Robert Spaemann (1927-2018) was an internationally acclaimed German philosopher and Catholic public intellectual. He was an ordinary professor of philosophy at the Universities of Stuttgart, Heidelberg, where he succeeded Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Munich. In his books and essays, he touches on all the major themes of philosophy: God, religion, human nature, politics, ethics, bioethics, as well as the method and place of science, both social and natural. Much admired by Benedict XVI, he draws on classical philosophy and Christian theology to assess modern thought and culture. In 1982, the great English philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe lamented that Spaemann was too little known in the English-speaking world. Since then, some of Spaemann’s books and essays have been translated into English. In this interview, Adam Myers takes us through them.
A native Virginian, Adam Myers teaches philosophy at Mount Mercy University, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has degrees in philosophy, history, and religion at Liberty University (Va.), Wheaton College (Ill.), Yale Divinity School (Conn.), and Baylor University (Tex.). His dissertation at Baylor comprised a genealogical defence of what is sometimes called ethical naturalism, tenets of which are found in the work of Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Robert Spaemann. Intrigued by the networks of this modern Aristotelian revival, he is now working on an essay on Spaemann's relation to his teacher, Joachim Ritter.
- Basic Moral Concepts
by Robert Spaemann - Persons: The Difference Between 'Somone' and 'Something'
by Robert Spaemann - A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person
by D.C. Schindler and Jeanne Heffernan Schindler - Happiness and Benevolence
by Robert Spaemann - Essays in Anthropology: Variations on a Theme
by Robert Spaemann
....and as an extra recommendation... - Love and the Dignity of Human Life: On Nature and Natural Law
by Robert Spaemann
Perhaps we can begin with a brief biographical overview of Spaemann.
He was born in 1927. This meant that his youth coincided with the Nazi period. He was never tempted by the typical cultural temptations of Nazism. He found it unpalatable. His youth was characterised more by a pious and devout embedding in Catholic religion. That made National Socialism very unappealing to him.
His mother was a dancer, in an avant-garde style. She died quite young. His father became a well-known Catholic priest and writer in Germany. He wrote on many topics, such as euthanasia. In a sense, Spaemann grew up virtually an orphan.
About ten years ago, he published some autobiographical reflections. Unfortunately, most of these have not been translated into English. He painstakingly goes over his younger years as a philosopher, thinker, and intellectual. He does not recount a particular time in which he first gave himself over to philosophy or theology but he does write about his teachers in the Gymnasium. He writes in a journal, for instance, “Today the teacher philosophized again.” He does not quite know what he means when he said that, but he saw that the teacher had departed from the typical material and was reflecting at a higher level.
When he went off to university, he studied Roman antiquity, German literature, and theology. It was only when he met Joachim Ritter that he opted decisively for philosophy.
Then, he began teaching. The themes of his work can be described though his relationship to Ritter, a philosopher who is not very well-known in English-speaking circles. Other post-war German philosophers are better-known: Heidegger, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, and Gadamer. Ritter does not normally make his way into that list. That is a shame.
Ritter had collected around him, in what was called the collegium philosophicum, a ragtag group of young intellectuals who were getting their doctoral degrees and studying with him. Some of them were theologians; some, jurists; some, Protestant theologians; some, Catholics; some, positivists; some, sociologists; some, philosophers, like Spaemann. This informal group of students was not unified by any theory or methodology. In this regard, it was quite distinct from the Frankfurt School. The Ritter-Schule was much more diverse. It was unified, for Spaemann at least, by a certain way of asking questions; certain interests; and by questions of a historical nature that were concerned with modernity. All of its members were, to a certain degree, shaped by a historical or sceptical approach to asking questions. Their approach was sceptical in the deep philosophical sense. They were always asking, “Give me some reason for thinking what you have just told me to think.”
Spaemann went on to teach at different institutions for a good thirty years. He settled in Munich and was made emeritus there. After that, his writing became more religious, theological, and, one might even say, spiritual. For instance, he published a series of meditations on the Psalms. Unfortunately, they have not been translated into English. They are beautiful, very distinct writings. I do not think I have ever come across someone reading the Psalms quite like this before. I saw new things in the Psalms by reading them with Spaemann.
I do not know what accounts for this change in his writings. It is not that he was not concerned with these topics earlier on. However, he would not have been the first philosopher teaching publicly who thought that he should stick to business for the meanwhile and, once he was not teaching, would go on to write about faith-related matters. Elizabeth Anscombe had a similar approach. In her published philosophical writings, there is not much trace of a religious sensibility, much less of religious names. She explicitly kept names like Aquinas out of discussions about things that she learned from him and did so for reasons that appeared obvious to her. As soon as you mentioned Aquinas, nobody was going to be interested in what you were saying. They would just tar you as a religious nutjob. In Spaemann’s later writings, I pick up a more straightforward confidence. He does the philosopher’s tasks earlier, showing all the work that one must do to reach certain conclusions.
You are studying how Spaemann’s teacher, Joachim Ritter, influenced him. Ritter, a student of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, was one of the most influential figures in German philosophy after World War II. Known for his innovative studies on Hegel and Aristotle, and for the Historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Historical Dictionary of Philosophy), he also formed a circle of influential German intellectuals that, in addition to Spaemann, included figures such as Hermann Lübbe and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde. Unlike Gadamer’s circle, Ritter’s had a distinct interest in political philosophy and was singled out by Habermas for its conservative leanings. Is Ritter relevant to contemporary debates in the Anglophone world? To what extent does Spaemann carry on themes from Ritter?
People like Habermas called him a reactionary and a counter-Enlightenment thinker. Schnädelbach calls him a neo-Aristotelian, and that is not a compliment.
For their part, the Ritter-Schule styled themselves as liberal conservatives. They did not like the name neo-conservative, the exonym used by people such as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. It is more helpful to move beyond those names and get to their genuine concerns. Without entering into the justice of Habermas’s remarks, what you see in them is a concern with the gains and losses of twentieth-century modernity.
"Both Spaemann and Ritter saw that straight-up liberalism promises an ongoing emancipation and progress that has no goal or direction whatsoever. They wanted it to be more attentive to the historical situation of human beings."
You mentioned Hegel's central importance for Ritter. Hegel is very important for Spaemann too. They both read him very closely over the course of their life and named him as a one of their great teachers. His interpretation of the French Revolution is important for Ritter’s view of society. There is a dialectic between the abstract, negative freedom sought by the Revolutionaries and its consequences in France: the Great Terror, the reactionary movements of the ancien régime, and the rise of Napoleon. For Hegel and Ritter, it is important to see the underlying continuity between these two things. Even if the French Revolution looks like a rupture, it is philosophical to look for what underlies the apparently opposing sides of things. This was a model of engaging with twentieth-century modernity. Ritter did not want to be on either side. He did not want to be on the reactionary side: to go back and satisfy a nostalgic longing for a bygone world. Nor did he think you should just throw yourself into an empty ideal of constant progress. He saw that as an incoherent fall into the same partisanship that arose in the wake of the French Revolution. Both Spaemann and Ritter saw that straight-up liberalism promises an ongoing emancipation and progress that has no goal or direction whatsoever. They wanted it to be more attentive to the historical situation of human beings.
Human beings are born into a pre-shaped world that already has certain norms. The stage is set. The furniture is there. You do not get to control the backdrop. Your actions are shaped by that. This does not mean that you do not exercise any agency whatsoever. Rather, what Spaemann wanted us to do was acknowledge that individuals, communities, and society exist in contingent historical circumstances rather than pursue an empty ideal of freedom.
Both Spaemann and Ritter went through a Marxist phase. However, whereas Hasbermas advocates freedom from any kind of domination whatsoever (Herrschaftsfreiheit), for Ritter and Spaemann the historical situation of human beings is such that you are always going to emerge in a concrete situation that constrains and restricts what it is possible for you to do. This can be managed in a more-or-less orderly way. It is not domination in the negative sense. The liberal conservatives of the Ritter-Schule have a much more pronounced place for institutions in their practical and political philosophy. Both Spaemann and Ritter get this directly from Aristotle. Human action is possible in its rationality and in its sociality precisely because it is shaped by a range of institutions that are stable across generations. I can learn how to build ships or play a musical instrument because this rational activity is also a social activity. It comes to me via institutions.
This is remarkably similar to the thought of some anglophone philosophers, not least Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It is no accident that both Hegel and Aristotle have been significant conversation partners for MacIntyre as well. The same goes for Charles Taylor. They are all thinking about what it means to be a concrete human being, with the dramatic ideals proposed by human rationality, in modernity. That obscures a huge range of differences between these thinkers. But there is something quite similar going on in all of them.
"You might forget the thesis of the whole essay, but in the span of a sentence or two he says things that, in their own right, are memorable and extremely helpful."
In his writings, Spaemann eschews the highly technical approach adopted by most professional philosophers. That makes his books accessible to the general reader. Nevertheless, it is not always easy to follow his arguments. Often, he does not state his thesis explicitly at the beginning but teases it out and works his way towards it dialectically. Do you have any advice for those interested in reading Spaemann for the first time?
This takes us into the first book, Basic Moral Concepts. This book is dialectical. It starts with ideas we experience immediately. Then, it slowly complicates them, until you realise that you are doing ethics. In his works, Spaemann routinely motivates these questions, especially at the beginning of an inquiry or an undertaking. He does a very good job of showing an interesting question and making it accessible to the everyday person.
But you are right. Often, he wanders off in directions where you do not feel quite so guided by your everyday experiences. This is the advice I would give. If you are intrigued by what he claims to be talking about, just keep going. Let it remain unclear and push forward. Sometimes, what he says will have a retrospective effect on your reading.
On the other hand, his writings are riddled with brilliant aperçus. You might forget the thesis of the whole essay, but in the span of a sentence or two he says things that, in their own right, are memorable and extremely helpful.
1.
You have already mentioned that Basic Moral Concepts tops your list because it is the most accessible of Spaemann’s books. In fact, it was a series of talks broadcast on Bavarian radio in 1981.
That is right. There are also writings by English-language authors that were originally delivered as radio addresses: the Screwtape Letters or Mere Christianity, for example. It is remarkable how few people read aloud what they write. If we did, our style would improve so much. Spaemann seems to have had quite an ear for his own writing. A good part of what has been published in English was originally delivered as a spoken address. He speaks quite beautifully. On YouTube, you can find interviews with him or documentaries that he made on philosophy. Unfortunately, these are not accessible to people who do not speak German. However, he had an uncanny way of philosophising clearly, right in front of you. I always find it so refreshing and instructive. As a philosophy teacher, I often wonder, “How can I speak about these ideas with vivacity but also content?”
2.
With the next book we pass from Spaemann’s ethics to the closely related area of philosophical anthropology: Persons: The Difference Between “Someone” and “Something”. Here Spaemann engages the modern tendencies to reduce human personhood to consciousness and social recognition, by exploring the classical conception of personhood and its implications. How can Spaemann help us address the fundamental ethical and political problems that depend on a proper understanding of personhood?
This was the first book by Spaemann that I read. That was before I knew German and so I read it in translation. In fact, I read it because it had been translated by Oliver O’Donovan, an Anglican theologian. I was a great admirer of O’Donovan’s work and I thought that if he has taken the time to translate a whole book by this German philosopher in Germany, then I should read it. This is how I first learned about Spaemann.
This is not the only place where Spemann picks up the theme of personhood. It is an important theme in his applied ethics too, especially with regard to euthanasia. One of the refrains that he repeats is that human beings are not their nature; they possess their nature. This is directly relevant to his broadly Boethian notion of personhood. As he often points out, non-human animals do not have biographies where they collect all of the events of their life as a whole. They just exist in their nature. But human beings have their nature. We exist in a relationship to it. There is an indeterminacy about it.
This, by the way, is a dangerous thought. This distance between the human person and human nature has sometimes been exposed to negative effect in modern thought. You can distance yourself from your nature. It does not determine everything for you. You can infer erroneously therefrom that you are entirely self-determining, irrespective of nature. Spaemann is more realistic. Yes, you have a nature that is not entirely determined but some things about human beings are determinate. There is also a certain indeterminacy, especially in the case of human action and choices.
As the subtitle indicates, there is a difference between someone and something. However, Spaemann thought that non-human animals are a peculiar kind of third thing. Human personhood is deeply related to our animal nature, but nonhuman animals have something like personhood. For Spaemann, they are more someone than something.
It is helpful to bring this to the table. Sometimes, one can talk about personhood as a kind of human exceptionalism. Spaemann is more fine-grained. There are things that are exceptional about human beings, but non-human animals have similar characteristics and qualities.
"One does not often think of the Crucifixion as a historical contingency, but Spaemann realised that the advent of Christianity was revolutionary for our understanding of the dignity of the human person."
Another thing that I admire about Spaemann and find very refreshing is the way he can bring historical insight to bear on philosophical thought.
He does not think of personhood as a timeless concept, one that has always existed in the philosophical repertory. It required certain historical contingencies to emerge. One does not often think of the Crucifixion as a historical contingency, but Spaemann realised that the advent of Christianity was revolutionary for our understanding of the dignity of the human person. Human dignity makes the human being a very distinct kind of creature: not simply one capable of adorning itself externally with honours and prestige, but one that possesses an inwardness capable of an even grander kind of honour and prestige. This is something that most people nowadays take for granted. Of course, we can see the nobility of a great act of sacrifice, but, historically, this was not always so easy to see. Spaemann sees how the advent of Christianity made the dignity of the human person more visible.
3.
The next book is A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person edited by D.C. Schindler and Jeanne Hefferman-Schindler. Besides offering a comprehensive sample of Spaemann’s writings, it opens with a useful introduction and Spaemann’s own “Philosophical Autobiography”? Are there other essays in this volume that you would single out.
This is a fantastic volume and the English-speaking lovers of Spaemann owe a great deal to the Schindlers for this volume. It is quite a buffet of his writing.
There is an essay on “Bourgeois Ethics and Non-Teleological Ontology”. This is a chapter from his dissertation on Fénelon. There is also the essay, “From the Polis to Nature: The Controversy Surrounding Rousseau's First Discourse.” It gives English-speaking audiences a glimpse of Spaemann's capacity to sit with a philosopher, say Rousseau, and carefully read him, think through what he is saying, and engage with it.
The most natural English-speaking reader of Spemann would be surprised to find that he engages Rousseau so closely. The philosophy here, you might think, is to keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Actually, Spaemann thinks that Roussaeau made certain mistakes about the relationship of the social and the natural existence of the human being. However, the most important lesson that you gain from these essays is a sense of what was at stake in the debates to which Rousseau was contributing. Post factum, we have a much greater sense of what was at stake. These men and women were trying to come to grips with the sciences and new political organisations; forgotten knowledge and recovered knowledge. Spaemann helps you revisit these people and see just how dramatic these controversies were.
There is also a fantastic essay called “On the Traditionalist Error”. It may have originated from his writing on Louis de Bonald.
Spaemann begins by noting a peculiarity of Roman Catholicism. It is de fide for Catholics—in other words, Catholics have to believe—that the existence of God is not a matter of Catholic belief alone. Against the traditionalists of the nineteenth century, the First Vatican Council taught that the existence of God can be known by natural reason.
Traditionalism, such as that of the nineteenth-century, obscures the genuine philosophical task of even Catholic philosophers. The traditionalist seems to think that there are no grounds for knowing anything apart from being embedded in or submitting to a certain kind of tradition. You simply trust or have confidence in the tradition that you rely on. Neither Spaemann or MacIntyre would say that our knowing is ever traditionless. However, the traditionalist error that Spaemann points out forces us to abdicate from the noble task of thinking through certain things.
"Everywhere we have ever experienced human beings, we experience them through the medium of a culture, a language, practices, and institutions."
Spaemann’s aesthetics tends to get overlooked in English-speaking context. In this volume, there is an essay called “What Does It Mean to Say that 'Art Imitates Nature'?” This is a classic idea from the Physics of Aristotle. When you hear this phrase—art imitates nature— sometimes you think of photo-realism: the closer our fine arts get to how things really look, the better they are. This is not the sense of the phrase. Art is skilful technique. It is a body of knowledge ordered towards making a thing. Aristotle is saying is that human craft imitates natural activity.
This idea has not received the attention that philosophers should give it. It regards the relationship between technē and phūsis: between nature and that which is social, technical, or an element of human culture. Of course, Spaemann takes us in a host of other directions, well beyond Aristotle's initial dictum. For example, it shapes his engagement with Rousseau, who believes that, to enter society is to leave the natural world behind.. This leads to a split between the humanities and the natural sciences. The natural sciences study the realm of nature; the humanities study culture, literature, history, the fine arts, cultural products and artefacts. But this is a distinction, not a separation. The human being, by its very nature, is a cultural and social animal. Everywhere we have ever experienced human beings, we experience them through the medium of a culture, a language, practices, and institutions. We have never seen into human nature directly or immediately. Some people just throw up their hands in the face of this and say that the human being is merely a cultural animal and just leave the natural world. This bifurcation is characteristic of modern thinking. Spaemann is trying to help us overcome those clefts.
4.
Fourth on your list is Happiness and Benevolence. In this work, Spaemann’s is engaged in a project that is somewhat similar to that of Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue or G.E.M. Anscombe in her celebrated essay, “Modern Moral Philosophy.” He is arguing that modern moral philosophy is problematic insofar as it abandons the eudaimonism or happiness-centredness of classical ethics and gives priority to self-interest over benevolence. What, in your view, makes this book worth reading?
Spaemann’s very capacious intellect is on display in this book. Two kinds of people should read it. Both will be greatly challenged but also helped. On the one hand, there are those who work in what gets called virtue ethics nowadays. They tend to draw a lot of inspiration from certain parts of Aristotle, particularly the parts of the Nicomachean Ethics on eudaimonia. They should read this book because Spaemann is not insensitive to these parts of Aristotle. Nonetheless, he recognises that it is questionable whether eudaimonism is going to help us explain human action properly.
I have experienced this myself. In the various places I have studied, I have spent half my time studying with eudaimonists. At bottom, eudaimonism holds that we do everything because of the way it contributes to our flourishing. Stated so baldly, that is an extremely ambiguous thesis. This book helps make that thesis much more fine-grained. You will be much more ready to think through the implications of eudaimonism by reading this book. That is because Spaemann has what one could without too much injustice call a Kantian side.
He was a very appreciative reader of Kant, particularly regarding human freedom, duty, or obligation, things which he thought had been lost in certain eudaimonistic theories. It is not that Aristotle has nothing to say about obligation, but in the modern splitting-up of ethical theories you have deontological or duty-centred ethics, teleological or consequentialist ethics, and virtue ethics. Spaemann tries to take us beyond that. These modern taxonomies encourage us to think, that when it comes to ethics, virtue is all you need to think about. However, any prudent and just mother, father, or friend is going to recognise that he or she has obligations. It is not as if obligations play a nugatory role in a well-lived human life. But sometimes, your commitment to a label can keep you from readily admitting or seeing that. Similarly, if you commit yourself to a very rigorous deontological ethics, it may lead you to leave behind the contingent things about character formation and the kind of person you are. This results in another caricature. Similarly, with utilitarianism, the usefulness of things is an extremely relevant ethical feature. This does not mean that you should make the usefulness of things the Alpha and Omega of your actions. Spaemann helps us get beyond this labelling to see that we need elements from all these theories to have a well-formed way of thinking about what it means to live well. He ends up doing justice to Aristotle and Kant. Utilitarianism does not play a huge role in in this book or others. You see how continuous this is with Spaemann's other writings. He wants to do justice to the truth. He is not going to let labels or partisanship keep him from doing that.
"Spaemann wants to recover a teleological view of the human being."
5.
Finally, there is Essays in Anthropology: Variations on a Theme. This is a collection of four essays. The English translation takes its title from Spaemann’s own description of the common thread of the four essays: each addresses the question, “What is a human being?”. However, the original collection takes its title from the fourth essay, “The Natural and the Rational” (Das Natürliche und das Vernünftliche), where he argues that human rationality begins where instinctive nature ends, and artifice comes into play. How would you summarise the argument of this collection?
In this volume, Spaemann is struggling to recover an element of human existence that, for a variety of reasons, has fallen out of consideration: the natural dimension.
We are natural beings. We exist by nature. There are things about us that are instinctive. We are limited or delimited by our nature. This is something that modern people have difficulty getting their heads around. It goes back to the debates that Rousseau was having about the natural human being.
For Rousseau, natural man is a primitive, non-social creature who exists mainly for the sake of self-preservation. Spaemann wants to recover a teleological view of the human being. Human nature is teleological. Spaemann thinks that nature is teleological by its very definition. It aims not simply to maintain itself in existence, but to reach its completion. Modern people struggle to figure out how you arrive at this view. This is because of the bifurcations and ruptures between the humanities and the natural sciences; the fights between those who want to return to nature or the land and those who see in culture, technology, and human society the paradigm of human existence. Spaemann does not choose between them. With Aristotle, he believes that humans are social animals. This is troubled by certain interpretations of evolutionary theory. That is why evolution shows up in this volume and A Robert Spaemann Reader.
6.
As a supplementary volume, there is Love & the Dignity of Human Life: On Nature and Natural Law. This book comprises the three McGivney Lectures that Spaemann gave in 2010 at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, Catholic University of America. The lectures explore the nature of love, human nature, human dignity, and conclude with a critique of making brain-death the criterion for declaring a human person dead. What are the most salient points of these lectures?
One thing that stands out is the way that Spaemann sees modern science and medicine as human practices. You cannot just write off the experience that we ordinarily have as human beings.
In discussions about brain death, we have left behind the human dimension of these practices, and consigned ourselves to expertise. It is worse than that. Actually, we do not just give ourselves over to experts. We give ourselves over to experts who are interested in our organs and our money. For Spaemann, there is something particularly insidious about this kind of undertaking. It forces us to forget what we know already as human beings: that a person who is brain dead is not dead.
In a hospital, a person is declared brain dead, but then they need to kill that person. The brain death is secured so that they can harvest organs, for instance, but, before they can harvest the organs, they have to do something which results in death. Is this, Spaemann asks, supposed to be actual death? If so, brain death is not death at all. It is an illusory artifice. Spaemann says that just as we have difficulty defining what life is, we are going to have difficulty defining what death is. He may even say that we do not know what life is. We experience it because we are alive, but we cannot define it. He does think that life is the particular way in which living things exist. But this is a circular definition. However, for Spaemann, it beggars belief that you have to kill a person who is brain dead to make them more dead. Brain death is a definition of death that is no definition at all.
In this way, as in many other contexts, he calls us back to human experiences that are obscured from view by certain philosophies and rationalizations.
He does this with animal rights as well. He asks why people who like to eat meat do not like to watch documentaries that expose the circumstances in which that meat is produced. Why is it that we cannot stomach these documentaries? There is a primordial experience there. It is relevant to thinking about the food that we eat and whether the systems that provide us with it are just or unjust. Spaemann thinks that there is something inconsistent about enjoying something but requiring that its production be obscured from view. This does not settle the question, but it invites further inquiry and investigation. His contributions to discussions about brain death do just that.
