University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
Department of International Politics
A brief intellectual history of Early
Realism in IR: a Critical Realism?
Niebuhr, Morgenthau, Phenomenology and Critical Realism
Essay Paper for the International Association of Critical Realism,
International Relations Panel, Rio de Janeiro, July 2009
Guilherme Marques Pedro
(Ph.D. Candidate)
Introduction
This article seeks to differentiate the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) from
the quasi-scientific Realism of Hans Morgenthau (1904-1980) on the basis of their reading of
phenomenology and of critical realism. I argue that a closer reading of their reception of these
philosophical traditions shows how they derive from them different understandings of Reality,
human and social, and of the role of science. In turn, this reception history is expected to
explain the different epistemological conceptions that they deploy in their work – in spite of
the overwhelming set of commonalities. By comparing their reception of phenomenology –
namely Morgenthau's reception of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Niebuhr's engagement
with Max Scheler (1874-1928) – I want to claim that, contrary to Niebuhr, Morgenthau’s later
Realism came to replicate a very similar epistemological framework to that of the early Critical
Realism of Roy Wood Sellars (1880-1973). Due to time restraints I will not go into the
differences between Sellars and other major figures of early Critical Realism such as Arthur
Lovejoy (1873-1962) and George Santayana (1863-1950). I will rely mostly on Sellars selfunderstanding of Critical Realism - which invokes these three names as its key proponents and
shows close links to the phenomenology of Husserl. I will also use the terms Critical Realism
and Scientific Realism interchangeably and for the sake of making the argument clearer I will
temporarily suspend their differences.
I argue that Morgenthau’s has a different take on 'the problem of Reality' than that of Niebuhr,
one that is due in part to Morgenthau's more analytical mode of thinking the real, which
contrasts with Niebuhr’s mythological and existential understanding of it. At the
epistemological level, Niebuhr grounds his realism – in his major work The Nature and Destiny of
Man (1941, 1943) – in Scheler's theological departure from Husserl's phenomenology and in
Heidegger’s Nietzschean revolt against it. Furthermore, Niebuhr accommodates his reflections
on the nature of truth and reality in his broader reception of Kierkegaard and Augustine and
demarcates himself from the essentialism of Santayana, the rationalism of Lovejoy or Bertrand
Russell and the Critical realism of Sellars. Contrary to Niebuhr, Morgenthau’s epistemological
realism remains, in spite of his occasional Nietzschean moods, less prone to the sort of theoontological skepticism of Niebuhr and would, over time, become more analytical, more
positive and perhaps less normative and prophetic than that of his mentor. I contend that this
is due to Morgenthau's early engagement with the legal positivism of Kelsen which he had
sought to compensate with Husserl's understanding of phenomena. For the purpose of
demonstrating the links between phenomenology and critical realism, I will rely mostly on
Gary Gutting’s (1978) demonstration of the proximity between Husserl’s ideas and Sellars's
own. The affinities between Sellars and Husserl will in turn show where Morgenthau
approximates critical realism and where Niebuhr departs from it. I want to claim that where
Morgenthau differs from Niebuhr is in that his realism is not only non-theological but
ultimately scientific, phenomenological (in the Husserlian sense) and therefore critical in the
sense suggested by Sellars.
In order to demonstrate Niebuhr’s and Morgenthau’s understanding of Reality, the
epistemological status they attribute to the social sciences, how they react to phenomenology
and how they relate to Critical Realism, I will recall the fundamental tenets of phenomenology
and Critical Realism. I will highlight Morgenthau's gradual approximation to this sort of
scientific approach and describe Niebuhr's demarcation from it. Indeed, as Lovejoy's critique
of Niebuhr's pessimism demonstrates, right in the beginning of his Reflections on Human Nature
(1961), critical realism was not entirely indifferent to the development of neo-classical realism
in Interwar and Post-War America. After all, it was already a well-known method of knowing
with scientific, although non-rationalistic, aspirations. As an epistemology, it represented a
critique of American Pragmatism and of the so-called direct Realism (or New Realism) – which
believed in direct correspondence between reality and rational description of it and sought to
equate the objectivity of natural sciences with that of the social sciences. Morgenthau held
similar views to those of critical realists, namely regarding the role of rationality and the status
of science – especially in regard to social sciences and the possibility to objectively know the
human being. Nonetheless, his suspicion towards science, which became clear in his critique of
John Dewey in his first publication in American soil – Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946) –
would tend to decline throughout the Post-war years. I want to argue that this move towards
an increasingly scientific account of International Relations would bring him closer to the kind
of scientific realism that Niebuhr sought to criticize. Hence, Morgenthau, together with some
critical realists of the period, presents strong affinities with Husserlian phenomenology. A
closer look into one of his early articles, entitled La Realité des Normes, which appeared in 1934,
clearly reveals them. Finally, from it we will be able to discern how Niebuhr's theologically
mediated understanding of transcendence allows for an epistemological critique of rationality
and of science that is not founded in Morgenthau even if both of them remain politically
skeptical.
1
Critical Realism and Phenomenology
1.1. A brief introduction to Critical Realism and Phenomenology
Critical Realism was a reaction against a direct form of realism that, throughout the nineteenth
century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, identified the external world with the
knowledge that we, as subjects, produce of that world. This type of direct realism can also be
seen as a kind of pure positivism in that it conceives of the human mind as a tabula rasa that
passively receives experience, neither changing it nor mediating it. Critical Realism wanted to
dispute this. It was founded by Roy Wood Sellars who published a book with the same title in
1916. But since then he has also sought to extend the scope of the category so to include other
names such as those of Arthur Lovejoy, George Santayana, Broad or even Bertrand Russell –
although not without some reservations.
Phenomenology had emerged as a philosophical approach to human experience from the
writings of the German logician Edmund Husserl in the beginning of the twentieth century
(namely from his Logical Investigations -1901). Indeed, his aspiration was a scientific one in the
sense that he sought to establish in the consciousness of experience the ultimate source of
truth. The key argument of phenomenologists is that only through the experience of the
surrounding reality does the subject become conscious of himself – he is a subject because he
is subjected to the world. In this sense, intentionality does not only precede cognition – it actually
determines the subject qua subject. In experiencing its environment the subject reacts
intentionally not because he freely chooses too, but because his body and mind cannot perceive
and absorb everything. So intentionality towards the world is what underpins the subject’s
consciousness of things and of himself. Therefore intentionality can be defined as the given
organization and conduction of otherwise chaotic perceptions into a stream of consciousness
that is both coming from and directed at an object.
Critical Realism concerns itself, together with the broader philosophical movement of
phenomenology, with the nature of knowledge. In short, both phenomenology and critical
realism – or, for that matter, scientific realism – seek to question the mode of knowledge that
science entertains so to aver of its possibility. In this sense, besides opposing to positivism,
both phenomenology and critical realism also reject the kind of perspectivism in which the
knowing subject can determine the reality of the object through interpretation as well as the
kind of direct naturalism (or new realism) according to which knowing the object of
perception corresponds exactly to the presence of the object. In this regard. Roy Sellars
highlighted the outstanding role of Husserl ‘in his stress on logical description’ (Sellars, 1961:
331). Sellars saw it has an important contribution in the context of the rather vague and
unverifiable theories that originated in Continental Europe after the existentialist turn. For
critical realists such as him, and for more traditional phenomenologists such as Husserl (the
father of phenomenology), knowledge must lie somewhere in between these two poles. For
this reason it can neither be considered as radical cognitive critique nor as an extreme realism.
Critical realists further stand against this dualism which ultimately leads to monism: knowledge
is conceived as lying completely in the object known or depending strictly on the subject’s
consciousness. They claim that ‘it is the mediateness of knowledge that is stressed’ (Sellars, What
is the correct interpretation of critical realism?, 1927: 238). Much as in phenomenology, consciousness
becomes the centre of the experience of knowing. However, since consciousness is always
consciousness of something and ‘we always think of a concept as a ‘concept of’ (Sellars, Referential
Transcendence, 1961: 3), the mind cannot be taken in isolation from experience nor can
experience be taken separately from the mediating role of the mind. This is the case even if the
object exists without the experience of it being perceived by consciousness:
‘When knowing is made explicit, it is found to be interpretative of objects, themselves not given
in consciousness, toward which the organism and its mind are directed in accordance with a
technique which has a realistic basis in the nature of things. The structure of this knowing must
be carefully and empirically worked out. It will then be found that psychological structures and
distinctions make possible a reference to that which transcends consciousness existentially. It
will be seen, then, that critical realism makes much of consciousness and its categories. Here we
have an emergent level without which knowing would be impossible. It is, however, a level
intrinsic to the highly evolved human organism with its use of communication and symbolism’
(Sellars, 1927: 238-9).
The problem then becomes one of defining accurately what the ‘characters, meanings, and
propositions in terms of which the knower interprets the selected and meant object’ (Sellars,
1927: 239). This is why critical realism can at this stage also be understood as a form of
representationalism – even though the representation of objects does not affect in any way their
existence outside the realm of consciousness. This is an important point to keep in mind when
we come to deal with Morgenthau’s conception of Law vis-a-vis Reality. Sellars is, in his own
description of critical realism, very aware of the danger of generalization and calls attention to
the possibility of some disagreement between critical realists regarding the nature of the
objects once they are given in experience: ‘one group may hold them to be Platonic universals
and complexes of universals, while another takes a more conceptualistic and empiricist view’
(Sellars, 1927: 239). He criticizes Santayana for holding on to an understanding of objects of
representation as corresponding to ‘essences’ – a view from which he departs along with
Arthur Lovejoy and others. This type of Critical Realism has, however, many problems. I shall
highlight one of them so to facilitate the bridge to the following part which is devoted to
Morgenthau’s reception of Edmund Husserl.
For critical realists of this period, the medium of any cognitive experience is what Sellars calls
the ‘psycho-physical organism’ (Sellars, 1927: 239). He stresses, against Calkins, that critical
realists do not have to conform themselves to the idea that ‘meanings are non-mental’ (Sellars,
1927: 239). However, if this is true, it is also true that these entities cannot be mere mental
states, otherwise nothing would authorize me to ascribe them to external objects (ibid.). Sellars
responds to this with the typical phenomenological recipe: when the subject attempts to know
an object he or she rarely intends to know it absolutely and in all its possible features. In this
regard, Sellars seems to open the possibility – which had been the historical landmark of
Husserl’s own enterprise – that knowledge is always selective from the start. What is it that
makes it selective? What is the criterion of selection? Sellars and Husserl would agree in that
knowledge is mediated by intentionality - even though they place it in different realms of
experience. Intentionality is understood here as a sort of mind-directedness towards some objects
rather than others or some parts of the same object rather than other parts; therefore a holistic
conception of knowledge is impossible, proving wrong the proponents of direct realism. To
quote Husserl, ‘intentionality involves our individuating objects in consciousness’ (The Crisis of
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy,
(1936) 1995 : 381). In this sense, Phenomenology can indeed be compared with a sort of
solipsism and it is not coincidence that Sellars ends his analysis by admitting to have ‘pondered
Berkeley long and carefully’ (Sellars: 241).
1.2. Critical Realism as phenomenological Realism
Before explaining how this can help us understanding and distinguishing Niebuhr's and
Morgenthau’s own versions of political Realism, it is important to clarify the strong affinities
between Husserlian phenomenology and Critical realism. In an article written in 1978, Gary
Gutting starts by stressing the differences between the two. Gutting wants to show how
Phenomenology and Critical Realism are commensurate and can open the way for a correct
version of scientific realism that can compensate for the faults denounced by
phenomenologists (Gutting, ‘Husserl and Scientific Realism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 1978: 43). In a passage which already signs some commonality between critical realism
and phenomenology - under the label of a ‘critical phenomenological approach to science’ Gutting affirms his purpose: ‘to join with the critical phenomenological approach (…) for the
“subversive” end of providing a basis for a critical justification of scientific realism’ (Gutting,
1978: 42-3). To this he adds a ‘caveat’ of fundamental importance:
‘Certainly there are texts in Husserl (e.g., Logical Investigations and Ideas I) that seem much more
congenial to a realistic view of science. I have bracketed these interesting and important
historical issues for the sake of a more forceful and unambiguous formulation of the
phenomenological challenge to scientific realism’ (Gutting, 1978: 43).
Gutting succinctly summarizes these differences by focusing briefly on Husserl’s
understanding of science as a process of ‘idealization’ where ‘concrete empirical phenomena
are thus of interest only insofar as they approximate idealities – i.e., insofar as we can posit
“beneath” the empirical phenomenon an exact mathematical entity (e.g., an ideal triangle) to
which the empirical phenomenon approximates’ (Gutting, 1978: 44). Against this Gutting
points out that the emphasis of modern science has been exactly the opposite: ‘Idealizations
are of interest to the scientist only insofar as they provide a convenient way of approaching the
complexities of empirical reality’ (Gutting, 1978: 44). Furthermore, Gutting will also argue that
in Husserl it is mostly the life-world that determines the content of ideas – a formulation
summed up in the concept of ‘eidetic ontologies’. Indeed, Husserl hesitates throughout his life,
when it comes to claim some essential predicates to all life-worlds – and therefore to all forms
of human cognition. As Gutting sees it (or wants to see it),
‘his primary emphasis is on the need for any possible object of experience to exhibit,
spatiotemporal location, causal connections, and irreducibly qualitative properties. Such
requirements clearly do not determine the specific first-order predicates that describe the world
and so are not inconsistent with a properly formulated rejection of the myth of the given’
(Gutting, 1978: 55).
Gutting thus notes that scientific realism is in opposition to Husserl only if we take his
phenomenology to mean that there are first-order predicates (like colors or a particular
determined shape) which are essential to certain environments and objects. However,
‘if the essential features were limited to such general characteristics as having some kind of
qualitative predicates (like but not necessarily identical with our familiar colors) or having some
sort of geometrical structure, then there would be no contradiction with scientific realism (…).
Husserl’s actual discussion of the essential “ontology” of any life-world seems to support an
interpretation along the latter lines (cf. Crisis, pp. 139ff)’ (Gutting, 1978: 55).
Gutting concludes by stating that the work of Wilfred Sellars – Roy Sellars’s son and an
important figure in more recent forms of Critical realism – ‘the similarity to Husserl is striking’
(Gutting, 1978: 56). One could indeed say the same thing about his father. Indeed, Husserl’s
intent to make of philosophy a rigorous science was not irrelevant to (Roy) Sellars, whose
objective was to define, under the banner of critical realism, a ‘referential transcendence’ where
the subject is conceived as transcendent only in relation to a life-world referent. As we will see this
conception of transcendence as relational also appears in Morgenthau and, in a very different
way, in Niebuhr. Their views on science appear in the midst of an existential approximation
between philosophical critical thinking and the reality of facts. In the same way, Sellars
observed that ‘it is here that science and philosophy can make contact' (Sellars, 1961: 2). And
in a another very eloquent demonstration of this life quest, Sellars would claim that
'I can, myself, feel the hot breath of science on my neck as I deal with it’ (ibid.).
So it is in the cleavage between science and philosophy that the question of intentionality gains
a new meaning. The American scholar Hubert Dreyfus has referred to Husserl’s understanding
of intentionality has beyond mere intentions. In an interview made available online, Dreyfus
stresses that by intentionality Husserl was referring to an essential ‘mind-directedness’ present
in
every
subject,
irrespective
of
his
life-world
(see
Dreyfus,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaGk6S1qhz0). Indeed, he also refers to the term
‘aboutness’, a concept which Sellars himself would use later on to spell out his own
understanding of what he referred to as ‘referential transcendence’ (Sellars, 1961: 3):
‘To speak for myself, I was a direct realist but regarded perceiving as a mediated operation,
guided by sensations but concerned with things in the framework of response. Cognizing
evolves from a disclosing use of sensations to a stage in which reference and characterization
have developed with the growth of concepts and language. The framework is now that of
aboutness with a strong sense of physical things, their manipulation, and the applications of
concepts to them’ (Sellars, 1961: 6).
The idea that objects are in control of our own perception of them meant a revolution in
traditional metaphysics and philosophy of mind which placed the subject in the centre of the
world. However, in both Phenomenology and Critical Realism this did not mean the exclusive
determination of the subject by its environment but rather a more complex implication: ‘The
visual field is causally controlled in us by the things we are looking at. It is a circuit of return’
(Sellars, 1961: 3). Indeed, the intentionality of the subject is partly imposed by the
environment’s input upon the mind; but without the mind the action that responds to that
environment could never be formulated. ‘After all, our sense organs were not evolved without
a function to perform, that of a guided adjustment to the environment’ (Sellars, 1961: 6). Since
it is this ‘directedness’ that founds consciousness, intentionality can thus also be understood as
the leap of the world upon the subject: ‘in looking at a thing, or manipulating it, we are acting under
its control’ (Sellars, 1961: 2). In other words, if we want to understand how knowledge works
than we must try to apprehend the way in which our environment calls us, that is, how it
configures us according to its own needs and final ends. In short, how we are part of our
environment and yet above it. Whilst Morgenthau sought a scientific formulation of this
problematic, Niebuhr opted for a theological understanding of it and this meant, as we will
now see, a totally different understanding of relationality and transcendence.
Sellars ideal of a ‘Referential Transcendence’ allowed him to do away with the kind of
theological understanding of Transcendence that Niebuhr endorsed, one that sought to
circumscribe science and physical knowledge to a higher form of belief: that of faith. In one
passage of the same article Sellars would claim that ‘we do not need to get mystical about
transcendence’ (Sellars, 1961: 6). For the remainder of this paper I will attempt to show how
Morgenthau adopted this line of scientific realism precisely to escape the traps of forms of
realism that were beyond science, unfalsifiable, more prone to mysticism and to theological
imagination. Contrary to him, Niebuhr took transcendence in a totally different direction and
therefore became very critical of the type of epistemological realism propounded by Sellars or
Lovejoy. Indeed, Niebuhr did 'get mystical about transcendence’ (Sellars, 1961: 6).
2
Morgenthau, Phenomenology and Critical Realism
2.1. Morgenthau’s reception of Phenomenology: towards a Critical Realism?
The skepticism of Morgenthau towards social sciences and a technocratic Modernity would
not be surprising were it not for his later incorporation of them. In America, Morgenthau
clearly adopts the same vocabularies he had critiqued, and of which he seemed strongly
suspicious, at least in his early phase – the result of which was the publication of Scientific Man
vs. Power Politics in 1946. Patomaki very eloquently shows Morgenthau’s intellectual revolt
against the reformist idealism of social scientists and what he saw as the takeover of ‘rational
scientism’ in the academic fields of international relations and political science during the war
years:
‘Just listen to him in his most Nietzschean moment, contrasting idealizations of ‘scientific man’
to the brute ‘realities of power politics’ (…):
“Aristotle anticipated this modern problem, as so many others, when he remarked in the Nicomachean Ethics:
‘Intellect itself, however, moves nothing. When rationalism was reaping its philosophical triumph Hume could say:
‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve
and obey them” (Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, 1946 quoted in Patomaki, After
International Relations, 2002: 154).
Having recently arrived in America, Morgenthau was able to mobilize American pragmatism to
denounce Reason as the most obedient server of power, ‘carried by the irrational forces of
interest and emotion to where those forces wanted it to move, regardless of what the inner
logic of abstract reason would require’ (Morgenthau, 1946: 155). He quoted William James,
who, possibly caught in one of his Kierkegaardian moods, had written that
‘Reason is one of the feeblest of nature’s forces (…). Appealing to reason as we do, we are in a
sort of forlorn-hope situation, like a small sandback in the midst of a hungry sea read it to wash
it out of existence’ (William James in Morgenthau, 1946: 154).
It would not take much time though for Morgenthau to change the tone as well as the content
of his message. Indeed, ‘the Morgenthau of Scientific Man vs. Power Politics was extremely
skeptical about finding any scientific knowledge about the world, because, ultimately, the world
is romantically tragic and Nietzschean’ (Patomaki, 2002: 36). However, he might have thought
that the American audience had little patience for this kind of romantic moaning which it
applauded or tolerated only when coming from theological circles – of which Niebuhr still
hold the intellectual monopoly – but that would certainly sound very suspicious if uttered by a
social scientist; or, Morgenthau probably thought that he needed, first and above all, to
establish his reputation as a Scholar in an Academia populated by social and political scientists,
many of whom undoubtedly corresponded to the kind of positivist ‘experts’ he abhorred. For
this purpose, Campbell Craig offers a good description of his work after suffering the impact
of American audiences:
‘Morgenthau altered his position fundamentally after 1946. His Nietzschean philosophy was too
extreme for American sensibilities, not only because its extreme pessimism, bordering on
nihilism, collided so directly with the traditions of American liberal optimism, but also because
its moral relativism with respect to the United States and the Soviet Union was simply
unacceptable to a nation – perhaps any nation – searching for meaning in its new and active role
in foreign affairs. Keen to introduce his European writing on power politics to an American
audience, Morgenthau toned down his grim philosophical understanding of that tradition,
emphasizing instead how modern political and technological realities defined the emerging Cold
War’ (Craig, The Glimmer of the New Leviathan, 2003: 71).
Patomaki, in turn, describes Morgenthau as ‘a twentieth-century stoic’ who, after having
arrived to the United States, had chosen ‘to adopt a position of quasi-scientific neutrality’ for
the rest of his career.
‘Here we have the later Morgenthau, who claimed that political realism is the scientific theory of
international politics, and the neo-realists, who have become faithful followers of a modern,
scientist Hume by borrowing their methodological ideas from positivist economics’ (Patomaki,
2002: 35-6).
One wonders however if such radical shift was not instead a return to a more conservative and
intellectually less vibrant, albeit still prolific, time. Indeed, Morgenthau had been a pupil of
Hans Kelsen in Europe and as a law student he could hardly have devoted many lines to
Nietzschean philosophy – even though he was a great admirer of Nietzsche and as soon as
1930 had published an article on Sigmund Freud. Instead, the early and continental
Morgenthau seemed very much attuned, at least in style and method, to Kelsen’s juridical
positivism and to his internationalist Kantianism whose aspiration to universal and normative
objectivity did not seem to bother the young student. In fact, Morgenthau had started one of
his first essays entitled La Realité des Normes, by praising Hans Kelsen’s work as ‘the most
profound oeuvre of contemporary normative science’ (Morgenthau, 1934: 1). But his adherence
to Kelsen's ideas would only go this far. Indeed, Morgenthau wanted to maintain the kind of
argumentative (almost syllogistic) rigor and terminological and logical precision of scientific
enquiry whilst critiquing the idealistic tendencies he saw in Kantian political ontology as well as
in Kelsen. As we will see in what follows, he deployed for that purpose an understanding of
Reality which he drew from Husserl and which strongly approximates that of scientific critical
realism.
2.2. Morgenthau’s dialogue with Husserl
The title of that small monograph was clear in its intent: Morgenthau wanted to fill in what he
saw as a gap in contemporary legal thinking which focused in the logical structure of norms, its
content and its application. That gap had to do with 'the Reality of Norms' – the title of the
piece. In this regard, he noted, the Neokantian school was responsible for making the relative
categories of what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’, absolute – as if they had a correspondence with
actual reality and, in this case, with actual human behavior. For Morgenthau, humans could not
be divided into these categories, unless for the heuristic purpose of a legally guided ethical
conduct, the legality of which had to be derived immanently from the reality of human relations
- a reality of power. In this sense, similarly to what happened in the case of Critical Realists,
Morgenthau was unsatisfied with the naturalization of mental representations as if they could
actually correspond to something real.
‘In misunderstanding the relative character of the opposition between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ and in
treating the domain of ethics according to the methods of the Kantian critique of Pure Reason,
they [Neokantians] created an unbridgeable rift between the two domains’ (Morgenthau, 1934:
4).
In what is another reminiscent passage of a critical realist point of view Morgenthau would add
that
‘the conception according to which the opposition between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ is of absolute nature,
presupposes that we can consider the two domains as absolute ones, as being the sole
phenomena that exists in the world’ (Morgenthau, 1934: 6).
As Reinhold Niebuhr would write 10 years after, Morgenthau poses ‘the problem of reality’ as
the central problem with which we have to deal if we want to reach some, if limited,
understanding of life as well as of ourselves. This problem is threefold (as in the case of
Sellars): it concerns our consciousness or ‘concept of’; the existence of objects out there; and,
finally, how both we and those objects appear as phenomena. In what follows, Morgenthau
achieves a brilliant synthesis between phenomenology and the concerns that were at the core
of Anglo-American critical realism by exploring those three dimensions of the problem of
reality.
Firstly,
‘the problem of reality is above all the central problem of any theory of knowledge that poses the
question as to how we can be certain that the content of our consciousness corresponds to an
objective reality and under what conditions the knowledge of that reality is possible’
(Morgenthau: 9).
Secondly, Morgenthau remarks that the problem of reality is a ‘problem of ontology’, that is,
the unveiling of the ‘objective structure’ of things (Morgenthau: 9). Thirdly, this problem can
still be posed as the problem of the relation between the subject as it appears, that is, as
phenomena and the objects as they appear to us, as pure phenomena’ (Morgenthau: 9). Regarding
this understanding of reality, Morgenthau acknowledges Husserl’s originality in having defined
‘reality’ as what is valid:
‘Reality here means validity, that is, a sort of abstract validity, i. e. logical, instead of normative
validity’ (Morgenthau: 9).
By saying this he wants to stress that that reality can be understood as what the immediate
perception of the subject ‘validates’ as real – even before it can question such reality:
‘it is this third aspect that Morgenthau sought to engage with: following Husserl’s distinction
between real and imaginary definitions, Morgenthau argues that ‘reality’ in such a purephenomenological approach signifies abstract (as opposed to normative) ‘validity’. It is this
equation of ‘reality’ with ‘validity’ that is key to Morgenthau’s approach, and also completely in
line with the work of Kelsen’ (Jutersonke, ‘The Image of Law’ in Williams, Realism Reconsidered,
2007: 105).
As in critical realism, Morgenthau reaches a comprehensive characterization of a
phenomenological understanding of truth and reality and, unlike Niebuhr, re-affirms
transcendence on the basis of a scientific realism that can rescue science from scientism as well
as safeguard legal and social science from a radical rationalism. Morgenthau’s scientific
vocation – to use a Weberian expression that was familiar to him – comes out curiously in his
early phase and in his later years which adds credence to my point that his mid-phase of the
Scientific Man vs. Power Politics corresponded to a popular, although inconsequent, temporary
romantic mood. Morgenthau wanted to critique the obsession of modern societies with the
reformist and emancipatory power of technique and technology but this did not mean that we
could dispense with science altogether. Indeed, Morgenthau agreed with Max Weber
demarcation between values and facts and would hold on to it regardless of his criticism to
social scientists. He had criticized Carl Schmitt in the early thirties for loosing sight of a
referential point that only science could provide. In regard to Schmitt, Morgenthau remarked,
in an essay from 1933 entitled Theorie des Differends Internationaux, that his doctrine
‘is a metaphysics that only loosely resorts to historical or psychological reality. And in face of a
doctrine that unquestionably carries a metaphysical character, we can only adopt one of two
attitudes: either that of opposing to it a different metaphysics and of critiquing it from the
viewpoint of a transcendental principle – which would lead us to abandon the fields of science
and to move into that of metaphysics. Or we can try and discern some logical contradiction in
the principles or in the deductions of the doctrine in question, thus showing that the ends that
the author had proposed could not be achieved by those means he adopted or that the
conclusions he drew were in contradiction with his premises. And in the latter case, the critique
[to Schmitt] would be immanent, grounded on the theory as such and not in any other
unverifiable principle. That critique would therefore have a scientific character, because it would
rest in general principles of logic’ (Morgenthau, Theorie des Differends Internationaux, 1933: 46-7).
Morgenthau would adopt the same logical inflexibility and analytical impatience towards Carr.
He presents Carr’s political thought as ‘unfortified by a transcendent standard of ethics’ which
his rational and logical ethics still allowed (‘The Political Science of E. H. Carr', 1948: 134).
Basically, Morgenthau saw Schmitt and Carr as too vague theorists for their contributions to
carry any credibility - and it would not be surprising if he privately held the same idea of
Niebuhr. Theirs was an unreliable romantic intellectual project and hence one that could not
support a proper political ontology, let alone a trustworthy epistemology of international
affairs. Morgenthau thought that the kind of desperate romanticism that both Schmitt and, to a
lesser degree, Carr demonstrated were a consequence of their realization that the ought was, by
definition, unachievable. As for the critical realists and Husserl himself, ‘the question of the
specific reality of the psycho-physic act by which the idea, in this case, the ‘ought’, realizes
itself, does not exert any influence whatsoever upon the reality of the ‘ought’’ (Morgenthau:
10). The ‘ought’ contained in a norm is grounded in a mode of being and this mode of being
cannot do without the ‘ought’. In short, the ought is part of being. Therefore laws will always have
to take into account the power arrangements that make those laws necessary and yet possible
too. In this sense, he was in agreement with Niebuhr who used Heidegger to spell out his
understanding of the human situation as a constant oscillation between 'actuality and
potentiality' (Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1941: Ch. VII) where the actuality of
power informs the potential for transcendence and vice-versa. But Morgenthau was also
manifestly against the revival of a theological world-view that sought to compensate for the
faults of modern science. He sought to change social science from within, with the resources that
Reason itself provided. Against Niebuhr, he observed that ‘there is no third domain to which we
can ascribe a reality that does not belong to either the psychic or the physic and therefore there
exists no ideal reality specifically normative that is not a particular variant of the psycho-physic
reality’ (Morgenthau: 11). Niebuhr would, as we will see, never have agreed to this and would
enroll in a search for a transrational form of transcendence.
As is turned out, Morgenthau was indeed in a rather isolated position: skeptical, but not an
anti-Enlightenment thinker as Schmitt or Heidegger or, to a lesser extent, Niebuhr; pessimistic,
but neither a romantic nor surrendered to the wonders of Christian theology; philosophical,
but not enough to restrain his belief in science. Indeed, a bit like Weber before him – and
indeed owing much to him too. His conception of Law which Morgenthau calls ‘pluralistic’
(Morgenthau: 16) would also stand against Kelsen’s idea of a ‘fundamental law’ from which all
others could be derived regardless of their reality. Morgenthau’s realism was therefore totally
within the scientific and legal demands of logic and Reason. It made its way through Kelsen’s
legal idealism and Schmittian romanticism but partly also against them. In this sense,
Morgenthau achieves, in his early years, a critical turn vis-à-vis one of the most succeeded
theoretical legal systems by forcing law and ethics to be derived from reality: ‘For Kelsen, the
juridical quality of a norm emanates from the fundamental norm; for us, it results from the
formal structure of the law as such’ (Morgenthau: 17). This movement against transcendental
law was obviously a consequence of his existential sensibility and his concern with
international relations – understood as relations of power and conflict of interest. Under the
banner of a reviewed balance of power, Morgenthau thought that a system of immanentlyderived rights and duties would work better in the context of an already given and therefore real
custom-ruled competition between states than in a purely rationalistic and procedural system
of law operating from top to bottom:
‘The pure theory of law poses the question of knowing what are the norms of the juridical order
of the State and the International Community. We admit, on the contrary, the existence of
juridical norms in the formal structure of the juridical norm itself, regardless of the fact that they
can be part of a given juridical and national or transnational systems, that is to say, irrespective
of their legitimacy as part of those systems’ (Morgenthau: 17).
In critiquing Kelsen, Morgenthau was already introducing his reader to a very particular
understanding of international politics where power and a set of rules prudentially built to
balance that power could be the main factor of stability and order instead of trying to impose a
generalized system of laws with no correspondence whatsoever with the reality of power
politics; or, instead of trying to raise ‘the political’ above all other categories of modern culture
– including the legal one – as Schmitt had attempted. In this sense, Morgenthau’s faith in
logical reasoning led him to adopt what Michael Williams has designated as a ‘strategy of limits’
where each sphere of life (economic, political, cultural) prudentially and progressively
negotiates its jurisdiction upon human ethical conduct (Williams, The Realist Tradition and the
Limits of International Relations, 2005: 160). This strategy was not present in Schmitt who placed
the political as the overall framing category; or Niebuhr for whom faith and religion should, as
I will show in the next part, constitute the fundamental yardstick of human experience,
individual and collective. In this sense, Morgenthau was truly much more analytical and
scientific than Scientific Man would suggest. Morgenthau’s realism started to emerge both as an
epistemological project and then also, and most importantly, as an ontological disposition,
privileging a conception of law that could correspond to its object (hence Sovereign Laws
would correspond to Sovereign Powers). Naturally, Morgenthau’s vision of political and
juridical regimes was already, at that stage, a negative one where states ought to seek protection
and defend themselves instead of trusting in abstract systems of law that would guarantee
nothing – as the example of the League of Nations had demonstrated.
Morgenthau’s phenomenological (and critical) realism was therefore in his attempt to
understand what the world requires from the human subject, what is the exact nature of the world's
call upon the subject – instead of putting the subject in a position of constant demand for what
the world cannot give – a subject-centered position common to idealists and, in particular,
Woodrow Wilson. This implied some understanding of what Husserl defined as the 'life-world'
even though Morgenthau never refers to it directly. He undoubtedly demonstrated a constant
concern for the (international) environment as constituted by more or less vulnerable power
arrangements. He wanted to know how the world is inescapable in its effects upon the human
being – and subsequently also upon the states – inexorably leading them to conflict.
Furthermore, he believed, against Niebuhr, that these relations could indeed be studied in
detail and measured even in spite of all the difficulties. In a later article entitled ‘The
Limitations of Science and Social Planning’ Morgenthau concludes with a rather ambiguous
claim which however was very representative of his position towards the social sciences and
also very revealing of his Husserlian background:
‘Viewed with the guidance of rationalistic, blueprinted map, the social world is indeed a chaos of
contingencies. Yet it is not devoid of a measure of rationality if approached with the
expectations of Macbethian cynicism’ (Morgenthau, in Ethics, 1958: 184).
Given this background and Morgenthau’s attention to the interplay of agents with their
environment, the intellectual fate of Realism could not have been other than that of an
intensification and expansion of its scientific tools and analytical scope. It would reach its
height with the structural realism of Kenneth Waltz thus moving away from the theological
transcendence of Niebuhr which would tend to disappear more and more.
3
Niebuhr, Phenomenology and Critical Realism
3.1. Against Scientific Realism, for a Theological Realism
We have seen how Morgenthau’s legal pluralism was grounded in a rather classical and very
sophisticated understanding of knowledge and reality: one which could privilege both
consciousness and transcendence and yet preserve the objects of existence outside the sphere
of consciousness. In spite of holding roughly the same views about international relations,
Niebuhr came from a totally different background. In the case of Morgenthau, the attempt to
build up a complex epistemology with objective cognitive ends – especially towards the end of
his career – resulted in some indifference towards great transcendental ideals (such as that of
the Imago Dei) that could ground a higher morality. For Niebuhr the fundamental doubts that
critical realism presented – as any other theory of knowledge for that matter – were just one
more sign of man’s constantly frustrated attempt to subordinate his self-knowledge to Reason
instead of attempting to establish an internal conversation with God that could transcend
Reason.
Niebuhr thus compensated the lack of sophistication when it came to his philosophy of
knowledge with an ethical and mythological substance he drew from Christian theology and
especially from the Bible, one that could evaluate our knowledge of reality in strictly moral
consequential terms. In that sense, he was hardly concerned with scientific or legal truth - and
he has indeed been accused of some relativism. For Niebuhr man's appropriation of truth
serves the corruption of individuals and subjects them to pride and group interests. Thus the
only authentic truth is, by definition, in the hands of God - and hence unattainable, albeit
discernable. As long as our understanding of reality was capable of revealing what Niebuhr
thought was the key paradox of the human condition, between creation and destruction, sin
and grace, tragedy and hope, doubt and certainty than it could hardly matter what reality really
is. To see in the scientific method an end to the quest for truth is to loose the opportunity, or
to relinquish the responsibility, of thinking an end for human action and knowledge that can
be truly ethical, that is, beyond good and evil.
It should be noted that for an existential theologian such as him reality could not simply be –
and in this Niebuhr was certainly with the critical realists in their critique of direct forms of
naturalism as well as of solipsistic models of consciousness. Indeed, as we will see, for Niebuhr
reality is always mediated and even manipulated for certain purposes – mainly purposes of
power. And it is precisely because it cannot be left untouched that it should offer itself to
interpretation and judgment. This capacity to transcend reality and history was anyway what
characterized the human being and granted him the necessary vantage point from which to
look beyond his self-interest. Simultaneously however that same capacity was often used to
project that self-interest. Niebuhr’s theological Realism can therefore be summarized in the
idea that it is not Reality that matters but what we do with it. And this means to place real experience
in the world in a degree of significance then it would otherwise have. It is by focusing on his
understanding of reality that we can again spot the differences between him, Morgenthau and
the Critical Realists.
The differences between Niebuhr and the critical realism of Sellars can be explained in terms
of the latter’s dismissal of existentialism, in particular of Heidegger’s and Jaspers’ versions of it
– even though they disliked the label. In an article published in 1961 entitled ‘Existentialism,
Realistic Empiricism and Materialism’ Sellars alerted to the fact that ‘Existentialists pay little
attention to the empiricist tradition’ and ‘yet it should be plain that empiricism has long
opposed essentialism’ (Sellars, ‘Existentialism, Realistic Empiricism and Materialism’, Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, 1961: 315). In an implicit reference to Niebuhr he applies that
judgment to ‘the overtly religious and theologically-inclined existentialists, those who [like
Niebuhr] affiliated themselves with the Dane, Kierkegaard’ (Sellars, 1961: 317). Indeed, Niebuhr
owed his conception of truth to Kierkegaard (see part 3.4. below) and through it sought to
oppose to a scientific understanding of truth. Sellars recognized in Heidegger the philosophical
achievement of making clear the reflective nature of human being:
‘Existentialism is a movement to be appraised judicially. It has its own dimensions in human life.
Perhaps the question, so widely asked these days, of the “meaning” of human life defines its
center of interest. (…) Man is an animal who can ask questions. That is a point that Heidegger
makes’ (Sellars, 1961: 318).
But he presented us however with a rather narrow reading of Heidegger so to facilitate the
dismissal of his thought later. ‘Of course, these are not new questions’ Sellars claims in the
next paragraph. Later on he would complain that
‘While I have made great efforts to appreciate Heidegger and Jaspers, I find their modes of
thought a little alien. There is a tendency to call on intuition. Heidegger is making a tremendous
effort to penetrate to the revealable depths of Being. He turns his back on representational, or
correspondence, theories of truth, something which, I think, is tied in with scientific
achievement’ (Sellars, 1961: 318).
Sellars’s critical realism therefore depicts existentialism as the modern turning point where
philosophy and metaphysics have ‘turned their back’ at Reason and Science. In this sense, his
was a very accurate description of how this sorts of anti-scientific and very skeptical
existentialism easily lend itself to theological transcendence - as it did in the case of Niebuhr.
For the purpose of this article this passage helps showing how Niebuhr’s undertaking of a
Christian Realism would therefore take a similar approach to knowledge and truth and
therefore become distant from earlier versions of scientific realism or phenomenology – which
has we saw, had been rather influent on the early Morgenthau.
3.2. Niebuhr's critique of Scientific Rationalism and the meaning of Transcendence
Niebuhr charges Arthur Lovejoy for his a blind belief in rationality or ‘rational intelligibility’ as
the criteria to measure progress and the social and civilizational achievements of humanity. He
observed that
‘Professor Lovejoy does not seek to account for the remarkable persistence of the thesis of the
world’s rational intelligibility. But it is not too difficult to see in this effort a typical instance of
man’s tendency to overreach the limits of his powers and thereby to obscure the ambiguity of
his situation as both a creature of time and a creator of history in time. In so far as he
transcends the temporal process he can discern many meanings in life and history by tracing
various coherences, sequences, causalities and recurrences (…). But in so far as man is himself
in the temporal process which he seeks to comprehend, every sequence and realm of coherence
points to a more final source of meaning than man is able to comprehend rationally’ (Niebuhr,
Faith and History, 1949: 55).
Lovejoy stood against the always dark picture which Niebuhr constantly painted of the
present. He stressed the pointless character of such pessimistic outlook and answered it with
the equally sober moderation of critical realism:
‘The main fact is evident. We all find the spectacle of human behaviour in our own time
staggering to contemplate; we are all agreed that the world is in a ghastly mess, and that it is a
man made mess: and there is no theme of public discourse now more well worn than the tragic
paradox of modern man’s amazing advance in knowledge of and power over his physical
environment and his complete failure thus far to transform himself into a being fit to be trusted
with knowledge and power’ (Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, 1961: 8).
Therefore Niebuhr’s major issue with Santayana, Lovejoy or Sellars was in their attempt to
subordinate religion to a scientific account of reality – even if their conception of science was
not as rationalistic nor as naturalistic as Niebuhr painted it. In this sense, Niebuhr's
disagreement with critical realists revolved around their understandings of history,
transcendence and reality. For Niebuhr, the problem with the belief in science was that it
oscillated between a too strong empiricism or a very accentuated utopianism. His belief that
‘there are no essences in history’ led him to accuse Santayana of a certain idealistic
foundationalism whose Platonism insisted too much on a strict division between body and
mind. Niebuhr saw this as a much more fluid relation, the fixed polarization of which was the
primary condition of a scientific world-view. His drawing upon the existentialism of Scheler,
Heidegger or Jaspers was very symptomatic of his affinities with major criticisms of the
devastating effects of science upon human thinking. Their focus on worldliness would allow
theologians to appropriate existentialism for the purpose of stressing man's creatureliness and
hence his incapacity to stand outside himself fully as social sciences would have us believe –
for why would we need God in that case? Niebuhr would have undoubtedly agreed with
Heidegger's claim that 'science does not think'. Like Nietzsche, he was very suspicious of what
he saw as modern forms of Platonism and its infiltration in Christian theology. Overall, he was,
unlike Morgenthau, an anti-Enlightenment thinker adn this would explain his critique of
scientific critical realism.
Christian Realists such as Niebuhr were very concerned with the ethical, political and
theological consequences of any form of rationalism. Indeed, the age permitted such a
skeptical attitude towards Reason – but also a very narrow understanding of it. It is usually
forgotten that American political Realism starts off as an existential theology against
Rationalism, also strongly opposed to Romantic nihilism but more sympathetic to its ethical
naturalism than to scientific naturalism of cognitive realists. Niebuhr was deeply concerned
with the pernicious effects of rationalistic/scientific discourses upon human sociability – in
particular, the sociability amongst large human groups and collectives. In fact he saw Fascism
and Communism as a combination of the two. Against Sellars, Niebuhr claimed that
‘One of the mistakes of modern naturalism is that “it vibrates as sensitively as idealism” (quoting
Sellars) to the foolish idea that natural evolution changes the essential human situation and
finally places man in a position of freedom and power in which he can negate the conditions of
his creaturehood’ (Faith and History: 84).
Niebuhr's problem with any form of rationalism or knowledge of the mind and the
environment of the kind propounded by Critical Realists was that it put forth an emancipatory
agenda and a belief in progress. Championed by Sellars or Lovejoy, it sought to override man's
worldliness – on, in theological parlance, his creatureliness. For Christian realists, scientific
knowledge was seen as having great affinities with liberal narratives regarding history, the
possibility of progress and human perfection. In particular, they were critical of the fact that
liberalism naively indulged the 'enlightened' belief that social sciences could improve man
morally and politically in the same way that natural sciences had improved man's technical
knowledge. Morgenthau had also spotted this problem and was very aware that cognitive
progress at the level of natural sciences had not provided any basis for moral achievement (see
‘The Limitations of Science and the Problem of Social Planning’, Ethics, 1958: 174). However,
this did not lead Morgenthau, as it did Niebuhr, to abandon social sciences altogether; instead,
Morgenthau accepted, ash we saw, the challenge of attempting to change them from the inside.
What was Niebuhr concrete answer to Critical realists then? What world-view did he
propounded and especially what conception of knowledge and of history as alternative to
theirs?
Niebuhr's call for action was usually very vague. Eric Gregory portrays him as an Augustinian
liberal of negativist leanings and a proponent of a prudential ethics which remained, for the
most part, very vague (see Politics and the Order of Love, 2008). Indeed, against the background of
international liberalism, Niebuhr pioneers the critique of social sciences in the history of
international thought. In theology, he was probably the first, along with Carl Schmitt, to
embrace the modern call for the rise of the Political opposing the dominant liberal discourses
that praised 'the cultural' and 'the economic' as fundamental categories of human sociability
and self-understanding. Niebuhr thought that modernity was doomed to become a
depersonalized society, mostly because of the atomistic effects of the individualism that
Renaissance had started and the Industrial Revolution had propagated. It was therefore partly
against the backdrop of cognitive Critical Realism that political Realism started. The birth of
Realism, whether if we want to place it in the work of the so-called ‘pope’ of IR theory Hans
Morgenthau, or in the earlier explorations of Reinhold Niebuhr (whom George Kennan called
‘the father of us [realists] all’), starts with a strong epistemological disposition against reason
and naturalism and seeks to deconstruct, by means of the recall of theological myths and
symbols, the essentialism and foundationalism of scientific knowledge production.
Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man – his major work based on the Gifford lectures he
delivered in 1939 in Edinburgh (from here onwards NDM) – was meant to denounce the
reason for the failure of the traditional enquiries into the nature of the human being
throughout the history of western thought. In it, it became clear that 'man has always been his
own most vexing problem’ (NDM, 1941: 1). Niebuhr indeed shared a fundamental concern
with Morgenthau: 'Man as a Problem to Himself’ (NDM, 1941: 1). His discursive strategy
relied on the recast of the various approaches to this problematic in the history of western
thought. In NDM, Niebuhr studies the various ways through which many have sought to
approach Man in its most mysterious features, above all, that of the meaning of existence. In
them, he claims, there is always presupposed a certain understanding, if not a definition, of
man himself. His contribution to the understanding of this problematic lies not only on the
indication of the traps that many of those approaches have fallen into, but on pointing out that
the reason for that might be in the contradictory, or at least ambivalent, nature of the human
being itself. Niebuhr acknowledges that ‘every affirmation which he may make about his
stature, virtue, or place in the cosmos becomes involved in contradictions when fully analyzed’
(NDM, 1941: 1). In this sense, Niebuhr announces that ‘it is one of the purposes of this
volume [the first of two] to analyze the meaning of the Christian idea of sin more fully, and to
explain the uneasy conscience expressed in the Christian religion’ (NDM, 1941: 18). His intent
is that of arguing ‘that the Christian view of human nature is involved in the paradox of
claiming a higher stature for man and of taking a more serious view of his evil than other
anthropology’ (NDM, 1941: 14) would do.
Niebuhr existentialism is already patent in the centrality that his political theology attributes to
Man rather than God although always stressing the relation between the two. ‘How shall he
think of himself?’ asks Niebuhr (NDM, 1941: 1). For Niebuhr, every analysis that men have
developed seem doomed to fail as it ‘reveals some presupposition or implication which seems
to deny what the proposition intended to affirm’ (NDM, 1941: 1). An example of this is how
more traditional standpoints about this problematic have been focused usually in one variable:
human reason (NDM, 1941: 1). When looking at man specifically through this variable,
Niebuhr claims that man already ‘betrays his unconscious sense of kinship with the brutes’
(NDM, 1941: 1). For Niebuhr, this reveals a ‘note of anxiety’ in that such question fails to go
beyond reason and therefore to grasp man as a trans-rational being. Niebuhr’s discursive
strategy is therefore one of downplaying reason so to bring out religious transcendence as the
ideal alternative. It never occurred to Niebuhr that the monism he denounced in Reason could
be a result of his own monistic understanding of it – instead of conceiving of it as ‘dialectical’
or intersubjective. For Niebuhr, clearly, the reason why we are able in the first place to know
rationality is that, as humans, we can also stand outside of it – without surrendering necessarily
to unreason. This sort of meta-rationality is labeled by Niebuhr as ‘transcendence’: ‘The very
effort to estimate the significance of his [man’s] rational faculties implies a degree of
transcendence over himself which is not fully defined or explained in what is usually connoted
by “reason”’ (NDM, 1941: 1). Niebuhr goes on to say that man ‘has capacities which transcend
the ability to form general concepts’ (NDM, 1941: 1) and faith is one of them.
The fundamental duality of man’s existence firstly comes to the fore, in his understanding, in a
very traditional and religious way: that of the opposition between good and evil. Along these
lines, he develops his history of ideas by characterizing two fundamental modes of thought in
the West: one more optimistic that focuses on the good and neglects ‘the particular
consequences and historical configurations of evil tendencies in man himself’ (NDM, 1941: 2);
another, more pessimistic, that is able to presuppose that evilness but immediately falls into
contradiction since such pessimistic judgment would be unattainable were it not for a
presumed idea of good: ‘his capacity for such judgments would seem to negate the content of
the judgments’ (NDM, 1941: 2). Niebuhr later insists on this problematic by relating it to
man’s transcendence over himself:
‘How can man be “essentially evil if he knows himself to be so? What is the character of the
ultimate subject, the quintessential “I”, which passes such devastating judgments upon itself as
an object?’ (NDM, 1941: 2).
For Niebuhr however, transcendence (even when unacknowledged) seems to be present even
in those actions that attempt to deny life, ‘otherwise he could not be tempted to the error from
which he is to be dissuaded’ (NDM, 1941: 2). In this sense, ‘committing suicide’ attests for the
existence of human transcendental capacities as well as the existence of ‘religions and
philosophies which negate life and regard a “lifeless” eternity, such as Nirvana, as the only
possible end of life’ (NDM, 1941: 2). Therefore, ‘if one turns to the question of the value of
human life and asks whether life is worth living, the very character of the question reveals that
the questioner must in some sense be able to stand outside of, and to transcend, the life which
is thus judged and estimated’ (NDM, 1941: 2). For Niebuhr henceforth such questioning is not
only demonstrative of some features of the object questioned; it itself reveals the capacities of
the questioner, so that the question always tells us something about he who poses it. In fact,
however insignificant the object of the question might be, it never ceases to reveal the
significance of the act of questioning. ‘The vantage point from which man judges his
insignificance is a rather significant vantage point’ (NDM, 1941: 3). Only from that standpoint
can man ‘negate “life”’ which proves that he ‘must be something other than mere vitality’
(NDM, 1941: 2).
But if transcendence is therefore what characterizes ‘man’s place in the universe’ (NDM, 1941:
2) than this characteristic is also what reveals the fundamental ‘antinomies’ that run through
his existence. Niebuhr’s answer to the problem of human existence could not but acknowledge
the problematic character of its object, for it would never be a matter of concern otherwise. In
this sense, Niebuhr attempts to show throughout his book that historical responses to this
problem have forgotten what it was they were attempting to answer in the first place. ‘Every
philosophy of life is touched with anthropocentric tendencies’ (NDM, 1941: 2) and it does not
surprise him that many of these have been too anxious to give an answer without seeing in the
question an affirmation of some human element already. This explains why ‘men have been
assailed periodically by qualms of conscience and first of dizziness for pretending to occupy
the centre of the universe’ (NDM, 1941: 3). And it is quite clear for Niebuhr – and in fact one
of his favorite targets of criticism – ‘that the advance of human knowledge about the world
does not abate the pride of man’ (NDM, 1941: 3) nor does it lead necessarily (and apparently)
to a better realization of his condition on earth.
However, there is something we can learn from this existential paradox. On the one hand, it is
an ‘obvious fact … that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its
necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature
permits its varied organic forms, allowing them some, but not too much, latitude’ (NDM,
1941: 3). On the other hand, there is a less apparent feature in human existence: ‘man is a spirit
who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world’ (NDM, 1941: 4). Niebuhr
ends the first part of this chapter by identifying the source of problems into which any enquiry
into the nature of man necessarily merges: ‘how difficult it is to do justice to both the
uniqueness of man and his affinities with the world of nature below him’ (NDM, 1941: 4). Out
of this difficulty there have emerged two fundamental tendencies in western thought that have
pursued one of the two available roots: Rationalism on one side and Naturalism on the other.
He ascribes scientific realism to the first.
According to Niebuhr, whilst Romanticism seems ‘to obscure the uniqueness of man’,
scientific rationalism is keen to ‘describe and emphasize the rational faculties of man or his
capacity for self-transcendence, to forget his relation to nature and to identify him, prematurely
and unqualifiedly, with the divine and the eternal’ (NDM, 1941: 4). This division suits
Niebuhr’s own historical-intellectual framework espoused in NDM and, as we will see, mirrors
the other fundamental division at work in his enquiry, that between ‘spirit’ and ‘nature’, a
division which modern culture has tragically misinterpreted. Naturalists tend to stress the role
of nature over reason and the human spirit whilst rationalists have forgotten nature and how
the human being remains attached to it. Again, the term political theology (although never
used by Niebuhr himself) seems extremely pertinent to characterize his ideational scheme if we
understand the political as an appeal to the remembrance of man’s irresistible bond to nature –
that is the inevitability of being confronted with actual experience once he exists – combined
with the capacity to transcend it – which in Niebuhr, as with any other theologian, is not
without theological implications. According to him, the confrontation between rationalists and
naturalists was miscarried by Modernity. This is necessary as his political theology, in the
context of which a philosophy of experience assumes a new relevance, follows up from it.
Niebuhr never ceases to outline the antinomy that has characterized modern culture since its
inception which he clearly locates in western history: ‘It is not unfair to affirm that modern
culture, that is, our culture since the Renaissance, is to be credited with the greatest advances in the
understanding of nature and with the greatest confusion in the understanding of man’ (NDM,
1941: 2). With irony, Niebuhr claims that ‘perhaps this credit and debit are logically related to
each other’ (NDM, 1941: 5). It is clear for him that once the understanding of nature had
gained prominence over the understanding of man as two separate objects of enquiry - as
critical realism still does -, such development would not only amount to a mere question of
priority. Such prioritization would carry an enormous impact upon the substance of man’s
most fundamental question which we should keep in mind: ‘how shall he think of himself?’
(NDM, 1941: 1). Indeed, Niebuhr attempts to trace modern predominant discourses about
nature and man back to its origins. ‘All modern views of human nature are adaptations,
transformations and varying compounds of primarily two distinctive views of man: (a) The
view of classical antiquity, that is of the Graeco-Roman world, and (b) the Biblical view’
(NDM, 1941: 5). But the distance that they have gained from their origins offers Niebuhr
enough ground for the revival of those traditions, against the background of their modern
liberal disfigurement. In fact those two sources – that appear in Niebuhr’s work in a rather
simplistic an idealized form – were, according to him, once synthesized in the Catholicism of
Medieval Europe (NDM: 5). Of particular import for Niebuhr in this context were the writings
of Aquinas in merging Aristotelian with Augustinian thought (NDM: 5). But Modernity did
not take this conflation on board and would remain, to the detriment of man's moral
achievements, stuck in between the dualism:
‘The history of the modern culture really begins with the destruction of this synthesis,
foreshadowed in nominalism, and completed in the Renaissance and Reformation’ (NDM: 5).
Modern culture is seen as weighing a scattering effect upon such synthesis, the ashes of which
the Renaissance and the Reformation had attempted to reconstruct. But ‘in the dissolution of
the synthesis, the Renaissance distilled the classical elements out of the synthesis and the
Reformation sought to free the Biblical from the classical elements’ (NDM: 5). In Niebuhr’s
view, ‘modern culture has thus [and since] been a battleground of two opposing views of
human nature’, the unity of which is still sought by what Niebuhr labels ‘Liberal Protestantism’
(NDM, 1941: 5). Such project is considered by him ‘on the whole an abortive one’ as ‘there is,
in fact, little that is common between them’ (NDM, 1941: 5). In this sense, Niebuhr sees in
modern culture the mere reproduction of the struggle between two irreconcilable ideological
movements through a rationalistic framework flawed with the illusion that what was common
between Greek and Christian still holds. What happens in fact is that ‘what was common in the
two views was almost completely lost after modern thought had reinterpreted and transmuted
the classical view of man in the direction of a greater naturalism’ (NDM, 1941: 5).
3.3. The Christian view as an alternative to Scientific Rationalism
In his earlier publication Moral Man and Immoral Society (1933), Niebuhr had already shown the
Nietzschean leanings of his post-Marxist suspicion towards capitalism. He referred to Marxist
revolutionary ideals in Nietzschean terms as the new ‘transvaluation of values’ leading to yet
another ‘slave morality’. Therefore Niebuhr wanted to rescue Christian theology from
embarking in ‘Enlightened’ projects of Modernity such as those of Marxism or of Liberalism in
general. He wanted to claim for Christian theology the kind of pessimistic outlook of human
nature that one finds in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, whilst abstaining from the nihilistic ontopolitical implications of the former. In epistemological terms however his critique of science
and reason was overtly Nietzschean and for that purpose he had to criticize the liberal
elements in Christian Orthodoxy. At the end, romantics had lost faith in human transcendence
for having associated it with rationalism. Such link was, for Niebuhr, fatal. It was made
possible only at a time were religion was being understood erroneously under rationalistic
terms. Attuned to the platonic separation between mind and body – which he still criticized in
Santayana – this type of Christian psychology betrayed a judgment upon the body which
naturalists, and him, obviously rejected. Christian Orthodoxy suggested that the mind had to
be privileged as the source of good and the master over the body. ‘Christian psychology and
philosophy have never completely freed themselves from this fault, which explains why
naturalists plausibly though erroneously regard Christian faith as the very fountain source of
idealism’ (NDM, 1941: 13). The instillation of this rationalistic insight into Christianity had
made naturalists devoid of a hospitable intellectual home within it. But this was, as Sellars
would point out later in the sixties, about to end. In America, Christian theology had found a
place for its radicalization, for its reformation but also for the revival of the Bible along
modern philosophical lines where it blended with an American version of Existentialism. As
Sellars observes in what would be a brilliant description of Niebuhr’s Christian Realism
‘[Existentialism] has a vogue on the Continent where it developed and has affected religious
thinking, particularly, on this side of the Atlantic. It has a hortatory way of stressing
individuality, authenticity, anxiety and freedom. The human condition bulks large in its
presentations. There is less concern with logic and theory of knowledge and the sciences’
(Sellars, 1961: 326).
Against such movement Niebuhr seeks to restore what he calls the Christian view of man
which allows ‘an appreciation of the unity of the body and soul in human personality which
idealists and naturalists have sought in vain’ (NDM, 1941: 13). In reclaiming the worth of the
body as a constitutive element of human nature, Niebuhr seeks to underscore the existential
dimension of the human being as opposed to the traditional essentialist priority of the mind,
proper to Cartesian rationalism. ‘God’ so Niebuhr claims ‘is not merely mind who forms a
previously given formless stuff. God is both vitality and form and the source of all existence’
(NDM, 1941: 5). Niebuhr traces the biblical unity of mind and body to primitive Hebraic
thought where the soul was believed to be in the blood rather than in the mind. He claims that
in spite of the later distinction between ruach (spirit) and nephesh (psyche) ‘unlike Greek
thought, this distinction does not lead to dualistic consequences’ (NDM, 1941: 14). Another
example of the rationalistic distortion (in which Niebuhr seems to insist more than the
naturalistic one) is the rational interpretation of the principle of Imago Dei. According to
Niebuhr, it has been the mistake of many Christian rationalists to assume that this term is no
more than religious-pictorial expression of what philosophy intends when it defines man as a
rational animal’ (NDM, 1941: 14). Spirit cannot be confined within the limits of reason.
Contrariwise, it is ‘the rational capacity of surveying the world, of forming general concepts
and analyzing the order of the world’ that is ‘but one aspect of what Christianity knows as
“spirit”’ (NDM, 1941: 14). For Niebuhr the human capacity for transcendence allows us to
take reason itself as an object of enquiry. Rationality certainly helps consciousness as ‘a
capacity for surveying the world and determining action from a governing centre’ (NDM,
1941: 14).
But self-consciousness moves man beyond mere consciousness and objectification. ‘Selfconsciousness represents a further degree of transcendence in which the self makes itself its
own object in such a way that the ego is finally always subject and not object’ (NDM, 1941:
14). In this sense, the Christian view of man which compares him to God (as ‘made to his
image’=Imago Dei) appears as a more suitable framework to see in man much more than ‘the
uniqueness of his rational faculties or his relation to nature’ (NDM, 1941: 14) – as rationalists
and naturalists would make us believe. It is in this sense that Niebuhr calls for an ‘essential
homelessness of the human spirit’ as ‘the ground for all religion’ (NDM, 1941: 14): ‘for the self
which stands outside itself and the world cannot find the meaning of life in itself or the world’
(NDM, 1941: 14). Niebuhr hence appears to thrive beyond naturalism and rationalism in
claiming that human freedom ‘is obviously something different from the necessary causal links
of nature’ and also very distinct from ‘rationality, since it transcends its own rational processes,
so that it may, for instance, ask the question whether there is a relevance between its rational
forms and the recurrences and forms of nature’ (NDM, 1941: 15). After defeating rationalists
and naturalists, Niebuhr’s concern will be that of a referential transcendence for human nature
and action that can guide man’s destiny in the way that nature and reason could not. And the
reason for this is simple: man cannot have as a referential for his ethical conduct something
that he can himself transcend - as Critical Realists would have it with the mind, consciousness,
intentionality, reason or even the brain. That ultimate reference had to be untranscendable:
something that whilst allowing man to transcend earthly things and even himself, stops him
from going beyond everything, of knowing and controlling the totality of the universe.
In spite of this, man’s is indeed free for he is able to conceive of (some form of) totality and ‘it
is this capacity of freedom which finally prompts great cultures and philosophies to transcend
rationalism, and to seek for the meaning of life in an unconditioned ground of existence’
(NDM, 1941: 14). It is not hard to imagine what Niebuhr means by ‘unconditioned ground of
existence’. Surely, only a God could provide for such an unconditioned realm and for that
reason Niebuhr finds in faith the right attitude for any individual that ‘naturally’ and ‘fatefully’
seeks fulfillment, the only type of ethic that can handle man’s constant swing between a limited
existence and the unlimited possibilities that it opens. Niebuhr was now able to reformulate
the principle of Imago Dei along existential lines, that is, as a philosophy of knowledge that
could only find coherence in the context of a life philosophy devoted to God: ‘God as will and
personality, in concepts of Christian faith, is thus the only possible ground of real individuality’
(NDM, 1941: 15). Niebuhr insists that ‘faith in God as will and personality depends upon faith
in His Power to reveal Himself. The Christian faith in God’s self-disclosure, culminating in the
revelation of Christ is thus the basis of the Christian concept of personality and individuality’
(NDM, 1941: 15). Only though revelation can man be brought into a position where his will
‘founds its end in’ divine will (NDM, 1941: 16): ‘to understand himself truly means to begin
with a faith that he is understood from beyond himself’ (NDM, 1941: 16). Niebuhr follows on
from this to stress that ‘this relation of the divine to the human will makes it possible for man
to relate himself to God without pretending to be God, and to accept his distance from God
as a created thing without believing that the evil of his nature is caused by this finiteness’
(NDM, 1941: 16).
To compensate his ideal of human existence as Imago Dei and to counterbalance this kind of
idealism with the skeptical mood that is known of all forms of Augustinianism, Niebuhr adds
the role of ‘human virtue in Christian thought’ (NDM, 1941: 16). This point is of relevance for
as we will see it is in the context of man’s sinfulness that Niebuhr reveals its affinities with the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger (in particular, in chapters VI and VII). ‘Sin is defined as
rebellion against God’ (NDM, 1941: 14) and in this sense Niebuhr will regard every attempt by
man to place himself in God’s position as a sinful act. The human being ‘is a sinner not
because he is one limited individual within a whole but rather because he is betrayed, by his
very ability to survey the whole, to imagine himself the whole’ (NDM, 1941: 14).
In modernity in particular, the rationalist temptation to replace faith with science, revelation
with reason, could not escape Niebuhr’s criticism for whom the ‘vitality’ of man ‘expresses
itself in defiance of the laws of measure’ (NDM, 1941: 14). Contrary to the scientific spirit
which attempts to negate evilness and man and tries to allocate threat to the outside world,
Christianity claims that ‘only within terms of the Christian faith can man not only understand
the reality of the evil in himself, but escape the error of attributing that evil to any one but
himself’ (NDM, 1941: 18). The problematic nature of man thus has this dual meaning: it is
problematic in the sense that it can be questioned and therefore it constitutes a question that
discloses being to a whole range of possible answers; but it is also problematic because it
represents, in and out of itself, a problem, an existential crisis that needs solving. Man ‘stands
at the juncture of nature and spirit’ (NDM, 1941: 18).
Niebuhr argues that ‘the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate
historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either
to the unique freedom of man or to the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom’
(NDM, 1941: 25). As the major opponents to this liberal idea of history Niebuhr gives the
examples of Hobbes and Nietzsche (and, in its footsteps, Freud) who have first understood an
unconscious ‘will-to-power’, underlying the scientific understanding of man and history. I will
now outline how Niebuhr understands and adopts a phenomenological view of the human
condition which, based as it is on Max Scheler, represents a theological and mystical departure
from Husserl's scientific phenomenology.
3.4. 'Reality' and the phenomenology of Max Scheler
In the beginning of chapter VI of The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr observes that the
Christian world-view consists of a credible alternative to the liberal protestant. According to
him, its advantage is in the ‘manner in which it interprets and relates three aspects of human
existence’ (NDM, 1941: 161). These three aspects are man’s self-transcendence, his finitude
and his unwillingness to recognize the first two as mutually constitutive of his nature.
Naturally, Niebuhr wants to stress this last aspect as it is the hardest to grasp whilst at the same
time the more dangerous:
‘It affirms that the evil in man is a consequence of his inevitable though not necessary
unwillingness to acknowledge his dependence, to accept his finiteness and to admit his
insecurity, an unwillingness which involves him in the vicious circle of accentuating the
insecurity from which he seeks to escape’ (NDM, 1941: 161).
The importance of the paradox in which human existence is involved is in how it leads man to
believe that he is either one or the other exclusively. And indeed his historical enquiry
categorizes significant efforts to understand man’s fundamental problem (‘himself’) along
rationalistic lines - which have conceived of ‘self-transcendence’ in purely rational terms thus
deifying Reason; or naturalistic ones - which tend to stress man’s ‘sentimentality’ and reduce
his existence to the compliance with the laws of physics. Again, we recall Niebuhr’s
characterization of Man as standing ‘at the juncture of nature and spirit’ (NDM, 1941: 18). The
enumerated third aspect corresponds precisely to this ‘juncture’ and becomes for Niebuhr the
key to the understanding of man - against Morgenthau's denial of a third realm of
understanding. Again, Niebuhr coherently maintains his original research plan which is not
necessarily that of finding a solution to every single problem - and which would put him in
contradiction with the claim that we can never occupy God’s place - but of formulating the
problem in a totally different fashion thus allowing for the revival of the Bible as the ethical
cornerstone of any political order based upon human experience. I will argue that this
problem-posing attitude necessarily leads to a conception of reality as again a problem which
can hardly be dealt by scientific means but is rather enmeshed in political and cultural
presuppositions.
We had already ascertained that phenomenological references are not Niebuhr’s main
intellectual sources, not even outside the Christian canon. The influence of nineteenth-century
existentialism as well as that of American pragmatism has been outlined by many. But it cannot
be ignored that within his contemporaries Niebuhr clearly emphasizes the importance of the
phenomenology of Heidegger, whom he considers ‘the ablest non-theological analysis of
human nature in modern times’ (NDM, 1941: 173). Before that however Niebuhr pays
attention to Augustine as the ‘first Christian theologian to comprehend the full implications of
the Christian doctrine of man’ Man ‘stands at the juncture of nature and spirit’ (NDM, 1941:
165). Niebuhr is clearly dazzled by Augustine's capacity to describe man’s capacity for
transcendence, including his ability to turn transcendence over and against itself: ‘Therefore is the
mind too strait to contain itself’ Niebuhr quotes (NDM, 1941: 167). Niebuhr claims that
Augustine’s conclusions about man are too important to be left unaccounted. ‘The power of
transcendence places him [man] so much outside of everything else that he can find a home
only in God’ (NDM, 1941: 167). But in order to show how actual experience of the physical
world leads to ultimate transcendence Niebuhr needs to explore this revelatory dimension of
the experiencing of reality.
Naturally, from Augustinian theology we are already able to understand the subtleties of a
Christian philosophy of life: ‘Human life points beyond itself. But it must not make itself into
that beyond’ (NDM, 1941: 169). However, this is still not sufficient to give us a proper
understanding of the surrounding reality of human experience and for that Niebuhr seems to
contradict his own effort to search the past for an existential theology, opting rather for
explanations that are closer to his time and mainly of ‘non-theological’ character – as he likes
to class Heidegger (NDM, 1941: 173). It might be worth recalling that Heidegger was not at all
indifferent to the thought of Augustine, a name that would become central to the
phenomenologies of theological overtones such as that of Hannah Arendt (see The Human
Condition, 1958, chapter I).
We cannot know for sure how Niebuhr was acquainted with the semi-theological backdrop of
Heidegger’s thought – which constituted an intrinsic part of his early academic past as a
student in theology, before deciding to enroll in the philosophy degree in Freiburg. However,
Niebuhr intended to show how the critique to modern rationalism was echoed by prominent
voices in western philosophy and that these unintentionally incorporated biblical elements
even when selling themselves as secular theories. With this Niebuhr attempted to show two
things: first, that the opposition to a worldview dominated by science was not necessarily
religious; second, and in relation to the first, was the fact that it was precisely this secularist
support for his critical standpoint that strengthened his conviction that the Bible did indeed
offered a more comprehensive view of human nature. In fact, so comprehensive that it could
anticipate and embrace even those views thought as ‘non-theological’ (NDM, 1941: 173).
Needless to say that Heidegger’s phenomenology was full of philosophical affinities with
Christian theology, let alone that of Max Scheler, whose work is possibly the best example of
the combination of the two. This theological appropriation of Heidegger would therefore be
seen as an assault only for those who miss the religious aspects of Heidegger’s ontology. And
certainly, these would come as very convenient to Niebuhr, unable as he was to explain fully
and convincingly how human experience could lead to transcendence without sounding like
just another theologian. But such use of phenomenology would obviously carry consequences to
the outlook of theology itself – and, I will argue now, it would contribute to make it more
political (that is, to make it a ‘political theology’). Let us now look more attentively at the first
instance of Niebuhr’s analysis of Heidegger, which comes after Niebuhr’s recognition of the
limitations of Augustinianism (which were a product of the still powerful signs of Plato and
Aristotle):
‘the ablest non-theological analysis of human nature in modern times, by Heidegger, defines this
Christian emphasis [on man as something beyond reason] succinctly as “the idea of
‘transcendence’, namely, that man is something which reaches beyond itself – that he is more
than a rational creature”’ (NDM, 1941: 173 quote from Being and Time (B&T), 1927: 49).
From this point onwards Niebuhr embarks in a joint-venture between phenomenology and
theology that he will only embrace discretely throughout his work but that will carry, I argue,
some weight upon his more concrete political remarks – especially in regard to international
politics. In this sense, it is interesting to verify how in spite of the attention paid to Niebuhr’s
own particular form of realism, no attention has been dedicated to his use of Scheler in
establishing a more solid conceptual framework for a proper grasp of reality and human
nature. In fact, Niebuhr picks up from him the concept of ‘Urphaenomenen’ (NDM, 1941: 173).
In doing this, Niebuhr makes a significant existential leap in his work: from transcendence as
man’s self-understanding in relation to God, to transcendence as man’s self-understanding in
relation to real existence as actual experiencing, what Scheler coins as ‘primeval (‘Ur’)
phenomena’ (NDM, 1941: 173). Niebuhr thus employs Scheler’s own interpretation of the
Bible, in which Scheler is known to demarcate from Husserlian insights into experience and
consciousness: ‘Max Scheler, following the Biblical, proposes to use the word “spirit” (Geist) in
distinction to the Greek nous to denote this particular quality and capacity in man, because it
must be a “word which, though including the concept of reason, must also include, beside the
capacity of thinking ideas, a unique type of comprehension for primeval phenomena
(‘Urphaenomenen’) or concepts of meaning and furthermore a specific class of emotional and
volitional capacities for goodness, love, contrition and reverence”’ (NDM, 1941: 173). Our
understanding of experience therefore can only make sense in the relational context of man's
dialogue with God - a mystical understanding of experience which critical realists like Sellars
would later reject.
For Niebuhr it was clear that the concern with the most fundamental features of the human
being which include his capacity to know experience cannot be reduced to a purely cognitive
point of view as they were with Sellars and Morgenthau. Knowing by means of ‘concepts of
meaning’ is not what the human being is all about. Niebuhr clearly wants to suggest that a
more substantial realm of human transcendence subsists under the mere practical intelligence
of human beings, and that it is this ‘spiritual’ realm that is the central locus of his theological
enquiry as it has been for many phenomenological enquiries too - such as that of Scheler or
Heidegger but not that of Husserl: ‘Scheler is right in his emphasis upon the final dimension of
“spirit” in contrast to mere reason’. Niebuhr immediately stresses that spirit necessarily
overwhelms reason for ‘what is ordinarily meant by “reason” does not imply “spirit”, but
“spirit” does imply “reason” (NDM, 1941: 174, footnote 1). Niebuhr is also quite keen in
making clear that while reason appears to be a mere cumulative capacity that man has gained
and developed over the years depending on what challenges lied ahead of human action, spirit
seems to remain untouched by events and unaltered in its substantial characteristics. In this
sense, the spiritual dimension appears also as a more constant element in time and space thus
allowing for the generalization of this particular feature to the whole of humankind. ‘The
distinction between the two is qualitative and not merely quantitative’ (NDM, 1941: 174,
footnote 1).
Clearly, from Niebuhr's understanding of Scheler’s words, man has to think of himself in
spiritual terms and having in mind in particular the articulation between ‘experience’ and
‘transcendence’. It is because of this reformulation of what he considers to be a fundamental
problem in the history of western thought that we can class him as a phenomenological
theologian or a theological phenomenologist. On one hand, where other versions of modern
theology had not succeeded in accommodating modern philosophical contributions, Niebuhr
appears to do quite well. On the other hand, when phenomenology was taking a more or less
secular path in the works of Husserl and later in Jean-Paul Sartre, Niebuhr deploys it to justify
a biblical political theology and the need for the search of a collective and ultimate end:
‘man is self-determining, not only in the sense that he transcends himself in such a way as to be
able to choose between various alternatives presented to him by the processes of nature, but
also in the sense that he transcends himself in such a way that he must choose his total end’
(NDM: 173).
Niebuhr believes that man is much freer than what a strictly rational choice approach would
have him; but the problem is that such freedom necessarily leads him to a higher degree of
responsibility upon himself and his destiny thus conditioning him. ‘The freedom of which
Scheler speaks is something more (and in a sense also something less) than the usual “freedom
of choice” so important in philosophical and theological theory’ (NDM: 174). Nevertheless,
the irony of such situation, which is the irony of transcendence itself, has not been grasped by
predominant interpretations of the Bible throughout history - even though in cases such as
Augustine, Kierkegaard and Scheler we were not very far off the mark. It is this concern that
moves Niebuhr to engage in such detail with the history of western ideas. He will spell it out
even more explicitly when employing Heidegger’s own understanding of the human condition.
At stake is man’s unique character in being able to transcend experience so incompletely: ‘”The nature
of man (…) and that which could be determined his unique quality transcend that which is
usually called intelligence and freedom of choice and would not be reached if his intelligence
and freedom could conceivably be raised to the nth degree”’ (Niebuhr quoting Scheler, NDM:
173). In this line Niebuhr grounds his realism in Kierkegaard’s conception of ‘truth’ to spell
out the contradictions that the human condition withholds:
“Truth [in the human situation] is exactly the identity of choosing and determining and of being
chosen and determined. What I choose I do not determine, fir if it were not determined I could
not choose it; and yet if I did not determine it through my choice I would not really choose it. It
is: if it were not I could not choose it. It is not: but becomes reality through my choice, or else
my choice were an illusion… I choose the Absolute? What is the Absolute? I am that myself the
eternal personality… But what is this myself?... It is the most abstract and yet at the same time
the most concrete of all realities. It is freedom” (Niebuhr quoting Kierkegaard, NDM: 173).
Again, this brings us to Niebuhr’s realistic interpretation of the concept of the Imago Dei: ‘the
real situation is that man who is made in the image of God is unable, precisely because of
those qualities in him which are designated as “Image of God”, to be satisfied with a god who
is made in man’s image’ (NDM: 175). The fact that unlike God man is in constant and
unstoppable relation to reality, to a world of things surrounding and invading him, makes him
a privileged, and in fact the unique, interlocutor of experience to God. Only through
experience can man reach the ultimate meaning of transcendence and only through
transcendence can he expect to fully give meaning to experience and transmit it to God.
Meaning appears therefore to bridge between Niebuhr’s theology and Scheler’s
phenomenology. For Niebuhr this is ‘the basic problem of religion’ (NDM: 176). Indeed this
personalized level of interpretation is deeply contrasted with the sort of impersonal
observation that critical realists entertained. It was precisely because of this that Niebuhr
sought to explain how faith could reach truths that science would never be able to. In
response, Sellars compared Niebuhr’s existentialism with William James pragmatism:
‘Most expositions of it [American Existentialism] begin with Kierkegaard with his aversion to
Hegel’s impersonalism and his shift to the subjective and a leep of faith, not altogether unlike
William James’s “Will to Believe”’ (Sellars, 1961: 326-7).
In a crucial point of his analysis Sellars goes on to note that
‘Nietzsche is always included, though he was critical of Christianity. I suppose what they have in
common is a concern with human life. Existentialism is what the Germans call Lebensphilosophie,
a philosophy of human life, a concern with the human situation’ (Sellars, 1961: 326-7).
Therefore meaning-attribution was not a mere rational cognitive process – it was rather one
that took place in the world and not outside of it. ‘Implicit in the human situation of freedom
and in man’s capacity transcend himself and his world is his inability to construct a world of
meaning without finding a source and key to the structure of meaning which transcends the
world beyond his own capacity to transcend it’ (NDM: 176). Niebuhr advises against the belief
that transcendence is something of a non-human capacity. Transcendence, as it is, is always
human and tainted by contingency – and so is the meaning we attribute to the realities outside
of us. Contrary to science, we should never believe that the attribution of meaning to particular
phenomena (that is, its interpretation as phenomena) is serving an impartial and God-like
perspective upon the world.
We should instead be ready to admit that whatever meaning we attribute to the real is
conditioned by the obstacles that that real imposes on us, and that it is because of them in the
first place that we seek in philosophy, religion and myth to accommodate them into a
meaningful life. In face of its overwhelming power therefore man has to admit his limitations
and in it in this sense that he must adopt a realist position. ‘the problem of meaning (…)
transcends the ordinary rational problem of tracing the relation of things to each other as the
freedom of man’s spirit transcends his rational faculties’ (NDM: 175). This type of
transcendental or existential realism supersedes a cognitive realism that the natural sciences
had made us used to. Insofar as the object of analysis, that is, what is to be transcended, is not
a ‘what’ but a ‘who’ (a subject) this means that this object is not bound by those rules which
we usually associated with the physical world – hence the need for a new kind of metaphysics
or as I had previously suggested a meta-reason which cannot be confused with unreason. ‘This
problem [the problem between metaphysical transcendence and practical rationality] is not
solved without the introduction of a principle of meaning which transcends the world of
meaning to be interpreted’ (NDM: 176). Niebuhr seems to suggest that transcendence is so
powerful as to transcend itself – something which reason was apparently unable to do, at least
through science. He appears very close to what in late modern terminology has come to be
known as deconstruction when claiming that science leads man to ‘idolatry’ in the sense that
‘he uses something which itself requires explanation as the ultimate principle of coherence and
meaning’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176).
In approaching this particular problem – ‘the problem of meaning’ as ‘the basic problem of
religion’ – Niebuhr adds an important footnote. He reminds us of how Max Scheler himself
conceived of the ‘distinction’ between ‘(the freedom of) man’s spirit’ and ‘his rational faculties’.
I argue that in this footnote where Scheler in great detail we find one of the most insightful
phenomenological leanings of Niebuhr and also one of the most powerful understandings of
how phenomenology underpins indeed his link between human existence and human
transcendence. Scheler starts by giving the example of what would be a pure scientific analysis
of pain:
‘A problem of reason would be the following: “I have a pain in my arm. Where did it come
from and how may I be rid of it?” To determine that is a task of science’ (NDM, footnote 1:
176).
With this example, Scheler presents the scientific view of experience as a pragmatic
understanding of human phenomenon. Clearly, the problem-solving nature of scientific
enquiry is spelled out in the phrase ‘how may I be rid of it [the problem of pain]?’ (NDM,
footnote 1: 176). Furthermore, this problem is preceded by the question ‘where did it [the
pain] come from’ which allows for the depiction of causality as the temporal framework more
suitable for the practicality of the action that biological necessity and survival imposes on the
human being, that is, to ‘be rid of it’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176). This interpretation of experience
presupposes therefore the purely practical meaning of pain: pain is an obstacle to the carrying
of life as usual and science, although being a meaning attribution process that abstracts from
the problem in order to seek for a solution, is still operating within everyday life: ‘rational
principles of coherence represent another, somewhat higher, and yet inadequate system of
meaning’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176). In this sense they are for Niebuhr a mere ‘subordinate
principle’ of transcendence and anyway incapable of providing a proper understanding of
existence or even of themselves as a mode of understanding among others (NDM: 176).
Against this relativity, Niebuhr claims that science tends to ‘identify meaning with rationality’
and that this necessarily ‘implies the deification of reason’ (NDM: 176).
Causality is an example of how ‘rational faculties’ can hardly stand above themselves for selfcriticism. The ‘cause’, understood scientifically, is not a problem as such – in the sense of an
existential problem; it is only a practical problem, that is, a problem from the viewpoint of the
solution. Therefore, ‘if the effort is made to comprehend the meaning of the world through
the principle of natural causation alone, the world is conceived in terms of a mechanistic
coherence which has no place for the freedom which reveals itself in human consciousness’
(NDM: 176). In this sense, science is a form of abstraction or a form of theorizing that does
not reach beyond everyday life. Scheler opposes to that view the phenomenological
understanding of pain:
‘But I may use the pain in my arm to reflect upon the fact that the world is tainted with pain,
evil and sorrow. Then I will ask: What is pain, evil and sorrow essentially and of what nature is
the ground of all existence, making pain as such, without reference to my particular pain,
possible?’ (NDM, footnote 1: 176).
At this stage it becomes clear that Niebuhr adopts phenomenology as an interpretative method
of experience, after having ascertain his conviction that rationalism (and naturalism) does not
understand human experience – at least not in a way that can explain ultimate human
transcendence. Only phenomenology appears to open up experience to that fundamental
human characteristic and hence open existence to God. ‘The fact of self-transcendence leads
inevitably to the search for a God who transcends the world’ (NDM, footnote 1: 177).
Experience becomes the central realm where the fundamental problem of human existence
must be posed and answered for. In this sense, we can understand that for Niebuhr both
empiricism/naturalism and rationalism are wrong in insisting that the object of enquiry that
would allow for a better understanding of the human being is either in him (in his mind) or in
the world around him. Indeed, experience shows that it is somewhere in between the two –
indeed a phenomenological implication but without the scientific detail provided by Husserl or
later by Sellars. However, for Niebuhr, as for Heidegger or Scheler, that epistemological
separation corresponds to just another mode of being or way of existing: that of the human
being as a knowing being. Niebuhr deconstructive enterprise therefore suggests the
decentralization of man’s intelligibility away from its positivist and now dominant focus: the
mind vis-à-vis world. This is because ‘a mind which transcends itself cannot legitimately make
itself the ultimate principle of interpretation by which it explains the relation of mind to the
world’ (NDM, 177). Only through a 'theological phenomenology' is man able to avoid the risk
of lifting ‘some finite and contingent element of existence into the eminence of the divine’ as
Niebuhr claims man does with the divinization of reason (NDM, footnote 1: 177).
We conclude from this that Niebuhr’s theology (also in its political outcomes) is not only
profoundly existential but also concretely phenomenological although in its theological and
anti-scientific version: one does not attribute meaning to pain so that by obtaining a clearer
understanding the problem can then be solved; rather, from the meaning we attribute to pain
some idea of what it means to exist must be extrapolated. Heidegger had started a
metaphysical revolution against Husserl under the claim that 'only as phenomenology is
ontology possible' (Being and Time, 1927: 60). Niebuhr would appropriate it only to reclaim the
legacy of Biblical theology which stressed of man's cognitive and existential limitations:
absolute knowledge and absolute existence could be found only in God and man would
forever be reduced to witnessing that fundamental truth which biblical mythology and in
particular the idea of miracle confirmed. Naturally, he would never have turned that principle
upon God himself, whose ontology could not be dependent on its appearing to the subject
(phenomenology).
3.5. Existentialism vs. Critical Realism
On a footnote in chapter VII, Niebuhr develops rather thoroughly his more profound
understanding of Heidegger in regard to his concept of Sorge, or as it is translated in English,
‘Care’ or ‘Anxiety’. Before going into the intricacies of the translation which Niebuhr himself
points out as well as his appropriation of Heidegger in this instance, I should note that his
exploration of the Heideggerian understanding of anxiety is not without consequence. After it,
Niebuhr will make use of the concept of anxiety along these lines to the extent that whenever
he refers to the term anxiety it springs to mind this specific understanding – instead of that of
Kierkegaard’s ‘angst’ which he had hinted at previously. And in fact the four long paragraphs
that proceed from this one (and close the second part of the seventh chapter) start off with
the word ‘anxiety’ or the correspondent adjective ‘anxious’. I will now look closely at the
footnote and then move on to explore his closing remarks on the idea of ‘anxiety’. After
having done this, I will present a brief discussion about the concept of Sorge in Heidegger’s
Sein und Zeit so to make clear Niebuhr’s own take on the matter.
At the core of Niebuhr’s understanding of anxiety, the basic existential structure of Being,
something Heidegger calls ‘geworfenen Entwurfs’ (footnote, NDM: 196). This German term
refers to the ambivalence between ‘contingency’ and ‘potentiality’ that characterizes human
existence. Even regretting that the English language ‘makes the distinction between Angst and
Sorge impossible’ and that therefore ‘both of them must be translated as anxiety’ Niebuhr
explains that ‘this double connotation, according to Heidegger, is clearly revealed if Sorgfalt is
juxtaposed to Sorge, that is care as carefulness to care as anxiety’ (footnote, NDM: 196). From
this detailed insight we can conclude that for Niebuhr ‘contingency’ refers to man’s carefulness
about the world around him while anxiety necessarily points beyond that contingency, once his
‘potentiality’ is revealed. He quotes Heidegger in affirming that man’s ideal of ‘perfection’ has
precisely to do with Sorge, that is, the fact that man’s care for the world can hardly account for
the potential that that world reveals when experienced – that is the potential for perfection.
Thus, it is experience of ‘care about’ the world and ‘being cared for’ (by the world) that
automatically places man in a non-contingent position:
'Heidegger calls attention to the significant double connotation of the word " Care", Sorge,
cura, that is a double connotation revealed in many languages. He writes “The perfection of
man, his becoming what in his freedom he can become according to his ultimate possibility, is a
capacity of care or anxiety (Sorge). But just as basically care points to his being at the mercy of
an anxious world, of his contingency (Geworfenheit). This double connotation of cura points
to a basic structure in man of contingency and potentiality' (geworfenen Entwurfs)" Sein und Zeit, I.
198.
For Heidegger too, perfection is not something that lies outside the being for him to aspire to
it. It is rather a sort of totality that emerges from the subject interaction with the environment
and allows him to dominate, even if partly, that environment. Perfection is not an ideal-type
that comes from the outside of everyday life. In this sense, perfection is never perfect in the
absolute sense, it is only perceived as so. Indeed, this seems to confirm Niebuhr’s view that
absolute ideals are always necessarily ‘tainted’ with contingent elements: Man ‘is unable to
define the total human situation without coloring his definition with finite perspectives drawn
from his immediate situation’ (NDM: 196).
But the so-called ‘care-structure’ does not only represents man’s condition on earth, it also
points towards the temporality or historicality of his existence. In fact, the title from which
Niebuhr collects these remarks by Heidegger is in itself symptomatic of man’s existential
dialectical condition: Sein und Zeit (in English Being and Time). Being and time points precisely to
the idea that the Being of the Subject necessarily induces him into a time framework. Because
present always reveals a future possibility (including the possibility of not Being), we cannot
think of ourselves as not oriented towards some future. In this sense, in Niebuhr, as in
Heidegger, man is never pure ‘actuality’; he is always, from the outset, placed in a position of a
potential to be fulfilled and looks at actuality from the viewpoint of the fulfillment of that
potential. In this sense, his Being is always in time (although this does not mean that Being is
always present). Or to put it better, the human subject would not Be were it not for his
historical consciousness of a future, which nevertheless emerges from his interaction with the
immediate reality. Niebuhr formulates this though in the following terms: man would never
reach transcendence if there was nothing for him to transcend from in the first place. The
world becomes therefore a necessary, although not necessarily sufficient, condition for his
getting beyond the purely physical world (metaphysics).
The human being is thus naturally metaphysical, for otherwise he would not be able to
conceive of the ‘physical’ as such (that is, as something out there that I can touch, feel, smell
and ‘care’ about). His observer stance is a immediate consequence of his practical stance: he
becomes an observer because he is, above all and from the start, a practitioner; he
contemplates possibilities because his actions, were it not for his capacity (‘Sorge’) to step back
and reflect, would fail to achieve their goals. In this sense, the Present ends up being a mere
tool in the machinery of a strategic action oriented towards the future. The same applies to the
Past. They are only meaningful, and therefore brought into a cognitive status (of something
that can be known and deserves to be known) if they carry in themselves some possibility (of
a future).
It is also in this sense that Heidegger, in the quote that Niebuhr presents us, classifies the
world (and not only the subject) as anxious. The world is an ‘anxious world’ because it lies out
there waiting to be given full potential and in that sense it is a contingent world, whose
immediacy subsequently bears on potentiality: the potential is always the potential of
something contingent. Man could not expect to potentiate something if that thing was not in a
stage of overt incompleteness, that is, placed in some sort of passive anxiety, ‘present-at-hand’
to use Heideggerian terminology. This relates to our early discussion of Morgenthau's concern
for the Environment and of how it affects the subject's intentionality and his capacity to
actualize it. However, in Niebuhr and in Heidegger this line would be explored more deeply to
establish a relation to the divine that Morgenthau , Husserl and Sellars rejected. As a
theologian Niebuhr was more concerned with the ethical implications of this human
circumstance, that is, with what it tells us about social interaction and, even more importantly,
about politics. The fact that contingency always defies itself by revealing hidden and
unexpected potentials, while still never allowing for that potential to be fully realized, stresses
the difficulty of our knowledge of those limits: ‘There are, of course, limits but it is difficult to
gauge them from any immediate perspective’ (NDM: 196). But besides that point, we are still
to know if those possibilities are worth realizing and to what extent they are creative. For a
‘tamed cynic’ like Niebuhr, the border between ‘sinful action’ and ‘moral action’, that is, our
capacity to predict if the potentiality that contingency opens up for the human being is good,
is still a very blurred one: ‘It is not possible to make a simple separation between the creative
and destructive elements in anxiety’. He goes on to argue that ‘for that reason it is not possible
to purge moral achievement of sin as easily as moralists imagine.’ (NDM: 196).
The duality between contingency and potentiality therefore seems to provide, for Niebuhr’s
purposes at least, a conceptual framework for posing the problem of human nature, rather
than presenting a solution. In this sense, Niebuhr’s realism appears as a problem-posing theory,
rather than a problem-solving one. This critical motive goes well with his Heideggerian
inspired deconstruction. In fact, his whole work consists of a history of ideas whose authors
have attempted to solve the problem of human nature and destiny in various different ways –
and have failed to do so. The ones that, according to him, come closer to an understanding of
the problematic inherent to human life are Scheler and Heidegger. But even these philosophers
have only succeeded in framing the problem, not in presenting a solution. As he sees it, that
problem is a moral one and he formulates it in these terms:
'The same action may reveal a creative effort to transcend natural limitations, and a sinful effort
to give an unconditioned value to contingent and limited factors in human existence' (NDM:
196).
For Niebuhr, man should look at the fundamental condition of Sorge with some prudence
(‘Man may, in the same moment, be anxious because he has not become what he ought to be’)
while at the same time making sure that we never compromise it totally (and also anxious lest
he cease to be at all’ (NDM: 196)). But, although we are still not able to discern a solution to
this problem, we can say why some of the solutions will fail or have failed in the past
according to Niebuhr. Above all, we should make sure that we never forget that potentiality is
never fully disjointed from contingency and that any doctrine or theory that suggests so is
oblivious to the dangers of such position.
But Scheler, as much as Niebuhr, would give it the necessary theological twist: existence
becomes the condition not only of my particular understanding of pain but also of an
understanding of pain in general, that is, ‘without reference to my particular pain’ (NDM,
footnote 1: 176). Pain is therefore elevated to the status of human suffering and gains a
transcendental moral dimension that animals cannot reach and science could not explain. It
results from this that we are to understand existence not only as a privileged locus of pain or of
experience in general, but as the proper locus of the following (existential) possibility: to
interpret pain in such a way that allows us to give meaning to existence as such and in general that is, in relation to God. Naturally, the experience of pain is not kept in the present, that is, in
the actuality of that experience. The experiencing of pain projects itself upon the future, it
opens the possibility that I might feel pain again during my existence. It might also remind me
of painful experiences of the past. But, above all, while opening up that possibility, the
experiencing of pain no longer allows me to think of my own existence as painless. Therefore,
existence, precisely because it reveals this potential also unveils its conditioned character.
Whenever existence opens up a possibility for the Being it immediately ties it down to his
conditioned existence. In short, it is because existence is such a world of possibilities that it is
also so worldly. Only experience can confront man with other possibilities – he would not
need considering completing his existence were it not for its incompleteness.
Unlike scientific enquiries of any kind, theology was for Niebuhr the appropriate cognitive
framework that could face and embrace the fact of man's epistemological and ontological
incompleteness – whilst remaining faithful to a higher plane of knowledge that could
constitute the yardstick for measuring the relative validity of science and rationality. Niebuhr
relativization of scientific truths could only obtain in the context of a higher transcendence,
that of religious truths. He remained skeptical therefore of man's moral capacity for
amelioration, especially when his ideal of perfection was now deployed through a mundane
tool (science) for the sake of mundane purposes (rationality) instead of being sought through
faith in God. From the point of view of critical realism faith was obviously insufficient. Sellars
impatience towards Heidegger and Jaspers clearly signed that. His opposition to this sort of
‘philosophical genre’ as he would call it – which he thought of as overly mystical and romantic
– was itself very symptomatic of the divide between Anglo-American philosophy and the
continental mode of thinking. Indeed, what was central in this divide – as well as to his
unstated disagreement with Niebuhr – was the old scientific problem of falsifiability. The
major contention of Sellars against existentialism - and the sort of realism propounded by
Niebuhr - was in the fact that its claims were scientifically unverifiable. In critical realism,
rationality and logic were placed as the yardstick of comparison between both Realisms
(Christian and Critical) – and it was precisely against this yardstick that Niebuhr stood,
suggesting a Godlike transcendence as alternative to it. Not without some irony, Sellars
protested against continental philosophy:
‘I do not want to give the reader the impression that British and American philosophers are not
concerned with the human condition. It is only that they want to approach with as few untested
assumptions as possible’ (Sellars, 1961: 327).
In another article, he clearly targeted the kind of existentialism that had, after Heidegger's
demarcation from Husserl, gained theological overtones. Indeed, Niebuhr had accommodated
Heidegger’s insight into the human condition which characterized it in biblical fashion as one
of thrownness (see Being and Time, 1927: 179). Sellars sought to preserve the idea that although
the human being was fundamentally conditioned by his environment, one should not take the
environment as given in experience. In other words, Sellars sought to secure Husserl against
Heidegger’s assault:
‘Concepts are tools which interplay with the sensations in the same cognitive direction. As
percipients as well as agents we are in the world, not thrown into it’ (Sellars, ‘Referential
Transcendence’, 1961: 11).
Indeed, Sellars seemed to think of the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre as the bastard son
of Husserl’s phenomenology even though ending up with the hope that one day they could be,
along with historical materialism and empiricism, combined to form a more exact picture of
human existence and knowledge. Truly, a great expectation when considering the philosophical
landscape of today.
Conclusion
In this paper I have attempted to draw some fundamental differences between Niebuhr’s
epistemological framework and Morgenthau’s. I have done so by resorting to a comparison
between their theories and the more classical versions of Critical Realism, namely that of its
founder: Roy Wood Sellars. Clearly, Morgenthau’s stands much closer to this type of enquiry
than Niebuhr. This has to do mainly with the strong theological input of Niebuhr’s Christian
Realism – but also with its tragic outlook on the state of international relations which draws on
more radical sources (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Scheler and so on). In turn,
Morgenthau’s proximity to critical realism stems not only for his rhetorical and methodological
turn – after having left Europe for the United States – but also from his formative stage in
legal theory and phenomenological theory. From the point of view of Critical Realism – as
defined above – Morgenthau’s Realism appears therefore much more concise and
accomplished.
However, one is left with the feeling that the ethical insufficiencies of Critical and Scientific
Realism – obsessed as it is ‘to know’ – does leave some empty room for more reflection
regarding the role that knowledge plays in the construction of a meaningful life – a space that
Niebuhr, along with other types of existentialist theologies, seemed to fill in. On the other
hand, Niebuhr’s writings appear sometimes on the verge of moralism and religious
paternalism. His discourse is repetitive and at times very vague, showing no concern for the
exact meaning of some central concepts, adding no analytical depth to the historiography of
international relations. Unlike Niebuhr, Morgenthau shows occasional commonalities with
Critical Realism, mainly in the rejection of naturalism and on its focus on transcendence
conceived scientifically rather than theologically, thus saving international relations and
political thought in general from becoming engulfed in mystical concerns.
This paper has achieved three things which, as far as I am aware, have not been of central
concern to any intellectual history of international relations. First, and foremost, it has
established an important connection or, at least, a comparison, between American Critical
Realism – especially that of Sellars – and the Political Realism of Niebuhr and Morgenthau.
The other two contributions of this paper are derivative from the first one. On the one hand,
it has been argued that there are some similarities between the Critical Realism of Roy Wood
Sellars and the quasi-scientific realism of Morgenthau. I have attempted to show that this is
due to their engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. On the other hand, the differences
between Niebuhr and Morgenthau were highlighted through the recast of Niebuhr’s reliance
on the Existentialism of Scheler and Heidegger on the basis of which Niebuhr’s critique of
Scientific Realism can be spelled out. Overall, I have attempted to demonstrate that in spite of
being political realists in broad terms, Niebuhr’s theological background and Morgenthau’s
legal scientific one, allow for different characterizations of their Realist discursive strategies, in
particular regarding their epistemological framework and the place of science, reason and the
possibility of knowledge in their thought.
Guilherme Marques Pedro
29th of June 2009