Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself Essay Text

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kierkegaard: love thy neighbor as thyself as a basis for ethics thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. Matthew 2 40, av when you open the door which you shut in order to pray to god, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful! kierkegaard, p.64 1 introduction this paper is a philosophical exploration of some aspects and implications of the second great commandment , to love thy neighbor as thyself , which kierkegaard called the royal command. Macquarrie several times notes his opposition to the belief, that moral laws are the heteronomous commands of a transcendent deity who demands obedience.

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P.219f and even worse, imposed on creatures from whom he is 'wholly other', a command, moreover, which they have no capacity to obey except by grace alone, while this grace, in turn, seems to be also external and has to be 'infused' from outside. P.221 kierkegaard wrote that, to the pagan, this command 'you shall love' will not only surprise him but will disturb him and be an offence to him. P.41 it may perhaps offend you 151 well, you know it anyway, that christianity is always accompanied by signs of offense. P.74 the thesis of this paper is that, setting aside the question of moral offense that has disturbed commentators from thomas paine the age of reason to william empson milton's god , agape to neighbor makes sense only under monotheistic or specifically christian assumptions, and therefore, the old saw, christianity may not be factually true, but it has a sublime ethical teaching , is problematical.

Some of these issues are discussed in the sections below: 2.1 how is love for god like love for neighbor? 2.2 is god's love for me like my love for neighbor? 2.3 how is love for neighbor like love of self? 2.4 is there any real distinction, in agape. Among neighbors? 2.5 how can loving be commanded? 2.6 why love my neighbor? 2.1 how is love for god like love for neighbor? the first great commandment is to love god the second, like unto it , is to love one's neighbor. What is the nature of like ? god is loved as god neighbor cannot be loved in the same way without that love's becoming idolatrous outka, p.53. But it could be held that my love for neighbor is actually love for him as an image of god, not for the neighbor himself. I love my neighbor because i can see god in him, and i cannot see god better anywhere else. But in this view, my neighbor has no intrinsic worth for me, but only worth as god's representation vorstellung ? .

My love is not for my neighbor himself, or for any of his unique or common qualities, but only for what he so incompletely represents to me. How do i love god by loving my neighbor? the answer is not apparent to the 'pagan' mind, even if man is the image of god. I can love agape another human being without necessarily seeing him as a surrogate for god very time i express that love. 2.2 is god's love for me like my love for neighbor? god's love for me is supposed to be unmerited i cannot earn it and equal offered to each without distinction.

Divine grace, according to nygren, is the pattern and prototype for human love outka, p.155. For barth, human love imitates divine love it is similar to god's love, but not identical to it outka, pp. I am called by god to love each neighbor equally and without regard to merit or valuation, like god's love for me. However, god's love for me is given freely and spontaneously, and without any motivation other than the giving of love itself, at least in nygren's account outka, p.155. Unlike god's love for me, my love for my neighbor is not to be freely and spontaneously given, but given in obedience to a divine command.

But then the love object can be any thing, at god's free choice, not necessarily man. And if so, my neighbor has no prior or inherent value not only to god, but also to the neighbor himself. Again, without a pre existing commitment to monotheism, this 'like' is not compelling. 2.3 how is love for neighbor like love of self? the command is to love thy neighbor as thyself . Others, more psychologically, hold that self love is a pre condition for love of anyone else. Still others consider the qualification to be a handy measure of my love for others 151 it has to be at least as strong as my love for myself.

The neighbor must be a second self , the same sort of entity that i am to myself otherwise, self's loving his neighbor has no logical relevance to self's loving itself. Outka wrote that the neighbor is held to be more than a conjunction of observable properties and not identifiable with behavour. He also quoted austin farrer in saying the first step to regard our neighbour as ourself is to see that he is as real as oneself, and that his reality has the same sort of actual structure and quality as our own. But this cannot be: for the self is either the subject of its world or which for heidegger, for instance seems to amount to much the same thing see zimmerman, passim the self is void or openness.

In either case the neighbor is not, ontologically, a second self not subject. Therefore loving one's neighbor as the self is either impossible or, at best, arbitrary. 2.4 is there any real distinction, inagape , among neighbors? the royal command is often taken to mean that one must love one's neighbor regardless of any particular merit on the neighbor's part. Pride would seem to inhere in self's opinion that it can pick and choose among neighbors kierkegaard's selfishness of preferential love p.58 , not that it should choose all neighbors. If my neighbor cannot do anything to me to merit or lose my love, then in some important sense i cannot be affected by him. In effect, there is only one neighbor in the world, and he/she/it is very much im personal. 2.5 how can loving be commanded? is not love, by its nature, a free gift, freely given, as god himself is said to love and gives himself in grace, freely? how then can i be commanded to love without that love's being at least diminished, perhaps destroyed? outka wrote, paraphrasing hildebrand, that affective responses possess a certain human richness which the will lacks.

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The affective responses cannot be engendered by pure effort and are therefore not under the self's immediate control. How then can love be commanded? outka, p.126 i am responsible for my affective responses , and cannot turn them on and off on demand. Kierkegaard also noted the problem: the very mark of christian love and its distinguishing characteristic is this, that it contains the apparent contradiction: to love is duty. Kierkegaard, p.40 god may give me grace to love my neighbor, as he gives me grace to love himself. Kierkegaard, p.16 a possible solution is linguistic: not all commands are imperatives on the model of a military order some statements that look like commands really imply in order to achieve y, which you have already decided you want.

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