Distanz des Gehorsams

Obedience has been as much invoked as a virtue as deemed to end in disaster. The history of Nazism, violent pedagogy, also at the hands of the church, and the general discrediting of the individual self in the discourses of obedience all illustrate this much-discussed yet seldom systematically scrutinised form of interpersonal relations. Mathias Wirth's systematic contribution lies in uncovering a core structure in the phenomenon of obedience, namely the distance between an individual as person and as agent, i.e. between the 'is' and 'ought' of willing. Obedience after all demands doing things one does not intrinsically want to do, otherwise a command to that effect would not be necessary. In his exploration of the sometimes merely postulated distance between the person and the agent, the author shows how this chasm poses an ethical and religious problem. The work was awarded the 2014 Hannover Wissenschaftspreis and the Ernst Wolf-Preis 2017 of the Gesellschaft für Evangelische Theologie in category A (dissertations/habilitations).