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Necessary fiction: Realism’s tragic theology

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Abstract

This article revisits the early realist understanding of tragedy in international relations in order to highlight its debt to continental philosophical thought and tragic theology. Far from sharing a view of tragedy as objective externality, early realists engaged with the existential conditions that make up the paradoxical structure of experience: human beings’ constant albeit frustrated striving to make the world intelligible and ascribe meaning to their actions. The upshot of this article is that early classical realists, such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, entertained a view of tragedy as a necessary fiction, that is, a fabricated but real condition that is inextricably linked with the constitution of subjectivity and human agency. This paradoxical view of tragedy as an ‘enabling obstacle’ that contests the idea of tragic destiny as inescapable determinism finds its roots in the continental philosophical and theological background of their thought but is more consistently exhibited in Niebuhr’s theological anthropology.

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Notes

  1. The slippage from the language of tragedy to the language of evil is not as illegitimate as it might seem at first glance. As Paul Ricoeur (1967, pp. 324, 314) remarks commenting on Job’s suffering, there is a circular relation between the Adamic myth of original sin and the tragic myth of the blindness of fate and ultimate unjustifiability of suffering.: ‘…only he who confesses that he is the author of evil discovers the reverse of that confession, namely, the non-posited in the positing of evil, the always already there of evil, the other of temptation, and finally the incomprehensibility of God, who tests me and who can appear to me as my enemy’. So ‘[i]t might be said that the avowal of evil as human calls forth a second-degree avowal, that of evil as non-human. Only tragedy can accept this avowal of the avowal and exhibit it in a spectacle, for no coherent discourse can include that Other’.

  2. See here Niebuhr’s (1941, p. 259) relevant remark about Luther’s interpretation of the original sin: ‘…Luther seems to heighten the Augustinian doctrine in the interest of greater consistency but at the price of imperilling one element in the paradox, the element of human responsibility’.

  3. For an analysis on how Niebuhr’s and Morgenthau’s republican sensibilities offer conceptual and practical resources to keep the destructive human tendencies at bay and energise the creative ones, see Tjalve (2008). However, see also here Levine’s (2012, pp. 134–135) recent criticism that Morgenthau lacks the Arendtian concept of ‘natality’ which in turn compromises his ability to imagine new repoliticising possibilities.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Daniel Levine, Richard Ned Lebow, Tony Lang and, especially, the editors of this special issue, Sean Molloy and Hartmut Behr, for their invaluable comments on previous drafts of this article. The usual disclaimer applies.

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  1. School of International Relations, Arts Faculty Building, University of St Andrews, The Scores, St Andrews, Scotland, KY16 9AX, UK

    Vassilios Paipais

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Paipais, V. Necessary fiction: Realism’s tragic theology. Int Polit 50, 846–862 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2013.38

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