{Is all so-called virtue merely ‘virtue signaling’? Are we all entitled to benefits based on our 'perpetual moral disabilities'? Such were the arguments made some 1600 years ago by Bishop Augustine of Hippo, the man who invented the introspective conscience of the West. 1 For Augustine, human reason, passion, and will were an unholy trinity that ruled over the human soul; neither individually nor in any combination could they be trusted. What was left? Faith, of course, and divine grace; in what follows, however, there is little of those. Instead, and what makes this essay of such interest, E.J. Hundert explains how Augustine ruthlessly applied a hermeneutic of suspicion to every human action, motive, and virtue; we learn that Augustine was a pioneer of deconstruction (of human behavior) and unmasking (of human moral pretensions). You might even refer to Augustine’s moral reasoning as CMT: Critical Moral Theory.}
“Reason is and must always be the slave of the passions.” (David Hume)
“All human acts cry out to be deconstructed…” (E.J. Hundert)
E.J. Hundert on Augustine’s understanding of "the divided self":
Augustine argued that reason itself, rather than providing suitable criteria for moral choice in rational beings, only functions instrumentally in self-interested creatures. Reason offers to human actors strategies for the attainment of their ends, but in no way can unaided reason provide efficient guidance to an agent for the choice of these ends themselves, since they are always objects decided by the passions alone.
Augustine’s reasoning explains how beings who were created in God’s image and who retain, even in their fallen state, the capacity for rational choice, are nevertheless drawn to the evil they properly despise. When Augustine disobeyed his parents and teachers as a boy, he did so not because he wanted to do something better with his time but from no other motives but frivolity and competitiveness. When he and his friends stole some pears from a neighbor’s orchard, they did so not because they wanted to eat but for the singular desire to be wicked: the act of theft itself made the indifferent fruit delicious.
Most evil deeds appear rationally unintelligible because the satisfactions they bring bear no necessary relation to the intrinsic worth of their objects. They remain inexplicable if considered within the context of the traditional moral argument that sought in reason’s governance a bridle to passion’s power. Augustine claimed that the impulse to evil cannot be accounted for by bodily or social circumstances external to the soul, just as his own experience demonstrated (he insisted) that evil acts were not the consequence of false beliefs induced by fallacious reasoning. The paradox of evil derives from the fact that it appears fully formed and fully effective even in the young and well-nurtured child whose will could not plausibly have been so perversely shaped by the environment in which he lived.
Augustine isolated the paradox which lies behind all purely mortal achievements by bringing into sharp focus the final emptiness of human virtues. Every worldly action, regardless of its apparent grandeur, must in fact properly be reduced to its elemental, self-regarding sources if it is to become morally comprehensible; and none more so than the apparent ‘loftiness’ of the great and the seemingly charitable acts of the mighty. Indeed, all human acts cry out to be deconstructed into the merely outward expressions of unacknowledged inner needs, the forever incomplete and so active attempts at happiness by morally blind sensibilities living under the dominion of their overpowering and incomprehensible wills.
Such moral rigorism was the conceptual foundation of an ongoing project developed by Augustine’s early modern successors. If the proper account of action depended on an exact evaluation of emotions, then the moralist had before him an enormous, virtually never-ending task of psychological decoding. Just as vice sought by dissimulation to parade as virtue and so cried out for exposure, almost all apparent virtues were themselves only the residue of one hidden, self-interested passion checking another. Self-deceived but ever seeking to deceive their fellows, men resembled nothing so much as actors consumed by the performative requirements of the parts they played.
It was possible to conceive of an individual’s life as a journey of self-discovery; even so, any presentation of the self within this life was an act tainted by self-regard. Obsessive seekers of the world’s applause, men were obliged to conceal from the gaze of others those signs of pride whose exposure would reveal as unobtainable the ‘delights’ they compulsively sought from society.
Thus, after Augustine, the bringing to consciousness of hidden impulses through the activity of unmasking became for Christian intellectuals a duty, one of placing before a properly chagrined consciousness the otherwise concealed evidence of the self’s perpetual moral disabilities.
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Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self on JSTOR (Original publication 1992)
1 Credit for that invention had long been given to Paul the apostle, but Krister Stendahl debunked that claim decades ago.
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