moral achievement (see ‘The Limitations of Science and the Problem of Social Planning’, Ethics, 1958: 174). However, this did not lead Morgenthau, as it did Niebuhr, to abandon social sciences altogether; instead, Morgenthau accepted, ash we saw, the challenge of attempting to change them from the inside. What was Niebuhr concrete answer to Critical realists then? What world-view did he propounded and especially what conception of knowledge and of history as alternative to theirs?

Niebuhr's call for action was usually very vague. Eric Gregory portrays him as an Augustinian liberal of negativist leanings and a proponent of a prudential ethics which remained, for the most part, very vague (see Politics and the Order of Love, 2008). Indeed, against the background of international liberalism, Niebuhr pioneers the critique of social sciences in the history of international thought. In theology, he was probably the first, along with Carl Schmitt, to embrace the modern call for the rise of the Political opposing the dominant liberal discourses that praised 'the cultural' and 'the economic' as fundamental categories of human sociability and self-understanding. Niebuhr thought that modernity was doomed to become a depersonalized society, mostly because of the atomistic effects of the individualism that Renaissance had started and the Industrial Revolution had propagated. It was therefore partly against the backdrop of cognitive Critical Realism that political Realism started. The birth of Realism, whether if we want to place it in the work of the so-called ‘pope’ of IR theory Hans Morgenthau, or in the earlier explorations of Reinhold Niebuhr (whom George Kennan called ‘the father of us [realists] all’), starts with a strong epistemological disposition against reason and naturalism and seeks to deconstruct, by means of the recall of theological myths and symbols, the essentialism and foundationalism of scientific knowledge production.

Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man – his major work based on the Gifford lectures he delivered in 1939 in Edinburgh (from here onwards NDM) – was meant to denounce the reason for the failure of the traditional enquiries into the nature of the human being throughout the history of western thought. In it, it became clear that 'man has always been his own most vexing problem’ (NDM, 1941: 1). Niebuhr indeed shared a fundamental concern with Morgenthau: 'Man as a Problem to Himself’ (NDM, 1941: 1). His discursive strategy relied on the recast of the various approaches to this problematic in the history of western thought. In NDM, Niebuhr studies the various ways through which many have sought to approach Man in its most mysterious features, above all, that of the meaning of existence. In them, he claims, there is always presupposed a certain understanding, if not a definition, of man himself. His contribution to the understanding of this problematic lies not only on the indication of the traps that many of those approaches have fallen into, but on pointing out that the reason for that might be in the contradictory, or at least ambivalent, nature of the human being itself. Niebuhr acknowledges that ‘every affirmation which he may make about his

stature, virtue, or place in the cosmos becomes involved in contradictions when fully analyzed’ (NDM, 1941: 1). In this sense, Niebuhr announces that ‘it is one of the purposes of this volume [the first of two] to analyze the meaning of the Christian idea of sin more fully, and to explain the uneasy conscience expressed in the Christian religion’ (NDM, 1941: 18). His intent is that of arguing ‘that the Christian view of human nature is involved in the paradox of claiming a higher stature for man and of taking a more serious view of his evil than other anthropology’ (NDM, 1941: 14) would do.

Niebuhr existentialism is already patent in the centrality that his political theology attributes to Man rather than God although always stressing the relation between the two. ‘How shall he think of himself?’ asks Niebuhr (NDM, 1941: 1). For Niebuhr, every analysis that men have developed seem doomed to fail as it ‘reveals some presupposition or implication which seems to deny what the proposition intended to affirm’ (NDM, 1941: 1). An example of this is how more traditional standpoints about this problematic have been focused usually in one variable: human reason (NDM, 1941: 1). When looking at man specifically through this variable, Niebuhr claims that man already ‘betrays his unconscious sense of kinship with the brutes’ (NDM, 1941: 1). For Niebuhr, this reveals a ‘note of anxiety’ in that such question fails to go beyond reason and therefore to grasp man as a trans-rational being. Niebuhr’s discursive strategy is therefore one of downplaying reason so to bring out religious transcendence as the ideal alternative. It never occurred to Niebuhr that the monism he denounced in Reason could be a result of his own monistic understanding of it – instead of conceiving of it as ‘dialectical’ or intersubjective. For Niebuhr, clearly, the reason why we are able in the first place to know rationality is that, as humans, we can also stand outside of it – without surrendering necessarily to unreason. This sort of meta-rationality is labeled by Niebuhr as ‘transcendence’: ‘The very effort to estimate the significance of his [man’s] rational faculties implies a degree of transcendence over himself which is not fully defined or explained in what is usually connoted by “reason”’ (NDM, 1941: 1). Niebuhr goes on to say that man ‘has capacities which transcend the ability to form general concepts’ (NDM, 1941: 1) and faith is one of them.

The fundamental duality of man’s existence firstly comes to the fore, in his understanding, in a very traditional and religious way: that of the opposition between good and evil. Along these lines, he develops his history of ideas by characterizing two fundamental modes of thought in the West: one more optimistic that focuses on the good and neglects ‘the particular consequences and historical configurations of evil tendencies in man himself’ (NDM, 1941: 2); another, more pessimistic, that is able to presuppose that evilness but immediately falls into contradiction since such pessimistic judgment would be unattainable were it not for a presumed idea of good: ‘his capacity for such judgments would seem to negate the content of the judgments’ (NDM, 1941: 2). Niebuhr later insists on this problematic by relating it to man’s transcendence over himself:

‘How can man be “essentially evil if he knows himself to be so? What is the character of the ultimate subject, the quintessential “I”, which passes such devastating judgments upon itself as an object?’ (NDM, 1941: 2).

For Niebuhr however, transcendence (even when unacknowledged) seems to be present even in those actions that attempt to deny life, ‘otherwise he could not be tempted to the error from which he is to be dissuaded’ (NDM, 1941: 2). In this sense, ‘committing suicide’ attests for the existence of human transcendental capacities as well as the existence of ‘religions and philosophies which negate life and regard a “lifeless” eternity, such as Nirvana, as the only possible end of life’ (NDM, 1941: 2). Therefore, ‘if one turns to the question of the value of human life and asks whether life is worth living, the very character of the question reveals that the questioner must in some sense be able to stand outside of, and to transcend, the life which is thus judged and estimated’ (NDM, 1941: 2). For Niebuhr henceforth such questioning is not only demonstrative of some features of the object questioned; it itself reveals the capacities of the questioner, so that the question always tells us something about he who poses it. In fact, however insignificant the object of the question might be, it never ceases to reveal the significance of the act of questioning. ‘The vantage point from which man judges his insignificance is a rather significant vantage point’ (NDM, 1941: 3). Only from that standpoint can man ‘negate “life”’ which proves that he ‘must be something other than mere vitality’ (NDM, 1941: 2).

But if transcendence is therefore what characterizes ‘man’s place in the universe’ (NDM, 1941: 2) than this characteristic is also what reveals the fundamental ‘antinomies’ that run through his existence. Niebuhr’s answer to the problem of human existence could not but acknowledge the problematic character of its object, for it would never be a matter of concern otherwise. In this sense, Niebuhr attempts to show throughout his book that historical responses to this problem have forgotten what it was they were attempting to answer in the first place. ‘Every philosophy of life is touched with anthropocentric tendencies’ (NDM, 1941: 2) and it does not surprise him that many of these have been too anxious to give an answer without seeing in the question an affirmation of some human element already. This explains why ‘men have been assailed periodically by qualms of conscience and first of dizziness for pretending to occupy the centre of the universe’ (NDM, 1941: 3). And it is quite clear for Niebuhr – and in fact one of his favorite targets of criticism – ‘that the advance of human knowledge about the world does not abate the pride of man’ (NDM, 1941: 3) nor does it lead necessarily (and apparently) to a better realization of his condition on earth.

However, there is something we can learn from this existential paradox. On the one hand, it is an ‘obvious fact … that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits its varied organic forms, allowing them some, but not too much, latitude’ (NDM, 1941: 3). On the other hand, there is a less apparent feature in human existence: ‘man is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world’ (NDM, 1941: 4). Niebuhr ends the first part of this chapter by identifying the source of problems into which any enquiry into the nature of man necessarily merges: ‘how difficult it is to do justice to both the uniqueness of man and his affinities with the world of nature below him’ (NDM, 1941: 4). Out of this difficulty there have emerged two fundamental tendencies in western thought that have pursued one of the two available roots: Rationalism on one side and Naturalism on the other. He ascribes scientific realism to the first.

According to Niebuhr, whilst Romanticism seems ‘to obscure the uniqueness of man’, scientific rationalism is keen to ‘describe and emphasize the rational faculties of man or his capacity for self-transcendence, to forget his relation to nature and to identify him, prematurely and unqualifiedly, with the divine and the eternal’ (NDM, 1941: 4). This division suits Niebuhr’s own historical-intellectual framework espoused in NDM and, as we will see, mirrors the other fundamental division at work in his enquiry, that between ‘spirit’ and ‘nature’, a division which modern culture has tragically misinterpreted. Naturalists tend to stress the role of nature over reason and the human spirit whilst rationalists have forgotten nature and how the human being remains attached to it. Again, the term political theology (although never used by Niebuhr himself) seems extremely pertinent to characterize his ideational scheme if we understand the political as an appeal to the remembrance of man’s irresistible bond to nature – that is the inevitability of being confronted with actual experience once he exists – combined with the capacity to transcend it – which in Niebuhr, as with any other theologian, is not without theological implications. According to him, the confrontation between rationalists and naturalists was miscarried by Modernity. This is necessary as his political theology, in the context of which a philosophy of experience assumes a new relevance, follows up from it.

Niebuhr never ceases to outline the antinomy that has characterized modern culture since its inception which he clearly locates in western history: ‘It is not unfair to affirm that modern culture, that is, our culture since the Renaissance, is to be credited with the greatest advances in the understanding of nature and with the greatest confusion in the understanding of man’ (NDM, 1941: 2). With irony, Niebuhr claims that ‘perhaps this credit and debit are logically related to each other’ (NDM, 1941: 5). It is clear for him that once the understanding of nature had gained prominence over the understanding of man as two separate objects of enquiry - as critical realism still does -, such development would not only amount to a mere question of priority. Such prioritization would carry an enormous impact upon the substance of man’s most fundamental question which we should keep in mind: ‘how shall he think of himself?’ (NDM, 1941: 1). Indeed, Niebuhr attempts to trace modern predominant discourses about nature and man back to its origins. ‘All modern views of human nature are adaptations, transformations and varying compounds of primarily two distinctive views of man: (a) The view of classical antiquity, that is of the Graeco-Roman world, and (b) the Biblical view’ (NDM, 1941: 5). But the distance that they have gained from their origins offers Niebuhr enough ground for the revival of those traditions, against the background of their modern liberal disfigurement. In fact those two sources – that appear in Niebuhr’s work in a rather simplistic an idealized form – were, according to him, once synthesized in the Catholicism of Medieval Europe (NDM: 5). Of particular import for Niebuhr in this context were the writings of Aquinas in merging Aristotelian with Augustinian thought (NDM: 5). But Modernity did not take this conflation on board and would remain, to the detriment of man's moral achievements, stuck in between the dualism:

‘The history of the modern culture really begins with the destruction of this synthesis, foreshadowed in nominalism, and completed in the Renaissance and Reformation’ (NDM: 5).

Modern culture is seen as weighing a scattering effect upon such synthesis, the ashes of which

the Renaissance and the Reformation had attempted to reconstruct. But ‘in the dissolution of the synthesis, the Renaissance distilled the classical elements out of the synthesis and the Reformation sought to free the Biblical from the classical elements’ (NDM: 5). In Niebuhr’s view, ‘modern culture has thus [and since] been a battleground of two opposing views of human nature’, the unity of which is still sought by what Niebuhr labels ‘Liberal Protestantism’ (NDM, 1941: 5). Such project is considered by him ‘on the whole an abortive one’ as ‘there is, in fact, little that is common between them’ (NDM, 1941: 5). In this sense, Niebuhr sees in modern culture the mere reproduction of the struggle between two irreconcilable ideological movements through a rationalistic framework flawed with the illusion that what was common between Greek and Christian still holds. What happens in fact is that ‘what was common in the two views was almost completely lost after modern thought had reinterpreted and transmuted the classical view of man in the direction of a greater naturalism’ (NDM, 1941: 5).

3.3. The Christian view as an alternative to Scientific Rationalism

In his earlier publication Moral Man and Immoral Society (1933), Niebuhr had already shown the Nietzschean leanings of his post-Marxist suspicion towards capitalism. He referred to Marxist revolutionary ideals in Nietzschean terms as the new ‘transvaluation of values’ leading to yet another ‘slave morality’. Therefore Niebuhr wanted to rescue Christian theology from embarking in ‘Enlightened’ projects of Modernity such as those of Marxism or of Liberalism in general. He wanted to claim for Christian theology the kind of pessimistic outlook of human nature that one finds in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, whilst abstaining from the nihilistic onto-political implications of the former. In epistemological terms however his critique of science and reason was overtly Nietzschean and for that purpose he had to criticize the liberal elements in Christian Orthodoxy. At the end, romantics had lost faith in human transcendence for having associated it with rationalism. Such link was, for Niebuhr, fatal. It was made possible only at a time were religion was being understood erroneously under rationalistic terms. Attuned to the platonic separation between mind and body – which he still criticized in Santayana – this type of Christian psychology betrayed a judgment upon the body which naturalists, and him, obviously rejected. Christian Orthodoxy suggested that the mind had to be privileged as the source of good and the master over the body. ‘Christian psychology and philosophy have never completely freed themselves from this fault, which explains why naturalists plausibly though erroneously regard Christian faith as the very fountain source of idealism’ (NDM, 1941: 13). The instillation of this rationalistic insight into Christianity had made naturalists devoid of a hospitable intellectual home within it. But this was, as Sellars would point out later in the sixties, about to end. In America, Christian theology had found a place for its radicalization, for its reformation but also for the revival of the Bible along modern philosophical lines where it blended with an American version of Existentialism. As Sellars observes in what would be a brilliant description of Niebuhr’s Christian Realism

‘[Existentialism] has a vogue on the Continent where it developed and has affected religious thinking, particularly, on this side of the Atlantic. It has a hortatory way of stressing

individuality, authenticity, anxiety and freedom. The human condition bulks large in its presentations. There is less concern with logic and theory of knowledge and the sciences’ (Sellars, 1961: 326).

Against such movement Niebuhr seeks to restore what he calls the Christian view of man which allows ‘an appreciation of the unity of the body and soul in human personality which idealists and naturalists have sought in vain’ (NDM, 1941: 13). In reclaiming the worth of the body as a constitutive element of human nature, Niebuhr seeks to underscore the existential dimension of the human being as opposed to the traditional essentialist priority of the mind, proper to Cartesian rationalism. ‘God’ so Niebuhr claims ‘is not merely mind who forms a previously given formless stuff. God is both vitality and form and the source of all existence’ (NDM, 1941: 5). Niebuhr traces the biblical unity of mind and body to primitive Hebraic thought where the soul was believed to be in the blood rather than in the mind. He claims that in spite of the later distinction between ruach (spirit) and nephesh (psyche) ‘unlike Greek thought, this distinction does not lead to dualistic consequences’ (NDM, 1941: 14). Another example of the rationalistic distortion (in which Niebuhr seems to insist more than the naturalistic one) is the rational interpretation of the principle of Imago Dei. According to Niebuhr, it has been the mistake of many Christian rationalists to assume that this term is no more than religious-pictorial expression of what philosophy intends when it defines man as a rational animal’ (NDM, 1941: 14). Spirit cannot be confined within the limits of reason. Contrariwise, it is ‘the rational capacity of surveying the world, of forming general concepts and analyzing the order of the world’ that is ‘but one aspect of what Christianity knows as “spirit”’ (NDM, 1941: 14). For Niebuhr the human capacity for transcendence allows us to take reason itself as an object of enquiry. Rationality certainly helps consciousness as ‘a capacity for surveying the world and determining action from a governing centre’ (NDM, 1941: 14).

But self-consciousness moves man beyond mere consciousness and objectification. ‘Self-consciousness represents a further degree of transcendence in which the self makes itself its own object in such a way that the ego is finally always subject and not object’ (NDM, 1941: 14). In this sense, the Christian view of man which compares him to God (as ‘made to his image’=Imago Dei) appears as a more suitable framework to see in man much more than ‘the uniqueness of his rational faculties or his relation to nature’ (NDM, 1941: 14) – as rationalists and naturalists would make us believe. It is in this sense that Niebuhr calls for an ‘essential homelessness of the human spirit’ as ‘the ground for all religion’ (NDM, 1941: 14): ‘for the self which stands outside itself and the world cannot find the meaning of life in itself or the world’ (NDM, 1941: 14). Niebuhr hence appears to thrive beyond naturalism and rationalism in claiming that human freedom ‘is obviously something different from the necessary causal links of nature’ and also very distinct from ‘rationality, since it transcends its own rational processes, so that it may, for instance, ask the question whether there is a relevance between its rational forms and the recurrences and forms of nature’ (NDM, 1941: 15). After defeating rationalists and naturalists, Niebuhr’s concern will be that of a referential transcendence for human nature and action that can guide man’s destiny in the way that nature and reason could not. And the reason for this is simple: man cannot have as a referential for his ethical conduct something

that he can himself transcend - as Critical Realists would have it with the mind, consciousness, intentionality, reason or even the brain. That ultimate reference had to be untranscendable: something that whilst allowing man to transcend earthly things and even himself, stops him from going beyond everything, of knowing and controlling the totality of the universe.

In spite of this, man’s is indeed free for he is able to conceive of (some form of) totality and ‘it is this capacity of freedom which finally prompts great cultures and philosophies to transcend rationalism, and to seek for the meaning of life in an unconditioned ground of existence’ (NDM, 1941: 14). It is not hard to imagine what Niebuhr means by ‘unconditioned ground of existence’. Surely, only a God could provide for such an unconditioned realm and for that reason Niebuhr finds in faith the right attitude for any individual that ‘naturally’ and ‘fatefully’ seeks fulfillment, the only type of ethic that can handle man’s constant swing between a limited existence and the unlimited possibilities that it opens. Niebuhr was now able to reformulate the principle of Imago Dei along existential lines, that is, as a philosophy of knowledge that could only find coherence in the context of a life philosophy devoted to God: ‘God as will and personality, in concepts of Christian faith, is thus the only possible ground of real individuality’ (NDM, 1941: 15). Niebuhr insists that ‘faith in God as will and personality depends upon faith in His Power to reveal Himself. The Christian faith in God’s self-disclosure, culminating in the revelation of Christ is thus the basis of the Christian concept of personality and individuality’ (NDM, 1941: 15). Only though revelation can man be brought into a position where his will ‘founds its end in’ divine will (NDM, 1941: 16): ‘to understand himself truly means to begin with a faith that he is understood from beyond himself’ (NDM, 1941: 16). Niebuhr follows on from this to stress that ‘this relation of the divine to the human will makes it possible for man to relate himself to God without pretending to be God, and to accept his distance from God as a created thing without believing that the evil of his nature is caused by this finiteness’ (NDM, 1941: 16).

To compensate his ideal of human existence as Imago Dei and to counterbalance this kind of idealism with the skeptical mood that is known of all forms of Augustinianism, Niebuhr adds the role of ‘human virtue in Christian thought’ (NDM, 1941: 16). This point is of relevance for as we will see it is in the context of man’s sinfulness that Niebuhr reveals its affinities with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (in particular, in chapters VI and VII). ‘Sin is defined as rebellion against God’ (NDM, 1941: 14) and in this sense Niebuhr will regard every attempt by man to place himself in God’s position as a sinful act. The human being ‘is a sinner not because he is one limited individual within a whole but rather because he is betrayed, by his very ability to survey the whole, to imagine himself the whole’ (NDM, 1941: 14).

In modernity in particular, the rationalist temptation to replace faith with science, revelation with reason, could not escape Niebuhr’s criticism for whom the ‘vitality’ of man ‘expresses itself in defiance of the laws of measure’ (NDM, 1941: 14). Contrary to the scientific spirit which attempts to negate evilness and man and tries to allocate threat to the outside world, Christianity claims that ‘only within terms of the Christian faith can man not only understand the reality of the evil in himself, but escape the error of attributing that evil to any one but himself’ (NDM, 1941: 18). The problematic nature of man thus has this dual meaning: it is

problematic in the sense that it can be questioned and therefore it constitutes a question that discloses being to a whole range of possible answers; but it is also problematic because it represents, in and out of itself, a problem, an existential crisis that needs solving. Man ‘stands at the juncture of nature and spirit’ (NDM, 1941: 18).

Niebuhr argues that ‘the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or to the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom’ (NDM, 1941: 25). As the major opponents to this liberal idea of history Niebuhr gives the examples of Hobbes and Nietzsche (and, in its footsteps, Freud) who have first understood an unconscious ‘will-to-power’, underlying the scientific understanding of man and history. I will now outline how Niebuhr understands and adopts a phenomenological view of the human condition which, based as it is on Max Scheler, represents a theological and mystical departure from Husserl's scientific phenomenology.

3.4. 'Reality' and the phenomenology of Max Scheler

In the beginning of chapter VI of The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr observes that the Christian world-view consists of a credible alternative to the liberal protestant. According to him, its advantage is in the ‘manner in which it interprets and relates three aspects of human existence’ (NDM, 1941: 161). These three aspects are man’s self-transcendence, his finitude and his unwillingness to recognize the first two as mutually constitutive of his nature. Naturally, Niebuhr wants to stress this last aspect as it is the hardest to grasp whilst at the same time the more dangerous:

‘It affirms that the evil in man is a consequence of his inevitable though not necessary unwillingness to acknowledge his dependence, to accept his finiteness and to admit his insecurity, an unwillingness which involves him in the vicious circle of accentuating the insecurity from which he seeks to escape’ (NDM, 1941: 161).

The importance of the paradox in which human existence is involved is in how it leads man to believe that he is either one or the other exclusively. And indeed his historical enquiry categorizes significant efforts to understand man’s fundamental problem (‘himself’) along rationalistic lines - which have conceived of ‘self-transcendence’ in purely rational terms thus deifying Reason; or naturalistic ones - which tend to stress man’s ‘sentimentality’ and reduce his existence to the compliance with the laws of physics. Again, we recall Niebuhr’s characterization of Man as standing ‘at the juncture of nature and spirit’ (NDM, 1941: 18). The enumerated third aspect corresponds precisely to this ‘juncture’ and becomes for Niebuhr the key to the understanding of man - against Morgenthau's denial of a third realm of understanding. Again, Niebuhr coherently maintains his original research plan which is not necessarily that of finding a solution to every single problem - and which would put him in contradiction with the claim that we can never occupy God’s place - but of formulating the problem in a totally different fashion thus allowing for the revival of the Bible as the ethical

cornerstone of any political order based upon human experience. I will argue that this problem-posing attitude necessarily leads to a conception of reality as again a problem which can hardly be dealt by scientific means but is rather enmeshed in political and cultural presuppositions.

We had already ascertained that phenomenological references are not Niebuhr’s main intellectual sources, not even outside the Christian canon. The influence of nineteenth-century existentialism as well as that of American pragmatism has been outlined by many. But it cannot be ignored that within his contemporaries Niebuhr clearly emphasizes the importance of the phenomenology of Heidegger, whom he considers ‘the ablest non-theological analysis of human nature in modern times’ (NDM, 1941: 173). Before that however Niebuhr pays attention to Augustine as the ‘first Christian theologian to comprehend the full implications of the Christian doctrine of man’ Man ‘stands at the juncture of nature and spirit’ (NDM, 1941: 165). Niebuhr is clearly dazzled by Augustine's capacity to describe man’s capacity for transcendence, including his ability to turn transcendence over and against itself: ‘Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself’ Niebuhr quotes (NDM, 1941: 167). Niebuhr claims that Augustine’s conclusions about man are too important to be left unaccounted. ‘The power of transcendence places him [man] so much outside of everything else that he can find a home only in God’ (NDM, 1941: 167). But in order to show how actual experience of the physical world leads to ultimate transcendence Niebuhr needs to explore this revelatory dimension of the experiencing of reality.

Naturally, from Augustinian theology we are already able to understand the subtleties of a Christian philosophy of life: ‘Human life points beyond itself. But it must not make itself into that beyond’ (NDM, 1941: 169). However, this is still not sufficient to give us a proper understanding of the surrounding reality of human experience and for that Niebuhr seems to contradict his own effort to search the past for an existential theology, opting rather for explanations that are closer to his time and mainly of ‘non-theological’ character – as he likes to class Heidegger (NDM, 1941: 173). It might be worth recalling that Heidegger was not at all indifferent to the thought of Augustine, a name that would become central to the phenomenologies of theological overtones such as that of Hannah Arendt (see The Human Condition, 1958, chapter I).

We cannot know for sure how Niebuhr was acquainted with the semi-theological backdrop of Heidegger’s thought – which constituted an intrinsic part of his early academic past as a student in theology, before deciding to enroll in the philosophy degree in Freiburg. However, Niebuhr intended to show how the critique to modern rationalism was echoed by prominent voices in western philosophy and that these unintentionally incorporated biblical elements even when selling themselves as secular theories. With this Niebuhr attempted to show two things: first, that the opposition to a worldview dominated by science was not necessarily religious; second, and in relation to the first, was the fact that it was precisely this secularist support for his critical standpoint that strengthened his conviction that the Bible did indeed offered a more comprehensive view of human nature. In fact, so comprehensive that it could anticipate and embrace even those views thought as ‘non-theological’ (NDM, 1941: 173).

Needless to say that Heidegger’s phenomenology was full of philosophical affinities with Christian theology, let alone that of Max Scheler, whose work is possibly the best example of the combination of the two. This theological appropriation of Heidegger would therefore be seen as an assault only for those who miss the religious aspects of Heidegger’s ontology. And certainly, these would come as very convenient to Niebuhr, unable as he was to explain fully and convincingly how human experience could lead to transcendence without sounding like just another theologian. But such use of phenomenology would obviously carry consequences to the outlook of theology itself – and, I will argue now, it would contribute to make it more political (that is, to make it a ‘political theology’). Let us now look more attentively at the first instance of Niebuhr’s analysis of Heidegger, which comes after Niebuhr’s recognition of the limitations of Augustinianism (which were a product of the still powerful signs of Plato and Aristotle):

‘the ablest non-theological analysis of human nature in modern times, by Heidegger, defines this Christian emphasis [on man as something beyond reason] succinctly as “the idea of ‘transcendence’, namely, that man is something which reaches beyond itself – that he is more than a rational creature”’ (NDM, 1941: 173 quote from Being and Time (B&T), 1927: 49).

From this point onwards Niebuhr embarks in a joint-venture between phenomenology and theology that he will only embrace discretely throughout his work but that will carry, I argue, some weight upon his more concrete political remarks – especially in regard to international politics. In this sense, it is interesting to verify how in spite of the attention paid to Niebuhr’s own particular form of realism, no attention has been dedicated to his use of Scheler in establishing a more solid conceptual framework for a proper grasp of reality and human nature. In fact, Niebuhr picks up from him the concept of ‘Urphaenomenen’ (NDM, 1941: 173). In doing this, Niebuhr makes a significant existential leap in his work: from transcendence as man’s self-understanding in relation to God, to transcendence as man’s self-understanding in relation to real existence as actual experiencing, what Scheler coins as ‘primeval (‘Ur’) phenomena’ (NDM, 1941: 173). Niebuhr thus employs Scheler’s own interpretation of the Bible, in which Scheler is known to demarcate from Husserlian insights into experience and consciousness: ‘Max Scheler, following the Biblical, proposes to use the word “spirit” (Geist) in distinction to the Greek nous to denote this particular quality and capacity in man, because it must be a “word which, though including the concept of reason, must also include, beside the capacity of thinking ideas, a unique type of comprehension for primeval phenomena (‘Urphaenomenen’) or concepts of meaning and furthermore a specific class of emotional and volitional capacities for goodness, love, contrition and reverence”’ (NDM, 1941: 173). Our understanding of experience therefore can only make sense in the relational context of man's dialogue with God - a mystical understanding of experience which critical realists like Sellars would later reject.

For Niebuhr it was clear that the concern with the most fundamental features of the human being which include his capacity to know experience cannot be reduced to a purely cognitive point of view as they were with Sellars and Morgenthau. Knowing by means of ‘concepts of meaning’ is not what the human being is all about. Niebuhr clearly wants to suggest that a

more substantial realm of human transcendence subsists under the mere practical intelligence of human beings, and that it is this ‘spiritual’ realm that is the central locus of his theological enquiry as it has been for many phenomenological enquiries too - such as that of Scheler or Heidegger but not that of Husserl: ‘Scheler is right in his emphasis upon the final dimension of “spirit” in contrast to mere reason’. Niebuhr immediately stresses that spirit necessarily overwhelms reason for ‘what is ordinarily meant by “reason” does not imply “spirit”, but “spirit” does imply “reason” (NDM, 1941: 174, footnote 1). Niebuhr is also quite keen in making clear that while reason appears to be a mere cumulative capacity that man has gained and developed over the years depending on what challenges lied ahead of human action, spirit seems to remain untouched by events and unaltered in its substantial characteristics. In this sense, the spiritual dimension appears also as a more constant element in time and space thus allowing for the generalization of this particular feature to the whole of humankind. ‘The distinction between the two is qualitative and not merely quantitative’ (NDM, 1941: 174, footnote 1).

Clearly, from Niebuhr's understanding of Scheler’s words, man has to think of himself in spiritual terms and having in mind in particular the articulation between ‘experience’ and ‘transcendence’. It is because of this reformulation of what he considers to be a fundamental problem in the history of western thought that we can class him as a phenomenological theologian or a theological phenomenologist. On one hand, where other versions of modern theology had not succeeded in accommodating modern philosophical contributions, Niebuhr appears to do quite well. On the other hand, when phenomenology was taking a more or less secular path in the works of Husserl and later in Jean-Paul Sartre, Niebuhr deploys it to justify a biblical political theology and the need for the search of a collective and ultimate end:

‘man is self-determining, not only in the sense that he transcends himself in such a way as to be able to choose between various alternatives presented to him by the processes of nature, but also in the sense that he transcends himself in such a way that he must choose his total end’ (NDM: 173).

Niebuhr believes that man is much freer than what a strictly rational choice approach would have him; but the problem is that such freedom necessarily leads him to a higher degree of responsibility upon himself and his destiny thus conditioning him. ‘The freedom of which Scheler speaks is something more (and in a sense also something less) than the usual “freedom of choice” so important in philosophical and theological theory’ (NDM: 174). Nevertheless, the irony of such situation, which is the irony of transcendence itself, has not been grasped by predominant interpretations of the Bible throughout history - even though in cases such as Augustine, Kierkegaard and Scheler we were not very far off the mark. It is this concern that moves Niebuhr to engage in such detail with the history of western ideas. He will spell it out even more explicitly when employing Heidegger’s own understanding of the human condition. At stake is man’s unique character in being able to transcend experience so incompletely: ‘”The nature of man (…) and that which could be determined his unique quality transcend that which is usually called intelligence and freedom of choice and would not be reached if his intelligence and freedom could conceivably be raised to the nth degree”’ (Niebuhr quoting Scheler, NDM:

173). In this line Niebuhr grounds his realism in Kierkegaard’s conception of ‘truth’ to spell out the contradictions that the human condition withholds:

“Truth [in the human situation] is exactly the identity of choosing and determining and of being chosen and determined. What I choose I do not determine, fir if it were not determined I could not choose it; and yet if I did not determine it through my choice I would not really choose it. It is: if it were not I could not choose it. It is not: but becomes reality through my choice, or else my choice were an illusion… I choose the Absolute? What is the Absolute? I am that myself the eternal personality… But what is this myself?... It is the most abstract and yet at the same time the most concrete of all realities. It is freedom” (Niebuhr quoting Kierkegaard, NDM: 173).

Again, this brings us to Niebuhr’s realistic interpretation of the concept of the Imago Dei: ‘the real situation is that man who is made in the image of God is unable, precisely because of those qualities in him which are designated as “Image of God”, to be satisfied with a god who is made in man’s image’ (NDM: 175). The fact that unlike God man is in constant and unstoppable relation to reality, to a world of things surrounding and invading him, makes him a privileged, and in fact the unique, interlocutor of experience to God. Only through experience can man reach the ultimate meaning of transcendence and only through transcendence can he expect to fully give meaning to experience and transmit it to God. Meaning appears therefore to bridge between Niebuhr’s theology and Scheler’s phenomenology. For Niebuhr this is ‘the basic problem of religion’ (NDM: 176). Indeed this personalized level of interpretation is deeply contrasted with the sort of impersonal observation that critical realists entertained. It was precisely because of this that Niebuhr sought to explain how faith could reach truths that science would never be able to. In response, Sellars compared Niebuhr’s existentialism with William James pragmatism:

‘Most expositions of it [American Existentialism] begin with Kierkegaard with his aversion to Hegel’s impersonalism and his shift to the subjective and a leep of faith, not altogether unlike William James’s “Will to Believe”’ (Sellars, 1961: 326-7).

In a crucial point of his analysis Sellars goes on to note that

‘Nietzsche is always included, though he was critical of Christianity. I suppose what they have in common is a concern with human life. Existentialism is what the Germans call Lebensphilosophie, a philosophy of human life, a concern with the human situation’ (Sellars, 1961: 326-7).

Therefore meaning-attribution was not a mere rational cognitive process – it was rather one that took place in the world and not outside of it. ‘Implicit in the human situation of freedom and in man’s capacity transcend himself and his world is his inability to construct a world of meaning without finding a source and key to the structure of meaning which transcends the world beyond his own capacity to transcend it’ (NDM: 176). Niebuhr advises against the belief that transcendence is something of a non-human capacity. Transcendence, as it is, is always human and tainted by contingency – and so is the meaning we attribute to the realities outside of us. Contrary to science, we should never believe that the attribution of meaning to particular phenomena (that is, its interpretation as phenomena) is serving an impartial and God-like perspective upon the world.

We should instead be ready to admit that whatever meaning we attribute to the real is conditioned by the obstacles that that real imposes on us, and that it is because of them in the first place that we seek in philosophy, religion and myth to accommodate them into a meaningful life. In face of its overwhelming power therefore man has to admit his limitations and in it in this sense that he must adopt a realist position. ‘the problem of meaning (…) transcends the ordinary rational problem of tracing the relation of things to each other as the freedom of man’s spirit transcends his rational faculties’ (NDM: 175). This type of transcendental or existential realism supersedes a cognitive realism that the natural sciences had made us used to. Insofar as the object of analysis, that is, what is to be transcended, is not a ‘what’ but a ‘who’ (a subject) this means that this object is not bound by those rules which we usually associated with the physical world – hence the need for a new kind of metaphysics or as I had previously suggested a meta-reason which cannot be confused with unreason. ‘This problem [the problem between metaphysical transcendence and practical rationality] is not solved without the introduction of a principle of meaning which transcends the world of meaning to be interpreted’ (NDM: 176). Niebuhr seems to suggest that transcendence is so powerful as to transcend itself – something which reason was apparently unable to do, at least through science. He appears very close to what in late modern terminology has come to be known as deconstruction when claiming that science leads man to ‘idolatry’ in the sense that ‘he uses something which itself requires explanation as the ultimate principle of coherence and meaning’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176).

In approaching this particular problem – ‘the problem of meaning’ as ‘the basic problem of religion’ – Niebuhr adds an important footnote. He reminds us of how Max Scheler himself conceived of the ‘distinction’ between ‘(the freedom of) man’s spirit’ and ‘his rational faculties’. I argue that in this footnote where Scheler in great detail we find one of the most insightful phenomenological leanings of Niebuhr and also one of the most powerful understandings of how phenomenology underpins indeed his link between human existence and human transcendence. Scheler starts by giving the example of what would be a pure scientific analysis of pain:

‘A problem of reason would be the following: “I have a pain in my arm. Where did it come from and how may I be rid of it?” To determine that is a task of science’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176).

With this example, Scheler presents the scientific view of experience as a pragmatic understanding of human phenomenon. Clearly, the problem-solving nature of scientific enquiry is spelled out in the phrase ‘how may I be rid of it [the problem of pain]?’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176). Furthermore, this problem is preceded by the question ‘where did it [the pain] come from’ which allows for the depiction of causality as the temporal framework more suitable for the practicality of the action that biological necessity and survival imposes on the human being, that is, to ‘be rid of it’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176). This interpretation of experience presupposes therefore the purely practical meaning of pain: pain is an obstacle to the carrying of life as usual and science, although being a meaning attribution process that abstracts from the problem in order to seek for a solution, is still operating within everyday life: ‘rational

principles of coherence represent another, somewhat higher, and yet inadequate system of meaning’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176). In this sense they are for Niebuhr a mere ‘subordinate principle’ of transcendence and anyway incapable of providing a proper understanding of existence or even of themselves as a mode of understanding among others (NDM: 176). Against this relativity, Niebuhr claims that science tends to ‘identify meaning with rationality’ and that this necessarily ‘implies the deification of reason’ (NDM: 176).

Causality is an example of how ‘rational faculties’ can hardly stand above themselves for self-criticism. The ‘cause’, understood scientifically, is not a problem as such – in the sense of an existential problem; it is only a practical problem, that is, a problem from the viewpoint of the solution. Therefore, ‘if the effort is made to comprehend the meaning of the world through the principle of natural causation alone, the world is conceived in terms of a mechanistic coherence which has no place for the freedom which reveals itself in human consciousness’ (NDM: 176). In this sense, science is a form of abstraction or a form of theorizing that does not reach beyond everyday life. Scheler opposes to that view the phenomenological understanding of pain:

‘But I may use the pain in my arm to reflect upon the fact that the world is tainted with pain, evil and sorrow. Then I will ask: What is pain, evil and sorrow essentially and of what nature is the ground of all existence, making pain as such, without reference to my particular pain, possible?’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176).

At this stage it becomes clear that Niebuhr adopts phenomenology as an interpretative method of experience, after having ascertain his conviction that rationalism (and naturalism) does not understand human experience – at least not in a way that can explain ultimate human transcendence. Only phenomenology appears to open up experience to that fundamental human characteristic and hence open existence to God. ‘The fact of self-transcendence leads inevitably to the search for a God who transcends the world’ (NDM, footnote 1: 177). Experience becomes the central realm where the fundamental problem of human existence must be posed and answered for. In this sense, we can understand that for Niebuhr both empiricism/naturalism and rationalism are wrong in insisting that the object of enquiry that would allow for a better understanding of the human being is either in him (in his mind) or in the world around him. Indeed, experience shows that it is somewhere in between the two – indeed a phenomenological implication but without the scientific detail provided by Husserl or later by Sellars. However, for Niebuhr, as for Heidegger or Scheler, that epistemological separation corresponds to just another mode of being or way of existing: that of the human being as a knowing being. Niebuhr deconstructive enterprise therefore suggests the decentralization of man’s intelligibility away from its positivist and now dominant focus: the mind vis-à-vis world. This is because ‘a mind which transcends itself cannot legitimately make itself the ultimate principle of interpretation by which it explains the relation of mind to the world’ (NDM, 177). Only through a 'theological phenomenology' is man able to avoid the risk of lifting ‘some finite and contingent element of existence into the eminence of the divine’ as Niebuhr claims man does with the divinization of reason (NDM, footnote 1: 177).

We conclude from this that Niebuhr’s theology (also in its political outcomes) is not only profoundly existential but also concretely phenomenological although in its theological and anti-scientific version: one does not attribute meaning to pain so that by obtaining a clearer understanding the problem can then be solved; rather, from the meaning we attribute to pain some idea of what it means to exist must be extrapolated. Heidegger had started a metaphysical revolution against Husserl under the claim that 'only as phenomenology is ontology possible' (Being and Time, 1927: 60). Niebuhr would appropriate it only to reclaim the legacy of Biblical theology which stressed of man's cognitive and existential limitations: absolute knowledge and absolute existence could be found only in God and man would forever be reduced to witnessing that fundamental truth which biblical mythology and in particular the idea of miracle confirmed. Naturally, he would never have turned that principle upon God himself, whose ontology could not be dependent on its appearing to the subject (phenomenology).

3.5. Existentialism vs. Critical Realism

On a footnote in chapter VII, Niebuhr develops rather thoroughly his more profound understanding of Heidegger in regard to his concept of Sorge, or as it is translated in English, ‘Care’ or ‘Anxiety’. Before going into the intricacies of the translation which Niebuhr himself points out as well as his appropriation of Heidegger in this instance, I should note that his exploration of the Heideggerian understanding of anxiety is not without consequence. After it, Niebuhr will make use of the concept of anxiety along these lines to the extent that whenever he refers to the term anxiety it springs to mind this specific understanding – instead of that of Kierkegaard’s ‘angst’ which he had hinted at previously. And in fact the four long paragraphs that proceed from this one (and close the second part of the seventh chapter) start off with the word ‘anxiety’ or the correspondent adjective ‘anxious’. I will now look closely at the footnote and then move on to explore his closing remarks on the idea of ‘anxiety’. After having done this, I will present a brief discussion about the concept of Sorge in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit so to make clear Niebuhr’s own take on the matter.

At the core of Niebuhr’s understanding of anxiety, the basic existential structure of Being, something Heidegger calls ‘geworfenen Entwurfs’ (footnote, NDM: 196). This German term refers to the ambivalence between ‘contingency’ and ‘potentiality’ that characterizes human existence. Even regretting that the English language ‘makes the distinction between Angst and Sorge impossible’ and that therefore ‘both of them must be translated as anxiety’ Niebuhr explains that ‘this double connotation, according to Heidegger, is clearly revealed if Sorgfalt is juxtaposed to Sorge, that is care as carefulness to care as anxiety’ (footnote, NDM: 196). From this detailed insight we can conclude that for Niebuhr ‘contingency’ refers to man’s carefulness about the world around him while anxiety necessarily points beyond that contingency, once his ‘potentiality’ is revealed. He quotes Heidegger in affirming that man’s ideal of ‘perfection’ has precisely to do with Sorge, that is, the fact that man’s care for the world can hardly account for the potential that that world reveals when experienced – that is the potential for perfection. Thus, it is experience of ‘care about’ the world and ‘being cared for’ (by the world) that

automatically places man in a non-contingent position:

'Heidegger calls attention to the significant double connotation of the word " Care", Sorge, cura, that is a double connotation revealed in many languages. He writes “The perfection of man, his becoming what in his freedom he can become according to his ultimate possibility, is a capacity of care or anxiety (Sorge). But just as basically care points to his being at the mercy of an anxious world, of his contingency (Geworfenheit). This double connotation of cura points to a basic structure in man of contingency and potentiality' (geworfenen Entwurfs)" Sein und Zeit, I. 198.

For Heidegger too, perfection is not something that lies outside the being for him to aspire to it. It is rather a sort of totality that emerges from the subject interaction with the environment and allows him to dominate, even if partly, that environment. Perfection is not an ideal-type that comes from the outside of everyday life. In this sense, perfection is never perfect in the absolute sense, it is only perceived as so. Indeed, this seems to confirm Niebuhr’s view that absolute ideals are always necessarily ‘tainted’ with contingent elements: Man ‘is unable to define the total human situation without coloring his definition with finite perspectives drawn from his immediate situation’ (NDM: 196).

But the so-called ‘care-structure’ does not only represents man’s condition on earth, it also points towards the temporality or historicality of his existence. In fact, the title from which Niebuhr collects these remarks by Heidegger is in itself symptomatic of man’s existential dialectical condition: Sein und Zeit (in English Being and Time). Being and time points precisely to the idea that the Being of the Subject necessarily induces him into a time framework. Because present always reveals a future possibility (including the possibility of not Being), we cannot think of ourselves as not oriented towards some future. In this sense, in Niebuhr, as in Heidegger, man is never pure ‘actuality’; he is always, from the outset, placed in a position of a potential to be fulfilled and looks at actuality from the viewpoint of the fulfillment of that potential. In this sense, his Being is always in time (although this does not mean that Being is always present). Or to put it better, the human subject would not Be were it not for his historical consciousness of a future, which nevertheless emerges from his interaction with the immediate reality. Niebuhr formulates this though in the following terms: man would never reach transcendence if there was nothing for him to transcend from in the first place. The world becomes therefore a necessary, although not necessarily sufficient, condition for his getting beyond the purely physical world (metaphysics).

The human being is thus naturally metaphysical, for otherwise he would not be able to conceive of the ‘physical’ as such (that is, as something out there that I can touch, feel, smell and ‘care’ about). His observer stance is a immediate consequence of his practical stance: he becomes an observer because he is, above all and from the start, a practitioner; he contemplates possibilities because his actions, were it not for his capacity (‘Sorge’) to step back and reflect, would fail to achieve their goals. In this sense, the Present ends up being a mere tool in the machinery of a strategic action oriented towards the future. The same applies to the Past. They are only meaningful, and therefore brought into a cognitive status (of something that can be known and deserves to be known) if they carry in themselves some possibility (of a future).

It is also in this sense that Heidegger, in the quote that Niebuhr presents us, classifies the world (and not only the subject) as anxious. The world is an ‘anxious world’ because it lies out

there waiting to be given full potential and in that sense it is a contingent world, whose immediacy subsequently bears on potentiality: the potential is always the potential of something contingent. Man could not expect to potentiate something if that thing was not in a stage of overt incompleteness, that is, placed in some sort of passive anxiety, ‘present-at-hand’ to use Heideggerian terminology. This relates to our early discussion of Morgenthau's concern for the Environment and of how it affects the subject's intentionality and his capacity to actualize it. However, in Niebuhr and in Heidegger this line would be explored more deeply to establish a relation to the divine that Morgenthau , Husserl and Sellars rejected. As a theologian Niebuhr was more concerned with the ethical implications of this human circumstance, that is, with what it tells us about social interaction and, even more importantly, about politics. The fact that contingency always defies itself by revealing hidden and unexpected potentials, while still never allowing for that potential to be fully realized, stresses the difficulty of our knowledge of those limits: ‘There are, of course, limits but it is difficult to gauge them from any immediate perspective’ (NDM: 196). But besides that point, we are still to know if those possibilities are worth realizing and to what extent they are creative. For a ‘tamed cynic’ like Niebuhr, the border between ‘sinful action’ and ‘moral action’, that is, our capacity to predict if the potentiality that contingency opens up for the human being is good, is still a very blurred one: ‘It is not possible to make a simple separation between the creative and destructive elements in anxiety’. He goes on to argue that ‘for that reason it is not possible to purge moral achievement of sin as easily as moralists imagine.’ (NDM: 196).

The duality between contingency and potentiality therefore seems to provide, for Niebuhr’s purposes at least, a conceptual framework for posing the problem of human nature, rather than presenting a solution. In this sense, Niebuhr’s realism appears as a problem-posing theory, rather than a problem-solving one. This critical motive goes well with his Heideggerian inspired deconstruction. In fact, his whole work consists of a history of ideas whose authors have attempted to solve the problem of human nature and destiny in various different ways – and have failed to do so. The ones that, according to him, come closer to an understanding of the problematic inherent to human life are Scheler and Heidegger. But even these philosophers have only succeeded in framing the problem, not in presenting a solution. As he sees it, that problem is a moral one and he formulates it in these terms:

'The same action may reveal a creative effort to transcend natural limitations, and a sinful effort to give an unconditioned value to contingent and limited factors in human existence' (NDM: 196).

For Niebuhr, man should look at the fundamental condition of Sorge with some prudence (‘Man may, in the same moment, be anxious because he has not become what he ought to be’) while at the same time making sure that we never compromise it totally (and also anxious lest he cease to be at all’ (NDM: 196)). But, although we are still not able to discern a solution to this problem, we can say why some of the solutions will fail or have failed in the past according to Niebuhr. Above all, we should make sure that we never forget that potentiality is never fully disjointed from contingency and that any doctrine or theory that suggests so is oblivious to the dangers of such position.

But Scheler, as much as Niebuhr, would give it the necessary theological twist: existence becomes the condition not only of my particular understanding of pain but also of an understanding of pain in general, that is, ‘without reference to my particular pain’ (NDM,

footnote 1: 176). Pain is therefore elevated to the status of human suffering and gains a transcendental moral dimension that animals cannot reach and science could not explain. It results from this that we are to understand existence not only as a privileged locus of pain or of experience in general, but as the proper locus of the following (existential) possibility: to interpret pain in such a way that allows us to give meaning to existence as such and in general - that is, in relation to God. Naturally, the experience of pain is not kept in the present, that is, in the actuality of that experience. The experiencing of pain projects itself upon the future, it opens the possibility that I might feel pain again during my existence. It might also remind me of painful experiences of the past. But, above all, while opening up that possibility, the experiencing of pain no longer allows me to think of my own existence as painless. Therefore, existence, precisely because it reveals this potential also unveils its conditioned character. Whenever existence opens up a possibility for the Being it immediately ties it down to his conditioned existence. In short, it is because existence is such a world of possibilities that it is also so worldly. Only experience can confront man with other possibilities – he would not need considering completing his existence were it not for its incompleteness.

Unlike scientific enquiries of any kind, theology was for Niebuhr the appropriate cognitive framework that could face and embrace the fact of man's epistemological and ontological incompleteness – whilst remaining faithful to a higher plane of knowledge that could constitute the yardstick for measuring the relative validity of science and rationality. Niebuhr relativization of scientific truths could only obtain in the context of a higher transcendence, that of religious truths. He remained skeptical therefore of man's moral capacity for amelioration, especially when his ideal of perfection was now deployed through a mundane tool (science) for the sake of mundane purposes (rationality) instead of being sought through faith in God. From the point of view of critical realism faith was obviously insufficient. Sellars impatience towards Heidegger and Jaspers clearly signed that. His opposition to this sort of ‘philosophical genre’ as he would call it – which he thought of as overly mystical and romantic – was itself very symptomatic of the divide between Anglo-American philosophy and the continental mode of thinking. Indeed, what was central in this divide – as well as to his unstated disagreement with Niebuhr – was the old scientific problem of falsifiability. The major contention of Sellars against existentialism - and the sort of realism propounded by Niebuhr - was in the fact that its claims were scientifically unverifiable. In critical realism, rationality and logic were placed as the yardstick of comparison between both Realisms (Christian and Critical) – and it was precisely against this yardstick that Niebuhr stood, suggesting a Godlike transcendence as alternative to it. Not without some irony, Sellars protested against continental philosophy:

‘I do not want to give the reader the impression that British and American philosophers are not concerned with the human condition. It is only that they want to approach with as few untested assumptions as possible’ (Sellars, 1961: 327).

In another article, he clearly targeted the kind of existentialism that had, after Heidegger's demarcation from Husserl, gained theological overtones. Indeed, Niebuhr had accommodated Heidegger’s insight into the human condition which characterized it in biblical fashion as one

of thrownness (see Being and Time, 1927: 179). Sellars sought to preserve the idea that although the human being was fundamentally conditioned by his environment, one should not take the environment as given in experience. In other words, Sellars sought to secure Husserl against Heidegger’s assault:

‘Concepts are tools which interplay with the sensations in the same cognitive direction. As percipients as well as agents we are in the world, not thrown into it’ (Sellars, ‘Referential Transcendence’, 1961: 11).

Indeed, Sellars seemed to think of the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre as the bastard son of Husserl’s phenomenology even though ending up with the hope that one day they could be, along with historical materialism and empiricism, combined to form a more exact picture of human existence and knowledge. Truly, a great expectation when considering the philosophical landscape of today.

Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to draw some fundamental differences between Niebuhr’s epistemological framework and Morgenthau’s. I have done so by resorting to a comparison between their theories and the more classical versions of Critical Realism, namely that of its founder: Roy Wood Sellars. Clearly, Morgenthau’s stands much closer to this type of enquiry than Niebuhr. This has to do mainly with the strong theological input of Niebuhr’s Christian Realism – but also with its tragic outlook on the state of international relations which draws on more radical sources (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Scheler and so on). In turn, Morgenthau’s proximity to critical realism stems not only for his rhetorical and methodological turn – after having left Europe for the United States – but also from his formative stage in legal theory and phenomenological theory. From the point of view of Critical Realism – as defined above – Morgenthau’s Realism appears therefore much more concise and accomplished.

However, one is left with the feeling that the ethical insufficiencies of Critical and Scientific Realism – obsessed as it is ‘to know’ – does leave some empty room for more reflection regarding the role that knowledge plays in the construction of a meaningful life – a space that Niebuhr, along with other types of existentialist theologies, seemed to fill in. On the other hand, Niebuhr’s writings appear sometimes on the verge of moralism and religious paternalism. His discourse is repetitive and at times very vague, showing no concern for the exact meaning of some central concepts, adding no analytical depth to the historiography of international relations. Unlike Niebuhr, Morgenthau shows occasional commonalities with Critical Realism, mainly in the rejection of naturalism and on its focus on transcendence conceived scientifically rather than theologically, thus saving international relations and political thought in general from becoming engulfed in mystical concerns.

This paper has achieved three things which, as far as I am aware, have not been of central

concern to any intellectual history of international relations. First, and foremost, it has established an important connection or, at least, a comparison, between American Critical Realism – especially that of Sellars – and the Political Realism of Niebuhr and Morgenthau. The other two contributions of this paper are derivative from the first one. On the one hand, it has been argued that there are some similarities between the Critical Realism of Roy Wood Sellars and the quasi-scientific realism of Morgenthau. I have attempted to show that this is due to their engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. On the other hand, the differences between Niebuhr and Morgenthau were highlighted through the recast of Niebuhr’s reliance on the Existentialism of Scheler and Heidegger on the basis of which Niebuhr’s critique of Scientific Realism can be spelled out. Overall, I have attempted to demonstrate that in spite of being political realists in broad terms, Niebuhr’s theological background and Morgenthau’s legal scientific one, allow for different characterizations of their Realist discursive strategies, in particular regarding their epistemological framework and the place of science, reason and the possibility of knowledge in their thought.

Guilherme Marques Pedro

29th of June 2009