Libido dominandi st augustine

The libido domanandi is a Latin term that can be roughly translated as “lust for domination.” The lust for domination is, for Augustine, the driving impulse of fallen man and his society (the city of man). The twentieth century philosopher Eric Voegelin surmised that the libido dominandi was man’s “will to power” to borrow a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Libido Dominandi in the City of God

Augustine informs us in the preface that the lust for domination is a major theme that he will be examining in the course of his work. “Therefore I cannot refrain from speaking about the city of this world, a city which aims at dominion, which holds nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination.”[i] This lust for domination, as what drives life—or more accurately from Augustine’s view, destroys it—is motivated by service to the self and want to control everything: control what is good, control what is “fact” or “true”, control how others behave, c

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+JMJ+ In an experiment came to a close. A professor at Catholic University of amerika taught a course on St. Augustine’s City of God. That may not sound very experimental until I tell you that he taught the course on Twitter. Yep, for a few brief months Twitter was a shining light, a surprising beacon of hope in an otherwise nasty, snarling mess of murky mental midgetry and not infrequent lewdness and lunacy. It was a crazy idea and an ingenious one and I loved it. 

Professor Pecknold shared quotes and insights using the hashtag #CivDei (from the title of the book in Latin, de Civitate Dei), participants read the source ämne, the professor’s tweets, asked questions, and offered their own insights. And a good time was had by all. I miss it very much.

At the end of the Twitter course #CivDei we were asked to share a brief summary of what it meant to us, something that made an impression on us. Here is my offering. Re-reading it tonight I can’t help but think of w

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Libido dominandi: Augustine's genealogy of a fallen world

Brian Thomas Harding, Fordham University

Abstract

In this dissertation I argue that Augustine's claim that ancient virtue is not really virtuous is not as unreasonable as it is often taken to be. That claim, I suggest is best understood as a conclusion to a rather long and subtle argument, an argument that proceeds on the basis of a critique of ancient (predominantly Roman) culture and philosophy that is best understood in terms of ‘genealogy.’ Genealogy suspiciously reappraises the ideals of a given discourse (in this case, antique virtue) with an eye towards discovering hidden or repressed contradictions at work. This hermeneutic is most often associated with the work of Nietzsche and subsequent philosophers, so in the first I present a reading of Nietzsche. However, in the second chapter I argue that there are antecedent genealogical hermenauts focusing on two authors very influential for Nietzsche's development: T