Von Hildebrand on the Roots of Moral Evil

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61989592%3A15260%2F23%3A73620541" target="_blank" >RIV/61989592:15260/23:73620541 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/7/843" target="_blank" >https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/7/843</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel14070843" target="_blank" >10.3390/rel14070843</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Von Hildebrand on the Roots of Moral Evil

Original language description

In this article, I sketch, both in broad outlines and in selected details, the new, richer picture of von Hildebrand’s account of moral evil as it emerges from my discovery of extensive materials in von Hildebrand´s Nachlass at the Bavarian State Library in Munich dealing with the “roots of moral evil”. These manuscripts and typescripts, the critical edition of which will be published at the same time as this article or shortly thereafter, show that von Hildebrand´s account of moral evil is much richer, more nuanced, and complex than the one we can glean from the final section of Ethics, his magnum opus in moral philosophy. In this article, I also aim to situate von Hildebrand´s analysis of the roots of moral evil in the context of both Christian religious thought and the Western philosophical tradition. Von Hildebrand was, to be sure, an heir to both of these traditions, despite the thrust of his phenomenological method to “bracket” all extant theories and turn “back to the things themselves”. The mind-boggling feature of the tension between von Hildebrand´s existential rootedness in the Catholic tradition and his methodological distance to it, including the Aristotelian–Thomist philosophy, is the following: On one hand, he claims that the two ultimate roots of moral evil are pride and concupiscence, which sounds perfectly traditionally Christian. On the other hand, however, he strips these concepts of most of their traditional connotations and endows them with the meaning they acquire in the context of his phenomenological analyses. The intriguing result of this approach is the transformation of religious or moral theological concepts of pride and concupiscence into descriptive phenomenological categories which encompass an almost inexhaustible wealth of various subspecies and subordinate forms of moral evil.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60302 - Ethics (except ethics related to specific subfields)

Project

—

Continuities

S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach

Publication year

2023

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Religions

ISSN

2077-1444

e-ISSN

2077-1444

Volume of the periodical

14

Issue of the periodical within the volume

7

Country of publishing house

CH - SWITZERLAND

Number of pages

15

Pages from-to

843-857

UT code for WoS article

001036409200001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85166346440