Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T07:03:48.913Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Loving Kindness and Mercy: their Human and Cosmic Significance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2019

John Cottingham
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper starts by examining the language used in some well known scriptural passages where the importance of mercy or compassion is stressed. Such passages underline the ethical importance of a direct, physically and emotionally involved response. This leads on to a critique of the shortcomings of approaches to ethics which advocate the impersonal promotion of welfare; our lives as ethical beings depend intimately on the immediate responses arising from our encounters with others in our day-to-day lives. The paper then further explores the special status of loving kindness and mercy in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and argues that secular ethical systems, whether grounded in human nature or in the supposed requirements of rationality, are unlikely to be able to underwrite this kind of status. The final section reflects further on the ‘cosmic’ significance of love in a theistic worldview.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 27 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 A point made by Gill, Robin, Why does God allow suffering? (London: SPCK, 2015), 34Google Scholar.

2 For those interested in the grammar, the Latin verb misereor, ‘I pity’, normally takes the genitive (as in the famous Psalm 51 [50], Miserere mei, Deus), but sometimes the dative; so both nostri, as in the Vulgate, and nobis, as in the Agnus Dei, are grammatically correct.

3 misertus, a variant of miseritus, the normal past participle in Classical Latin.

4 See Nicolas King, ‘From the Beginning’, The Tablet, 12 December 2015, 10–11.

5 McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 93Google Scholar (slightly adapted). It should be noted that associating these two modes of awareness with the right and left hemispheres, respectively, is something of a schematic approximation, as McGilchrist himself stresses. There is evidence to suggest that in most people the respective functions do broadly correlate with neural activity in the relevant halves of the brain, but in normal subjects there is constant interaction between the halves.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886], §37.

7 See Thomas Nagel, ‘Ways to Help’, Times Literary Supplement 20 November 2015, 3–4, reviewing MacAskill, William Doing Good Better (Guardian: Faber, 2015)Google Scholar, and Singer, Peter, The Most Good You Can Do (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

8 William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (c. 1603), Act II, scene 2.

9 William Blake, Jerusalem (1805), ch. 3.

10 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), Ch. 4: ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’.

11 David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Section V, part 2.

12 Nussbaum, Martha, Love's Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 282Google Scholar.

13 Foot, Philippa, ‘Nietzsche's Immoralism’, In Schacht, R. (ed.) Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

14 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1605), Act IV, scene 1.

15 Weil, Simone, ‘He whom we must love is absent’ [c. 1941] in Thibon, G. (ed) La Pésanteur et La Grace (Paris: Plon, 1947)Google Scholar, trans. M. von der Ruhr as Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 2002), 110.

16 Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, section IX, Part 1.

17 Williams, Bernard, ‘Replies,’ in Altham, J. and Harrison, R. (ed.), World, Mind, and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 199Google Scholar.

18 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785], Ch. 2, §25.

19 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §202.

20 In this and the following section I take up some of the points made in my ‘Love and Religion’, in Grau, C. and Smuts, A. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), Ch. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals [Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785], Ch. I, §10, trans. Hill, T.E. and Zweig, A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 201Google Scholar.

22 May, Simon, Love: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 18Google Scholar.

23 For these Stoic formulations, see Long, A. and Sedley, D., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l987)Google Scholar, §§63A and B.

24 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradise [La Divina Comedia: Paradiso c. 1310], final line.

25 Housman, A. E., ‘The laws of God, the laws of Man’, in Last Poems [1922], repr. in Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956)Google Scholar.

26 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’ [1929], in Philosophical Review, 74 (1965), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (1849), CXXVI.

28 May, Love, 6–7.

29 Harris, Sam, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion (London: Bantam Press, 2014)Google Scholar, 14, 17, 18.

30 Comte-Sponville, André, The Book of Atheist Spirituality [L'esprit de l'athéisme, 2006] (London: Bantam, 2008)Google Scholar, 150ff.

31 Comte-Sponville, André, A Short Treatise of the Great Virtues [Petit Traité des Grandes Vertus, 1996], (London: Heinemann, 2002), 276Google Scholar.

32 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)Google Scholar, Ch. 8; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations [Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1953], transl. Anscombe, G. E. M. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), §23Google Scholar.

33 Cottingham, John, Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 See Moser, Paul, The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.