Love and the Dignity of Human Life: On Nature and Natural Law

by Robert Spaemann, David L. Schindler (Foreword)

What does it mean to love someone? What does the concept of human dignity mean, and what are its consequences? What marks the end of a person's life? Is personhood more than consciousness? These perplexing questions lurk beneath the surface of everyday life, surfacing only to demand urgent attention in crises.
Renowned German philosopher Robert Spaemann addresses these and other foundational enigmas in three eloquent short essays. Speaking wisdom to controversy, he offers carefully considered, novel approaches to key philosophical and theological questions about the nature of human love ("The Paradoxes of Love"), dignity ("Human Dignity and Human Nature"), and death ("Is Brain Death the Death of a Human Person?").

Genres: Philosophy

69 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Robert Spaemann wurde 1927 in Berlin geboren. Er promovierte 1952 in Münster, war dann vier Jahre lang als Verlagslektor tätig. 1962 habilitierte er in den Fächern Philosophie und Pädagogik und war bis 1992 ordentlicher Professor an den Universitäten Stuttgart, Heidelberg und München.

Reviews

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short trio of essays served as my introduction to Robert Spaemann, the respected German philosopher who was a favourite of Pope Benedict XVI's. Some quotes stood out to me. The first on forgiveness and the folly of those who assert that forgiveness does not require change from wicked ways:

"Forgiveness means not to pin someone down on being what he is - a coward, a liar, or a traitor - but to allow him to distance himself from his being that way, and to begin anew. Being able to do so is characteristic of a person. Because love aims at the person, it can let go of the 'that is just how you are,' and allow the other to distance himself from himself and have a new beginning. To accept someone as he is, is the ultimate form of resignation. The proclamation of Jesus does not begin with the words: 'God accepts you as you are,' but with the words: 'Repent, change! Be different from what you are now!' (pp. 16-17).

Love at its highest is reciprocal - a giving AND a receiving. This can strike believers especially as God - what do WE have to offer God? Yet Spaemann writes:

"He who truly wishes another well with all his heart will let him feel that he, the lover, also needs him, the beloved. He who only wants to be a giver does not give enough. Christianity teaches that the ultimate gift of God is that he makes himself into a receiver with regard to us. He who gives someone to understand that he is ready to be everything for him, but that he is not interested in being loved himself, humiliates the other. The amor benevolentiae is love only if it is also amor concupiscentiae. And the same is true vice versa. Someone who really desires the other can only obtain what he desires if he is willing to give" (p. 21).

Spaemann warns against one of the insidious consequences of euthanasia, reminiscent of a similar remark by Rene Girard. Spaemann cautions:

"Making suicide a right has grievous consequences, for then the bearer of this right is responsible for all the consequences, all the personal and financial burdens, which arise from the fact that he does not make use of this right. From this derives with logical necessity an illegitimate pressure on those who are old or sick. The patient can be free from this responsibility only if he does not have any legal possibility to obtain his death from others at all." (pp. 40-41)

Lastly, I am grateful for the sober warnings that opponents of euthanasia marshal against assisted suicide but I also often struggle with what a "moral" death then actually looks like in the end - does a 90-year old senior who is content with the life they've lived and whose body has been ravaged in a heightened way by a disease who then refuses to eat committing suicide (I must do further reading on this topic)? Surprisingly, yet sensibly, the orthodox Spaemann contends that we SHOULDN'T radically prolong natural life by biomedical means simply for the sake of keeping someone alive who does not wish to continue living.

"Dying with true dignity, on the other hand, is the one who is accompanied by human presence, sheltered and saved from great pain. It is just as much against human dignity to prolong human life beyond any reasonable measure by medical procedures like artificial nutrition against one's will as it is against human dignity to bring about death intentionally." (p. 42).

[Chase Rodrigue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spaemann does well in this philosophical series to invite readers into a rational yet orthodox discussion on the topics of love, human dignity and brain death. Spaemann seems fair and consistent in his views and arguments while not betraying his loyalty to the Church and Her Magesterium. This series is an all-around insightful and highly informative philosophical exploration of current issues which proves the relevance of the intellectual enterprise in the realm of the metaphysical.

[Leonardo]

"¿Qué piensa Benedicto XVI?
Él nunca ha tocado directamente el tema, incluso ningún teólogo (sic) o Cardenal lo ha hecho. Sin embargo, si se sabe cuanto respeto él le tiene a su amigo Spaemann."

http://es.catholic.net/op/articulos/8...

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spaemann's work was relatively unknown in the Anglophone world prior to the past decade. Since then, the translation of his two most important works, Happiness and Benevolence and Persons: The Difference between Someone and Something, put Spaemann on the map. A relentless critic of the bioethics of Peter Singer and Derek Parfit, inter alia, Spaemann insists with the Catholic tradition that dignity rests upon a recognition of a human being as a person rather than the positing of personhood to a human being. The distinction is crucial, since without it personhood becomes a mere genus and one looks for localizable and transient characteristics to ground one's judgment that this particular being with whom I am to do is a person and thus in possession of dignity as such. Parfitt's and Singer's bioethics engage in exactly the sort of bureaucratic classification I've sketched here, and this leads them into all sorts of absurdities, as Spaemann points out in the third essay of this volume, 'Is Brain Death the Death of the Person'?, for instance, the conclusion that a person sleeping transiently ceases to be a person (66). The first essay, 'the Paradoxes of Love' develops themes that show Spaemann to be in continuity with Catholic social teaching and the Anglo-American communitarians, such as the insistence that knowledge can only be fulfilled in love and that love has an order expressed in love for particular things. Spaemann's thought in many respects is an unmasking of the sleight of hand that occurs in the process of abstraction in modern thought. The insistence upon 'inclusion' and the attempt to liberate the 'self' from the constraints of the particular community that are formative of 'persons' becomes an ideology which destroys the dignity that moderns are keen to preserve since in occult fashion it substitutes the creature for God. 'Only for God does the individual not disappear in the great number' (20). Instead, Spaemann invites us to contemplate the example of Mother Teresa: 'Mother Teresa did not choose the people for whom she was there; she simply was there for them. Yet, there is an ordo amoris. There is a creaturely relation of nearness and distance that is not invalidated by the commandment to love one's neighbor' (18). By contrast, Peter Singer thinks that particular loves are invalid, that all persons are in effect interchangeable insofar as the public good is concerned. But this 'is the attempt to take God's viewpoint and to devalue creaturely relations. As if we know by what the world is improved! It certainly is not improved by people who imagine themselves to bear the responsibility for the universe'. A beautiful book, and as Oliver O'Donovan writes in his blurb, these essays 'will make an excellent first encounter (it is unlikely to be the last) for readers who do not yet know the probing and delicate thought of this distinguished German Catholic moral philosopher'.

[Conor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth the final essay on brain death.