Self righteousness

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Under self-righteousness is meant the habit of people who compare themselves habitually with others and thereby come again and again to the belief that they themselves the manners comply with more stringent than the others. The behavior of people who let others feel that they feel morally and morally superior to them is usually perceived by those affected as offensive, insulting and degrading.

In polemical discourses, self-righteous behavior is occasionally castigated as " do-gooder ". Bigotry and double standards are related to self-righteousness, but bigotry only requires others to comply with the rules, not oneself. Self-righteousness differs from pride and arrogance in its strong relation to moral values, rules and social norms .

etymology

Instead of letting others - more professed - judge them, the self-righteous judge and justify themselves, with predictably favorable results. The compound word has been demonstrable in German since the late 18th century. The expression was previously in use as a fixed phrase in hyphenation. Martin Luther had translated in 1545: "Jr seids / who justify yourselves for man" ; this formulation was based on the Greek verb δικαιοω and the Latin verb iustificare .

Religious perspective: self-righteousness in Christianity

Pharisees and tax collectors. Fresco in the Saint Joseph Church in Marseille

The Christian knows self-righteousness has always been a problem because this religion not only knows a very large number of rules, but also because the believers assume that the rules are God-made. Against this background, those who tend to be self-righteous quickly come to the conclusion that God himself thinks that the person in question obeys the rules better than others. Biblical passages such as 1 Corinthians 6 : 9 - "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?" - leave no doubt as to the degree of binding force the rules set by God have for every believer.

On the other hand, however, self-righteousness is considered a sin in Christianity . The insight that no human being is perfect was already firmly established in Jewish ethics and was confirmed again in the Christian New Testament , for example in Romans 3:10, where Paul quoted: “There is no righteous person, not even one.” Christianity and his entire doctrine of salvation is based on the idea of ​​the sinfulness of all people; in most currents of Christian theology , man is justified not by good works but by God's grace alone. In Matthew 23 alone there are several passages in which Christ dismisses the Jewish scribes and Pharisees who repeatedly exalt themselves with their display of godliness in front of others. Another relevant passage is the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector ( Luke 18: 9-14), which closes with the sentence: “For whoever exalts himself will be humbled; and he who humbles himself will be exalted. ” Paul continues this line later, for example in Romans 2:17ff and in Galatians 3 : 1–2.

For theology, the problem is not so much the vanity of the self-righteous towards other people, but rather his presumptuous conviction that he can gain value before God through religious and charitable achievements, instead of allowing true justice to be bestowed upon him by the all-good God. In Romans 10: 4 Paul writes pointedly: “For Christ is the end of the law; He who believes in him is righteous. ” And in Galatians 2:21: “ ... for if righteousness comes through law, then Christ died in vain. ” One aporia that this teaching carries within itself is the problem of vain humility , which is sometimes discussed .

Philosophical perspective

In his analysis Die belated Nation , written in exile in 1935 , the philosopher Helmuth Plessner described a type of self-righteousness which he perceived as specifically German and which he tried to explain as a compensation for insecurity, as self-protection against a chaotic individualizedness, and which he tried to explain very easily could turn into violence .

In several of his essays, the skeptic Odo Marquard has reflected on philosophically founded self-righteousness, which is expressed in the fact that people with a notoriously good conscience accuse other people excessively. As the history of philosophy origin of such self-righteousness identified Marquard overcoming the Leibniz - theodicy by accepting the non-existence of God, in the mid-18th century to the emergence of the philosophy of history have done. There it is no longer God but man as the creator of history, whereby an accused is still needed for the evils of the world - a role that can no longer be fulfilled by God but only by man himself. It comes to the "over-tribunalization of the reality of life", to a situation in which "the human being as absolutely accused because of the evils of the world - before a permanent tribunal, whose accuser and judge is the human being - comes under absolute pressure to justify, under absolute pressure to legitimize", a compulsion, which in a secular philosophy is no longer cushioned by divine grace and which thus becomes unbearable and inexperienced. Man comes under extreme pressure to break out into unrestrainability; one (of several) possibilities to do this is to escape from having a conscience into a “being of conscience”: man escapes from the role of the absolute accused by making the role of the absolute accuser his exclusive role: “absolute defendants are then the people, but only the other people, because you yourself are only the absolute accuser. ”Marquard found a radical exaggeration of this idea in the revolutionary philosophy of history, to which the New Left developed critical theory against the resistance of its inventors and protagonists and which made the "conscience" the principle of an avant-garde , whose representatives are no longer questionable because they attribute themselves to the future and everyone else to the past, and which mainly likes criticism because it Action to free them from the burden of conscience.

Psychological and psychiatric perspective

Although self-righteousness does not appear under the ICD-10 and DSM-5 definition criteria for narcissistic personality disorders , psychiatrists have repeatedly described self-righteousness as a characteristic trait of narcissistic personalities or associated with narcissistic personality disorders, in particular to illustrate the mechanisms by which some narcissists, when challenged, resort to aggression and violence .

literature

  • Michael Roth: Free Will ?: A theological essay on guilt and sin, self-righteousness and skeptical ethics , CMZ, Rheinbach 2011, ISBN 978-3-87062-122-3 .
  • Fritz Wandel, Ingrid Wandel: Everyday Narcissists: Destructive Self-Realization in the Light of Transaction Analysis , Junfermann, Paderborn 2011, ISBN 978-3-87387-793-1 .

Web links

Wiktionary: self-righteousness  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ZB Wilhelm Gottlieb Reiz: Last words to two congregations of God , Greiz 1780, p. 23
  2. ↑ E.g. Johannes Bugenhagen, Ludwig Hätzer: A short well-founded exposition on the toes trailing epistles S. Pauli , 1524, p. 159
  3. ↑ Luke 16:15 (Luther, last hand) ; Luke 16:15, Greek, Latin and German
  4. ↑ 1 Corinthians 6: 9
  5. ↑ Romans 3:10 (Elberfeld)
  6. ↑ Matthew 23 (Luther)
  7. ↑ Luke 18: 9-14 (Luther)
  8. ↑ Romans 2,17ff (Luther)  ; Galatians 3: 1-2 (Luther)
  9. ^ Self-righteousness New Theological Dictionary
  10. ↑ Romans 10: 4 (Luther)
  11. ↑ Galatians 2:12 (Elberfelder)
  12. ↑ For example Hans Mohr: Sermon in Time. Depicted in the history of the Protestant sermon on Luke 5: 1–11 , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1973, ISBN 3-525-57114-3 .
  13. ^ Helmuth Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften, Volume VI: The belated nation , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt, p. 92; quoted from: Lothar Voigt: Activism and moral rigorism. The political romanticism of the 1968 student movement , Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1991, ISBN 978-3-8244-4080-1 , p. 158 f.
  14. ↑ Odo Marquard: The accused and the exonerated man , pp. 40, 47–50, 56, in: ders .: Abschied vom Prinziplichen , Reclam, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 39–66; Odo Marquard: Inkompetenzkompensationskompetenz , p. 33, in: ders .: Farewell to Principles , Reclam, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 23–38
  15. ↑ Odo Marquard: Farewell to the Principal , pp. 12, 17, in: ders .: Farewell to the Principal , Reclam, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 4–22
  16. ↑ Odo Marquard: Inkompetenzkompensationskompetenz , p. 32f, in: ders .: Abschied vom Prinziplichen , Reclam, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 23–38
  17. ^ RF Lax: Some comments on the narcissistic aspects of self-righteousness: defensive and structural considerations , Int J Psychoanal, Volume 56, Issue 3, August 1975, pp. 283-292; Elsa F. Ronningstam: Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality , Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-19-514873-2 , pp. 34, 91, 107, 131
  18. ↑ Caroline Logan: Narcissism , pp. 97-99, in: Mary McMurran, Richard Howard (Eds.): Personality, Personality Disorder and Violence , Wiley Series in Forensic Clinical Psychology, 2009, ISBN 978-0-470-05948-7 , Pp. 85-112; M. Lewis: The development of anger and rage , in: RA Glick, SP Roose (Eds.): Rage, Power, and Aggression , New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; Heinz Kohut: Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage , Psychoanal. Study Child, Vol. 27, 1972, pp. 360-400