At war within oneself

Augustine's phenomenology of the will in the confessions

Robert Bernasconi

pp. 57-65

in: Paul Sars, Chris Bremmers, Koen Boey (eds), Eros and Eris, Berlin, Springer, 1992

Abstract

"At War within Oneself' offers a hermeneutical reading of Augustine's account of his conversion in the eighth book of his Confessions. Augustine is often said to have discovered the will or, at least, the will in conflict with itself. The author's depiction of his conversion might be described as phenomenological and Hannah Arendt for one attempted to find the phenomenological core of Augustine's experience of the will by separating it from its theological interpretation. "At War within Oneself' argues that the attempt to do so is thwarted by what might be called the finitude of historical experience: the experience of the will cannot be divorced from its theological context, because theology, especially insofar as it informed the institutional framework of conversion, helped produce the experience of the will in conflict with itself in the first place.

Cited authors

Arendt Hannah

Augustinus Aurelius