(A work in progress)
The reason for the foray into such improbable intellectual sources is to search for the adequate philosophic account for Gaudium et spes #24: "Man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself." This Trinitarian based Christological anthropology needs more than the received anthropology of man as an "individual substance of a rational nature." What is a needed is a metaphysic of the individual "I" as "self." Substance as "self" is "object" and, as such, inadequate to give an account of "self" as "subject" and gift. Substances - as we have conceived them - are neither self-determining nor capable of self-giving.
Louis Bouyer explained that the valid insights of the Protestant Reformation were vitiated by the use of an inadequate philosophy - the essentialist "nominalism" of Willian of Occam - that eventually extrinsicized the whole of Protestantism such that grace and nature, person to person lost the mysterious character of being integrated. Reality was construed to fit our way of conceptualizing rather than the other way round.
Concretely, Bouyer asks: "What, then, is the source of the element in Protestant theology of a God forbidden to communicate himself to his creature, of man unable, even by the divine omnipotence, to be torn from his own solitude, from the autonomy of his so arrogant humility, of a world and a God inexorably condemned to the most utter 'extrinsicism?' To the historian, the reply is obvious. The Reformers no more invented this strange and despairing universe than they found it in Scripture. It is simply the universe of the philosophy they had been brought up in, scholasticism in its decadence. If the Reformers unintentionally became heretics, the fault does not consist in the radical nature of their reform but in its hesitation, its timidity, its imperfect vision. The structure they raised on their own principles is unacceptable only because they used uncritically material drawn from that decaying Catholicism they desired to elude but whose prisoners they remained to a degree they never suspected. No phrase reveals so clearly the hidden evil that was to spoil the fruit of the Reformation than Luther's saying that Occam was the only scholastic who was any good. The truth is that Luther, brought up on his own system was never able to think outside the framework it imposed..." Louis Bouyer, "The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism," Scepter (1956) 184.
I fear the same will be the fate of the insights of Vatican II and the Magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI if the theological content is not undergirded and accounted for by an adequate exercise of reason that attends to, and discovers, the experience of the "I" as being and participating absolute. Hence, the search for the "I" experiencing itself in the use of language as obediential self-gift, and hence, the survey of Herder's origin of languate, Kant's absolute "I," Hegel's integration of the two, Wojtyla's phenomenology of the experience of self-determination and assignation of being, and ultimately Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth being Jesus the Christ, the Absolute Son of the living God - in the contingency of history.
The Absolute in History
Joseph Ratzinger’s initial intellectual interest was centered on the problem faced by German philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries: the absolute in the concrete. As appearing below in “The Drama of Third Millennial Theology,” Ratzinger remarked:
“As we are well aware, the central theme of salvation-historical theology has always been the question of the relationship between ontology and history: How can history play a role in the molding of being, and when is it alien to being?”[1]
“Has not the ‘Hellenization’ of Christianity, which attempted to overcome the scandal of the particular by a blending of faith and metaphysics, led to a development in a false direction? Has it not created a static style of thought which cannot do justice to the dynamism of the biblical style?”[2]
To the question: How do we find the absolute truth (or good) in the contingencies of history, the answer from the Magisterium of the Church in Veritatis Splendor #17 is: “Perfection demands the unique maturity in self-giving to which human freedom is called.” That is, the Being that is the supreme absolute immersed in the contingencies of time and space is the individual man Jesus of Nazareth Who is the redeeming God Jesus Christ.
The human person is made in the image and likeness of this prototype. Therefore, the human person experiences and becomes conscious of absoluteness in the experience and consciousness of the individual self in the “maturity of self-giving.” Commenting on this, John Paul II remarked to Andre Frossard: “God gives himself to man created in his own image, and this ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ alone can make this communication possible. This communication creates the innermost, transcendent, final thread in the history of each man and of humanity as a whole. It is also a ‘trans-historical’ thread, since, while taking account of the transitory character of man, inscribed in time together with the whole visible world, it also reveals in him the element that does not pass away, that resists time, destruction and death. As we have just said, this is the historicity of man – this arrest, this hold on what passes away to extract from it what does not pass away, what serves to immortalize the most essentially human element, the element through which man is the image and likeness of God and surpasses all the creatures subject to an ephemeral existence. Historicity is also the existence of some one who, while ‘passing away,’ retains his identity.
“Understood in this way, the historicity of man is the focal point of Revelation in which faith and its history, and consequently the history of salvation, are fashioned.
“That said, the historicity of man so regarded is one of the sources of theist thought, of the intelligence going to meet God. It is precisely in his historicity and because of it that man is prompted to seek a Being who embodies everything in him that resists transitoriness, or in other words the ultimate Transcendent of his own transcendence, the eternal model of whom he is, as man, the image and likeness.
“Thus it is not only the world (or the Universe) that is at the root of the rational knowledge of God [the five ways of St. Thomas], but also and perhaps above all man himself-in-the-world, man in his historicity, that is, at the same time in what transcends him.”[3]
The above becomes concretized in the early development of “Veritatis Splendor” where the argument of the moral absolute appears in the question put by the rich young man to Christ: “What shall I do to gain eternal life” (Mk. 10, 18)? The boy wants absolute, unending life. Jesus answers: “There is only one who is good” (Mt. 19, 17); “No one is good but God alone (Mk. 10, 18; cf. Lk. 18,19). If that is the case, and man has been made in the image and likeness of God Who alone is good, then, “If you wish to be perfect, come follow me” (Mt. 19, 21). That is to say, since “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10, 30), do what I do, and you will be like me. You will become good like me, and good like the Father. You will experience that the God-like goodness in yourself, which as perfection, is absolute. It is the ontological grounding of the entire moral life since it is in that ontological experience of the self as “acting person,” as going out of self to serve as Christ-Gift, that the “anamnesis” (not-forgetting = remembering) that we first become conscious of the value: “good.”
This doesn’t mean that only self-transcending persons experience the good. Everybody has this anamnesis (“not forgetting”) in that the very being of the human person - made in the image and likeness of the divine Persons Who are Self-transcending Gifts to each other - experiences itself in this “tendency” toward the Absolute Good that is divine Personhood. In this regard, Joseph Ratzinger commented (and recorded many times on this blog): “There is an inherent existential tendency of man, who is created in the image of God, to tend toward that which is in keeping with God. Thanks to its origin, man’s being is in harmony with some things but not with others. This anamnesis of our origin, resulting from the fact that our being is constitutively in keeping with God, is not a knowledge articulated in concepts, a treasure store of retrievable contents. It is an inner sense, a capacity for recognition, in such a way that the one addressed recognizes in himself an echo of what is said to him. If he does not turn back on himself, he comes to the insight: this is the goal toward which my whole being tends, this is where I want to go.”[4]
Kant
Accounting for the Absolute in the Subject
The insight of Immanuel Kant consisted in his experience of the absolutes in morality. The absolute must be rigorously separated from anything exterior or extrinsic to the self as autonomous subject. All that is not the Cartesian “cogito” and that is not on the side of pure thought thinking itself is foreign, or “heteronymous,” to what Kant will call “autonomy” and cannot enter into the purity of the absolute that is evident in moral decision. The absolute is the unsullied a priori of the practical intellect that is pure duty. There is, and cannot be, any admixture of nature, its laws and tendencies.
David Hume, attentive to the matter side of the mind-matter dualism, held, in Charles Taylor's account, that “the subject could only be studied as another object…. It was because Hume was dealing with the self as a set of phenomena that he could say such an outrageous thing as that the self was a mere ‘bundle of perceptions’ with no visible principle of unity.”[5]
But Kant held to the experience of absoluteness in moral life and constructed the “transcendental argument” that infers the subject from the phenomenon of absoluteness. Taylor says that Kant “tries to infer from experience back to the subject of that experience: what must we be like in order to have the kind of experience we do? In this way it can claim to say things about the nature of the subject which could never be founded in the objects of experience [where sensible perception finds no absolutes, only contingency]. The Kantian answer to Hume’s bundle theory of the self is to point out that the subject is not exhausted by the phenomena given in introspection, that underlying the observation of self as much as that of the external world is the subject of this observation, who pro tanto as observer is not the observed. But this dimension of the subject can only be reached by inference, by arguing back from what experience is like to what the structure of the subject must be if this experience is to be possible.
“This is transcendental argument…”
In a word, all we find in sensible nature are laws of necessity. There is no freedom in the sense of self-determination in the realm of nature. It is pure S and P (stimulus and response), and there is no moral absolute because there is no freedom for what we experience moral action to be: self-determination in conformity with the truth of the self (as absolute). So, the starting point for Kant is the experience of moral freedom that is autonomy that decides against “natural inclination,” as exterior or extrinsic to the self: thus heteronomy. What is evident, however, is that Kant does not recognize the “experience” of the absolute to be the contact with the ontological reality of the self, and, as son of the Enlightenment, he assigns absolute value as an “a priori” of reason. It is noteworthy that Kant recognized the absolute as a phenomenon of the subject, but not the subject as consciousness being, i.e., not as a being that is conscious of self as self-determining act. Taylor recognizes Kant’s unique value here in the discovery of the freedom of autonomy of the self. He says: “This is the central, exhilarating notion of Kant’s ethics. Moral life is equivalent to freedom, in this radical sense of self-determination by the moral will.”[6] He rejects Hume’s reduction of the subject to an object that is a bundle of sensations. The subject is not an object, but a subject that determines itself according to the a priori (which he confuses with the will and which Wojtyla shows to be the ontological “I” itself[7] ). Taylor remarks: “It was taken for granted by Enlightenment thinkers like Hume that the subject could only be studied as another object. True, it was special in that one gained access to it by ‘reflection’ rather than the ordinary perception which yielded us knowledge of external things; but in either case one was dealing with the given, a set of phenomena that he could say such an outrageous thing as that the self was a mere ‘bundle of perceptions’ with no visible principle of unity.”[8]
The genius of Kant, the “central, exhilarating notion of Kant’s ethics,” is his recognition of another kind of experience than the experience of objects. His transcendental argument consists in trying “to infer from experience back to the subject of that experience: what must we be like in order to have the kind of experience we do? In this way it can claim to say things about the nature of the subject which could never be founded in the objects of experience.” And then, importantly, Taylor says: “The Kantian answer to Hume’s bundle theory of the self is to point out that the subject is not exhausted by the phenomena given in introspection, that underlying the observation of self as much as that of the external world is the subject of this observation, who pro tanto as observer is not the observed. But this dimension of the subject can only be reached by inference, by arguing back from what experience is like to what the structure of the subject must be if this experience is to be possible.”
That said, it must be stated that, although Kant’s method is correct, his conclusion does not square with the experience. Wojtyla takes the same method and concludes to the “I” as ontological reality. Wojtyla sees a division in man – that of act and potency - on the basis of the experience of free action. The human person is both the agent and the patient of every action he performs. Every free action is self-determination. Wojtyla says: “It is impossible to deny that he who acts is simultaneously the one in whom something or other happens. Similarly, it is impossible to question the unity and the identity of man at the roots of acting and happening. Neither is it possible to question of his unity and identity at the roots of the efficacy and the subjectiveness structurally contained in the acting and the happening that occur in man. For the human being is… a dynamic unity… Man’s acting and that human efficacy which constitutes it experientially, as well as all that happens in him, combine together as if they issued from a common root. For it is the human being, as the dynamic subject, who is their origin.”[9] In summary, he says, “The two structures, that in which man acts and that in which something happens in man, cut across the phenomenological field of experience, but they join and unite together in the metaphysical field. Their synthesis is the man-person, and we discover the ultimate subject of the synthesis in its ontological groundwork. Not only does this groundwork underlie the whole dynamism of the man-person, but it itself is also the dynamic source of the dynamism.”[10]
What is unique to Kant – “exhilarating” – is the attention to experience, the distinction of experience of objects and the experience of subjects, and the attempt to give an account of the latter without reducing it to the empirical mechanistic and objectified. Wojtyla followed the same road but found the experience of the subject to be empirical, objective and yet irreducible to being an object. As he said in Crossing the Threshold of Hope: “It is not possible to affirm that when something is transempirical it ceases to be empirical.
“It is therefore possible to speak from a solid foundation about human experience, moral experience, or religious experience. And if it is possible to speak of such experiences, it is difficult to deny that, in the realm of human experience, one also finds good and evil, truth and beauty, and God…. If God is a knowable object… He is such on the basis of man’s experience both of the visible world and of his interior world. This is the point of departure of Immanuel Kant’s study of ethical experience in which he abandons the old approach found in the writings of the Bible and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Man recognizes himself as an ethical being, capable of acting according to criteria of good and evil, and not only those of profit and pleasure. He also recognizes himself as a religious being, capable of putting himself in contact with God. Prayer … is in a certain sense the first verification of such a reality.”[11]
Herder
Expressivism: Disclosing Subjectivity through Language (Art)
In the Enlightenment dualism of mind and matter in which we still find ourselves, it is important to see the emergence of the self in the context of the experience of being, and not identified with pure consciousness. The key to that emergence is “integral expressivism” that is the spoken word as found in Johann Gottfried von Herder. Let us go by steps:
1) The Aristotelian Form:
It is important to start with the received metaphysical anthropology of Aristotle that sees man as an organic substance integrated by matter and form with rationality as an accidental specific difference. Such an account of the human person antedates the epistemological split into subject and object that took place after Descartes in the 17th century. After that time, the human person was accounted for on either one side or the other, i.e. either pure consciousness, or pure material mechanism. We are still caught between the horns of that dilemma. Herder represents a recovery of integration but now as subject.
This is revolutionary. And the decisive criterion for subsuming both body and soul under the epistemological rubric of subject is language. Only man speaks; or rather, only man “names.” Herder adds to ancient rational hylomorphism the dimension of tendency and feeling that he had sifted from Spinoza (life-force, tendency, feeling) and which he locates, not in the world-spirit, but in the individual monad of Leibniz.
Charles Taylor says: “On the anthropology developed by Herder and those who followed him, there is certainly a rehabilitation of some basic Aristotelian concepts; to see life as an expression is to see it as the realization of a purpose, and in so far as this purpose is not meant to be ultimately blind, one can speak of the realization of an idea. But this is also understood as the realization of a self; and in this respect the notion is modern, it goes beyond Aristotle and shows a filiation to Leibniz.” He continues: “Leibniz too is obviously of central importance, whose notion of the monad was seminal for that of a self-unfolding subject. But Herder and those of his generation and the succeeding one were also greatly influenced by Spinoza. This may be surprising in that Spinoza was the great philosopher of the anti-subject… But the age in receiving him imposed a certain reading on Spinoza. His philosophy was not seen as denying an understanding of human life as self-unfolding; rather the Spinozan notion of a conatus in all things to preserve themselves was read in this light. What Spinoza seemed to offer… was a vision of the way in which the finite subject fitted into a universal current of life… In other words he was re-interpreted to incorporate the category of self-unfolding, now seen as the act of a universal life which was bigger than any subject, but qua self-unfolding life very subject-like.”[12]
2) Self-Mastering Form:
This self-unfolding as dynamic is not simply conformity to a non-rational tendency of mechanical nature for a fulfillment of life as object. It is a conscious form that is a self whose first move is to determine consciously what the form or self is. Taylor says: “If we think of our life as realizing an essence or form, this means not just the embodying of this form in reality; it also means defining in a determinate way what this form is. And this shows in another way the important difference between the expressivist model and the Aristotelian tradition: for the former, the idea which a man realizes is not wholly determinate before hand; it is only made fully determinate in being fulfilled. Hence the Herderian idea that my humanity is something unique, not equivalent to yours, and this unique quality can only be revealed in my life itself… The idea is not just that men are different; this was hardly new; it was rather that the differences define the unique form that each of us is called on to realize. The differences take on moral import; so that the question could arise for the first time whether a given form of life was an authentic expression of certain individuals or people. This is the new dimension added by the theory of self-realization.”[13]
Taylor considers Herder “a hinge figure: he swings our thought about language into a quite different angle.” In his “The Importance of Herder,”[14] Taylor sees in Herder what, in my estimation, Walker Percy sees in Helen Keller. Only Percy is clearer. What Herder, Taylor and Percy see is the subjective agency of the person who uses signs (like words), and in the exercise of self-mastery, experiences the “I” as ontological reality, precisely because it is experience. As Percy says - describing Helens naming the water from the pump as it washed over one hand, Ann Sullivan tapping in the Braille in the other - : “Here in the well-house in Tuscumbia in a small space and a short time, something extremely important and mysterious had happened. Eight-year-old Helen made her breakthrough from the good responding animal which behaviorists study so successfully to the strange name-giving and sentence-uttering creature who begins by naming shoes and ships and sealing wax, and later tells jokes, curses, reads the paper, writes La sua volontade e nostra pace, or becomes a Hegel and composes an entire system of philosophy.”[15] Helen had remarked: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.” Percy draws attention to the word “meant” and I would suggest that it is precisely the experience of the exercise of “agency” of the subject in naming. This is huge discover since it opens up an entirely new metaphysical horizon of agency-being and completes the traditional metaphysic of the object.
It might be added that Wojtyla is clearer still since he does the phenomenology and metaphysics of the act of self-determination that must precede the act of language, say, in Adam’s naming the animals. There, in that act and in its wake, Adam had altered and determined his being such that he experienced the consciousness of being alone, the so-called “original solitude.”[16] By the act of obedience whereby Adam gave his entire self in submission to God to subdue the earth, the first part of the earth to subdue was his very self composed of matter (slime of the earth) and spirit (breathed into his nostrils). Before he could subdue that earth and the animals by naming them, he had to subdue himself in order to get possession of himself as a self. In that act, Adam achieved in act the potential subjectivity that he was originally endowed with as image of the Subjectivity of Yahweh’s “I Am” (Exodus 3, 15). Wojtyla says: “The Yahwist text allows us… to discover also further elements of this admirable passage, in which man finds himself alone before God, above all to expr3ess, through a first self-definition, his own self-knowledge as the first and fundamental manifestation of humanity. Self-knowledge goes hand in hand with knowledge of the world, of all visible creatures, of all living beings to which man has given their names to affirm his own dissimilarity before them… He is not only essentially and subjectively alone. In fact, solitude also signifies man’s subjectivity, which constitutes itself through self-knowledge. Man is alone because he is ‘different’ from the visible world, from the world of living beings. When we analyze the text of Genesis, we are in some way witnesses of how man, with the first act of self-consciousness, ‘distinguishes himself’ before God-Yahweh from the whole world of living beings (animalia), how he consequently reveals himself to himself and at the same time affirms himself in the visible world as a ‘person.’ That process of seeking a definition of himself… also leads to the first delineation of the human being as a human person, with the proper subjectivity that characterizes the person.”[17] In the next General Audience, John Paul drives home the meaning of solitude as being a subject in a universe of objects: “The concept of original solitude includes both self-consciousness and self-determination. That fact that man is ‘alone’ contains within itself this ontological structure” of subjectivity that sets Adam apart from all else that is object. “This man, about whom the account of the first chapter says that he has been created ‘in the image of God,’ is manifested in the second account as a subject of the covenant, that is, a subject constituted as a person, constituted according to the measure of ‘partner of the Absolute’… Man is ‘alone:’ this is to say that through his own humanity, through what he is, he is at the same time set into a unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable relationship with God himself.” [18]
Taylor considers Herder “a hinge figure: he swings our thought about language into a quite different angle.” In his “The Importance of Herder,”[14] Taylor sees in Herder what, in my estimation, Walker Percy sees in Helen Keller. Only Percy is clearer. What Herder, Taylor and Percy see is the subjective agency of the person who uses signs (like words), and in the exercise of self-mastery, experiences the “I” as ontological reality, precisely because it is experience. As Percy says - describing Helens naming the water from the pump as it washed over one hand, Ann Sullivan tapping in the Braille in the other - : “Here in the well-house in Tuscumbia in a small space and a short time, something extremely important and mysterious had happened. Eight-year-old Helen made her breakthrough from the good responding animal which behaviorists study so successfully to the strange name-giving and sentence-uttering creature who begins by naming shoes and ships and sealing wax, and later tells jokes, curses, reads the paper, writes La sua volontade e nostra pace, or becomes a Hegel and composes an entire system of philosophy.”[15] Helen had remarked: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.” Percy draws attention to the word “meant” and I would suggest that it is precisely the experience of the exercise of “agency” of the subject in naming. This is huge discover since it opens up an entirely new metaphysical horizon of agency-being and completes the traditional metaphysic of the object.
It might be added that Wojtyla is clearer still since he does the phenomenology and metaphysics of the act of self-determination that must precede the act of language, say, in Adam’s naming the animals. There, in that act and in its wake, Adam had altered and determined his being such that he experienced the consciousness of being alone, the so-called “original solitude.”[16] By the act of obedience whereby Adam gave his entire self in submission to God to subdue the earth, the first part of the earth to subdue was his very self composed of matter (slime of the earth) and spirit (breathed into his nostrils). Before he could subdue that earth and the animals by naming them, he had to subdue himself in order to get possession of himself as a self. In that act, Adam achieved in act the potential subjectivity that he was originally endowed with as image of the Subjectivity of Yahweh’s “I Am” (Exodus 3, 15). Wojtyla says: “The Yahwist text allows us… to discover also further elements of this admirable passage, in which man finds himself alone before God, above all to expr3ess, through a first self-definition, his own self-knowledge as the first and fundamental manifestation of humanity. Self-knowledge goes hand in hand with knowledge of the world, of all visible creatures, of all living beings to which man has given their names to affirm his own dissimilarity before them… He is not only essentially and subjectively alone. In fact, solitude also signifies man’s subjectivity, which constitutes itself through self-knowledge. Man is alone because he is ‘different’ from the visible world, from the world of living beings. When we analyze the text of Genesis, we are in some way witnesses of how man, with the first act of self-consciousness, ‘distinguishes himself’ before God-Yahweh from the whole world of living beings (animalia), how he consequently reveals himself to himself and at the same time affirms himself in the visible world as a ‘person.’ That process of seeking a definition of himself… also leads to the first delineation of the human being as a human person, with the proper subjectivity that characterizes the person.”[17] In the next General Audience, John Paul drives home the meaning of solitude as being a subject in a universe of objects: “The concept of original solitude includes both self-consciousness and self-determination. That fact that man is ‘alone’ contains within itself this ontological structure” of subjectivity that sets Adam apart from all else that is object. “This man, about whom the account of the first chapter says that he has been created ‘in the image of God,’ is manifested in the second account as a subject of the covenant, that is, a subject constituted as a person, constituted according to the measure of ‘partner of the Absolute’… Man is ‘alone:’ this is to say that through his own humanity, through what he is, he is at the same time set into a unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable relationship with God himself.” [18]
Taylor considers Herder a hinge or swing figure because he recognizes the ontological reality of the “I” as agent of language, art and meaning, or better, that language, art and meaning is the “I” itself proffered as gift. A self-determining subject means a self that is ontological reality and that is both act and potency with regard to itself while being an integral whole and not an accidentally connected dualism. The disappointment was that Herder did not give a clear and rigorous account of that. (How could he? since he did not have the conceptual philosophic tools at his disposal to give such an account). Taylor goes further and suggests that both Kant and Herder failed to go as deep as they could and failed to discover that they were both talking about the same thing. That “same thing” is the subject that is in another epistemological horizon and knows and is known with another type of knowing that accompanies another kind of experience: the experience of the “I” in the act of self-transcendence, self-unfolding, self-expression (be it language, art, etc.). Herder calls it “Besonnenheit,” which Taylor translates as “self-clarity.”[19] It corresponds to Kant’s distinction between Verstand and Vernunft.
"Besonnenheit" (Awareness)
Herder’s “Besonnenheit” is translated by Michael N. Forster as “awareness.”[20] Herder says: "The human being demonstrates reflection when the force of his soul operates so freely that in the whole ocean of sensations which floods the soul through all the senses it can, so to speak, separate off, stop, and pay attention to a single wave, and be conscious of its own attentiveness. The human being demonstrates reflection when, out of the whole hovering dream aof images which proceed before his senses, he can collect himself into a moment of alertness, freely dwell on a single i8mage, pay it clear, more leisurely heed, and separate off characteristic marks for the fact that this is that object and no other…. The first act of this acknowledgment provides a distinct concept… What brought about this acknowledgment? A characteristic mark which he had to separate off and which as a characteristic mark of taking-aware-ness fell distinctly within him. Good! Let us shout to him the eureka! This first characteristic mark of taking-awareness was a word of the soul! With it human language is invented…. White, soft, woolly – his soul, operating with awareness, seeks a characteristic mark – the sheep bleats... the sheep comes again. White, soft, woolly… it bleats…'Aha! You are the bleating one!’… The sound of bleating, perceived by a human soul as the distinguishing sign of the sheep, became, thanks to this determination to which it was destined, the name of the sheep, even if the human being’s tongue had never tried to stammer it.’”[21]
This was to be the task of Hegel. Taylor remarked: “The hope was that men would unite the two ideas, radical freedom [Kant] and integral expression [Herder]. Because of the affinities between then… it was almost inevitable that if either were deeply and powerfully felt, the other would be as well. Members of the older generation could remain aloof from one or the other; thus Herder never warmed to the critical turn of Kant’s thought, and the two from having been close during Herder’s time of study at Konigsberg became somewhat estranged in the 1780s.Herder saw in the transcendental exploration of Kant only another theory which divided the subject. Kant for his part was snooty about Herder’s philosophy of history, and seems to have felt little attraction to this powerful statement of the expression theory.”[22]
The key to the union of the two strands can be found in the metaphysical anthropology that is subjacent to the theological formulation in Gaudium et spes #24 of the Second Vatican Council. The prime epistemological point is the notion of experience that has been hidden forever within, behind or under the consciousness of the self that is background to all conceptual (intentional and scientific) knowing. As soon as one discovers that the consciousness of the “I” is the consciousness of the absolute value of good and evil, and that that consciousness is the result of the experience of self-determination (which is, as experience, of the ontological passage from potency to act: the self as potency to the self as act), and that this self-determination is the condition of the possession (ownership) of the self by the self and which leads to self-gift if it be a good act, then both strands of Kant’s absolute, free and autonomous self coincides with Herder’s self-giving expression of language. We will see that Hegel did not hit explicitly on this notion of experience of the self in the act of self-determination, and failing that, he invented the Geist as a philosophoumenon to jury-rig a solution. Wojtyla has actually done it philosophically, and Ratzinger has given the theological explanation by the Person of Christ (Jesus of Nazareth in history is Jesus the Christ as Absolute) in history. My point here is that Hegel is immensely useful in Taylor’s account of him because he was working toward the above solution of Gaudium et spes #24 that is right before us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
This was to be the task of Hegel. Taylor remarked: “The hope was that men would unite the two ideas, radical freedom [Kant] and integral expression [Herder]. Because of the affinities between then… it was almost inevitable that if either were deeply and powerfully felt, the other would be as well. Members of the older generation could remain aloof from one or the other; thus Herder never warmed to the critical turn of Kant’s thought, and the two from having been close during Herder’s time of study at Konigsberg became somewhat estranged in the 1780s.Herder saw in the transcendental exploration of Kant only another theory which divided the subject. Kant for his part was snooty about Herder’s philosophy of history, and seems to have felt little attraction to this powerful statement of the expression theory.”[22]
The key to the union of the two strands can be found in the metaphysical anthropology that is subjacent to the theological formulation in Gaudium et spes #24 of the Second Vatican Council. The prime epistemological point is the notion of experience that has been hidden forever within, behind or under the consciousness of the self that is background to all conceptual (intentional and scientific) knowing. As soon as one discovers that the consciousness of the “I” is the consciousness of the absolute value of good and evil, and that that consciousness is the result of the experience of self-determination (which is, as experience, of the ontological passage from potency to act: the self as potency to the self as act), and that this self-determination is the condition of the possession (ownership) of the self by the self and which leads to self-gift if it be a good act, then both strands of Kant’s absolute, free and autonomous self coincides with Herder’s self-giving expression of language. We will see that Hegel did not hit explicitly on this notion of experience of the self in the act of self-determination, and failing that, he invented the Geist as a philosophoumenon to jury-rig a solution. Wojtyla has actually done it philosophically, and Ratzinger has given the theological explanation by the Person of Christ (Jesus of Nazareth in history is Jesus the Christ as Absolute) in history. My point here is that Hegel is immensely useful in Taylor’s account of him because he was working toward the above solution of Gaudium et spes #24 that is right before us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Hegel
On Charles Taylor’s interpretation of Hegel, we find that he is not the mad and impenetrable idealist of the ethereal Geist and the unthinkable confusion of reason’s dialectic with matter-making-history, but a synthetic mind trying to resolve the two horns of the Enlightenment dualism of mind and matter. What Taylor suggests he saw were the two parallel lines of thought in Kant’s free autonomous self and Herder’s integral expressivism.
[1] J. Ratzinger, “Section 2, Faith and History, A. Salvation and History,” in Principles of Catholic Theology Ignatius (1987) 159.
[2] J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure” Franciscan Herald Press (1989) xi.
[3] John Paul II, Andre Frossard, “Be Not Afraid,” St. Martin’s Press (1984) 59-60.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” Values in a Time of Upheaval Ignatius (2006) 92.
[5] Charles Taylor, “Hegel” Cambridge University Press (1975) 30.
[6] Ibid. 32.
[7] “The most evident feature in an act of will is the efficacy of the personal self. This efficacy is immediately given: it is reflected in the awareness of the acting person as an act of will….Kant abandoned this dynamic essence of the will in his interpretation of ethical life, confining himself to an analysis of the contents of practical reason as the determining factors in the direction of the will And yet the first and most fundamental aspect of ethical experience is the very efficacy of the personal self, which Ach, Lindworsky, and other representatives of the same school of psychology describe as essential for the will;” K. Wojtyla, “The Will in the Analysis of the Ethical Act,” Person and Community, Lang (1993) 7-8.
[8] Charles Taylor, “Hegel,” op. cit. 30.
[9] K. Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” Analecta Husserliana Reidel (1979) 72.
[10] Ibid
[11] John Paul II, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Knopf (1994) 34.
[12] Charles Taylor, “Hegel,” op. cit 16.
[13] Charles Taylor, “Hegel” op. cit. 17.
[14] Charles Taylor, “Philosophical Arguments” Harvard University Press (1997)
[15] Walker Percy, “The Delta Factor,” Message in the Bottle, Noonday (1995) 35.
[16] John Paul II, “Man and Woman He Created Them, A Theology of the Body,” Pauline Books and Media (2006) 146-156.
[17] Ibid. 150
[18] Ibid 151.
[19] Charles Taylor, “Hegel,” op. cit 22.
[20] “Herder – Philosophical Writings,” Cambridge University Press (2002) 87-89.
[21] Ibid
[22] Charles Taylor, “Hegel,” op. cit. 34.
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