3 - A hermeneutical account of self-relation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2009
Summary
Self love is not first and foremost about the self's interests vis-à-vis her neighbor's. It is a more fundamental problem of proper self-relation. An ethics of right self love, then, requires rich normative anthropologies. Yet as the first two chapters showed, such anthropologies face important challenges. This chapter begins to argue for a particular approach to moral anthropology, a hermeneutical account of self-relation. It insists that the basic activity of self-understanding or interpretation is central to self-relation. In this way the approach accommodates and fruitfully relates key insights of theological and contemporary secular approaches to the self. Theologically it is faithful to the claim that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Self-relation reverberates within the self's relation to God. Yet a hermeneutical approach also recognizes that human beings construct systems of meaning to orient themselves in the world. These systems include claims about God. For this reason, I begin with some comments about self-understanding and self-relation and then develop them in a constructive theological manner by engaging the work of Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich. Specifically, this chapter argues: (1) that the person is created in relation with God, (2) that the person's self-determination constitutes a response to God, and (3) that this relation and response are best characterized in terms of love. In doing so this chapter initiates an interpretive or hermeneutical account of self-relation and argues that self-relation is reflexive, embodied, and interpretive.
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- Self Love and Christian Ethics , pp. 81 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002