Eberhard Jüngel: finding ourselves?
“The person who in everything seeks his own self will lose himself. The person who is always in pursuit of his own identity runs the risk of finding neither himself nor anything else for that matter.... In the endeavour to realise himself, man loses those possibilities which make human existence human.”
—Eberhard Jüngel, Death: The Riddle and the Mystery (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1975), p. 130.
Is it a particularly German quality or just fashionable since Nietzsche to utter recondite epigrams that in their self-contained certainty seem true but actually defy understanding. Certainly if Jungel is positing this on the assumption that love in community is an essential precondition of realising the human then isn't Christ the worst example, he lived only for the Father who he alone understood and knew and any that differed from his understanding were of the devil and unworthy of him and although he dined with sinners let's be honest who'd want to party with a Puritan, even then these people became acceptable insofar as they agreed with him, is it surprising that Christianity so easily falls victim to an intolerable dogmatic spirit and the current fahion for inclusiveness is equally intolerable. More true by far Kojeve's assertion that 'no animal can be a snob' for the desire to differentiate and judge based on those differences is, sadly, the truest mark of being human, all too human, and the resisting of this desire a sure mark of being 'a partaker in the divine nature'.
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