Fus Qd1001 All

Quaestiones
Disputatae
Contemporary Engagement with the
Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand
DT Sheffler
Special Guest Editor
2019
Quaestiones Disputatae
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2
Quaestiones Disputatae
Vol. 10, No. 1 Fall 2019
Contemporary Engagement with the

Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand
Editor’s Introduction
DT Sheffler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Further Development of the Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand

Josef Seifert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Hildebrand, Hypostasis, and the Irreducibility of Personal Existence

DT Sheffler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics and the Value of Modern Art

Mark K. Spencer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
The Intersubjectivity of Love and the Structure of the Human Person

Michael Grasinski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Toward the Name of the Other

Alexander Montes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Critical Rehabilitation of Plato’s Forms

Justin Keena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Affirmation of Different Forms of Individual Subjectivity in

Karol Wojtyła and Dietrich von Hildebrand
Hrvoje Vargić . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Dietrich von Hildebrand and C. S. Lewis on the Rationality of

Affective Value-Response
Arthur Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Concept of Value

Martin Cajthaml . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
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Editor’s Introduction
DT Sheffler
Guest Editor
This volume brings together a number of scholars working on topics ranging

from contemporary ethics to the history of philosophy. This wide scope
reflects the comprehensive nature of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s philosophic
vision, including foundational works on ethics, philosophical method, aes-
thetics, and the nature of love. Hildebrand managed to fit his extensive schol-
arly writing into a heroic life of anti-Nazi political activism during World
War II. Within his corpus of works are a number of important philosoph-
ical problems that beg for further development, such as his conception of
personal existence, his rich and pluralistic conception of beauty, and his
distinction between person and personality. In several places, however, the
development of Hildebrand’s thought must involve a correction or even
an outright challenge to his reasoning. Each of these papers does just this,
applying the insights of Hildebrand to a number of diverse philosophical
problems while also advancing and challenging his thought in various ways.
Despite the wide diversity of problems, three central areas appear in this vol-
ume, which represent some of Hildebrand’s most important contributions
to philosophy: (1) his method of phenomenological realism, (2) his concep-
tion of value and value-response, and (3) his personalism. In the following
sections, I provide a brief sketch of these three areas in order to provide a
background for the papers in this volume.
Phenomenological Realism
Hildebrand remained committed to two strands of philosophical method

that are sometimes seen to be in tension: metaphysical realism and phenom-
enology. Like his teacher Husserl, Hildebrand sought to ground philosoph-
ical argument in that which is given to us in experience rather than rely at
the outset on abstractions or theories that distance us from what is given.
Unlike Husserl (at least as he is frequently interpreted), however, Hildebrand
remained committed to a metaphysically realist version of this phenome-
nological approach. According to Hildebrand, the reality that we investigate
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4 Editor’s Introduction
when we do philosophy is a reality beyond us, transcending our subjective

experience of it. This reality is revealed in our subjective experience, but it
is not constituted by it. Hence the aim of philosophy must be a faithfulness
to that which is real. This means that we must strive to grasp reality as it
discloses itself and to find suitable terms to accurately express what we have
grasped while minimizing any distortion in our understanding or misleading
characterizations in our language. Hildebrand typically proceeds by describ-
ing in detail an ideal type or essence, attempting to isolate this datum in its
purity. He often attempts to preserve this purity by enumerating a set of
perversions, distortions, or alternatives to the datum so that our minds can
understand the ideal by contrast with what it is not.
At times, this procedure may at first appear similar to the process of
conceptual analysis in the analytic tradition. Admittedly, one finds a great
deal of variety and development within the analytic tradition on the meth-
ods and aims of conceptual analysis. Nevertheless, the primary object of
analysis tends to be our own concepts or words. Hildebrand, however, under-
stands his own method to run directly contrary to this because he takes the
object of analysis to be the objective, intelligible structure of reality rather
than a subjective structure selected from among our own concepts. Hilde-
brand’s goal is the conformity of our concepts to what is given rather than
an analysis of our concepts themselves as we happen to find them. I hasten
to add, however, an ecumenical qualification. Analytic philosophy begins as
a revolt against British idealism and subjectivisms of all sorts by its return
to rigorous logical analysis, just as Husserl himself begins with a return to
logical analysis. Frege’s mathematical Platonism stands as a precursor to both
traditions, and it is logic that is hailed as the harbinger of a new objectivism
in both phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Ironically, both traditions
soon fall back into various forms of the very subjectivism and idealism from
which they originally tried to escape. Nevertheless, in both traditions, realism
has survived and is alive and well.
This theme of realism runs, in some way, through all the papers in this
collection, but it comes out with special force in Justin Keena’s comparison
between Hildebrand’s account of necessary truth and Plato’s theory of the
Forms. According to Keena, Hildebrand’s realism preserves the core insights
in Plato’s theory of the Forms, while it avoids much of the unnecessary meta-
physical baggage, such as metempsychosis and the doctrine of recollection.
Value and Value-Response
Hildebrand is well known for his philosophy of value and value-response,

which grounds many of his most important philosophical insights and
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DT Sheffler 5
appears in nearly all his works. Value, according to Hildebrand, is a basic

datum of experience that divides into three types: the “important in itself,”
the “merely subjectively satisfying,” and the “objective good for the person.”
For example, suppose I see a case of moral excellence, such as a person
forgiving an enemy under difficult circumstances. The encounter with this
excellence presents itself as something more than merely neutral, something
that demands a kind of respect even though it may not hold any element
of subjective pleasure for me or involve a benefit to me at all. This second
aspect of Hildebrand’s philosophy interacts with his phenomenological real-
ism because the revelation of something as important in itself leads us on
to inquire into the ways that reality must be structured such that it could
contain this dimension of value. Since we can discern in experience a clear
distinction between the sense that something is important in itself and the
sense that something is important because of a particular connection to us,
reality contains a type of value that is not a mere projection of personal
preference.
His treatment of value is pluralistic in the sense that he does not reduce
what appears as important in itself to some single type of value such as
moral or aesthetic value. Instead, he welcomes into his analysis a great vari-
ety of different kinds of value. For example, the kind of value present in
a living organism is distinct from the kind of value present in a beautiful
symphony, which in turn is distinct from the kind of value present in the act
of forgiveness. Throughout Hildebrand’s work, we see a systematic attempt
to catalogue all these various kinds of value and understand the distinctions
between very specific subvarieties within these. Hildebrand is not a plural-
ist, however, in the sense that he would consider all these various kinds of
value to be on an equal footing. Instead, moral goodness holds for Hilde-
brand a kind of preeminence among the values. Further, within this sphere,
as within others, different kinds of moral goodness ought to be prioritized
above others.
Characteristic of all his ethical writings, Hildebrand understands our
experience of value to include the sense that values call for some fitting
response on our part. This response varies according to the kind of value
and our circumstances: for example, when I observe a heroic act of forgive-
ness, I may be called upon to imitate it by forgiving my own enemies. In an
experience of aesthetic value, however, such as my encounter with the terrible
grandeur of a mountain vista, I may be called upon to appreciate the vista’s
magnificence in humble admiration. This understanding of value and value-
response establishes a balance between a thorough analysis of the phenomena
on the object side and a thorough analysis on the subject side. Metaphysi-
cal realists sometimes focus so heavily on an analysis of the object that our
subjective response is left underdeveloped, whereas Hildebrand devotes a
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great deal of his thinking to an inquiry into the inner workings of the subject.
He does this, however, without lapsing into any form of subjectivism.
Two papers in this collection focus on this idea of value and value-
response. First, Martin Cajthaml provides a valuable survey of Hildebrand’s
theory of value and offers a number of helpful critiques. Cajthaml espe-
cially challenges the idea that Hildebrand’s account of value stands in as radi-
cal a contrast as Hildebrand thought to Plato and Aristotle’s understanding
of the good. Second, Mark Spencer argues that Hildebrand’s own account of
aesthetic value gives him reason to hold a more favorable view of modern art
than that found in the negative pronouncements he makes about modern
art in several places. This follows from the pluralism mentioned earlier:
Spencer argues that there are aesthetic values that Hildebrand acknowledges
besides beauty, and these values are often present in modern art even when
it is ugly.
We see an especially important case of value-response in Hildebrand’s
analysis of affectivity. When he investigates this dimension of our response,
we see at work the importance of the balance between an analysis of the
object and an analysis of the subject. In much of his writing but especially in
The Heart, Hildebrand seeks to rehabilitate our understanding of the affec-
tive dimension in our response to value, which remains underdeveloped, he
claims, in the philosophical tradition. It is not enough, he contends, to see an
act of forgiveness and then will to act in a similar manner. We certainly ought
to will thus, but we ought also to be moved in our affectivity. In this volume,
Arthur Martin focuses on this importance of affectivity in our response to
value and draws an important parallel between Hildebrand’s position and
that taken by C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. He argues that the affec-
tive dimension of our response can be rational, although it is distinct from
the activity of our intellect, since our affectivity can be rooted in a reasonable
apprehension of the true nature of things.
Personalism
Hildebrand is known for the strong current of personalism that runs through
all his thinking, and he is one of the central figures in the twentieth-century
Christian personalist movement, which also includes such thinkers as Gabriel
Marcel, Hildebrand’s friend Max Scheler, Edith Stein, and Karol Wojtyła.
The particulars of these thinkers differ, but they are all united in placing a
special emphasis on the person. This emphasis can take several forms: with
respect to metaphysics, personalists tend to emphasize the radical distinction
between person and thing and the richer mode of being realized in the for-
mer; with respect to ethics, personalists tend to emphasize the special dignity
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DT Sheffler 7
and worth of the person in contrast to mere utility and the special respon-
sibility involved in free agency; with respect to political philosophy, person-
alists tend to emphasize both the relational dependence of the person in
community and the proper freedom of the person from totalitarian claims
of the state; with respect to epistemology and phenomenology, personal-
ists tend to emphasize the dimension of interiority that we discover in self-
consciousness. In some ways, Hildebrand is not a typical representative of
this movement because he never wrote a complete study devoted to the topic
of personhood alone. Nevertheless, the central themes of this movement
can be seen as holding an abiding interest for him in all his work, and many
of his central arguments depend on a personalist understanding of these
themes. Hildebrand makes several important contributions to the thought of
this movement, but three stand out in particular: his understanding of our
“free personal center,” his understanding of Eigenleben, and his understanding
of the irreplaceable value of each person.
As I examine in my own article, Hildebrand makes an important contri-
bution to ethics with his notion of “sanctioning.” According to Hildebrand,
the inner life of our personal existence is not to be understood solely in
terms of drives, impulses, or psychological processes happening to us. For
us to be able to say, “This is something I do,” we must be capable of recog-
nizing these impulses or thoughts and either adopting them as truly our
own or rejecting them. Hildebrand explains this as giving an inner “yes” or
“no.” When we refuse something, it does not automatically disappear, and
we may need to take responsibility for previously developing our character
in such a way that we are now the kind of person to have these thoughts or
impulses. Nevertheless, Hildebrand explains that our inmost refusal has the
power to deeply mitigate the influence of these impulses in our psychology.
Conversely, even a good impulse that we know we should act on is not truly
our own until we give our inner “yes” to it, or “sanction” it, as Hildebrand
says. This capacity for sanctioning points to a deep core of the person, which
Hildebrand calls our “free personal center.” As I argue in my own essay, this
free personal center cannot be reduced to the dimension of nature, which
characterizes us as things in the world, but rather indicates a radically distinct
dimension whereby we exist also as persons.
As Hrvoje Vargić explains in his piece, Eigenleben could be translated liter-
ally as “one’s own life” or “the life proper to oneself,” although the philo-
sophical meaning comes closer to “subjectivity” as John F. Crosby chooses
to translate the term in The Nature of Love.
This choice is a difficult one because Hildebrand does not mean by Eigen-
leben that which I happen to find subjectively satisfying, which we contrasted
earlier with the important in itself. Instead, Eigenleben refers to all that matters
for my objective happiness or that touches upon my real concerns as a being
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with an unrepeatable personal existence. Hildebrand’s contribution is to

see that this concern with the objective good of my own personal being is
not the same as the inward-turning narcissism involved in the egocentric
attitude. As Michael Grasinski points out, Hildebrand brings together in his
philosophy of love the poles represented by the classical intentio benevolentiae
(desire for the good of the beloved) and intentio unionis (desire for union with
the beloved). We may be tempted to think that we should sacrifice the latter
entirely for the former because we are drawn to the conception of love as
sheer altruism. Hildebrand, however, stresses that our concern for our own
objective good need not be understood exclusively by the categories of altru-
ism and egoism. This is especially true because our own personal existence is
intrinsically ordered toward the surpassing of itself in love.
Throughout Hildebrand’s work, one can see a deep appreciation for the
unique and irreplaceable value of each person. He emphasizes again and
again in his Ethics, for example, the importance of assigning a special value to
personal existence and to each person in particular. In Liturgy and Personality,
he understands our development as persons in terms of growing into a full-
bodied “personality,” which for each person is ideally “the original undupli-
cable thought of God which He embodies.” In his article for this volume,
Alexander Montes examines this issue in depth, examining the way we use
names to indicate the unrepeatable significance of each person. He argues
that Hildebrand’s analysis of love gives us a phenomenology that helps
address certain shortcomings in Levinas’s understanding of alterity (i.e., the
“otherness” of the person we encounter in relationship).
The Work Left to Do
Hildebrand’s philosophy touches upon several critical areas of live inquiry. In

many places, Hildebrand’s thought prompts the thoughtful student toward
the continuation of analyses that Hildebrand began. In this regard, much
work remains still to be done. In other places, however, Hildebrand leaves
certain conceptions ambiguous or overstates certain points. This gives the
admirers of Hildebrand a chance to improve upon or correct his thought
rather than slavishly repeating his insights. In his survey of the work that
lies before us, Josef Seifert argues that Hildebrand himself would have wel-
comed gladly both development and correction.
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Further Development of the Philosophy
of Dietrich von Hildebrand
Josef Seifert
Founding Rector, International Academy of Philosophy in the
Principality Liechtenstein; Director of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Institute
of Philosophy and Realist Phenomenological Research, Gustav Siewerth Academy
I. Appropriating Hildebrand’s Insights
The first way in which we can make Hildebrand’s thought fruitful is to see
for ourselves what he has discovered. Anyone who gains the same insights
into reality that Hildebrand has gained contributes to the fruitful embodiment
of the Hildebrandian philosophy in his own mind and possibly in the minds of
his students. In the words of Saint Augustine, the teacher of philosophy should
help students read in “the book of that light which is called truth” (in libro lucis
illius quae veritas dicitur; Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV, xv, 21).
Any real appropriation of a philosophical insight requires delving into
the nature of things themselves. Anyone who draws from the same foun-
tain of truth from which Hildebrand drank will be led to discover some
new aspects of being, however small they may be in comparison with Hilde-
brand’s significant discoveries.
For a presentation of Hildebrand’s momentous philosophical insights, I
refer to Hildebrand’s self-presentation.1
II. Systematic Presentations of Hildebrand’s Thought
A second form of adding to the thought of Hildebrand lies in providing sys-

tematic presentations of it. Such presentations can take chiefly three forms:
1. Presentations of his thought in general, perhaps in a work analo-

gous to the ones of Roger Troisfontaines on Gabriel Marcel (Trois-
fontaines 1953–68) or of Rocco Buttiglione on Karol Wojtyła and
Augusto del Noce (Buttiglione 1997, 1991).
1
Hildebrand 1975a, 77–127.
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10 Further Development of the Philosophy
2. Presentations on different topics on which systematic accounts are

missing from his work but in which many dispersed insights can be
found. An example of this is his philosophy of history, to which
Hildebrand makes many contributions. Among such contributions
are his sharp distinction between the intersubjective historical life
of ideas and their truth and his penetrating critiques of historical
relativism, the ideology of progress, and the arrogance of imagin-
ing one’s own era to be vastly superior to all previous eras, which
he compares to the silly pride underlying racism.2 Hildebrand
elaborates our real task when confronted with dominant ideas and
ideologies: namely, not becoming mouthpieces of the spirits of our
epoch but, in the light of the eternal truths about things, provid-
ing a sharp and sober critical analysis of the respective zeitgeist
and sorting out the elements of truth from possibly fatal errors
contained in it. Hildebrand executed this task both in his heroic
fight against National Socialism and its antipersonalistic errors and
in his devastating criticism of the errors pervading society and
many theological trends within the Catholic Church in the 1960s
and thereafter (Hildebrand 1994; Seifert 1998). One should also
here mention his splendid analyses of classical and romantic ele-
ments in the works of different classical composers.3
3. Synthetic presentations of his thought referring to those fields and
areas of philosophy where coherent and large systematic works
of Hildebrand exist—such as on aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of
community, and love—but where at least a general and broader
public could very much profit from abbreviated summary presenta-
tions of his thought.4
2
See especially Hildebrand 1993, 1994a, 2014.
3
Hildebrand 1962, 1975, 1993, 1994, 2004; Seifert 1998. See also Buttiglione
1991a.
4
Hildebrand 1975a, 1977, 1994, 1989, 2006b; Premoli De Marchi 1998; Rodrigo
Guerra López 2003; Gian Paolo Terravecchia 2004; Rogelio Rovira 2006; Vincenzo
Cicero 2006. Hildebrand’s most extensive contributions belong to the sphere of
ethics. See Hildebrand 1916, 1918–82, 1966, 1978, 1982. We possess already some
excellent short presentations of them, such as the introductions to Hildebrand’s ethi-
cal writings by Karl Mertens, in Hildebrand 1973, 1955; as well as by García Norro in
Hildebrand 1983; and by Palacios in Hildebrand 2006; Seifert 1990.
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Josef Seifert 11
III. Presentations of the Philosophical and

Historical Development of His Thought
Hildebrand’s philosophy forms a coherent whole from his earliest writings to

his latest posthumous works. There is nothing like a Heideggerian Kehre or
other pseudo-dramatic turns in his thought nor truly dramatic revolutionary
changes such as Scheler’s during the last four or five years of his life.5
Nonetheless, there are also certain important developments in Hildebrand’s
thought, such as the later addition of the third category of importance—
the objective good for the person—to his earlier crucial distinction between the
merely subjectively important (satisfying) and the objective (intrinsic) value.6
Another development involved his more fundamental change of position on
the nature of the free value-response that we will discuss later, and an elabo-
ration on the fundamental newness of being motivated by the objective good
of another person in the intentio benevolentiae of love deserves special emphasis
as well (Hildebrand 1971, 1980). Moreover, in an absolutely brilliant chapter,
Hildebrand shows that the loving person desires the good for the other person not
only under the aspect of being a good for the other person but because in being an objective
good for the other, it becomes an indirect objective good for the loving person himself.7 Also,
Hildebrand’s later addition, in his Moralia, of a series of sources of moral
obligations not considered in his Ethics (Hildebrand 1978), such as laws or
self-chosen commitments, and so forth, besides the morally relevant values,
ought to be emphasized here (Hildebrand 1980).
IV. Historical Influence of Hildebrand’s

Philosophy on Other Thinkers
Such a study could begin with expounding Husserl’s exceedingly positive

evaluation of Hildebrand’s doctoral thesis.8
At least two important parts of such a Wirkungsgeschichte deserve careful
study:
1. Hildebrand exerted great influence on generations of direct and

indirect students of his, many of whom first united at the Univer-
sity of Munich, then at Fordham University. A later generation of
5
See Scheler’s own explanation of this in Scheler 1928–76, 1979. See also Hilde-
brand 1955a, 1955b, 1955c.
6
See Hildebrand, 1968, 1916–69, 1978.
7
Hildebrand 1971, ch. 7; Seifert 2013.
8
See, for instance, Edmund Husserl 1912; 1993, 125–26.
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his students taught at the University of Dallas as well as the Uni-

versities of Madrid, Rhode Island, and Steubenville; they include
students from many countries and all five continents, thanks to the
thirty-one years of work by the International Academy of Philosophy
(Seifert 1989a).
2. Secondly, one ought to investigate the close proximity between
Hildebrand and Karol Wojtyła and the Cracow Lublin school.9
V. Popularizing Hildebrand
Widely accessible Hildebrand readers beyond the existing ones10 are desirable
because Hildebrand’s philosophical works always aim at a clarity and a depth
accessible to everyone and are remarkably free of jargon. His work forms, in
this respect, a radical contrast to Heidegger’s philosophy and calls to mind
Friedrich Nietzsche’s profound statement: “Who knows to be deep, strives for
clarity; who wants to appear to be deep to the masses strives for obscurity. For
the masses believe everything deep, the bottom of which they cannot see.”11
VI. Comparison of Hildebrand’s Insights with

Those of Other Thinkers: Making Both More
Fruitful through Further Development
There exist important relations between Hildebrand’s insights and those

of many other philosophers, such as Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl, Adolf
Reinach,12 Moritz Geiger, Edith Stein, and Alexander Pfänder. Each of
these played an important, albeit different, role in Hildebrand’s formation as
described by him in his own account of his philosophical formation (Hilde-
brand 1955a, 1955b, 1955c, 1975a).
One should also explore the relations of Hildebrand’s philosophy to
classical and medieval thinkers, such as the strong similarities between his
thought on “ideal necessary essences” and ideal objects ante rem (Hildebrand
1976, ch. 4; Seifert 2000) and Plato’s doctrine of ideas (Reale 1997; Seifert
9
Seifert 1981, 1994, 2007; Styczeń 1979; Tarnówka 2002.
10
Suitable readers exist in German and English. See Overath 1992/2017; Jules
van Schaijik, ed., The Dietrich von Hildebrand Life Guide (South Bend, IN: St. Augus-
tine’s Press, 2007).
11
My translation of Nietzsche 1966, II, 144, 173.
12
Him alone Hildebrand recognized as his true and most authentic teacher. See
Hildebrand 1975a.
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Josef Seifert 13
1996, ch. 1) as well as the many Aristotelian elements in Hildebrand’s philos-

ophy. Countless necessary and immutable eternal “essences” (notwendige
Wesenheiten) or rationes of things preexist any temporal being in their timeless
inner necessity and extreme intelligibility; ultimately, they are, in very different
ways, “in God” (Hildebrand 1951; 1991, ch. 4). Hildebrand, at the same time,
agrees with Aristotle that real or true being is not identical with these ideal
forms or eide but with real things and their essences—above all, persons.13
Thus Hildebrand provided an original and highly relevant synthesis between
Plato and Aristotle, giving to both a strong personalistic turn.14 Overwhelm-
ing proximity exists also between Hildebrand’s Cogito and that of Augustine
and to some lesser extent that of René Descartes (Hildebrand 1994a). His
respective contributions that constitute a realist phenomenological turn in
the history of phenomenology represent, and gave rise to, a profoundly new
elaboration of the (realist) phenomenological method.15 Possibly the deepest
overall commonalities between Hildebrand’s thought and medieval prede-
cessors exist between his thought and that of Saint Augustine (especially
regarding the latter’s critique of stoicism and philosophy of spiritual forms
of affectivity), Anselm, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus. One is struck by the
striking parallels between the ethics and philosophies of love of Hildebrand,
Duns Scotus, and Bonaventure. Just think of the stunning parallels between
Hildebrand’s idea of value-response and Duns Scotus’s conception of love
and his analysis of the motivation through the affectio iustitiae.16 Similarly, the
Hildebrandian treatment of “qualitative values” parallels, on many points,
Anselm’s and Duns Scotus’s philosophies of freedom and of other pure
perfections (Colosi 1995; Seifert 1989, ch. 5; 1994a; 1994d).
Similar studies should be done about the proximity between Hilde-
brand’s investigation of experience and Bonaventure’s analyses of con-tuition
(Fedoryka 1993–94).
Hildebrand’s many references to Thomas Aquinas also deserve a detailed
study. In his ethics, he makes many positive references to Aquinas, particu-
larly to Thomas’s fascinating theory of human action and the famous distinc-
tion between the finis operis and the finis operantis, employed by Hildebrand’s
critique of situation ethics (Hildebrand 1966). There are profound agree-
ments on many other topics that merit further study as well.
13
This point was most clearly developed in a seminar titled “Geist and Person,”
which he taught in 1964 at the University of Salzburg.
14
See, for example, his unpublished notes made for metaphysics courses and his
(Hildebrand 1978, ch. 11) “Unity of Values,” on ontological and qualitative values.
See also Seifert 1996, ch. 1; 1989, ch. 1–4.
15
See Hildebrand 1991, ch. 4. See also Josef Seifert 1987–2013, 2009.
16
See Allan Wolter 1946, 1986; Seifert 1994a, 2005.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 13 9/21/20 11:53 AM

Hildebrand’s critique of Aquinas’s and Aristotle’s ethics chiefly regards

the relations of the morally good act and of love to happiness. Hildebrand
does not conceive of happiness as the end or final cause of the moral act
or of love; rather, he sees it as a superabundant fruit of morally good acts
and of a love that entails an affective and volitional response toward the other
person for his own sake in addition to being a gift of oneself. There exist
striking parallels between Hildebrand’s and Rosmini’s, Wojtyła’s, Styczeń’s,
Szostek’s, Wierzbicki’s, and other ethical and philosophical works on love.17
There is a profound similitude and kinship between Hildebrand’s
completely new and positive understanding of human sexuality in the light
of love as its fulfillment and expression or as embodiment of the personal
self-donation of love (Hildebrand 1966a, 1989a) and Karol Wojtyła’s person-
alistic ethics and “theology of the body.”18 In both philosophies, the role of
self-donation in the conjugal act and the personalizing of human sexuality
as an expression of self-donation play a decisive role.19 There is also room
for friendly critical exchanges between Wojtyła’s and Hildebrand’s theories
of action, virtue, and free will.20 Significant parallels between Hildebrand’s
philosophy of love and Robert Spaemann’s treatise on happiness and benev-
olence remain unexplored (Spaemann 1990).
There are many possible themes in this area of study of Hildebrand’s
philosophy, including the exploration of Hildebrand’s relations to the person-
alist thought of John Henry Cardinal Newman (Crosby 2014), one of whose
sermons is extremely close to Hildebrand’s aesthetics (Hildebrand 1955d).21
17
Unfortunately, Michael Waldstein did not consider these in his 2006. See Seif-
ert 1981, 1983, 1983a, 1984, 2002; Wierzbicki 2006.
18
Wojtyła 1987; Michael Waldstein 2003; Seifert 1984, 1996, 2017.
19
Styczeń 1979; Seifert 1981. Unfortunately, Michael Waldstein does not bring
this point out in his 2006. See Wojtyła 1987, 1993. See Hildebrand 1971, especially
ch. 1, 2, 4–9.
20
See the excellent article of Maria Wolter 2013.
21
John Henry Cardinal Newman, University Sermons, xv:
There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet what a
slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings forth so
much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great
master in it create his new world? Shall we say that all this exuberant
intensiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art like some game or
fashion of the day without reality, without meaning? Or is it possi-
ble that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich
yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic,
should be a mere sound which is gone and perishes? Can it be that
those mysterious stirrings of the heart, and keen emotions, and strange
yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we
fus-qd1001-all.indd 14 9/21/20 11:53 AM

Josef Seifert 15
The same holds true for Joseph Ratzinger’s sublime thoughts on beauty in
sacred music, Søren Kierkegaard, and others to whom Hildebrand frequently
refers.
VII. Making Hildebrand’s Philosophy Fruitful

for a Critique of Other Philosophers
Hildebrand always has been, in his life and in his philosophy as well as in
many of his religious works, a fighter against error and a soldier in the ser-
vice of the truth.22 Hildebrand led a courageous fight against philosophical
errors.23
Hildebrand’s elaboration of an objective synthetic a priori and its foun-
dation in necessary essences and states of affairs is of the utmost significance
for the method and nature of philosophy and for its capacity to critique
Kant, Hume, German idealism, Thomas Kuhn, Popper, empiricism, and
positivism.24 This contribution, above all through Hildebrand’s distinction
between three kinds of essences, is so important that one might see in Hilde-
brand, along with Adolf Reinach (Reinach 1989), the chief architect of the
new classical philosophy and phenomenology that has been termed “realist
phenomenology” (Seifert 1995a) and has been said by Balduin Schwarz to
play a key role in the seventh great renewal and rehabilitation of philosophy
in history (Schwarz 1996; Seifert 1989c, 1999). By giving decisive answers
know not whence, should be brought in us by what is unsubstantial,

and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself ? It is not so; it
cannot be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere, they are
the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound;
they are echoes of our home; they are the voice of angels, or the Mag-
nificat of the Saints, or the Living Laws of Divine Governance, or
Divine Attributes; something they are besides themselves, which we
cannot encompass, which we cannot utter, though mortal man, and he
perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of
eliciting them.
See also Hildebrand, The New Tower of Babel: Manifestations of Man’s Escape from God,
2nd ed. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), 202.
22
He introduced himself under this title to Engelbert Dolfuß. Hildebrand 1994,
1993, 1993b.
23
Some of the noblest traits of a knight-errant, which he possessed, may explain
his intense love of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Hildebrand told me that he read this
novel about fifty times. See also Seifert 1976a.
24
See Hildebrand 1991, 1950, 1994a; Seifert 1991a.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 15 9/21/20 11:53 AM

to Kant’s and Hume’s critiques of any objective knowledge of the essences

and existence of things in themselves, Hildebrand decisively contributed to a
new objectivism that rationally and critically overcomes the subjectivism and
relativism prevalent in philosophy after Hume and Kant (Schwarz 1970). In
his careful investigation into the phenomena of conscious life and the rich
recesses of this “enigma of enigmas,” Hildebrand did not arrive at the imma-
nentism that the later Husserl espoused in virtue of a number of serious
equivocations and confusions; rather, he regained the transcendence of man
in knowledge and a return to a knowledge of things in themselves—to an
objective ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of the person (Seifert 1989,
1987–2013, 2015). In these purely positive contributions, however, also lies
an immense critical potential in Hildebrand’s philosophy, a capacity that as of
yet has only insufficiently been explored or developed.25
The same is true for his ethics that explicitly entails a critique of ethical
relativism and situation ethics as well as elements of the ethics of Max Scheler
and Immanuel Kant. Additionally, like the ethics of Karol Wojtyła and Tade-
usz Styczeń, Hildebrand includes a deep critique of eudaemonistic elements in
Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics (Seifert 1990), which implicitly contains a power-
ful critique of utilitarianism and consequentialism.26 Hildebrand’s aesthetics is
likewise diametrically opposed to aesthetical relativism. His largely unpublished
philosophy of religion stands in stark opposition to the vast majority of rela-
tivistic philosophies of religion, which exert an immense influence on theology,
particularly on the so-called theology of religions. Hildebrand offers implicitly
a penetrating criticism of these (Rütsche 2017).
VIII. Contributions toward Continuing Hildebrand’s

Method and Investigations into New Areas
Hildebrand often said that he opened many doors and that we (his students)
should go through them. Given the infinity of what is knowable, it may
indeed be regarded as a general mark of the quality of a philosophy that it
not only possesses a high value in itself but also proves fruitful for further
investigations. Such investigations can turn to areas on which Hildebrand
has already published and made important contributions—for example, on
the nature of the person (Crosby 1996, 2004; Seifert 1989). The same holds
true for the three (or more) different ways of participation in value open to
persons;27 or on further spheres of morality besides the three spheres he dis-
25
See Balduin Schwarz 1970; Fritz Wenisch 1988; as well as my 1987, 1976, 2001.
26
Seifert 2015a, 2015b.
27
See Hildebrand 1991; Maria Wolter 2012.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 16 9/21/20 11:53 AM

Josef Seifert 17
tinguished, counting for example the fundamental moral attitude as a fourth

sphere; or developing new ones mentioned in his Moralia (Hildebrand 1980;
Seifert 2000b). There are countless fields of further work along these lines.
IX. A Study of and Publication of Hildebrand’s

Many Unpublished Materials
One should edit and complete the incomplete writings of Hildebrand on

happiness; the categories of love; causality; opposites; and other questions of
metaphysics, philosophy of language, and especially philosophy of religion28
as well as philosophy of man and woman.29
X. Additional Fields in Which Hildebrand Has Done Little Work
Among these areas of philosophy on which Hildebrand has done little work
are a philosophy of the following:
1. What Thomas Aquinas calls the actus essendi: the unique character
of real existing
2. Essence versus existence
3. Cosmological, personalist, and ontological arguments for the exis-
tence of God
4. The body-soul question
5. The nature of life as such
6. Logic
7. Modalities: logical, ontological, epistemic, volitional, and other
modalities in entirely different areas
8. Aporias, antinomies, and apparent paradoxes
9. The knowledge of other persons and empathy
10. Peace and human dignity
11. General ontology and first principles of being
12. Game theory30
On this topic, Alice von Hildebrand-Jourdain 1970 has made significant

28
contributions. See also Ciril Rütsche 2017.

29
Alice von Hildebrand-Jourdain has developed much in her lengthy lecture
series on feminism given at EWTN. See also Seifert 1989d, 1993.
30
On most of these areas, among others, I have worked personally. See Josef
Seifert 1973; 1977; 1989; 1989a; 1989b; 1989c; 1989d; 1991; 1991–02; 1992; 1992a;
1992b; 1993; 1993a; 1994; 1994a; 1994c; 1995; 1996; 1997, ch. 4; 1997a; 1997b;
fus-qd1001-all.indd 17 9/21/20 11:53 AM

XI. Critical Thoughts on Some Erroneous

Views in Hildebrand’s Writings
Hildebrand oftentimes said that his disciples had a duty to criticize and over-
come any error they would find in his philosophy because the sole purpose
of his writings was to state the truth. He himself gave some extraordinary
examples of self-critique. In this area of critically continuing Hildebrand’s
philosophy, I wish to mention an error about the nature of the free volitional
response, which Stephen Schwarz was the first to note and which Hildebrand
himself later revoked (Hildebrand 1980). Hildebrand claimed in chapters 17
and 21 of his Ethics31 that the volitional response, the free inner “yes” or
“no” as the first perfection of free will, can only respond in union with the
second perfection of the will—the will as initiating a causal chain that aims
at unrealized states of affairs realizable through me. Stephen Schwarz criti-
cized the thesis that free responses, as taking free stances toward values and
beings endowed with them, could only work together with what Hildebrand
terms the second perfection of freedom (the free initiating action)—the will
as king of action. He insisted, quite rightly, on the capacity of the volitional
response to respond to persons, existing beings, and not solely to unreal-
ized states of affairs realizable through me. The first perfection of free will,
the act of taking free stances, is not bound to operate jointly with the sec-
ond perfection of freedom. Hildebrand took this position because he had
in mind only the will in the narrower sense of action, in which I cannot will
something that is already realized. It would be a grave error, however, to
believe that this is the only sphere of free acts and responses (Seifert 2017).
In fact, the supreme proof that this would be a grave error is Mary’s free
response expressed in her response to the angel: “Behold, I am the handmade
of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word.” This free response
is given to a miracle and to the incarnation of God in her womb—that is, to
a state of affairs entirely outside Mary’s power to realize through her action.
Hildebrand himself essentially came to agree with criticisms against his
position and published his own “retractationes” of this error in his Moralia
(Hildebrand 1980).
This error of which I have spoken has large ramifications.
1. The thesis that volitional responses can only refer to unrealized states
of affairs, and hence not to other human persons or to God, leads to claiming
1998/99; 2000; 2001; 2002; 2002b; 2002c; 2003; 2003a; 2004; 2004/2005a; 2005,
ch. 2; 2005a, ch. 1, ch. 13; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a. See also Wolfgang Waldstein 2010.
31
Moreover, much later repeated in his Das Wesen der Liebe, ch. 2. See especially
Hildebrand, Ethics, chs. 21, 17.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 18 9/21/20 11:53 AM

Josef Seifert 19
unjustifiably an immense superiority of the affective responses over the voli-

tional ones.
2. Hildebrand’s own retractatio of this claim opens the way for seeing
much more clearly that the object of free responses is in no way restricted
to states of affairs, which are not yet real but realizable through me. There-
fore, the inner volitional value-responses, and not only the affective value-
responses, constitute a large part of the second sphere of morality (inner
responses) distinct from action.
Hildebrand’s position becomes much more consistent through this crit-
icism. Even though he claimed in chapter 17 of his Ethics that the volitional
response can only respond to unrealized states of affairs (a claim repeated
in chapter 2 of his Das Wesen der Liebe), he himself affirms in chapter 27 of
Ethics the opposite: “The second is the sphere of concrete responses; this
includes both the volitional responses, which do not result in actions but remain
immanent activities [emphasis mine], and above all the affective responses:
contrition, love, hope, veneration, joy, or acts such as forgiving, thanking and
so on” (Hildebrand 1978, ch. 27).
That the free volitional response is not restricted to cases in which it
is closely linked to the free initiating of an action through which a person
realizes a not yet realized state of affairs also results from Hildebrand’s own
distinction between actual and superactual free responses. By “superactual
responses,” Hildebrand means such acts that do not exhaust their reality in
the short moments in which we actually experience or live them (such as a
toothache). They continue to exist in our conscious life or as background
of our actual consciousness for years or for the rest of our lives. While an
intense toothache or headache simply (and fortunately) ceases to exist as soon
as we no longer actually feel it, our virtues or our love remain an important
reality in our soul even when we do not actually experience them. On the
background of these distinctions, Hildebrand distinguishes three spheres of
moral life:
1. The actual inner free responses (or affective responses sanctioned

by our free will);
2. Free actions that aim at realizing states of affairs not yet real but
realizable through me, such as saving a drowning person’s life; and
3. Superactual free responses and general attitudes, such as virtues.
In all of these three spheres of moral acts we find the fundamental opposites
of good versus evil acts.
All good superactual free responses of the third sphere of morality, of
the virtues, can also exist as actual inner responses of the second sphere
of morality inasmuch as they have not yet gained superactual existence and
fus-qd1001-all.indd 19 9/21/20 11:53 AM

deep roots in the person. Moreover, Hildebrand’s recognition of virtues,

which plays a key role in his ethics as superactual free volitional responses,
itself contradicts his claim. Hildebrand argued previously in his Sittlichkeit und
ethische Werterkenntnis that the most foundational virtue, the good fundamental
moral attitude, first exists as a mere free intention and often only later reaches
the superactual existence of the attitude (Hildebrand 1982). Moreover, these
are not just habits but free volitional responses and superactual attitudes.
This would hold for all virtues as well as for the concrete inner responses that
eventually, but not always, give rise to external actions.
3. That the will could originally (apart from sanctioning or disavowing
affective responses) only respond to unrealized states of affairs realizable
through me is one of the chief reasons why Hildebrand argues in chap-
ter 2 of his Das Wesen der Liebe that love cannot be, as Thomas Aquinas
and many other philosophers thought, a volitional response. According to
Hildebrand, it can only be an affective response for which the will indeed
plays an important—although only indirect or cooperative—role, prepar-
ing the way for the affective response of love and sanctioning it when it is
given as a gift. It follows from retracting this error that Hildebrand’s main
argument for why love cannot be a volitional response (Hildebrand 1991,
ch. 2)—namely, because volitional responses respond solely to unrealized
states of affairs—cannot be used. Thus love could, at least with a view to this
reason, very well be both a response of the will and of the heart or even, in
states of affective dryness, only of the will. This would entail dropping the
claim that the deepest acts directed at other existing persons can initially only
be affective responses, even though they should be sanctioned, according to
Hildebrand, by the will. While Hildebrand’s philosophy of the intentional
and spiritual affective life of the person constitutes one of his deepest and
most stunning contributions,32 the undue restriction of the will, such that
it could not also affirm and respond to existing beings and persons, is thus
of major consequence. It is, for example, one main root for Hildebrand’s
reinterpretation of the first two commandments—namely, those of the love
of God and the love of neighbor—in the sense that not love itself, which
according to him essentially is an affective response, but only deeds of love,
preparatory acts of indirect and consequent acts of cooperative freedom, can
be commanded.
4. An explicit recognition of the capacity of volitional responses to
respond to existing states of affairs and persons renders Hildebrand’s posi-
tion immune against Wojtyła’s critique of Scheler’s “emotionalization of
consciousness” (Wojtyła 1979, 1980)—that is, of seeing affective experiences
as the largest and most important part of conscious life. Wojtyła attributes
32
See Hildebrand, 1973, ch. 2; 2006a, ch. 2.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 20 9/21/20 11:53 AM

Josef Seifert 21
this danger to Scheler’s theory of Wertfühlen, which Hildebrand has criticized

from the beginning, insisting on the cognitive nature of value cognition as
distinct from feeling and distinguishing value cognition from being touched
by values affectively (the being affected / Affiziertwerden). While Hildebrand
completely rejects the consequence Scheler draws from the “emotionaliza-
tion of consciousness,” as if a moral obligation (ought) addressed to our free
will did not really exist in morality, Hildebrand’s characterization of the voli-
tional response, being directed only at unrealized states of affairs realizable
through me, leads to Hildebrand’s emotionalizing consciousness in that love
and other important acts directed at persons could originally only be affective
responses.
I see another example of an error in Hildebrand’s explicit, though
extremely brief, rejection of the Anselmian ontological argument in virtue
of the thesis that a transition from a necessary essence to existence is never
possible, not even in God. I recall my lively discussions with him on the
remark he makes on this subject in his What Is Philosophy?33 He was extremely
open to a possible correction; he said that I might well be right and that he
had to think about this question more, which he never did extensively, as far
as I know.34
XII. Philosophical Contributions in

Hildebrand’s Religious Writings
Some of the best-known and most beautiful works of Hildebrand are partly
or wholly religious; others contain religious thought and theological reflec-
tions.35 Many philosophers have therefore disregarded Hildebrand the philos-
opher, instead focusing on Hildebrand the theologian. This constitutes a huge
narrow-mindedness, given that no one will deny the stature as philosophers of
33
Reinach likewise rejected the ontological argument, for example in his 1989.
Hildebrand had rejected the ontological argument in his 1991, ch. 4, 126.
The only realist phenomenologist (prior to me) who was clearly sympathetic
toward the ontological argument was Koyré 1923–84. Shortly after my 1985 paper,
the realist phenomenologist Rogelio Rovira, himself an important philosopher,
defended the ontological argument brilliantly in his 1991. See also Seifert 2000a. Max
Scheler 1986 had a certain openness toward the ontological argument even though
he too rejected it quite adamantly. Scheler 1966, 298. This is surprising because he
accepted it implicitly in a number of different works and contexts. See Seifert 1998b.
34
I dedicated several papers and one of my main books to the defense of this
argument. See Josef Seifert 1985; see also Seifert 2000a.
35
Hildebrand 1984, 1989, 1989a, 1989b.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 21 9/21/20 11:53 AM

thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, or Anselm of Canterbury simply because

most of their philosophy is found in their religious or theological works.36 In
contrast, Hildebrand has written many purely philosophical works.
Instead of discarding Hildebrand’s purely philosophical writings in
favor of his religious ones, let us read and study carefully the rich philosophical
content of his religious works. For example, his Trojan Horse in the City of God
contains a whole philosophy of culture, truth, and history. His Transformation
in Christ contains many sections of a philosophy of religious acts and atti-
tudes or virtues such as humility and trust in God but also a great amount
of purely ethical philosophical analyses of moral freedom, of contempla-
tion, of different senses of self-consciousness, and so on.
May the stature and largely unexplored greatness of Hildebrand as philos-
opher become better understood and explored and be rendered more and
more fruitful for all who can profit from Hildebrand’s aiming at truth and lead-
ing others to truth, to a diligere veritatem omnem et in omnibus, to love all truth and to
love it in everything.37
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Josef Seifert 23
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Josef Seifert 25
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ildebrand, Hypostasis, and the
H
Irreducibility of Personal Existence
DT Sheffler
Georgetown College
On one reading, twentieth-century Christian personalists such as Max Scheler,

Dietrich von Hildebrand, or Edith Stein merely translate into Christian terms
a set of modern concerns that arise apart from and are at odds with the
historical Christian tradition. According to this reading, modern philosophy
makes a fundamental break with previous thinking when it turns inward to
examine the interior, personal dimension of existence. A person who favors
this inward turn will see the Christian personalists as vainly attempting to
salvage traditional Christian categories while trying to keep up with the times.
For example, someone who favors twentieth-century existentialism or psy-
choanalysis may sympathize with a Christian personalist account of the inte-
riority and irreplaceable uniqueness of each person but despise the larger
religious framework of grace and salvation. Someone who favors traditional
metaphysics, by contrast, may see these personalists as falling prey to modern
errors when they should have kept the faith. Such a traditionalist may think,
for example, that an emphasis on the personal is an infiltration into Christian-
ity from secular political philosophies of individualism and that this has been
thinly covered over with traditional Christian language.
Both perspectives, however, ignore the historical roots of person-
alism much further back in the history of philosophy than Descartes and
Kant. Central to this history is the idea that each person uniquely realizes
an incommunicable dimension of his existence, irreducible to the category
of nature or essence. While we are in nature and while we are a nature, our
nature as nature remains purely general, describing what we are in common
with every other member of our species. As particular persons exercising our
freedom and spiritual existence, however, each of us concretizes that purely
general nature in a unique, personal way. For many centuries, Christians have
called the dimension that concretizes nature ὑπόστασις: each ὑπόστασις is a
distinct realization of a general nature. When this notion is first introduced
into Christian discourse during the second half of the fourth century, the
uniqueness of persons as opposed to the uniqueness of individual pebbles
or horses does not come fully into focus. Nevertheless, a thick conception of
© DT Sheffler, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)
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DT Sheffler 35
ὑπόστασις develops in order to speak precisely about Trinitarian and Chris-

tological theology, and this context gives it a distinctly personalist character,
especially when it is translated into Latin as persona. In order to speak of God
as three ὑποστάσεις or personae in one essence and to speak of Christ as one
ὑπόστασις or persona in two natures, the category of ὑπόστασις must be irre-
ducible to the category of nature. Along this irreducible dimension, persons
are irreplaceable someones in relationship with other someones rather than
merely somethings, specimens of a kind more or less interchangeable with any
other such specimen.
The rootedness of this philosophical concept in specifically Trinitarian
and Christological doctrine means that it should count as a properly Chris-
tian idea if anything does. Over the course of these controversies, the Fathers
of the Church appropriate the old Greek philosophical word and infused it
with an entirely new meaning.1 While this usage at first remains restricted to
the purely theological realm, it slowly forces open a new passage in philosoph-
ical anthropology previously blocked in pre-Christian Greek thinking. In many
ways, Christian philosophy does not make full use of this expansion until the
twentieth century—perhaps encouraged in part by the change in emphasis
that occurs in modern thought outside of Christian thinking—but we should
see this development as the legitimate outgrowth of insights achieved centu-
ries before.
We will begin with a passage from Transformation in Christ, characteristic
of the Christian personalist movement, regarding what Dietrich von Hilde-
brand calls someone’s “free personal center.” According to Hildebrand, a
person can stand back from the impulses that his nature delivers and either
sanction those impulses or reject them. This ability reveals that being a
person involves more than being a mere natural substance, enacting a life
characteristic of one’s kind. After examining this passage, we will turn to
the historical development of ὑπόστασις as a new category in the Trinitarian
and Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries. While the
ideas in Hildebrand certainly show a profound growth of seeds planted in
early theology, this growth maintains a profound continuity with its origin.
Finally, we will consider the ways that a certain kind of substance dualism in
contemporary Christian philosophy seeks to capture the same spirit but does
not go nearly far enough because it continues to focus on the person as a
kind of thing.
1
For further discussion of this history, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, “On the
Concept of Person,” Communio 13 (1986); and Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the
Notion of Person in Theology,” translated by Michael Waldstein, Communio 17, no. 3
(1990).
fus-qd1001-all.indd 35 9/21/20 11:53 AM

36 The Irreducibility of Personal Existence
Hildebrand’s Free Personal Center
In the context of Transformation in Christ, Hildebrand argues that Christian

transformation involves a process of coming fully awake rather than remain-
ing in the somnolence of “false consciousness.” Only by doing so can a
person achieve full moral agency because one must be truly conscious of
the objective world of values in order to make a free moral response: “[True
consciousness] is the awakening to full moral majority, the discovery of the
capacity of sanctioning. The behavior of unconscious persons is dictated by
their nature. They tacitly identify themselves with whatever response their
nature suggests to them. They have not yet discovered the possibility of
emancipating themselves, by virtue of their free personal center, from their
nature; they make no use as yet of this primordial capacity inherent in the
personal mode of being. Hence their responses to values, even when they
happen to be adequate, will always have something accidental about them.”2
While the metaphysical structure of personal existence is not the focal theme
of this passage, I want to draw attention to several rich details that suggest
the background metaphysical picture that Hildebrand is working with. These
elements can be found in the background throughout much of Hildebrand’s
work, but I want to focus closely on this one passage because here they are
brought together in one place with a remarkable level of clarity.
Throughout Hildebrand’s ethical writings, we often return to the theme
of response. The world outside our head is replete with real values, some
moral, others aesthetic or metaphysical (among many other forms of value).
The beauty of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the goodness inherent in a
father’s act of forgiveness toward his son, the bond between two friends,
or the health restored to an old woman after an illness are all really valuable
whether or not a particular person subjectively finds them satisfying. These
objective values appear for us in subjective experience and by so appearing
place a call upon our lives, inviting us toward an adequate mode of response.
The beauty of Beethoven’s Ninth may simply call us to admiration, while the
goodness of a father’s forgiveness may call us to forgive in a similar manner.
At the root of all these different modes of response, however, lies the same
inner “yes” to value. Before I can step out and truly forgive my son, I must
first see the value of forgiveness and say within myself, “Yes, this is good;
this is what I must do.” By doing so, I sanction my act of forgiveness, and it
becomes an act that I perform rather than something that merely happens
Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ (Manchester, NH: Sophia

2
Institute Press, 1990), 62.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 36 9/21/20 11:53 AM

DT Sheffler 37
to me.3 Hildebrand calls this a “primordial capacity inherent in the personal

mode of being” because this capacity forms part of the fundamental differ-
ence between persons and nonpersons. Cats and trees do not have the capac-
ity to stand back from the organic processes directing their existence. While
each cat may have its unique quirks and each tree a unique branching struc-
ture, this type of uniqueness remains wholly an expression of their unfolding
nature. As such, we can properly view each cat or tree as a specimen of a
more general nature, whereas viewing persons as specimens of humanity
ignores the act of sanctioning whereby each person may freely endorse the
unfolding of his humanity as his own.
For example, suppose that someone named Peter forgives a terrible
wrong done to him. It is natural that Peter feel compassion, and it belongs
to the human species to comprehend the moral value in forgiveness, but it
remains for Peter himself to sanction this particular act under these particu-
lar circumstances. When he does, we are right to see this act of forgiveness
as an expression of Peter rather than merely an expression of humanity. To
be sure, the capacity for sanctioning is also “natural” in its own way because
it is part of human nature that we have the capacity for sanctioning. Indeed,
even when we fully exercise “this primordial capacity inherent in the personal
mode of being,” we do not transcend or escape from our nature as though
this capacity could constitute us as a separable being who could float free
from our own humanity. Instead, our nature is simply that which constitutes
the kind of thing we are, and this is not something that we can escape. In
one sense, we are our nature: Peter is human, and there would be no Peter
if there were not this instance of humanity. Peter’s humanity, however, is no
more his than Paul’s except in the purely logical sense that one instance of
a type is distinct from another. Peter’s act of forgiveness, however, belongs
to him and not to Paul as his own personal act, and it is an expression of his
incommunicable personal identity. Human nature does not strictly determine
this particular action but rather determines the limits within which Peter
may act and the kinds of actions available to beings like him. By sanctioning
his act, forgiveness is something Peter does rather than something about him
that is a mere given of his nature. His acts begin to reveal Peter as an unre-
peatable someone, a concrete moral agent, committing himself in this way now,
even though his action belongs to a type characteristic of his species. Hence
this capacity for sanctioning opens up a gap between the natural impulse
3
For a further development of this contrast between what I do and what
happens to me and the correspondence between this and the person-nature contrast,
see John Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 1996), ch. 3, sec. 2.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 37 9/21/20 11:53 AM

toward action and the endorsed action itself, even when a person does go
along with his first natural impulse.
While we all have this capacity, Hildebrand makes clear that many uncon-
scious persons “tacitly identify themselves” with the responses dictated
by their nature. While we have the capacity to stand back from it, we do
have a nature, including the organic processes that direct our actions like
other animals, and we do not always exercise our higher capacity. As an
embodied animal, we feel the urge to eat or the urge to run from danger, even
though as conscious persons we are under no necessity to act upon these
urges. We can observe them and decide not to eat or not to run—even unto
death. Those who are morally sleepwalking, however, experience little gap
between natural impulse and action. They are carried along on the stream of
natural causality and experience their lives as something happening to them
rather than something they are doing. As they are carried along, the “I” that
is capable of standing back from the steam of impulses grows quieter and
quieter until it barely seems to exist at all.4 Hence the “I” that they take them-
selves to be becomes more and more mistakenly identified with the stream
of impulses itself. The glutton seems to become his craving; the coward
seems to become his cowardice. This identification must be “tacit” because
if someone were to articulate an identity between the self and the stream of
natural impulses, he would, by that very act of articulation, begin to reveal the
existence of a self that can stand back from the stream. The shallowness of a
life immersed in this tacit identification remains even when we consider those
cases where the impulses arising from nature drive us toward actions that we
would and ought to sanction from our free personal center. We are inclined,
perhaps, to sympathize with someone in pain or to seek companionship.
Even lower animals do such things, but they do them without the explicit
conscious agency of a moral person. When we do what we ought to do
merely because we are carried along by our impulses rather than because we
recognize that we ought to do it and assent to the moral value involved,
we too live at a level below what is proper to persons.
In Hildebrand, then, we see a number of themes characteristic of
the wider Christian personalist movement: a focus on the particularity of the
person, an emphasis on the radical freedom involved in personal existence,
For a troubling expression of this truth, consider the explanation of the grum-
4
bling ghost in chapter 9 of C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce: “It begins with a grumbling
mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticizing it. And yourself, in a dark
hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But
there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you
left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on
forever like a machine.”
fus-qd1001-all.indd 38 9/21/20 11:53 AM

DT Sheffler 39
an account of the special dignity of the moral person, and a rich analysis of
the interior dimension of our moral lives. At first glance, these may seem to
be particularly modern themes, but a deeper reading of the ancient and medi-
eval literature reveals that they are not. We find in Plotinus, for instance, a rich
appreciation for our interior lives and in the Stoics a detailed analysis of free-
dom. The insistence, however, on the unrepeatable identity of the particular
person and the irreducibility of this identity to the plane of nature cannot
be found in pre-Christian ancient sources. The unwary student of philoso-
phy whose history is spotty between Aristotle and Descartes may therefore
suspect that such an insistence arises from modern concerns such as politi-
cal individualism or the existentialist idea that existence precedes essence. In
the next section, I will show that this is not the case. Instead, the notion of
incommunicable personal identity emerges out of detailed Trinitarian reflec-
tion that takes place over the course of centuries.
The Emergence of Ὑπόστασις in Early Christian Thought
While Hildebrand approaches this question from the direction of phe-

nomenology, the conception of personal existence that he is working with
developed in the context of traditional metaphysics and theology. A rich
metaphysical framework distinguishing the incommunicable, unrepeatable
existence of the person from purely general nature emerges in the fourth
and fifth centuries as Christian thinkers grapple with disputes over the doc-
trines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, ultimately giving a new meaning to
the term ὑπόστασις. Christian thinkers arrived at this conclusion after a long
struggle to articulate how three basic data of the faith could all be true:
1. Jesus of Nazareth is God.

2. Jesus prayed to God and spoke of his relationship with God his
Father.
3. Nevertheless, there can be only one God.
Arians and adoptionists attempted to compromise the sense of “is God” in

(1), while modalists such as Sabellius attempted to downplay the real rela-
tional distinction required by (2). Meanwhile, early Christians inherited from
their Jewish roots a commitment to monotheism and from Greek philosophy
arguments demonstrating that ultimate reality must be one. A denial of (3),
therefore, remained off the table, although opponents of Christianity have
always made the charge of tritheism. The early Christian community needed
the conceptual resources to articulate the real ontological unity of God along
one dimension while also maintaining a real relational distinction between
fus-qd1001-all.indd 39 9/21/20 11:53 AM

the Father and the Son (and by extension the Holy Spirit) along another
dimension.
The solution to this quandary, primarily accomplished by the Cappa-
docians, comes when Christians begin to carefully distinguish οὐσία, usually
translated as “substance” or “essence” from ὑποστάασις, usually translated as
“person.” We will see, however, that translating ὑπόστασις straightforwardly
as “person” is misleading because the orthodox use of the term is established
by Basil in order to emphasize the reality of the relational distinction between
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit against the Sabellian use of πρόσωπα, which can
also be translated as “persons” but originally means “faces” or “roles in a
play.”5 This results in the standard formula that God is three ὑποστάσεις in
one οὐσία. In order to arrive at this formula, however, the Cappadocians need
to invest ὑπόστασις with a new meaning that it does not possess in earlier
Greek. Much of the difficulty in explaining Trinitarian theology to students
comes from their eagerness to translate ὑπόστασις using a familiar notion
that they already grasp such as “entity,” “individual,” “being,” “personality,”
or even “person” in the ordinary English sense of the word, where it often
means little more than “particular human being.” Unfortunately, all these
words either name a kind of thing (in which case we have three Gods) or
name a mere mode, property, or activity of things (in which case Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit are not really distinct). Instead, we must appreciate how
radical an expansion of existing metaphysical categories the Cappadocians
accomplished: ὑπόστασις is simply irreducible to οὐσία.
Ilaria Ramelli has argued persuasively that Origen was the first to begin
distinguishing οὐσία and ὑπόστασις.6 Origen usually uses ὑπόστασις in a vari-
ety of meanings that were standard at his time, such as “reality,” “existence,”
“substance,” or “foundation.”7 According to this typical philosophical mean-
ing in pre-Christian Greek, ὑπόστασις is used to emphasize that something
really exists as opposed to understanding it as a mere conceptual abstrac-
tion, appearance, or phantasm. In a number of important passages, however,
Origen begins to use ὑπόστασις in a technical sense contrasted with οὐσία.
For our purposes, two of the most important will suffice. In Contra Celsum
8.12, Origen argues against Celsus’s contention that the Christians should
not object to the worship of other gods since they themselves “pay excessive
5
See Lucian Turcescu, “Prosōpon and Hypostasis in Basil of Caesarea’s ‘Against
Eunomius’ and the Epistles,” Vigiliae Christianae 51, no. 4 (1997), 374–95, for further
analysis of Basil’s motivations and a large number of revealing passages.
6
Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, “Origen, Greek Philosophy, and the Birth of the Trini-
tarian Meaning of Hypostasis,” Harvard Theological Review 105, no. 3 (2012), 302–50.
7
See ibid., 303–4, for an examination of these meanings and an excellent selec-
tion of references.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 40 9/21/20 11:53 AM

DT Sheffler 41
reverence to one who has but lately appeared among men.”8 Origen, however,
maintains that Christians worship only one God and that Celsus has not
understood the words of Christ, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30
KJV). Nevertheless, Origen feels the need to consider those who “from these
words [are] afraid of our going over to the side of those who deny that the
Father and the Son are two persons [δύο εἶναι ὑποστάσεις].”9 He maintains,
however, that this is not the case. While Christians “worship one God, the
Father and the Son,” nevertheless, “these, while they are two, considered as
persons or substances [ὄντα δύο τῇ ὑποστάσει πράγματα], are one in unity of
thought, in harmony and in identity of will.” Origen further distinguishes the
Holy Spirit as ὑπόστασις in his Commentary on John 2.10.75, where he claims
that he is “persuaded that there are three hypostases, the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Spirit”10 These developments in Origen’s use of the word, however,
went largely unnoticed, and ὑπόστασις continued to be used by many Chris-
tian writers in a wider philosophical sense often synonymous with οὐσία. We
can see this synonymous sense at work in a particularly momentous state-
ment at Nicaea anathematizing those who claim that the Son is of a different
“ὑπόστασις or οὐσία” from the Father.
Over the next half century, however, the term ὑπόστασις comes to iden-
tify the real basis of relationship between Father and Son in such a way
that it does not compromise the unity of the divine οὐσία. For this to be
so, ὑπόστασις must pick out a dimension that is simply not reducible to the
familiar Greek metaphysical category of nature or substance, and it cannot
simply name the familiar Greek notion that there are numerically distinct
instances of a species—otherwise there would be three gods. We can see an
early stage of this new meaning in Basil’s Letter 236, in which he outlines
the difference between ὑπόστασις and οὐσία as “the same as that between the
general (τὸ κοινόν) and the particular (τὸ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον).”11 He illustrates this by
contrasting “the animal” and “the particular man.” This sounds much like the
distinction between universal and particular, but when applied to God, Basil’s
thought is a little more complex:
8
Translated by F. Crombie in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4.
9
Greek text from PG 11, col. 1533.
10
Translated by Ronald E. Heine. It should be noted that in this same context,
Origen uses the language of “created” and “uncreated” in a way that will later be
repudiated by the Church, ultimately being corrected to the language of “unbegot-
ten” for the Father, “begotten” for the Son, and “processed” for the Spirit.
11
Translated by Blomfield Jackson in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8. Greek
from editor Roy J. Deferrari (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926).
fus-qd1001-all.indd 41 9/21/20 11:53 AM

If we have no distinct perception of the separate characteristics,

namely fatherhood, sonship, and sanctification, but form our
conception of God from the general idea of existence, we can-
not possibly give a sound account of our faith. We must there-
fore confess the faith by adding the particular to the common.
The Godhead is common; the fatherhood particular [κοινὸν ἡ
θεότης, ἴδιον ἡ πατρότης]. We must therefore combine the two
and say, “I believe in God the Father.” The like course must be
pursued in the confession of the Son; we must combine the
particular with the common and say “I believe in God the Son,”
so in the case of the Holy Ghost we must make our utterance
conform to the appellation and say “in God the Holy Ghost.”
In the context of Letter 236, this explanation is little more than an aside,
occupying only one paragraph in a series of answers to diverse questions that
Basil had received from Amphilochius, but it is valuable because it gives us a
glimpse into the earliest stages of the new idea.12
Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, however, takes up this distinction
in very similar terms, expanding on it considerably in Letter 38.13 Greg-
ory begins by drawing a grammatical distinction between what we would
now call nouns and proper names, using man and Peter, Andrew, John, or James as
examples. The nouns, he says, “indicate the common nature [ἡ κοινή φύσις],”
while in the case of proper names, “the denotation is more limited [ἰδικωτέ-
ραν ἔχει τὴν ἔνδειξιν].” We arrive at this more limited notion, he says, through
a “circumscription” (περιγραφή) of the more general and indefinite common
nature. For example, in the case of Paul and Timothy, the word man does not
apply to Paul any more than it does to Timothy. The name Paul, however,
leads our minds to pick out a particular someone distinct from Timothy.
Gregory holds that we form a clear conception of Paul in particular through
the use of particular “differentiating properties” (τὰ ἰδιάζοντα). This leads
us away from the vague and generic conception of nature and instead to
the concrete conception of that “nature subsisting” (ὑφεστῶσα ἡ φύσις).
Because of the concrete nature of this particularization, Gregory says, “My
statement, then, is this. That which is spoken of in a special and peculiar
manner is indicated by the name of the hypostasis [τὸ ἰδίως λεγόμενον τῷ τῆς
12
See Turcescu, “Prosōpon and Hypostasis in Basil of Caesarea’s ‘Against
Eunomius’ and the Epistles,” for the dating of this letter.
13
This letter is traditionally attributed to Basil and so appears in the sequence of
his letters. Many scholars today, however, side with a minority of manuscripts attrib-
uting the letter to Gregory. For an overview of the issue, see Lucian Turcescu, Gregory
of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons (Oxford University Press, 2005), 47–50.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 42 9/21/20 11:53 AM

DT Sheffler 43
ὑποστάσεως δηλοῦσθαι ῥήματι].” He further explains this choice of term: “This

then is the hypostasis, or ‘under-standing;’ not the indefinite conception of
the essence or substance, which, because what is signified is general, finds
no ‘standing,’ but the conception which by means of the expressed peculiar-
ities gives standing and circumscription to the general and uncircumscribed.”
Gregory uses a very similar example with slightly different language in his
famous letter Ad Ablabium addressing the question of why it is not proper
to speak of three gods. Here again Gregory begins by fixing the meaning of
the terms ὑπόστασις and φύσις through the contrast between proper names
such as Luke and common nouns such as man. Nouns, he claims, identify
individuals “by the common name of their nature [ἐκ τοῦ κοινοῦ τῆς φύσεως
ὀνόματος].”14 By contrast, Luke is “the proper appellation [ἡ ἰδιαζοῦσα προση-
γορία]” of someone and refers to him according to “that name which belongs
to him as his own [ἡ ἰδία ἐπικειμένη αὐτῷ].” Hence the idea of the persons (ὁ
τῶν ὑποστάσεων λόγος) admits of that separation which is made by the pecu-
liar attributes (ἰδιότητα) considered in each severally.
A few cautions are in order at this point. First, the Cappadocians are care-
ful to warn against the misuse of analogies applied to God. For example, in
Letter 38 during an extended exposition of several analogies to describe the
distinction in unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Gregory warns, “Receive
what I say as at best a token and reflexion of the truth; not as the actual truth
itself.” We should not, therefore, directly transfer without qualification the
relation between human nature and Paul onto the relation between Divinity
and the Father, nor should we turn around and transfer our conception of
divine ὑπόστασις directly onto Paul.
Second, the Cappadocians clearly do not have personhood in view as the
primary object of analysis. This may be obscured both by the standard trans-
lation of ὑπόστασις as “person” and the frequent use of human persons
as analogies for explaining the distinction between common and particu-
lar. While the particular technical meaning that the Cappadocians give it is
new, the philosophical resonances of ὑπόστασις remain in the background,
and the Cappadocians chose it in order to emphasize the real particularity
of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in contrast to the modalist views of Sabel-
lius and his allies. The fact that the Cappadocians frequently draw upon the
examples of individual human persons—among many other analogies—can
partly be explained by the frequent occurrence of similar examples in the
philosophical literature of the time. Aristotle, for instance, uses the exam-
ple of an individual human to describe the distinction between primary and
secondary οὐσία in Categories 2a, but he does this right alongside the example
14
Translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson in Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers, vol. 5. All Greek text is taken from Migne, PG 45, col. 120.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 43 9/21/20 11:53 AM

of a particular horse, so he clearly does not have in mind a kind of particu-

larity special to the personal mode of existence. Porphyry, similarly, uses the
example of Socrates as a particular instance of humanity in his discussion
of individuation in Isagoge 7.20. While attempting to appeal to the “common
notions” of the time in Ad Graecos 29.16–20, Gregory of Nyssa likewise
uses the stock examples of individual man and individual horse to explicate
his meaning of ὑπόστασις. Summarizing the teaching of the previous Greek
Fathers, John of Damascus also uses the examples of individual man and
individual horse in his definition of ὑπόστασις in Dialectica 42.15 Through-
out, therefore, we should not let the examples of human persons lead us to
believe that any of these authors have in mind a special distinction between
persons and nonpersons. Instead, the focus is the way that a general nature
is made concrete. In the pre-Christian sources, the analysis remains rather
undeveloped, whereas the distinctions necessary for a thorough doctrine of
the Trinity force the Cappadocians to articulate a much richer vision.
Nevertheless, this richer vision does contribute historically toward the
development of a profound notion of personhood. It does this for three
reasons. First, by placing this richer vision of particularity in the context
of Trinitarian theology, generations upon generations of Christian thinkers
come to associate the notion of particularity with the intra-Trinitarian rela-
tions of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. While there is a general
philosophical problem of how to account for the distinction between one
pebble and another, it makes a difference to begin one’s thinking about
the subject with the intensely personal language of Trinitarian discourse,
where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are really distinct yet not three instances
of a species (unlike the pebbles). The consistent use of human persons as
analogies for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit likewise encourages the mind in
this direction, even if they were stock philosophical examples at the time.
Second, as Josef Seifert has persuasively argued, we should understand
particular subsistence along a spectrum of realization, with persons realizing
the self-presence of subsistence in a deeper way than that which is realized
at the subpersonal level.16 Seifert argues that the concrete particularity of a
being subsisting as self-present and really distinct from others is at the core
of the Aristotelian notion of substance. While this is realized in some way by
all distinct beings, self-conscious moral persons realize this ideal of substance
in its fullness. Hence we should understand the concept of person as the real-
ization of substance par excellence. While we may want to speak for some
15
I am grateful to conversations with Jonathan Hill, who has helped me clarify
this point and shared the reference to John of Damascus.
16
See especially his Essere e Persona (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuere, 1989),
ch. 9.
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DT Sheffler 45
purposes of each blade of grass existing as a unique, self-subsisting being,

the uniqueness of each nevertheless remains in the background, as it were,
submerged in the nature that each blade has in common with every other. In
the spiritual existence of the person, however, the unrepeatable particularity
of each comes to the fore. While we could give a name to each blade, we are
compelled to use names for each person.17
Third, ὑπόστασις comes to be translated in the western half of the
Roman Empire by the Latin term persona. This is significant because persona
does include within its primary meaning a distinction between person and
nonperson, and it would be unnatural in Latin to illustrate the distinction
between persona and natura by the example of a particular horse. Hence West-
ern thinkers begin to combine their thinking about real relational particular-
ity, irreducible to nature, with their thinking about what it means to exist in
a rational rather than subrational mode. Before the Cappadocian settlement
of fourth-century disputes, Tertullian had already introduced the term persona
into Trinitarian discourse. In Ad Praxean 25, he appeals to scripture in order
to justify the distinction in person and unity of nature: “These three (tres) are
one (unum), not one (unus), as it is said, ‘I and the Father are one (unum).’”18
This way of putting things only comes out well in languages where the differ-
ence between gendered and neuter words is more universal. The distinction
between unus and unum is the distinction between someone and something,
between “who” and “what.”
The distinction between “who” and “what” nicely brings together two
critical distinctions: First, that between real uniqueness and common nature;
second, that between personal and nonpersonal modes of existence. We see
this aspect of the earlier tradition in Latin Trinitarian thinking put succinctly
by the twelfth-century Richard of Saint Victor. In Book IV of his De Trinitate,
Richard expresses his dissatisfaction with simply transliterating ὑπόστασις as
a technical term into Latin discussions of Trinitarian theology because doing
so needlessly obscures the meaning. Instead, he seeks a definition of persona
that applies analogically down the ladder of being from Divine Persons,
through angelic persons, all the way to human persons. In this effort, he
observes the following: “The word ‘substance’ does not mean who so much as
what [non tam quis quam quid]. Conversely, the word ‘person’ does not indicate
what so much as who [non tam quid quam quis].” At the end of the same section,
he likewise observes the following: “The word ‘substance’ does not refer to
someone so much as something [non tam aliquis quam aliquid]. But conversely, the
word ‘person’ does not refer to something so much as someone [non tam aliquid
17
See the profound meditation on this theme by Alexander Montes in this
volume.
18
Translated by Holmes in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, 621.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 45 9/21/20 11:53 AM

quam aliquis]” (De Trinitate 4.7)19 In this way, Richard wants to give meaning
to the term persona by contrasting it with the term substantia, and he hopes
that his audience will understand this contrast by referring to the intuitive,
everyday distinction they already make between quis (who) and quid (what),
between aliquis (someone) and aliquid (something).
Like Gregory, Richard attempts to flesh this out by contrasting personal
names with common nouns and reflecting on the kinds of questions we ask
and the kinds of answers we receive:
When something is so distant from us as not to be distinguish-

able, we ask what it [might] be, and generally the answer we
receive is that it is an animal, a man, a horse, etc. However, if
[this something] has come closer so as to enable us to see that it
is a man, we do not ask “what is that?” any longer, but rather
“who is that?” The answer we receive is that he is Matthew, or
Bartholomew, or someone’s father or son. You see well that to
the question “what is it?” we answer with a generic or specific
word, with a definition or with something of that sort. On the
contrary, the answer to the question “who?” is a proper name or
something equivalent.20
Again we see that Trinitarian theological reflection prompts a Christian

thinker, immersed in the tradition, to draw a categorical distinction between
these two dimensions and extend this distinction outside the strictly theolog-
ical sphere. This opens a door that, admittedly, neither Richard himself nor
any of the earlier Church Fathers walk through: the full appropriation of
these personalist insights to a properly Christian anthropology.
Returning to the Greek side of the Christian tradition, we see the next
phase of development occur surrounding a number of specifically Chris-
tological rather than Trinitarian disputes. To the previous basic data we can
now add a fourth:
4. Jesus of Nazareth is a human being.
Providing the metaphysical explanation for this was somewhat easier because
the Fathers were able to redeploy the new meaning of ὑπόστασις. We call this
doctrine the “hypostatic union” because the idea is that Jesus joins in his single
ὑπόστασις two complete natures (φύσεις). In this dispute, the “what” dimension
that stands in contrast to the “who” dimension usually goes by this name of
19
Translation mine; Latin is taken from Migne, PL 196, col. 934–35.
20
Translated by Ruben Angelici.
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DT Sheffler 47
“nature” (φύσις rather than οὐσία). Already in the earlier Trinitarian controver-
sies, however, we have seen the Fathers frequently use φύσις interchangeably
with οὐσία to denote that which is common between persons or things in con-
trast to that incommunicable identity that is peculiarly one’s own.
The heresies in this phase principally come from the recurring impulse
to identify the ὑπόστασις of Christ with some missing part of his human
nature. As Joseph Ratzinger puts it, all these early heresies “attempt to locate
the concept of the person at some place in the psychic inventory.”21 For
example, if the ὑπόστασις is simply the mind of a person, then we should
conceive of Jesus as a partial human being—complete except that the finite
human mind has been scooped out to make room for the Divine Mind to
enter in. This impulse comes, again, from the inclination to think of ὑπόστα-
σις as a kind of thing, and this in turn derives from the Greek predilection
for a metaphysics preoccupied with thinghood. In controversy after contro-
versy, however, the Church consistently affirmed that the human nature of
Jesus was truly complete, fully possessing a finite soul, a finite mind, a finite
will. Otherwise, it is hard to see how he could be “in all points tempted like
as we are” (Hebrews 4:15 KJV). As Ratzinger says, “Nothing is missing; no
subtraction from humanity is permitted or given.”22 What follows is the irre-
sistible conclusion that ὑπόστασις is simply not a kind of thing. Who Jesus
is simply cannot be reduced to a soul, a mind, a will, or any other thing. It
names an altogether distinct dimension of his existence perpendicular, so to
speak, to the dimension of substance or nature.
We can summarize the results of the foregoing analysis by borrowing
the language of Karol Wojtyła in his incisive essay, “Subjectivity and the Irre-
ducible in the Human Being.” According to Wojtyła, the thinking of classical
metaphysics is thoroughly “cosmological” in character.23 The question that
drives Greek thinking from the pre-Socratics, through Socrates and Plato,
to Aristotle is the question τί ἐστι (what is it?). The answer to this question
will be a certain kind of nature or substance given in general terms such that
this kind of thing can be situated in an orderly, intelligible cosmos alongside
other kinds of thing. Nature (φύσις) and substance (οὐσία) are not quite the
same type of answer to this question, since the former places the emphasis on
the internal, unfolding character of a kind of thing, while the latter places the
emphasis on the real being of a kind of thing. They both have in common,
however, an emphasis on thinghood and kinds. We can ask this type of ques-
tion about the divine: “What is God?” And we receive the single divine οὐσία
21
“Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” 448.
22
Ibid.
23
“Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” in Person and Commu-
nity: Selected Essays, ed. Theresa Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 209–17.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 47 9/21/20 11:53 AM

as our answer (although this answer is not without a host of separate theolog-
ical quandaries that need not trouble us here). We can also ask the question
of Christ: “What kind of thing is Christ?” And we receive both the answer
“human” and the answer “God.” The new meaning of ὑπόστασις, however,
opens up to us an altogether different kind of question and answer. Without
abandoning the question “What is God?” we can also ask, “Who is God?”
And we receive three answers: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We can further
ask, “Who is Christ?” And we receive just one answer: Jesus.
For some centuries, we do not see the new meaning of ὑπόστασις widely
applied outside its strictly technical usage in the context of Trinitarian and
Christological doctrine. The jump from theology to a Christian anthropol-
ogy does not happen all at once but is rather a slow development that, in
some ways, is still taking place. Nowhere in the Fathers do we find a dedi-
cated, purely philosophical treatise on the hypostatic identity of individual
human beings. Nevertheless, several of the passages I have examined and
many more like them show that the Fathers are quite willing to apply these
theological concepts to ordinary human individuals (albeit with an analogical
and qualified sense) and even fix their meaning by reference to this ordinary
sphere. It is only a matter of time before Christian thinkers interested in
philosophical anthropology and interested in maintaining continuity with the
Christian tradition will look to theological passages such as these for inspira-
tion and guidance.
Nevertheless, the difficult work the Fathers accomplished in bringing us
the theological notion of ὑπόστασις already does this much for our anthro-
pology: it forces us to expand the familiar Greek metaphysical categories of
substance and nature and consider deeply the existence of a particular someone
in contrast to the generic something made concrete by the particular person.
Ὑπόστασις names the dimension in virtue of which one stands in the logical
space of I-Thou encounter, who one is, someone in relationship with other
someones. Οὐσία, by contrast, names the dimension in virtue of which one
is also situated in the logical space of I-It interaction as a thing in a cosmos
of other things, what one is, something in an expansive nexus with other some-
things. The expansion in thinking required here resembles what happens
in the mind of a student when he makes the leap from two-dimensional
geometry and begins to work with solids. Once we have accomplished this
expansion and we turn to examine the phenomenological data, we have the
intellectual resources to conceive of ourselves as more than a mere instance
of a type. Along one slice of our existence we are instances of types, but this
compressed perspective misses our full-bodied personal existence. Hence the
experience of standing back from the stream of impulses given to us by
our nature need not involve the identification of our true self with merely
a higher impulse or another faculty within our “psychic inventory,” for this
fus-qd1001-all.indd 48 9/21/20 11:53 AM

DT Sheffler 49
would restrict our search again to the plane of generic kinds. The revelation
of God in Jesus Christ as a single someone irreducible to any nature breaks
free our fixation on this plane in such a way that we may begin to conceive
of ourselves by analogy as ὑπόστασις in a manner similar though not identi-
cal to his. The full development of this line of thought does not come until
more modern Christian philosophy and theology, but it lies implicit from the
beginning in Patristic metaphysics.
Dualism Is Not Enough
I want to end with a brief application of the insights from the first two sec-
tions by developing in the context of contemporary philosophy of religion
the idea that who I am cannot be analyzed solely in terms of generic thing-
hood. In current Christian philosophy, we see a laudable effort to defend the
doctrine of the human soul against the desiccating forces of materialistic
reductionism. For many reasons in Christian theology, philosophy of mind,
and practical spirituality, Christians must maintain that human beings possess
a soul and that this soul cannot be reduced to the mechanical interactions of
molecules. All this is well and good, but once they have defended the doctrine
of the soul, many Christians slip into identifying the true self with the soul
that they have defended.24 The thought, of course, is natural enough, and any-
one who reads the Phaedo in school will have the idea somewhere in the back
of his mind. A more careful student of the Christian tradition, however, will
know that this identification of the self with the soul has been consistently
considered and rejected by Christian thinkers. Thomas Aquinas, for one, in his
Commentary on First Corinthians regarding the necessity of the bodily resurrec-
tion states plainly, anima mea non est ego. Certainly, the soul in the intermediate
state between death and resurrection remains a person, and perhaps the soul
has more to do with who we are than the body. Nevertheless, we must be
careful not to simply identify who we are with the soul. Such a careful student
of the Christian tradition may worry that personalists like Hildebrand fall into
precisely this trap when they urge an emancipation of our “free personal cen-
ter” (which might be read as the soul) from the impulses arising in our nature
(which might be read as impulses from the body).
Our meditation on the early Christian struggle for the meaning of
ὑπόστασις makes clear, however, both why the identification of self with soul
would be a mistake and why Hildebrand is not guilty of this mistake. The
24
As just two examples, both Richard Swinburne and J. P. Moreland are well-
known defenders of a nonreductionist metaphysics of soul who frequently slip into
this identification of self and soul.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 49 9/21/20 11:53 AM

soul just as much as the body belongs to the realm of substance and nature.
The soul is a kind of thing, and “soul” is an appropriate answer to the ques-
tion, “What is it?” As human beings, we are invested with a particular kind
of soul that comes endowed with a range of faculties and organic processes.
This all belongs to our nature. From this sphere of our existence come the
“responses” that “[unconscious people’s] nature suggests to them.” While
many of these responses may derive from bodily desires such as responses
to food or drink, many have a wholly psychological origin, such as responses
to insults or flattery. Remaining submerged in the latter does not bring such
people one wit closer to “emancipating themselves, by virtue of their free
personal center, from their nature” than remaining submerged in the former.
Once we realize this, we may try to restrict our search to the faculty
of free will within the soul rather than the whole soul. If we construe free
will, however, as an essential faculty of a particular kind of nature, then
free will by itself will fare no better than the soul as a whole. So long as “free
will” amounts to no more than a generic faculty by which rational animals
select among alternatives, “free will” must be understood as something that
all rational creatures possess in common and cannot sufficiently explain the
particularity of the person who does the sanctioning. Hildebrand speaks of
a “primordial capacity inherent in the personal mode of being,” and it may
be tempting to understand this as a reference to the true person—as though
the real person could exist as a capacity within the person. Just like the soul
and the will of Christ, however, capacities remain “anhypostatic”—that is,
standing in need of concretization in a determinate ὑπόστασις. Free will
must always be realized as the free will of a particular someone, and free
actions express the peculiar identity of this someone rather than the generic
capacity that we all have in common. That being said, it is important to note
that personal existence does require that one have a certain nature, for each
ὑπόστασις is always the concretization of a general nature and could not
exist without such a nature. Furthermore, the kind of personal existence
and free, rational consciousness that Hildebrand describes requires a defi-
nite kind of nature with definite faculties in place. The “personal mode of
existence” must possess a “free personal center” after all. Trees, for instance,
do not have the necessary faculties in their nature to achieve moral agency,
and therefore their general nature does not provide the necessary basis for
the personal sanctioning that Hildebrand describes. Free will, then, remains
an important necessary condition for concrete personal existence but should
not be simply identified with the true person.25
Hildebrand speaks of the “personal mode of being,” and I believe he
chooses his words quite carefully here. He does not identify the person with
25
I am grateful to the reviewer Errin Clark for pressing me on this point.
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DT Sheffler 51
some particular thing inside of us as though the person were just a mysteri-
ous kind of thing within the familiar human kind of thing. Instead, he iden-
tifies a particular modality of being, a distinct dimension of one concrete being
along which a person exists as a someone. This is what it means to be a person.
Being a who in addition to being a what; being a thou in addition to being an
it. Thinking in this way must remain foreign to those whose metaphysics is
shaped exclusively by pre-Christian Greek categories because such a meta-
physics will always seek to flatten hypostatic existence down to the plane of
nature. Hildebrand and other modern Christian personalists are only able to
have the profound insights that they have because they are operating within a
tradition of metaphysics initiated centuries before by the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ.
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Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics
and the Value of Modern Art
Mark K. Spencer
University of St.Thomas—Minnesota
Realist Christian philosophers and theologians have frequently derided

modern painting as antirealist, antithetical to the Western artistic tradition,
nihilistic, or otherwise of little or no aesthetic or philosophical value.1 By
“modern painting,” I mean the styles of the last century and a half of the
European tradition in painting, including impressionism, fauvism, cubism,
futurism, surrealism, and expressionism. Dietrich von Hildebrand is one
realist Christian philosopher who engages in these sorts of criticism.2 In the
context of this paper, by “realist philosopher” I mean any philosopher who
holds the following: First, such a philosopher holds that in our intentional
acts and experiences we primarily grasp realities, as opposed to words, prop-
ositions, concepts, or representations. Second, he or she holds that what
we grasp in our intentional acts and experiences are for the most part irre-
ducible to items distinct from those that he or she has directly grasped. (To
say that one thing is irreducible to another is to say that it is not the case
that the former is nothing but the latter.) Third, such a philosopher takes
his or her task to be perceiving and accounting for every irreducible aspect
of reality and especially those that are most fundamental—that is, most
explanatory—of other aspects of reality. Many Christian philosophers,
especially many scholastics and realist phenomenologists, including Hilde-
brand, fit this description.3 To say that modern art is “antirealist” is to say
A typical example of this criticism is found in Philip A. Rolnick, Person, Grace,

1
and God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 135, drawing on Luc Ferry, Homo
Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993).
2
While I focus on painting, Hildebrand’s principles can be applied mutatis
mutandis to the appreciation of other modern approaches to existing art forms (such
as post-tonal music, absurdist literature, and brutalist architecture) and to new art
forms (such as film, performance art, readymade art, and art installations), but my
focus here, aside from a few scattered remarks, is on his approach to modern painting.
3
I have elsewhere worked out this account of what it is to be a realist philoso-
pher in greater detail and have shown there why Hildebrand is to be regarded as such
© Mark K. Spencer, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)
fus-qd1001-all.indd 52 9/21/20 11:53 AM

Mark K. Spencer 53
that it directs our attention away from or obscures our awareness of genuine
features of reality.
Despite the fact that many realist Christian philosophers critique modern
art in this way, I contend that many trends in modern art should actually be
welcomed by the realist philosopher. Modern artworks have revealed genuine
aspects of reality that were previously unperceived or underappreciated, for
which the realist philosopher must give an account; because modern artists
have seen and depicted these aspects of reality, our realist metaphysics, our
account of the irreducible and fundamental features of reality, can be more
complete. For example, in this paper, I argue that modern painting reveals
new aesthetic values, new kinds of perceptual acts in us, and new sense-
perceivable properties that were previously unknown or underexplored by
realist philosophers.
In this paper, I contend that more than other realist Christian philoso-
phers and despite his own critical assessments of modern art, Hildebrand
provides principles that can show us these aspects of the philosophical value
of modern art. The structure of the paper is organized around six aesthetic
principles that I draw from Hildebrand’s aesthetics. I draw out these princi-
ples in part by considering Hildebrand’s views in conversation with those of
other modern Christian realist aestheticians and metaphysicians who provide
principles for appreciating and critiquing modern art, especially Jacques
Maritain. I show how Hildebrand’s principles can ground a philosophical
appreciation of modern art and why his own assessment of that art clashes
with his own best principles. It is not my intention to endorse all (or even
most) modern art; the aforementioned criticisms are, in many cases, just.
Rather, my claim is just that certain major trends in modern art are significant
for the realist philosopher, and Hildebrand provides principles that allow us
to see this well. My intention in this paper is merely to draw out these prin-
ciples from Hildebrand’s works, not apply them to a full range of modern
artworks; my goals here are philosophical, not art-critical.
a philosopher, especially in his metaphysics of beauty and other aesthetic values. See
my “The Many Powers of the Human Soul: Von Hildebrand’s Contribution to Scho-
lastic Philosophical Anthropology,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 4
(fall 2017): 719–35; “Sense Perception and the Flourishing of the Human Person in
von Hildebrand and the Aristotelian Traditions,” Tópicos, Revista de Filosofía 56 (2019):
95–118; “Beauty and Being in von Hildebrand and the Aristotelian Tradition,” Review
of Metaphysics 73, no. 2 (December 2019): 311–34.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 53 9/21/20 11:53 AM

54 Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics
I. Categories of Aesthetic Value
A first key Hildebrandian principle for thinking about modern art is that art-
works, and other aesthetic objects, bear many different sui generis aesthetic
values. In order to understand Hildebrand’s views on aesthetic value, we must
consider first what he means by “value.” It will then be useful to contrast his
view of specifically aesthetic values to that of Jacques Maritain.
Hildebrand’s account of value is rooted in his broader account of the
experience of being motivated to think, act, and feel in various ways. Many of
our intellectual, affective, and volitional acts are not merely caused in us—that
is, brought about in us without our needing to consciously grasp anything.
Rather, they are motivated—that is, they only occur upon our consciously
grasping that something is important to us in some way. Things can appear
important and motivating to us in three ways. First, things can appear subjec-
tively satisfying—that is, they motivate our acts by presenting the opportunity
to have our individual desires satisfied. Second, things can appear as objective
goods—that is, they motivate our acts by being the sorts of things that can
fulfill the needs and teleological orientations toward fulfillment we have in
virtue of our human species. Third, things can appear as values—that is, they
appear as important in themselves such that they are worthy of a response for their
own sake, regardless of whether so responding fulfills or satisfies anyone.
Contrasted to them are disvalues, negative importance calling for rejection.
Hildebrand argues that values are distinct kinds of properties or principles
of being over and above their essential properties or principles, whereby
things have importance in themselves. He holds this on the grounds that each
appears experientially as an irreducible given: to grasp a value or disvalue just is
to find oneself categorically called to respond in some way, just as to grasp an
essence just is to see how a being is to be defined. While the fact that a being
has a certain value can sometimes be explained by features of that being, it is
nevertheless the case that values appear as irreducible unities of axiological
content, and so cannot be said to be nothing but aspects of their bearer.4
This is contrary to Maritain’s view, for he understands values like beauty to
be identical to beings or to arrangements of accidents. Aesthetic values are
one kind of value: they are kinds of importance that belong to how things
appear, and they call for a response to that appearance, such as admiration
or reverence.
We can better understand Hildebrand’s account of aesthetic values by
contrasting it to that of Jacques Maritain. Maritain differs from Hildebrand
Hildebrand, Christian Ethics (New York: McKay, 1953), ch. 3; Hildebrand,

4
The Nature of Love, trans. John F. Crosby and John Henry Crosby (South Bend, IN:
St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), 79–82; Aesthetics, 1:13–17, 90–94.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 54 9/21/20 11:53 AM

Mark K. Spencer 55
both in the number of kinds of aesthetic values he distinguishes and in his

metaphysical account of what values are. In his aesthetics, Maritain distin-
guishes only transcendental beauty (pleasingness when known, which belongs to
every being insofar as it is a being) and aesthetic beauty (a pleasing, propor-
tioned arrangement of visible or audible accidents). On his view, all aesthetic
value—all ways in which things call for a response just in virtue of how they
appear—belongs directly to the essential or accidental being of the beautiful
object.5 By contrast, Hildebrand distinguishes many aesthetic values, all of
which add kinds of importance to a being over and above its essential and
accidental features. Hildebrand shows his realism in noting that the appearance
of a being, the importance of that appearance and of the being itself, and the
essential and accidental features of the being themselves are all given in distinct
acts and prompt and explain different responses. Hence it is reasonable to
hold that they are distinct, irreducible features of reality. Because he distin-
guishes value in this way, and because his metaphysics is so closely rooted in
a phenomenological account of all the ways that reality is given to us expe-
rientially, Hildebrand’s metaphysics is able to include many more kinds of
aesthetic value than Maritain’s. The most important such value is beauty, but
other aesthetic values include the poetic; the elegant; the comic; the graceful;
artistic importance, power, brilliance, and vitality; and so forth.
Each such value intrinsically calls for and merits its own kind of
response.6 This can be seen just by surveying several of the kinds of beauty
that Hildebrand distinguishes. One kind of beauty is metaphysical beauty, the
pleasing appearance of various kinds of beings and values; it calls for enjoy-
ment and delight in those beings or values insofar as they are grasped intel-
lectually.7 Another kind of beauty is the beauty of the audible and visible,
which calls for delight in things grasped through those senses.8 Yet a third
kind of beauty, the one that Hildebrand regards as most important, he calls
“the beauty of the second power.” This beauty calls for deep reverence. It
belongs to audible and visible things whose beauty seems to far outstrip in
importance its bearer. With the beauty of the visible and audible, we can see
5
Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. Joseph Evans, ch. 5, avail-
able at https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art.htm; Creative Intuition in Poetry and
Art (Princeton, NJ: Bollingen, 1953), ch. 5, no. 2–3, available at https://www
.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9 131.
6
See, for example, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics, vol. 1, trans. Brian
McNeil (Steubenville, OH: Hildebrand Project, 2016), ch. 11, 17–19, 80–82; vol. 2,
trans. John Crosby, John Henry Crosby, and Brian McNeil (Steubenville, OH: Hilde-
brand Project, 2018), ch. 35.
7
Aesthetics, 1:87–89.
8
Ibid., ch. 5.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 55 9/21/20 11:53 AM

how the importance-in-itself of the beauty is rooted in and explained by the

visible or audible accidents; with the beauty of the second power, a beauty
appears that seems to be vastly in excess of the ontological status of its bearer.
For example, the beauty of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or of the Grand
Canyon seems to be vastly in excess of any beauty that could be explained by
notes or rocks. This beauty seems to descend upon its bearer from above as
an intimation of eternal beauty, not merely a value borne by earthly things.9
In making these metaphysical claims, Hildebrand is calling our attention to
the fact that some aesthetic values are given experientially as “earthly” values,
belonging entirely to creaturely beings, whereas other aesthetic values are
given experientially as the beauty not of creatures in themselves but of God
as revealed in creatures. While both merit our attention and admiration, the
latter merits far more reverence than the former.
Hildebrand’s distinction among many sui generis kinds of aesthetic values,
including many kinds of beauty, allows a first understanding of modern
painting: it instantiates a wide range of aesthetic values, each of which must
be perceived in its own right and which call for their own kind of response.
Many aesthetic values, like elegance—a value that belongs to fine clothes or
graceful dances, like the waltz or the ballet, and is closely connected to values
like wit and esprit—are far less lofty values than beauty of any sort. Elegance
is close to the border between value and disvalue. While it is given as a value,
to which a response of appreciation and emulation is due, it is easy to give
elegance more respect than is due to it; in attending to it, there is a danger of
turning our attention away from higher things. This is not because it is itself
a disvalue but because it is easy to focus not on the importance-in-themselves
of lower values but on the subjective satisfaction we take in responding to
them. Elegance is a purely “earthly” value: unlike, for example, the beauty
of the second power described earlier, it gives no experiential intimation of
eternity or of anything beyond its bearer.10 While some modern paintings
bear the qualities that Hildebrand sees as aspects of beauty, many do not. If
one took beauty to be the only aesthetic value, one would likely see modern
paintings as bearers only of disvalue. But once one grasps that there are many
genuine aesthetic values distinct from beauty, which call for responses other
than those due to beauty, one is enabled to look for and respond to this wider
range of values and to see nonbeautiful paintings as possible bearers of these
other values. Grasping this often requires that one look at these paintings
in a way distinct from how connoisseurs, critics, and gallery directors often
look at them; the latter often ascribe high aesthetic values to these paintings,
9
Ibid., ch. 9–10.
10
Ibid., ch. 18; vol. 2, ch. 14.
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Mark K. Spencer 57
including forms of beauty, which cannot objectively be found there.11 But

opposing the common aesthetic judgments of the art world does not require
one to reject the claim that these paintings are bearers of aesthetic value at
all; it is just that they are bearers of other, lower aesthetic values than beauty.
Consider briefly a few examples—it is essential that you look at examples
of these works (say, on the internet) to grasp the values they bear. Many of
Modigliani’s nudes are not beautiful—that is, they do not elicit peace, plea-
sure, enjoyment, or elevation of the mind toward the eternal, which are the
hallmark responses to different kinds of beauty. But they are bearers of an
intense, earthy attractiveness, which calls for a response at least of fascination.
Many landscapes by Cézanne are not—contrary to some critics—beautiful in
the sense just specified, but they reveal the importance of juxtapositions and
formal arrangements of color, which calls for attention and admiration. The
many perspectives juxtaposed in Braque’s cubist paintings reveal the worth-
whileness of perceptually contemplating even the slightest fragments of
objects and of contemplating the way in which the tactile features of objects
can be visually depicted. In many of these cases, the value of the paint-
ing has no name like “beauty” or “elegance.” But modern painting shows
us the importance or worthwhileness of contemplating many perceivable
aspects of things. Impressionism showed the world the worthwhileness of
looking at and attending to the most mundane subject matters. For example,
Monet’s celebrated series of paintings of haystacks reveals the subtle differ-
ences in value borne by different shades of light on a haystack. Surrealism,
for example in Salvador Dalí’s paintings, showed the world the worthwhile-
ness of contemplating the most unusual plays of images in the subconscious
imagination.
Hildebrand gives us an axiological framework within which we can see
why it is worthwhile to look at these paintings: they show the importance of
facets of the world ignored by earlier painting styles. The kinds of importance
emphasized by modern paintings are lower than beauty (though some modern
paintings certainly are beautiful), being mere “earthly” values, but they are
genuine values nonetheless. For the purposes of the realist metaphysician, they
are values of great interest because some (like those encountered in surrealist
paintings) are of an entirely new sort beyond those often encountered in natu-
ral or artistic aesthetic objects, while others (like those encountered in impres-
sionist paintings) can be found in natural objects, but we rarely attend to them.
When Christian realist philosophers assess modern art, they often presuppose
(as Maritain and Hildebrand do) that the only or main values to be sought in
paintings are forms of beauty. Instead, the metaphysician will get far more out
of modern painting if he or she does not make this presupposition but instead
11
I am grateful to DT Sheffler for calling this point to my attention.
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is open to any sort of aesthetic value exactly as it gives itself to perception and
affectivity. Hildebrand does not present a metaphysics of values that limits
in advance the number or kinds of aesthetic value that may be encountered;
for this reason, taking on his metaphysics, unlike one that does limit these
things, can guide us to perceive the aesthetic values that can be encountered
in modern painting.
We have now seen how Hildebrand’s account of aesthetic value allows
us to be open to discovering new kinds of aesthetic value and how this can
help us appreciate the ways in which it is worthwhile to view modern paint-
ings. But consideration of this metaphysics of value leads to the question of
how we perceive such values and other features of paintings, and it is to this
question that I now turn.
II. Kinds of Perception
A second key Hildebrandian principle for understanding and appreciating

modern art from a philosophical point of view is that there are indefinitely
many kinds of perception. There are certainly more kinds of perception than
are enumerated by a more traditional aesthetician like Maritain.12 On the
latter’s view, each case of natural perception is physically mediated (and so
restricted to beings with sense organs). It is based in reception of materially
grounded forms by our sense organs. Sense perception begins with quali-
tative accidental forms in extramental substances, such as visible or audible
features of substances, manifesting themselves through physical media, like
light or sound waves. These media carry intentional forms—copies of forms
in substances—to powers in our sense organs, which are actualized by those
forms, resulting in a conscious grasp of the accidents that are their source.
On the basis of sense perception, we can grasp, by our interior senses, par-
ticular aspects of beings (such as that they are unified wholes, are dangerous
or beneficial, and so forth), and by our intellect, we can abstract and thereby
perceive their conceptualizable and propositionally expressible features.
For the following Hildebrandian account of perception, see ibid., vol. 1,

12
ch. 4. For a comparison to scholastic accounts of sense perception, see my “Sense

Perception and the Flourishing of the Human Person in von Hildebrand and the
Aristotelian Traditions,” Tópicos, Revista de Filosofía 56 (2019): 95–118, along with
the scholastic sources cited there—for example, Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, q. 78–79,
84–86, available at www.corpusthomisticum.org. On Maritain’s account of percep-
tion, see the first part of The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
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Mark K. Spencer 59
But Hildebrand makes further distinctions among kinds of sensation on

the basis of phenomenologically attending to the structure of experience.
For example, he describes sensations of physical aspects of beings that occur
through media impinging on our sense organs. But he distinguishes these
from an experience of sense perception in which we grasp colors, tones,
values like beauty, and disvalues like ugliness as intrinsically meaningful or
intelligible. Even though these acts of perception involve sensing, perceiving
these qualities and values is also a spiritual act—one that is intentional (that
is, object-directed) and occurs only when some meaning is grasped and can
be performed in a fully self-conscious way. It is not a purely causal act—one
that, like sensation, arises in us purely by the causality of extramental objects
without needing to be grasped meaningfully or self-consciously to occur.
This distinction between causal and spiritual acts allows the phenom-
enologist to distinguish different “layers” or unified aspects of the world.
Some experiences and aspects of the world given in those experiences are
of a unified kind and presuppose others. For example, many acts of scientific
analysis grasp the causal layer of the world, in which events occur without
anything needing to be grasped by anyone for them to occur. Aesthetic quali-
ties and values belong to a human or spiritual layer of the world: the properties
and values that we can group together in this layer only appear when mean-
ingfully grasped. Many of them appear as a “message” from God to spiritual
creatures and as how beings ought or are worthy to appear. Because it is a
spiritual act in the sense previously specified, perception of these qualities
and values cannot be entirely explained by physical or hylomorphic causality;
those modes of causality can occur without requiring the spiritual relations
involved in spiritual acts. But this sort of perception is also nonconceptual
and nonpropositional and so cannot be explained by abstraction. Rather, it
is a kind of act that we perform (and that we experience ourselves perform-
ing) that must be distinguished (because of its distinct properties) from
the external sensory, internal sensory, and intellectual modes of perception
distinguished by the scholastics.13 This mode of perception, which grasps
13
Furthermore, that the world appears this way has no intelligible neces-
sary connection to underlying physical or metaphysical principles and so cannot
be deduced from them; rather, the aesthetic appearance of physical things always
involves, experientially, a mystery that contributes to its value and to the irreducibil-
ity of the perception that grasps it to any physical act. See Aesthetics, 1:238. Maritain
implicitly recognizes this sort of perception in his idea of “intellectualized sense,”
a conjoining of intuitive intellection with sense perception, though he cannot fully
explain it because he does not grant the existence of actually intelligible properties,
like values, in material reality; rather, on his view, all properties present in material,
nonintellectual things are only potentially intelligible, requiring the activity of the intel-
lect to be rendered actually intelligible. See Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 162.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 59 9/21/20 11:53 AM

meaningful properties in material things, comes in many kinds, each of which

is irreducible to the others. Although they are all sense perceptual experi-
ences, we perceive meaningful colors, tones, aesthetic values, persons, spaces,
and so forth in entirely sui generis ways. Since each kind of perceivable object
is perceived in its own way, we have another reason to value modern art:
many styles of modern art give themselves to perception in sui generis ways.
This is a reason why they are off-putting to many people, but perceiving these
artworks is also an occasion for discovering new sorts of acts that we can
perform and new kinds of objects we can perceive.
Indeed, many modern painters seem to have explicitly intended that their
paintings be perceived in sui generis ways. The multiple perspectives found in
Picasso’s cubist still lifes and later portraits (for example, the famous portraits
of Dora Maar) require that we perceive them in a way distinct from how we
perceive traditional still lifes and portraits. If we are to genuinely contemplate
these paintings, we must recognize in ourselves the possibility not just of
sequentially taking up multiple perspectives on a single object but of simulta-
neously doing so. These paintings reveal a human ability to perceive in a way
that may be unfamiliar to many people but is still intrinsically meaningful.
The close conjoining between visual and tactile senses, and our body’s motile
powers, revealed in the swirling lines of Jackson Pollock’s “action paintings”
or in the cramped spaces of Francis Bacon’s triptych portraits again requires
us to experience our body’s perceptual and motile relation to the world in a
distinctive way—but a way through which the world appears to be intrinsi-
cally meaningful and worthwhile to perceive. In each of these cases, modern
painting is of great value to the metaphysician, especially to the metaphy-
sician of the human person, for the history of modern painting is a series
of case studies revealing new perceptual powers in the human person. But
we can only see this if we do not try to squeeze all kinds of perception into
a single model but acknowledge with Hildebrand that there are indefinitely
many sui generis kinds of meaningful perception available to human persons.
III. The Artist as Seer
Up until this point, I have focused on how modern painting is an occa-

sion for the metaphysician to discover features of perceivable objects and
of perceivers. But consideration of modern painting is also an occasion for
the metaphysician to focus on irreducible features of acts of making and
knowing in artists themselves. A third key Hildebrandian principle for under-
standing modern art is that the artist is not ideally one who expresses him-
self but (as Plato knew) a seer, one who has seen something objective “that
remains closed to the non-artist” and who has directed his intention to the
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Mark K. Spencer 61
“objective shaping of this inspiration, to the creation of an object that is a

bearer of beauty.”14 In order to judge the value of an artwork, we must try
to see that layer of reality and those values that the artist saw, use that mode
of perception that the artist used, and then consider how well that layer and
those values have been grounded in the created work and how well the work
corresponds to the intended mode of perception. In its account of the artist,
Hildebrand’s aesthetics can bring together the correct claims of other Chris-
tian aestheticians without their deficiencies.
Thomistic philosopher Étienne Gilson, for example, holds that art is
not a matter of knowing but of making; art is the human activity that puts
us in closest touch with the evolution and divine creative processes behind
nature. Art’s primary end is to make new realities, not just to imitate old ones
and not just to accidentally modify substances. The artist does this devel-
oping primitive forms.15 Hildebrand recognizes the centrality of making to
the artistic enterprise. He agrees with Gilson that the artist’s activity is not
merely a matter of knowing and that it is not a mere accidental modification
of substances. Throughout his corpus, Hildebrand insists on the genuine
reality of artworks as “moral substances” or “quasi-substances.”16 This is
because, as he describes it, the kinds of unity and being experientially given
in aesthetic objects of any sort—whether they be artifactual, like paintings,
or natural, like landscapes—are irreducible to the kinds of unity and being
found among substances and accidents. Yet his view of what the artist’s activ-
ity consists in encompasses more than Gilson’s. Gilson’s conception of art
restricts it just to the activity of making, which obscures from our attention
many things that artists essentially do as artists. Contrary to this restricted
view, Hildebrand insists that the artist is a seer, not just a maker.
Hildebrand also agrees with Maritain that art involves the intellectual
transmuting of natural, sense-perceivable forms by creative intuition, not
a mere reproduction of natural forms that the artist has seen.17 The artist
must not just reproduce natural appearances in a mechanically photographic
way but penetrate to the depth of the mystery of a form. Hildebrand sees
this in traditional paintings; for example, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus does
not just depict a model but “penetrates the depth, the greatness, and the
poetry that the mystery of the form of the female body contains.”18 Each
14
Aesthetics, 2:12, drawing on Ion.
15
Gilson, Painting and Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1957), ch. 9, available at
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=1 0883.
16
Hildebrand, Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft (Regensburg, Germany: Josef Habbel,
1975), 20, 99–105; Aesthetics, vol. 2, ch. 1.
17
On Maritain’s view of modern art, see Creative Intuition in Poetry and Art, ch. 6.
18
Aesthetics, 2:222.
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of these terms— depth, greatness, and poetry— refers to a sui generis

value: the artist must not just see a sensible appearance but must see and
express the values contained in the spiritually meaningful and perceivable
appearance. The artist does not so much imitate the given and produced
forms of nature, the natura naturata, as he enters into the engendering
processes of nature, the natura naturans, following them in his work upon
the artistic medium and so bringing forth deeper layers of what is actually
given is nature.19
Hildebrand most fully explicates this principle of artistry in the context
of a discussion of sculpture. For this reason, the principle’s application to
modern painting can best be seen if we consider the latter’s universally sculp-
tural qualities.20 Much of modern painting can be seen as being “carved” out
of or “assembled” from other items in a way not grasped at other periods of
art. For example, Picasso’s figures (especially in his “neoclassical” period)
are often noted to have a sculptural quality, an imposing realness that shows
the ability of painting to depict volumes and spaces.21 Something similar can
be seen in many other modern paintings—for example, in the way that nature
is modeled out of juxtaposed blocks of color in Cézanne or Bacon or out
of smears of paint in van Gogh. Many modern painters are paradigmati-
cally artists whose medium is the making process itself. We see this above all
in abstract expressionists like Pollock and de Kooning, who depict the way in
which bodily movements give rise to perceivable traces, and in pop artists like
Andy Warhol, who emphasize the materiality of processes of depiction
like silkscreening. The modern artist seeks to bring to light the inner work-
ings of nature—not nature in the scientific or natural philosophical sense but
in what could be called (following phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
the phenomenological sense: modern painting brings to light the structure
of the process of sensation or the layers involved in the manifestation of
19
Ibid., 196.
20
The “sculptural” quality of modern art is seen in other modern art forms
besides painting. For example, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky referred to his
filmmaking process as “sculpting in time,” carving up units of time and assembling
sequences of time so as to reveal time’s inherent rhythms. See Andrei Tarkovsky,
Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
Poet William Carlos Williams described Ezra Pound’s process of writing The Cantos
not as writing but as “making,” assembling materials from history and literature for
a vast construction. See the back-cover blurb on Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York:
New Directions, 1996).
21
See, for example, throughout Patrick O’Brien, Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography
(New York: Norton, 1976), especially 154.
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Mark K. Spencer 63
the perceivable.22 But it does not follow, as Gilson thought, that art is entirely
about making. Art, including modern painting (which Gilson thought above
all illustrated his claim that art is just about making) also involves knowing
(or perceiving), as Hildebrand recognized. Its value to the metaphysician is in
what it allows us to know and see for the first time, including what it allows
us to know and see about the process of making, the layers of sensation, and
the powers of seeing found in human persons.
IV. Representational Modern Art and

Layers of Corporeal Reality
The three principles that I have drawn from Hildebrand so far guide the phi-
losopher to see the realist discoveries in modern art—the values and layers of
reality that modern artists have seen—in a way that overcomes problematic
judgments by Maritain and Hildebrand about two trends in modern art.23 In
the first trend, on Maritain’s view, modern schools of art tied to representa-
tion (such as cubism and futurism) recast visible things to make them express
free, creative subjectivity (over which natural appearances would exercise tyr-
anny), but they thereby prefer to use technical processes rather than creative
intuition in their painting. Maritain sees the resulting paintings as gimmicky
rather than genuinely penetrating and transmuting natural forms. The juxta-
posed perspectives of cubism, for example, are a purely artificial device to
free represented forms from their natural appearances and allow those forms
to serve the artist’s free self-expression; they do not, in Maritain’s judgment,
involve any genuinely creative intuition of those forms.
Despite this criticism, Maritain does not entirely reject distortion in
art; while, for example, it disfigures the beauty of the human face, it can
remain true to more fundamental forms, as Pablo Picasso’s distorted figures
22
For the claim that the work of modern artists is accomplishing basically
the same task as the phenomenologists, see the preface to Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002). Others
in the phenomenological and postphenomenological traditions have seen all this
well and have elucidated these layers of the natura naturans with greater precision.
See, for example, Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1973); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986); and Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith
(London: Continuum, 2003).
23
On Maritain’s criticisms of modern art movements, see Creative Intuition in
Poetry and Art, ch. 6; on Hildebrand’s, see Aesthetics, 2:223.
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remain true to the freedom of the creative line and an inherent sense of holis-
tic beauty—that is, in the language of the principles I drew from Hildebrand
earlier, it should be perceived as the bearer of distinct, genuine aesthetic
values. Distortion of forms in painting can unite natural forms with the tran-
scending power of creative emotion so as to allow an intuitive manifestation
of reality as grasped by the artist, as in paintings by Georges Rouault and
Marc Chagall. Hildebrand is stricter in his judgments regarding these move-
ments: he holds that art must not depart from the “language” given by God
in natural forms—that is, in the way that beings meaningfully appear. On
these grounds, he “deplores” art forms that distort natural appearances, as
in how Picasso “succumb[s] to the monstrous error of ignoring the given
language for the representation of nature, and of giving a new content to
what we might call meaningless sentences.”24
But his principles can and should point Hildebrand, as a realist philos-
opher, to different judgments. I recognize, of course, that it might sound
arrogant or misguided to say that Hildebrand did not understand how best
to apply his own principles. But, really, it frequently happens that a philos-
opher does not draw all the implications of his own principles. With many
a great thinker, just as with anyone else, their own predilections, prejudices,
and background can slant the way in which they apply their principles. Given
his background as a son of the realist sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand and
given his deep lifelong love for beauty and tradition, Dietrich von Hilde-
brand’s aesthetic judgments are quite understandable. But it is perfectly cogent
to argue that his philosophical principles can be applied in other ways—and,
more importantly, that it is more explanatory of reality as a whole to apply
them in other ways.
Hildebrand has shown that there are kinds of perception, like value-
perception, that grasp qualities in reality other than those always expressed
in the “language” of sensible qualities. A painting that distorts the latter qual-
ities may thereby be a more faithful depiction of the former sort of qualities
than a painting that does not distort the latter. And, contrary to Maritain, the
devices used to bring new values and modes of perception to visible repre-
sentation need not be taken to be “gimmicks” but rather as necessary parts of
the making process involved in that depiction. The drip process of Jackson
Pollock’s action paintings, for example, is a necessary part of his depiction of
the wonder at human bodily action, which is worth wondering at for its own
sake; something similar can be observed about other, apparently gimmicky,
processes in the production of modern paintings. Hildebrand’s awareness
Aesthetics, 2:223. For the same reasons, but with an even stronger level of
24
rejection, Hildebrand opposes Dadaism and absurdism in literature, seeing them as

barely rising to the level of art.
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Mark K. Spencer 65
that the artist is “seer” should give him the sympathy he needs to enter into
these layers of reality that the modern painter has seen and seeks to depict.
Furthermore, a fourth Hildebrandian principle is that there are many
kinds of objective relations among beings and values—causal relations, signi-
fying relations, qualitative analogies like that between fire and love, expres-
sive relations like that between happiness and a smile or between joy and a
blue sky25—and there are also many layers of reality within physical beings,
like the human body. We can distinguish the scientifically analyzable aspects
of the body, the aesthetic essence or way that bodies typically appear, sensible
qualities, expressions of interior states, body-feelings or ways that the person
tends to feel and present himself in his body, and so forth.26 Each of these
relations and layers bears distinct values; each can be seen and depicted in
its own right. The series of movements in modern painting such as impres-
sionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism, and so forth
is a series of discoveries of these and other layers of bodily experience and
bringing them, with their values and disvalues, to presentation.
In response to his own criticism of such art, Hildebrand’s principles
point to the alternative view that many (though not all) distortive artworks
should be seen as presentations of irreducible layers of corporeal reality,
with their values and relations. (It should be kept in mind that I am only
discussing the aesthetic value of modern paintings. Some modern paintings
are of great aesthetic value for the reasons I give but are also bearers of
moral disvalue, either in themselves or because of the artists’ motivations
in rejecting natural forms or engaging in distortion. There is reason to crit-
icize such paintings, even if they are still of aesthetic value and of value
to the realist metaphysician.) Insofar as they present an irreducible layer of
corporeal reality, distortive artworks do abide by a genuine “given language”
of reality, just one that appeals to other modes of perception than the “given
language” of sensible qualities that appeals to normal sense perception.
Certain painters just focus on one layer with its values rather than another.
For example, the painter Francis Bacon focused purely on the presentation
of the body as “meat”27 and Georges Rouault on the thick, earthy material-
ity of the face. Indeed, artists have always focused on some particular layer
of reality—say, the sheer existence of things in still lifes or the glory of the
saints in icons—but in modern art, this focus has become more apparent and
thematic, and the layers considered are often those that are more hidden than
in traditional art. Many examples of distortion in modern art should be seen
not so much as obscuring the beauty of natural forms as an intensive entering
25
Ibid., vol. 1, ch. 7.
26
See, for example, ibid., vol. 1, 144–49.
27
Deleuze, Francis Bacon, ch. 4.
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into the processes of the natura naturans. In cubism, for example, this is an
entering into the process of perception as it moves around an object or takes
up multiple perspectives on it,28 or, in Picasso’s African period, it is borne out
of an awareness of the potentially enslaving aspects of natural forms and the
need to “exorcise” them (that is, remove their power to control us and direct
our thinking) to adequately see their reality.29
This penetration to deeper layers of reality can be better understood
phenomenologically by a reference to Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between
paintings that are “idols,” which present a radiant, self-contained appearance
in a way entirely dependent on the artist, and those that are “icons,” which
show the call of faces or other aspects of reality in a way not entirely depen-
dent on the artist and not entirely contained in the painting. The metaphy-
sician who seeks a complete account of reality can learn a lot from “idols”
in Marion’s sense, as Marion recognizes in the case of Mark Rothko’s lumi-
nous, abstract blocks of color. In modern painting, layers of corporeality
are detached from their integration of other layers and allowed to come to
visibility in their own right.30
V. The Making of Artworks
While artistry requires seeing various layers of reality, it also involves various
acts of making, as we saw both Gilson and Hildebrand held. A fifth key
Hildebrandian principle for considering modern art is that, in addition to
being a seer imitating the natura naturans, the artist always engages in trans-
position. This involves the act of creatively adapting what appears in nature
so that it serves new artistic values. It also involves the act of adapting what
in nature appears ugly, trivial, mediocre, or boring so that it can be incorpo-
rated into a successful and genuinely aesthetically valuable artwork, bestow-
ing upon them new artistic values.31 Hildebrand distinguishes emotions that
are “ecstatic,” experientially taking us out of ourselves in the sense that they
raise our minds to what is higher than us, from those that do this in that
28
In Dadaism and absurdism, it is an entering into and revealing of the deep
structure of the engendering of language from sound and an escape from stultifying
given forms of official, totalitarian, and bureaucratic speech into the play of sound
in language. Something similar can be said of post-tonal music.
29
O’Brien, Picasso, op. cit. Compare the idol-icon distinction made in the next
paragraph.
30
See Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), ch. 2.
31
See especially Aesthetics, vol. 2, ch. 32.
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Mark K. Spencer 67
they immerse us in what is lower than our spiritual lives, as in erotic or Dio-
nysian frenzy.32 One could see in this a potential criticism of many modern
paintings, for many of them (for example, the action paintings of Jackson
Pollock or the futurist swirls of color in Joseph Stella) seem to immerse us
in an entirely subspiritual layer of human experience. Again, however, Hil-
debrand’s own principle overcomes this objection. What is mere animalistic
frenzy or immersion in material processes in reality can be transposed by
the artist such that its depiction or expression bears and shows new values,
including values genuinely borne by that layer of bodily reality. Furthermore,
again, contrary to Maritain, this principle helps us see that great instances
of representational modern art should not be seen as merely gimmicky or
relying entirely on technical processes and not creative intuition. The modern
artist sees some previously undisclosed aesthetic value or layer of reality and
then employs a technical process—like the dividing of the canvas into small
areas involved in the production of Picasso’s cubist paintings or acts of cut-
ting and pasting involved in his collages—in the service of transposing what
he has seen, including its ugly or mediocre aspects, into a new artistic whole.
In a sixth key principle for our purposes here, Hildebrand introduces a
distinction, based in the language of the Nicene Creed, between an artifact
that is begotten (genitum) and an artifact that is made (factum).33 A genitum, like
a genuine artwork, is something inspired and creatively, organically produced
that arises out of the artist’s own spirit as a unified, original whole and is
entirely individuated, not merely an instance of a type. A factum, by contrast,
is a mere product of acts of making, of an inorganic, mechanistic process,
where the product is a mere copy of a type, as in most mass-produced arti-
facts. Hildebrand grants that what appears as a genitum from one perspective
appears as a factum from another: a machine appears as a factum in comparison
to a painting but as a genitum in comparison to the act of cutting a stone.34
32
Hildebrand, The Heart (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007), 32.
33
Aesthetics, 2: 8–9.
34
Still, Hildebrand sees photographs as instances of facta: they are the product
of manipulating a machine rather than arising organically out of the artist’s creative
spirit and movement. Other modern art forms—say, film, video games, or brutal-
ist or Bauhaus architecture—also seem to be more facta than genita. Although the
production of photographs and films involves technical processes, these allow for
new events of organic begetting. Through the setup of shots and the later edit-
ing and cutting of film, new aesthetic unities, sculpted from movement and time,
can come to be; the use of the machine is only one part of the begetting of these
artworks. New connections among moments of times and parts of space, which are
bearers of unique values, come to be in a film. This too is based in a seeing of an
aspect of the structure of reality, which does not appear in natural perception. Some-
thing similar, I think, can be said about pop art, such as the art of Andy Warhol. In
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Maritain, in effect, accuses cubist and related paintings of producing facta,

not genita. But taking into account Hildebrand’s principle of transposition,
we can instead see these paintings as discoveries of new ways that artworks
can be “begotten,” transposing the lower value of acts of “making” into the
higher value of a holistic, organically conceived artwork.35
VI. Abstract Art
Having seen how Hildebrand’s principles point us toward an appreciation of

the first, representational trend in modern art, I turn now to the second trend
in modern painting that Maritain distinguishes, nonrepresentative or abstract
art. On Maritain’s view, this trend seeks to portray an infinite amplitude of
beauty in expressing feeling and other acts of spirit rather than finite natural
forms. But such an approach runs contrary to the structure of our powers,
Maritain contends: our spiritual powers are rooted in sensation of natural
forms and must find their expression there.36 He thinks that this trend falls
into a sort of idealism, breaking the natural connection of the human spirit
with real, sensible things. While this break can free perception to imagine
new creative possibilities, it is ultimately a dead end in art. Hildebrand does
not argue as strongly against abstract art as Maritain does. Like Maritain, he
sees this art as trying to portray expressions, atmospheres, or impressions
“without taking into consideration the requirements that have their origin in
genuine instances of this art, processes typically used to make mass-produced facta,
like silkscreening, photography, and multimedia, are taken up into a higher act of
begetting, albeit a highly conceptual one.
35
Hildebrand uses this principle primarily in the context of literature: what
is evil, ugly, or trivial in real life can become part of the beauty of a literary work
by being transposed into the context of the whole work of art. But I contend that
this principle of transposition can be found, mutatis mutandis, in all artworks. Even
those art forms that have a place in the natural world, such as architecture, can be
seen as transposing disvalues into an aesthetic whole: movements in architecture
like brutalism, Bauhaus, and postmodernism, while their products are ugly when
considered as real objects or buildings for use, can be seen as also bearers of posi-
tive aesthetic value when they are considered as artworks transposing disvalues into
an aesthetic whole.
36
Furthermore, as Maritain’s Lublin Thomist follower Piotr Jaroszyński empha-
sizes, such an approach seeks a hidden or occult reality beyond that which appears to
us and so risks denigrating the natural forms that disclose to us the actual essences
of things and entirely breaking with reality. See Jaroszyński, Metaphysics and Art, trans.
Hugh McDonald (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 129–44.
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Mark K. Spencer 69
nature.”37 But while he does not fault such art for failing to adhere to natural
forms—because it does not claim to take its reference from those forms, as
distorting art does—he finds such art aesthetically inferior to art rooted in
real forms. Hence abstract art can only have the sort of beauty that belongs
to a “carpet.”
But I contend that Hildebrand’s principles, enumerated earlier, allow the
realist philosopher to see abstract painting as also disclosing new layers of
reality and aesthetic values. Some abstract artists, like Mark Rothko, have seen
a pure affect and its objective correspondence to certain colors—another
instance of an irreducible real relation as Hildebrand describes them. Others,
like Wassily Kandinsky (as Marion explains38), have seen the beautiful as a free
event, incapable of being fully captured in a static object and needing to be
able to show itself on its own basis, without any comprehension or need
for explanation—another instance of a layer of bodily reality described by
Hildebrand. Still others, like Jackson Pollock, have grasped the process of
fluid bodily motion as a key feature of the process of engendering forms,
part of the natura naturans. In each case, the artist has seen some nonrepresent-
able feature of physical or spiritual reality and then transposed it into an artis-
tic medium. The goal is not in every case the instantiation of beauty; hence
Hildebrand’s quip about abstract art having the beauty of carpets misses
the mark, since often the abstract artist aims to express some perceived, sui
generis aesthetic value other than (though also lower in the hierarchy of value
than39) beauty. Hildebrand’s principles (and not his stated conclusions) show
us how we should actually think about this art: as a paradigm case of artistic
transposition.
Once again, there is an opportunity here to see how Hildebrand’s prin-
ciples allow a synthesis of claims by other Christian aestheticians without
their deficiencies. We saw earlier how Marion sees many modern paintings
as worthwhile for the philosopher to consider but also sees them as “idols,”
not allowing the appearance of anything other than what is self-contained in
the painting. But Hildebrand’s principles allow us to see what Marion would
37
Aesthetics, 2:230.
38
Jean-Luc Marion, Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2015), 175–77. Just as such beauty has always been instantiated
in absolute music, so Kandinsky (and Rothko) saw that it could be instantiated in
visual forms, through the given language of color and shape.
39
Hildebrand can help us see how there can be genuine art without beauty
(against Jaroszyński) while still affirming that beautiful art has superior aesthetic
value to other art (with Jaroszyński). Hence his principles ground his correct judg-
ments about the immense value of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Western
art tradition but do not (I contend) really ground his judgments about modern and
other art forms. See note 36 above.
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regard purely as “idols” to have an “iconic” quality as well. Both Gilson and
Greek personalist philosopher Christos Yannaras40 contend that art “spiritu-
alizes” matter, drawing out of it inherently meaningful, rational properties,
which are by nature latent within it, and raising it into a glorified or trans-
figured state. On Yannaras’s view, while the realist Western art tradition
trapped us in immanent naturalistic, spatiotemporally bounded forms, more
“abstract” art can put us in touch with what is more real. Byzantine icons
and idealized Greek sculptures set matter free from spatiotemporal bounds,
revealing the reality and glory of material persons by not placing them in a
naturalistic setting. Modern abstract art attempts to reveal the inner truth of
the material world through primitive color and shape. Hildebrand’s principles
support all these claims but without Yannaras’s denigration of the Western
art tradition. Both traditional and modern paintings reveal, in an iconic fash-
ion (that is, in a way that allows the perception of calls—demands for a due
response—by modes of importance not wholly contained in the paintings
themselves), the aesthetic values found in the perceivable world.
Like all art, and perhaps to an even greater degree, abstract painting (and
modern painting in general) runs the risk of becoming merely an illustration
of philosophical ideas, not a genuine depiction and transposition of what
has been seen. But if we consider abstract painting though the lens of Hilde-
brand’s aesthetic principles, we need not, contrary to Maritain, see abstract
art as an idealist attempt to escape the natural correspondence of spirit and
sense.41 Rather, abstract art is another way of penetrating to deep processes
of nature and the structure of the human realm of perceivable properties and
to their given correspondence with sensible qualities and transposing what is
perceived there into new artistic values and unities. If it were the case that we
only had the kinds of perception distinguished by the scholastics, Maritain’s
criticism of abstract art would be correct. But Hildebrand has shown that
we perceive in many, sui generis ways; as we have seen, spirit and sense are
related not just causally or by spirit’s abstraction from and return to sense.
Spiritual properties can be related to the sensory realm causally, by represen-
tation, by expression, by qualitative analogy, and in many other ways. The
artist has recourse to all these modes of perception and relations. If the
sensible world bears meaningful properties (including manifestations of God
40
Étienne Gilson, Arts of the Beautiful (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2000),
33; Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press,
1984), 231–64.
41
And contrary to Jaroszyński, we need not see it as seeking a hidden or occult
reality behind that which appears, except in the sense that it elucidates or brings to
perception layers of sensible reality that were always there but never thematized in
their own right. See note 36 above.
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Mark K. Spencer 71
that exceed the capacity and explanatory power of matter, as in beauty of the
second power), it can also, by transposition, bear perceivable properties that
show the inner processes of nature and their values.
The six principles I have drawn from Hildebrand ground a radically
nonreductionistic approach to art, especially modern art, guiding us to
perceive an ever-expanding range of aesthetic values, modes of perception,
kinds of relations, and layers of bodily reality, which can be transposed into
new, organically begotten artistic values and wholes. The realist philosopher
must be open to perceiving all this so that his understanding of reality is as
complete and nonreductionistic as possible—and for this, the guidance of
modern art is indispensable.
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The Intersubjectivity of Loveand the
Structure of the Human Person
Dietrich von Hildebrand’s MiddleWay between Eudaemonism and Altruism
as Indicative of the Intersubjective Structure of the Human Person
Michael Grasinski
Ruah Woods
1. Introduction
In The Nature of Love, Dietrich von Hildebrand analyzes the essence of

love through a phenomenological lens. In doing so, Hildebrand provides a
“middle way” between an understanding of love as pure egotism or, on the
opposite end of the spectrum, radical altruism. I will argue that Hildebrand’s
phenomenological investigation on the nature of love and his middle way
points to the truth of the metaphysical structure of the human person whose
essence is intersubjective in nature and whose personal good is found always
in relation to others.
2. The Problem
Dietrich von Hildebrand, in The Nature of Love, seeks to understand the

essence of love and in doing so to separate authentic love from the various
manifold appearances of what merely seems to be love. Kenneth Schmitz
notes in the preface to The Nature of Love, “The several deformations of
authentic love, such as purely selfless love and its opposite, self-centered
love, are treated with understanding as forms that fail to realize ourselves as
persons.”1 Schmitz notes that this is where Hildebrand makes a unique con-
tribution to the history of the problem in philosophy of what love is. Any
deformation or misunderstanding of the nature of love necessarily leads to
the deformation of the person, who by nature possesses a particular inter-
subjective structure.
Kenneth L. Schmitz, preface to The Nature of Love, by Dietrich von Hildebrand

1
(South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), xi.

© Michael Grasinski, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)
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Michael Grasinski 73
This structure can be understood in its basic form as the self in relation to
transcendence. Hildebrand further elaborates the problem: “It often happens
that my capacities for transcendence are thought to be incompatible with
being my own self.”2 Thus it would seem that one is either locked in a certain
immanence necessarily sacrificing any possibility of transcending oneself or
transcending oneself to the complete loss of the person. This is a problem
for a person because as person, one is meant to transcend oneself through
intersubjective relationality. Hildebrand makes it clear that this sets up a false
dichotomy by failing to understand the dynamic intersubjective structure of
the person and that in reality selfhood and transcendence are complemen-
tary.3 It is necessary first to identify the polarities of extreme altruism and
egotism to further understand how Hildebrand’s solution keeps these appar-
ent polarities in tension, thus avoiding the aforementioned disfigurement.
a. Extreme Altruism
Hildebrand describes the tendency present in some deformed notions of

love as that which leads to the total negation of the person under the guise
of love; here, this will be called extreme altruism. It should also be mentioned
that Hildebrand is careful to separate the love of neighbor and it’s selfless-
ness from this consideration altogether as it resides on and is inspired by a
supernatural plane of existence.4 Speaking in the context of love of God as
well as spousal love, Hildebrand notes the following: “An amour desinteresse
in relation to God is in reality less love, for the absence of the intentio unio-
nis, as expressed in the words, ‘My Happiness is not important,’ would, just
as in the case of spousal love, amount to a standing apart with myself and
my subjectivity and failing really to give myself . . . it would even amount to
a throwing away of my own self, a dissolution of my own subjectivity.”5 One
can see here that it is the negation of the selfhood of the person that con-
stitutes the collapse of not only authentic love but the proper structure of
the human person. Elaborating on this structure in relation to extreme altru-
ism, Hildebrand notes that whoever thinks that in desiring an objective good
for oneself one is simply falling into egotism “fails to see the mysterious
2
Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s
Press, 2009), 200.
3
Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 200–201.
4
“The sublime character of this love derives rather from its inherently super-
natural foundation, from its bond with Christ and the love for Christ.” Hildebrand,
The Nature of Love, 138–39.
5
Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 141.
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74 The Intersubjectivity of Love
center to which everything in the life of a person is referred, the center that
is addressed by beneficial goods and that is inseparably bound up with his
dignity as person.”6 No happiness is possible apart from a subject who is the
object of the experience of happiness.
It might seem obvious to state that there must be a subject of experience,
but it must be emphasized because the negation of the person in extreme
altruism precisely does away with the subject. Happiness as Hildebrand sees
it is “superabundantly conferred on me by value-bearing goods . . . only if I
am affected by these values as values and then respond to them, two stances
in which the transcendence of human persons is actualized.”7 Notice Hilde-
brand’s emphasis on “me” and “I,” not because of a shallow egotism—that
is, excessive concern for one’s own perceived good to the neglect of all
else—but because any notion of transcendence requires a subject through
which transcendence is made possible by first being affected; it is in the
nature of transcendence as such to be drawn out of oneself through an exte-
rior value that Hildebrand describes as that which is precious in itself. One
can even point to the love of neighbor to show that even in this particular
theme of love where one’s happiness is not thematic, the subjectivity is not
swallowed up in extreme altruism.
In the love of neighbor, Hildebrand admits there is a change in theme in
contrast to a spouse, where one’s own happiness is at stake in the intentio unio-
nis. This, however, does not mean that one loses one’s subjectivity—rather,
quite the opposite: “What occurs is rather a change of theme, not a dying
to my subjectivity. We see this in those persons in whom love of neighbor
is fully developed, in the saints. Although love of neighbor is so central to
them, subjectivity takes on its fullest form in them.”8 Directly rejecting any
notion of extreme altruism, Hildebrand uses the example of Saint Francis
of Assisi and his yearning for eternal salvation to show that even in the most
seemingly austere and ascetic people, there exists the objective good toward
which one aspires in value-response.9
The disfigurement of the person in extreme altruism is far reaching.
Hildebrand uses contrasting fundamental religious attitudes to exemplify the
damage done to the person. He does this by contrasting first the person
who goes to prayer with needs and desires yet consigns everything to the
will of God. Here one sees that this first example shows a legitimate desire
for the objective good for oneself but is subordinated to the ultimate good,
even if that entails a deprivation of an apparent and legitimate temporal
6
7
8
9
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good. In the second example, Hildebrand paints the picture of someone

who claims to have no aspirations or wishes and thus addresses no petitions
to God—rather, the person “sees the abandonment of one’s subjectivity as
particularly perfect, as the summit of resignation to God and selflessness.”10
The problem with this second attitude is that it is an abandonment of the
person in their intersubjective structure that denies free will, denies affec-
tivity in a pure value-responding attitude, and denies the very possibility of
knowing and grasping values.11 These denials effectively wipe out the person
as person who is composed of intellect, will, and heart;12 Hildebrand argues
that man is thus instrumentalized and the once unbridgeable gap separating
man from impersonal beings is thus lost.13 As John F. Crosby says in The Self-
hood of the Human Person, “Only a fully intact person can act authentically, and
so only such a one can love authentically.”14 Love itself relies on the structure
of the human person, thus one can also discern that structure more intently
as is being done here through examining authentic love itself. Having defined
one polarity, that of extreme altruism, the opposite false understanding of
love found in eudaemonism or pure egotism now requires explanation.
b. Eudaemonism
Eudaemonism, or what has been described as mere egotism, consists not in

the negation of the person through some notion of extreme altruism but
rather in seeing everyone and everything as a means to one’s own happiness
or perfection with no regard to the intrinsic value or worth of the other.15
In describing eudaemonism, Hildebrand writes, “One of them goes in the
direction of obscuring [his] transcendence, holding that man is in principle
incapable of taking an interest in something having value in itself but that
he can only be moved by something beneficial for himself.”16 Much like the
position of extreme altruism, this mistake fails to understand what
10
11
12
The articulation of these three spheres of the human person represents
another key and unique contribution by Hildebrand in contrast to the traditionally
understood composition of man as intellect and will.
13
14
John F. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1996), 111.
15
In The Selfhood of the Human Person, Crosby defines eudaemonism as that by
which “we love another only for the sake of becoming happy ourselves, and cannot
transcend ourselves in the sense of loving another for his or her own sake,” 111.
16
fus-qd1001-all.indd 75 9/21/20 11:53 AM

distinguishes man from all impersonal creatures.17 Hildebrand claims, “It

belongs to an authentic and especially to a qualitatively perfected subjectiv-
ity to be able to cross over it.”18 This crossing over is essential to authentic
happiness, and in egotism one disfigures the proper dynamic such as in the
case where one does not respond to the intrinsic value but rather makes what
would normally be the indirect benefit of value-responding the main theme
and motivation.
Such cases can be seen in respect to the happiness of enthusiasm. Hilde-
brand notes that as soon as one makes enthusiasm itself the main theme as
opposed to the object and its value, the enthusiasm itself vanishes. Enthu-
siasm can be understood, without degrading its legitimacy, as likened to a
peripheral object of sight that vanishes the moment one tries to direct one’s
gaze at it. More specially, Hildebrand refers to enthusiasm in this context as
an epiphenomenon rather that the main theme itself.19
The problem with egotism is that it tends to make the epiphenome-
non itself the main theme of motivation. Even if one recognizes the object
of value and its worth, in egotism there exists the tendency not to respond
to that value as such but rather respond to it as a means to one’s own end.
In chapter 6 of The Nature of Love, Hildebrand points to the essence of
what could be considered the eudaemonistic attitude in a critique of Plato
in contrast to the more complete intentio unionis as he understands it, and
it is worth quoting in full: “The inner movement of love is not seen as
value-response, as something the source of which is value, as an act of self-
donation having a strongly transcendent character, but rather as something
that is indeed engendered by the beauty of the other but that in the final anal-
ysis turns to the beloved out of an immanent yearning for perfection. This
holds all the more for the intentio unionis, which in Plato completely over-
shadows the intentio Benevolentiae.”20 Just as in the deformation that takes
place in extreme altruism, a “love” that is based almost solely upon one’s
own perfection without regard to the other as being worthy of a response in
itself, which is found lacking in eudaemonistic tendencies, the intersubjective
structure of the person is deformed into a negative immanence. Even in
Hildebrand’s critique of Plato where one might see a yearning for a just self-
perfection, Hildebrand says that this devolved into pure egotism later in the
history of philosophy.21 I will now turn to how Hildebrand seeks to resolve
these extremes that have been thus described.
17
18
19
20
21
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3. Hildebrand’s Middle Way
a. Love asValue-Response
Absolutely fundamental to the proper understanding of love as Hildebrand

sees it is the fact that love is a value-response. Value-response is not isolated
to one particular kind of love—rather, as Hildebrand notes, “It is essential
for every kind of love that the beloved person stands before me as precious,
beautiful, loveable.”22 Value-response is essential to laying the foundation for
understanding the nature of love and as a result the fundamental intersub-
jective structure of the human person. As has been noted in the critique of
false extremes, the pillars of intersubjective love require a self and other,
an I-Thou relationship. This is an important distinction to make lest this
dynamic devolve into merely I-It (oneself over and against the other).23 For
Hildebrand, the notion of love as value-response is founded in the full the-
maticity of the person. Therefore, one does not simply respond to particular
isolated values that may be legitimately present. Rather, in love, the value one
is responding to is so intimately united with the person that the person as
such is being manifest through the manifold appearances of apprehended
value that are never taken in isolation but have their basis in the unique per-
sonhood of the other.24
One thus notes that there are several implications here that have their
basis in the intersubjective structure of the person: on a broad view, as has
been noted, one sees there exists the I-Thou, and within this sphere there
thus further exists person(s) who themselves possess value and have the
intersubjective capacity for apprehending value as well as responding to this
value. One sees here the fundamental elements of the person as such in the
sphere of intellectual knowing, volitional power, and affective actualization,
all of which play an essential role in value-response. Authentic love can be
discerned by whether the love in question is a manifestation of this inter-
subjective structure. To be sure, one can be said to “love” nonpersonal enti-
ties, but Hildebrand is careful to make the distinction between authentic love
found between persons and the enthusiasm for nonpersonal entities; as will
be further seen, Hildebrand delineates between authentic love and nonper-
sonal beings in his explication of intentio unionis, which finds a home within
the structure of value-response.
22
23
See Excurus on the subject-object difference and on the problem of objec-
tifying persons in chapter 6, “Intentio Unionis,” of Hildebrand, The Nature of Love,
145.
24
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b. Intentio Unionis
We must now proceed to Hildebrand’s analysis of intentio unionis. Hildebrand

defines the intentio unionis as desire for union with the beloved person.25 Seek-
ing to avoid all misunderstandings of intentio unionis, Hildebrand further
defines intentio unionis as “an organic component of love as value-response
and which is so far from imparting a selfish character to love that it is much
rather an element that in a certain respect strengthens the value-response
and represents more rather than less commitment.”26 One might ask, How
can this be so; or rather, why should it be so that intentio unionis strengthens
value-response?
The key is found in the fact that in intentio unionis, properly understood,
there is a reciprocal structure present that increases the demands of the other
or rather is a product of the union brought about. Hildebrand states, “Inten-
tio unionis, can only come into being through a requital of love; indeed,
mutual love is the only possible way for achieving the full union of two
persons.”27 It should also be stated for the sake of understanding the proper
dynamic being proposed here that Hildebrand holds together the tension
of objective good for the other and the desire for union by giving a certain
priority to the good of the other without negating the desire for union that is
essential to the unsurpassable happiness of love: “The fact that the intentio
benevolentiae has a priority over the intentio unionis in no way implies that
the intentio unionis in not an element of self-donation all its own that can
be replaced by nothing else.”28 The desired union can be understood with
regard to the inherent capacity for love or a certain yearning.
In the intentio unionis, there is a fulfillment of the primordial yearning for
love, and this is important for the purposes of this paper because the yearn-
ing, while different itself from love, represents a basic element in the over-
all structure of the intersubjectivity of love.29 Hildebrand elaborates on the
yearning for love in two important movements, the first of which points to
an essential capacity in the person. Speaking of this capacity, Hildebrand
writes, “It cannot be denied that people can feel themselves to be capable
of loving before they have in fact ever loved.”30 This more primordial yearn-
ing can be understood as a key aspect of the intersubjective capacity of the
person because it propels one, as it were, toward a seeking out. This is not
25
26
27
28
29
30
fus-qd1001-all.indd 78 9/21/20 11:53 AM

the aforementioned egotism; rather, it is simply a verified fundamental aspect

of being human. With regard to the second movement of yearning, Hilde-
brand makes a clear distinction between a fundamental capacity as in the first
instance and a yearning brought about and awakened by an encounter with
the value of the other that then seeks union, and it is precisely this that gives
rise to the intentio unionis.
Speaking of the awakened yearning, Hildebrand makes the distinction
that now “[the one yearning for love] is rather entirely directed towards the
beloved person and his love is in response to the beauty of the beloved; it
is a commitment to that person. An entirely new yearning for union with
the beloved arises, what we will call the intentio unionis, which is essen-
tially different from the previous yearning for love.”31 The intentio unionis thus
conceived presents a picture of a more robust sense of love, where one is
neither implicated in shallow egotism32 nor guilty of the total negation of
selfhood through an extreme altruism; rather, there first exists a fundamental
capacity that thus meets its beloved, but rather than being simply an appe-
titive fulfillment of the primordial yearning, a new desire for union is awak-
ened in response to the beloved before us who is apprehended as intrinsically
precious. From this flows a desire for union that also represents an objective
good for the one who was made for love in the first place. Implicit and oper-
ative throughout this paper has been the key to the intersubjective structure
of love found in Hildebrand’s understanding of the notion of Eigenleben.
c. Eigenleben as the Key to the Intersubjective Structure of the Person
Throughout this paper, it has been shown that the deformities of love, in
an indirect way, point to the proper intersubjective structure of the human
person. It has also been shown that Hildebrand’s understanding of value-
response and intentio unionis provides the basic framework, in a positive sense,
for understanding this intersubjective structure. It will now be argued that the
key to the proper intersubjective structure of love, and thus the key to under-
standing the intersubjective structure of the person, is found in Hildebrand’s
understanding of Eigenleben.
31
32
Hildebrand is explicit in his rebuke of thinking love is merely appetitus because
of an existent yearning: “To take love as an appetitus simply because there in human
nature a yearning for love is just as mistaken as taking this yearning for religious faith
found in certain people . . . as proof for the fact that belief in God is the fulfillment
of an appetitus.” Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 32.
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As John F. Crosby notes, translating Eigenleben into English is a difficult

task, but the closest translation would be “subjectivity” in the positive sense.33
I argue here that Eigenleben and the difficulty to translate it lies precisely in its
power to explain the intersubjective structure of the human person, which
itself holds together what Hildebrand describes as interpenetrating polari-
ties.34 As I mentioned at the outset of this paper, the key to understanding
the fundamental intersubjective structure of the human person lies in under-
standing that the person comprises both a personal selfhood that is always
essentially operative and never extinguished and the capacity to transcend in
value-response.
We apparently find here a seeming coincidence of opposites: a nature
that is both in itself yet must necessarily transcend itself in order to find the
flourishing of the selfhood. Eigenleben, or subjectivity, defined by Hildebrand,
has to do with those things that concern the person in a special way.35 The
deepest part of this subjectivity is for Hildebrand “the dialogue between man
and God.”36 One can see that even in its most primordial sense, subjectivity
is intersubjective in nature as it is always in dialogue with God. Hildebrand
makes another key point for understanding this mysterious Eigenleben: “As we
use the term subjectivity it also refers to all that grows out of the natural or
instinctive solidarity that we have with ourselves and in this way it is ordered
to the sphere of happiness.”37 Hildebrand’s use of happiness provides another
key to Eigenleben.
Although Eigenleben is defined as subjectivity and pertains to the things
that involve oneself in a special way, it cannot be confused with egotism;
rather, it is the center from which the person operates qua person, and as we
have seen, a person is one who must transcend himself in order to flourish.
Hildebrand’s use of happiness with regard to Eigenleben leads one to under-
stand what has already been stated to this point about happiness: it is always
found in the transcendent act of value-response and, in the supreme case, an
abundant happiness found in super-value-response proper to love between
persons. Eigenleben is thus the underlying capacity that presupposes the act of
transcending oneself.
Having now tied together the various threads of deformed notions of
love and Hildebrand’s articulation of the nature of love especially found in
value-response, intentio unionis, and Eigenleben, a picture of the intersubjective
Footnote 1 in chapter 9, “Eigenleben and Transcendence,” in Hildebrand, The

33
Nature of Love, 200.

34
35
36
37
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structure of the human person has been brought to the forefront. Dietrich
von Hildebrand did not formulate his understanding of the nature of love in
a vacuum; rather, he articulated the phenomenon of love in all its intricacies
by having a cogent understanding of the human person as an intersubjective
being. The nature of love and the intersubjective structure of the human
person is a two-way street where one can come to understand the fundamen-
tal structure of the person by examining love, which in turn allows one to
identify authentic love apart from its counterparts. While in no way claiming
to be exhaustive, this paper has sought to sketch the most basic lines and
their implication for the intersubjectivity of love and the human person.
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Toward the Name of the Other
A Hildebrandian Approach to Levinasian Alterity
Alexander Montes
Boston College
In recent decades, Western philosophy, including personalism, has had to

face the question of how to respect the otherness of the personal Other,
a challenge issued most famously by Emmanuel Levinas. In his Totality and
Infinity, Levinas’s conclusions about alterity are stark. The Other is beyond all
conceptualization and precedes my activity as a subject. It is the Other who
founds my own independent subjectivity as an “I.”1 These are indeed radical
conclusions, but they raise the question, Does the very term Other itself fully
capture the alterity Levinas wishes to do justice to? The term Other (autrui) has
a certain unavoidable generality and abstractness to it.2 Any person who is not
myself, the world’s population minus one, can be referred to by this term. Yet
the Other is always richly distinguished in each case, for each Other is unique.
I will argue that the personalist philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand reveals
that the alterity of the Other rests on the more fundamental uniqueness of the
content of our personhood. This content, which is a value, is disclosed in love,
and it is indicated in the personal name.3 It is the name that, better than the
term Other, captures the alterity of the personal Other.
To argue this, I will first present Levinas’s conclusions about alterity in
the first three sections of Totality and Infinity before proceeding to outline how
the personhood of the Other is revealed in love for Hildebrand. Then, I will
respond to objections a Levinasian might raise to my thesis. Finally, I will set
up a contrast between the term Other and the personal name. This contrast
1
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA:
Duquesne University Press, 1969), 42–47.
2
French has two words that in English can be translated as “other”: autre, which
can refer to anything that is other than me, be it a rock, animal, or person, and autrui,
which refers only to a personal Other. Following Lingis’s translation of Totality and
Infinity, I am using “Other” with a capital “O” to refer to the personal Other of autrui
and “other” with a lowercase “o” for autre. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 24ff.,
translator’s footnote.
3
Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, trans. John F. Crosby and John
Henry Crosby (Notre Dame, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), 49.
© Alexander Montes, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)
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Alexander Montes 83
will reveal the name to be a sign of the fundamentality of personhood for a

philosophy of alterity.
Section 1: The Alterity of the “Other”
Levinas’s philosophy of the Other requires careful exploration, as his philos-

ophy both invents and gives new meaning to many technical terms. Levinas
sees this as necessary to do justice to alterity because, for him, alterity is
radical precisely in the sense that my relationship to the Other precedes and
founds any activity of myself as a subject. Moreover, the majority of Western
philosophy has failed to see this crucial feature of our own subjectivity.4
For Levinas, Western philosophy has been engaged in a long betrayal of its
own root: metaphysical Desire. Metaphysical Desire is the Desire for the
Infinite, a Desire for something absolutely Other. This Desire is therefore
absolutely transcendent.5 It is a Desire that, as it seeks the Other as Other,
is without return to the self or what Levinas calls “the same.”6 For Levinas,
“the same” denotes that which is comprehended or possessed by the subject
in which “alterity is thereby reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or
possessor.”7
The relations of need and intentionality are instances of a return to
“the same.” For Levinas, intentionality implies that I grasp and comprehend
the Other as the intentional object of my cognition. Intentionality involves
conceptualization: “Conceptualization is the first generalization and the
condition for objectivity.”8 Citing Husserl, Levinas critiques intentionality
because it involves a moment of passive Sinngebung (sense-giving) in which the
object, which is other than me, is made sense of and comprehended.9 Such
comprehension, literally a cognitive grasping of the object by the cognizing
subject, is always a reduction to the same. I see a poor Other and make
sense of him as a beggar. Implicitly, I comprehend this Other. I can recog-
nize him under a genus and concept “beggar.” In this intentional relation,
Levinas says, “thought remains an adequation with the object.”10 The Other
becomes “the same” as my thought of him. But I have lost precisely his exte-
riority from me and his Otherness. Similarly, in the relating via need, there
4
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 47.
5
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 33–35.
6
7
8
9
10
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84 Toward the Name of the Other
is a loss of otherness. In the relation of need, I seek something I lack that,

once I have obtained that thing, will be absorbed into relation with me.11 For
instance, in nourishment, what is initially other than myself is appropriated
by me in need, and this other becomes my energy and my strength.12 Both the
relation of intentionality and of need therefore cannot be Desire, for they are
a return to “the same,” where alterity is lost. In this sense, the experience of
the Other that Desire refers to is “infinite”; this Other is always more than,
other than, my idea of him. The Desire for the Other can never be satiated:
“The Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it.”13
Thus any philosophy characterized by an attempt to place the Other
into a theoretical system or “totality” does “violence” to the Other accord-
ing to Levinas.14 In a totality, the Other is placed beside other existents and
comprehended by means of a third term.15 Understood in reference to this
third term, exteriority is lost. It is rather the very relationship to the Other
that must come first for Levinas. The point of departure for this investi-
gation is the recognition that both the “I” and the Other are separate and
independent.16
So how should one understand the independence of the I? For Levinas,
it will not suffice for the individuality of the “I” to be a merely formal indi-
viduality in the sense of “being found in one sample only.”17 Material things
can have this formal individuality. It is the way the Mona Lisa or the Eiffel
Tower is individual. However, the “I” is so radically unique it exists “without
having a genus, without being the individuation of a concept.”18 Being the
mere individuation of a genus or concept would be a suppression of the
full uniqueness and individuality of the “I.” It would suggest the person is
in principle generalizable, just as Leonardo could have painted two Mona
Lisas. The person would fail to be individual in the way that the “I” actually
is individual. Instead, Levinas understands the “I” as unique in possessing its
own inner “personal life.”19 The life of the “I” consists in its “sojourn” in the
11
12
13
14
15
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 42–47. Levinas’s target here is largely Heidegger
who, according to Levinas’s reading, affirms “the priority of Being over existents,”
as it is Being which allows existents to become intelligible and comprehended. For
Levinas, this inverts the correct order; it should be the relation to someone, a partic-
ular concrete Other, that must come before universal knowing.
16
17
18
19
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Alexander Montes 85
world where the ego identifies itself and appropriates the otherness of the
beings it encounters in lack and need and converts them into its own strength
and energy.20 I enjoy the very otherness of this food, its taste and substance
that I lacked, but in this process the otherness of the food is abolished as it
becomes my own energy. The “I” is individuated in dynamic processes of
self-identification that constitute its very “personal life.” This interior life
of the “I” consists in going out to things that are other than “I” in the world
and appropriating them to serve the needs of the “I,” leading to affective
enjoyment.21 What is other than me becomes “my energy, my strength.”22 The
“I” is also individuated and identified in its thought. I am surprised that I am
dogmatic on a particular philosophical matter, yet in this very surprise where
I am foreign to myself, I recognize it as my surprise and thus merge back with
myself.23 In both of these ways, the “I” is individuated in its active life. Its
thought and enjoyment is its very subjectivity and individuation. Here Levi-
nas ascribes what I term a “thick” subjectivity to the personal “I.” It is one
that is more than what one could call a “thin” formal notion of subjectivity,
but instead this subjectivity is the very life and enjoyment of the personal “I.”
In a thin notion of subjectivity, the “I” is considered formally and without
content—for example, the pure ego of Husserl’s Ideas I who intends objects
in the world.24 By contrast, Levinas’s thick notion of subjectivity involves an
“I” that is constituted by its affective enjoyment. The enjoyment is the very
life and content of the “I.” As we shall see later on, Hildebrand analogously
understands the person as having a rich, thick subjectivity constituted in part
by enjoyment. It is precisely a being that is already independent and happy
that can seek truth about the Other, for Desire transcends the happiness of
enjoyment.25
If the “I” is characterized by interiority, the Other is characterized by
an exteriority so radical that we can never comprehend it. For Levinas, “the
concept Other has, to be sure, no new content with respect to the concept
20
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 37, 111.
21
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 37, 119.
22
23
24
Edmund Husserl, Ideas I, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett,
2014), §80, 161: “[The pure ego] has no explicable content whatsoever, it is in and
for itself indescribable: pure ego and nothing further.” It should be noted that, under
Scheler’s influence, Husserl came to add personal content and “habitualities” to the
ego in his later published and unpublished works, moving from a thin to a thicker
notion of subjectivity. See Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 168–79; and Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen, The Husserl Dictio-
nary (New York: Continuum, 2012), e-book, entries on ego and person.
25
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of the I.”26 Like the “I,” the Other possesses freedom, an inner personal
life and is “without genus.”27 Yet these mark the Other completely distinct
from me.28 Indeed, this alterity is “constitutive of the very content of the
Other.”29 So otherness of the Other, like the individuality of the “I,” is not
a formal notion. It is not the reversal of identity. Rather, the Other has a
“positive reality” that always exceeds my grasp. Indeed, the Other must come
before every initiative and activity of the subject if it is to be truly Other. If
the Other were somehow grasped in activity or intention of the subject, it
would fail to be Other—it would be comprehended and constituted by the
subject. This means that the Other cannot be given or at least not given in
the way phenomenology has traditionally understood the term given—that is,
disclosed, intuited, suspended. To view the Other as disclosed, say as beau-
tiful or valuable, is to consider the Other as disclosed to me, as being a kind of
intentional object I can comprehend. Precisely what is missed here is the
exteriority and alterity of the Other. If the Other is a phenomenon in this
way, then the Other is comprehended by me and thus not exterior to me. So
for Levinas, the Other always absents himself from my grasp.
Yet, of course, the Other is somehow given to us, specifically for Levi-
nas in the manifestation of the face, le visage d’autrui. Here Levinas’s thought
becomes paradoxical and apparently self-contradictory. The Other is not
manifested by its qualities, for qualities are something at least potentially
shared by many individuals (e.g., of a species). Instead the Other is expressed
in the face, and in this expression “the existent [i.e., the Other] breaks
through all the envelopings and generalities of Being to spread out in its
‘form’ the totality of its ‘content.’”30 It is the very alterity of the Other that
constitutes this content of the Other, as we have just seen. Moreover, later
in the work, Levinas claims that the face of the Other signifies “an always
positive value.”31 Indeed, the Other for Levinas strikes me as being “rich” in
the sense that the Other possesses what I do not have and “poor” in that the
Other does not possess what I have.32 This would suggest that the Other has
a kind of content and value that is expressed in the face, which would parallel
Hildebrand.
However, Levinas’s denial that the Other is given in intentionality, which
is Hildebrand’s position, problematizes recognizing the Other as having a
26
27
28
29
30
Levinas, Totality and Infinity 51.
31
32
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Alexander Montes 87
specific realizable and accessible value and content.33 For Husserl, value, like
objecthood, is founded in the process of Sinngebung, an active and constitut-
ing process of “making sense of ” the object. Because this Sinngebung entails
that the subject’s activity precedes the Other, Levinas claims that the Other
“does not radiate as a splendor that spreads unbeknown to the radiating
being—which is perhaps the definition of beauty.”34 By contrast, for Hilde-
brand, the very value of the Other as this precious person radiates a beauty
apprehended in love.35 Further, no content for the Other can be posited in
an intentional relation. One cannot ask, “Who is it?” without having encoun-
tered the Other: “He to whom the question [‘Who is it?’] is put has already
presented himself without being a content.”36 Paradoxically, for Levinas, the
Other both is a content and yet cannot be assigned a content. The Other has
an “always positive value” and yet does not radiate a beauty. The Other some-
how becomes manifest and yet precedes the very relation of intentionality.
These paradoxical claims are all possible, Levinas holds, when we recog-
nize that the relationship to the Other is not primarily intentionality but
rather is language, which expresses but never discloses the Other. For Levinas,
language has two components: the saying and the said.37 The said carries
the content of the words spoken—for example, the cat has four legs. Such
content is in principle generalizable. But there is another aspect to language,
the saying, which is the directionality of the words over and above their
content. The saying is the very directionality of the words coming from the
Other to me or vice versa. In speaking, I do not comprehend the Other as
under some concept but rather speak toward him or her precisely as Other.38
Thus in the process of speaking, either I to the Other or the Other to me,
“the Other has no quiddity”—that is, no essence that I could grasp and
comprehend.39 In this experience of the Other via language, he or she stands
before me as one who possesses freedom and an inner life, which indeed I
also have in common with the Other, and yet it is this freedom that makes the
Other completely distinct from me.40 We enter into a relationship but do not
33
Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 23–24; Hildebrand, Ethics (Chicago: Francis-
can Herald Press, 1972), 229.
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
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form a totality because we “absolve” ourselves from the relation in the sense
that we remain separated and independent.41
Thus as the first word of language, the face of the Other has, or rather
is, a “content” and “value,” precisely as Other, that is immune to conceptual-
ization and always recedes from me. In this sense, Levinas speaks of the face
as a “trace.” By “trace” Levinas means a sign that signifies without disclosing
itself; a sign that erases itself.42 A trace is like the fingerprint a criminal has
smudged that both testifies to his presence and yet absents him or her.43 The
face is such a “trace.”44 The face manifests the Other, yet it always recedes
from my grasp as other than my comprehension of the Other. Moreover,
this face, the visage, is always a particular Other who is hic et nunc given to me.
My responsibility to the Other is issued to me from these defenseless eyes
that look at me.45 Even identical twins have different faces. The saying that
issues forth from each is distinct.46 So it is the face, in a quite literal sense for
Levinas, that speaks this Other to me.
For Levinas, this unique relationship to the Other is the “ethical rela-
tion,” which is characterized by responsibility. Levinas insists this relationship
is not equal. The Other is not a Thou equal to and codefined by my “I.”47
Rather, the Other is a magisterial He (Ille) at a “height” who teaches me my
responsibility but remains independent of me. Height and teaching here refer
to the fact that the Other gives me responsibility, which for Levinas is the
very subjectivity of the subject. Language, and with it our ability to think
and act as linguistic beings, is given to us by the Other as teacher. The face
of the Other is the first word. The Other speaks first before any subsequent
activity on the part of the subject. In this way, Levinas in his later work,
Otherwise than Being, claims that there is a passivity prior to all activity in the
subject.48 All subsequent speaking, all subsequent free activity of my mind
and will, is a response to the Other. Once I have seen the face of this beggar,
I recognize that I, not anyone else, am called to feed him from the food
in my mouth. I can deliberately refuse to consider it to be my task to feed

41
Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso

42
Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 102–5.

43
Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 102–5.
44
Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 102–5.
45
46
Special thanks to Professor Josef Seifert for pointing out this particularity
of the visage, even in twins, to me in a conversation at the Hildebrand Residency at
Franciscan University of Steubenville in summer 2019.
47
48
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1997), 9–11, 50.
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Alexander Montes 89
him, but in so doing I still implicitly recognize my obligation. In this sense,

the Other is the teacher of my responsibility; he gives me my obligation.
The Other allows and requires me to be a subject of actions; in that sense,
the Other founds my subjectivity. But I am a subject in a second sense: I am
subjected in justice to my responsibility to the Other. Before I cognize the
Other, before constituting him as an intentional object, I am aware of my
responsibility, even if I reject it. I have already become responsible to this
unique Other. This responsibility to the Other, this pre-existing relationship
of being bound in justice, thus precedes the active cognition of truth and the
activity of freedom. It is in this sense, for Levinas, that goodness is before
truth and freedom.49
To close, I wish to note along with Derrida in his essay “Violence and
Metaphysics” how Levinas’s use of the term Other (autrui) so well captures
the alterity he has illustrated for us. Derrida notes that the word Other is a very
particular kind of noun.50 Derrida recognizes that the word Other cannot
be conceptualized for the very same reason that the actual Other before me
cannot be conceptualized. One can add that the very word Other is a trace.
The otherness indicated by the word Other exceeds and recedes from every
concept of that otherness. In this way, the word Other is a “trace,” a sign that
effaces itself because the otherness of the word Other exceeds the capacity
of any word to express it. Derrida also notes that Other is a substantive that
cannot take the plural and is indeclinable because the word is vocative.51
As Levinas himself notes, the vocative testifies to the saying and cannot be
subsumed under a category or a concept.52 Finally, Derrida notes that as a
49
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 47, 90. This priority of goodness over truth is one
of the more controversial aspects of Levinas’s philosophy, for how could I know
what to do in my responsibility to the Other without a standard of truth? However,
Levinas’s meaning here is that the relationship to the Other comes prior to cognizing
about the Other. The Other, in a certain sense, is the standard by which my system of
cognizing the Other is revealed as always incomplete and even “violent” if I forget
this incompleteness. On Levinas’s account, Western philosophy’s prioritization of
truth over goodness has led to totalizing systems that do violence to the Other, a
priority of the cognizing I over the goodness that is the relationship of responsibil-
ity to the Other. It is not my purpose in this paper to decide whether criticisms of
Levinas’s priority of goodness to truth do or do not succeed. I merely note later how
Hildebrand avoids the prioritization of truth over goodness that Levinas wishes to
avoid by having a priority of truth and goodness together in his notion of a receptive
apprehension of value.
50
Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 104–5.
51
Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 104–5.
52
fus-qd1001-all.indd 89 9/21/20 11:53 AM

third-person noun, the word Other has an “illeity” to it that marks the Other
not as an equal Thou who is in some equal relationship to me but is rather
a magisterial He (Ille) who founds my responsibility.53 The otherness of the
Other is not opposed to me as simply not being me—rather, that Other has
a separation and independence of its being; the Other is its own unique exis-
tent. It is precisely this uniqueness that forms the point of contact between
Levinas and Hildebrand.
Section 2: The Unique Person Found in Love
Hildebrand’s philosophy focuses on the person. The person is revealed first

and foremost in the relationship of love, and so it is in Hildebrand’s phe-
nomenology of love that we get a truly rich description of what it is to be
a person. The person is an “unrepeatable individual” who possess a unique
subjectivity and selfhood.54 Much as it is in Levinas’s work, enjoyment and
happiness play a role in the very subjectivity of the person. A healthy looking
after the sphere of one’s own concern—what Hildebrand terms Eigenleben—is
essential to being a fully realized and independent subject who recognizes his
or her own personhood.55 Eigenleben could be literally translated as “proper
life” or “one’s own life.” John Crosby translates Eigenleben, imperfectly by his
own admission, as “subjectivity” because Subjcktivität is often used where
Hildebrand could have used the word Eigenleben instead.56 In recognizing
something as concerning my personal center, I “experience the uniqueness
of myself.”57 Thus as in Levinas’s work, subjectivity and selfhood is bound
with the seeking of affective happiness for Hildebrand. His is a “thick” con-
ception of subjectivity.
Most crucially for Hildebrand, the person is always a unique value that
cannot be substituted for the value of any other person. Values are a category
of importance that motivate affective and volitional responses—namely,
those that are grasped to be important-in-themselves and not merely import-
ant because it is subjectively satisfying for me or because it objectively suits
my nature.58 Love is a response to such a value—namely, the value of the
beloved person. John Crosby and Metropolitan John Zizioulas note a problem
53
Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 104–5.
54
55
56
Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 200ff., translator’s footnote.
57
58
Hildebrand, Ethics, 34–50.
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Alexander Montes 91
that arises with determining the value toward which love is responding.59 If
I love only the qualities of my beloved, and then if I found another person
who has more of those qualities, I would abandon the first and go on to
“love” the second person. Yet this betrayal of my original beloved shows that
in fact I never loved him or her, nor this new person, but rather I loved only
the qualities. In true love, the beloved embodies those qualities in a unique,
personal way, but he or she also possesses a value as this person beyond and
more than those qualities as this unique beloved. This value, I argue, is more
than even the person’s own subjectivity, freedom, or any other aspect of her
personhood that all other persons have in their own unique way. I do not love
the freedom of my beloved but rather the beloved who has that freedom.
This value of the person is so unique that it is necessarily inexpressible, for
our language, as Edith Stein notes in her Finite and Eternal Being, “knows no
proper names.”60 Whenever I am forced to “explain” what I love, I may fall
into only mentioning the general qualities of the person, but those qualities
are not the proper object of love. Instead, what I love is the other person; I
must say “I love her.”
For Hildebrand, love is part of a complex process of intentional acts
starting from value-perception in the look of love, to being affected by the
value of the beloved, to the value-response that is love. Here there are both
great contrasts with Levinas but, as I will point out in the next section, also
points of convergence. When I initially encounter a value—say, that I stum-
ble upon a scene where a person is forgiving another—I perceive the value
cognitively. This is a sui generis form of perception that is a purely recep-
tive cognitive act whereby I gain knowledge of the value.61 As Hildebrand
himself phrases it, “Cognitive acts are first of all characterized by the fact
that they are a consciousness of something, that is to say, of the object. We
are, as it were, void; the whole content is on the object side.”62 When I intuit a “call
of value,” I intuit that the value imposes on me an obligation to give the
proper value-response.63
59
John F. Crosby, “Personal Individuality: Dietrich von Hildebrand in Debate
with Harry Frankfurt,” in Ethical Personalism (Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt, Germany:
Ontos Verlag, 2011); John Zizioulas, “An Ontology of Love: A Patristic Reading of
Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love,” Quaestiones Disputatae 3, no. 2 (2013):
14–27.
60
Edith Stein (Saint Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), Finite and Eternal
Being: An Attempt at an Assent to the Meaning of Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Wash-
ington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2002), 505.
61
Hildebrand, Ethics, 197.
62
Hildebrand, Ethics, 196 (emphasis added).
63
Hildebrand, Ethics, 38, 184.
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Two features of this intuition are crucial. First, in it the intentionality goes
from the object to the subject, not from the subject out toward the object to
adequate it.64 Hildebrand adopts the metaphor of language: the object speaks
its “word” (Wort) to me in this intuition. All value-responses necessarily
presuppose this initial cognitive intuition of value. I cannot respond or be
aware of a value without knowing it. Second, this intuition is purely receptive.
Hildebrand finds Husserl’s notion of constitution to be problematic, as he
makes clear in his What Is Philosophy?65 The only activity of the subject present
in this intuition according to Hildebrand is a spiritual “going-with” the object
or re-echoing of the object that executes the intentional participation in the
object.66 It is by no means a constitution of the object or a Sinngebung, sense-
giving in Husserl’s idealist sense. It is simply a “concerting” with the object,
an “active accomplishing of the receiving.”67 The intuition is purely receptive
and wholly determined by the object. The presence of the going-with does
not prevent the subject from being wholly void and receptive in this intuition.
In the case of love, this value-perception is almost immediately followed
by a nonvoluntary “being affected” by the value. I see a man forgive an enemy
and immediately feel “touched,” and I am in joy over this action. There is an
intelligible relation of the value to the affection. Here there is a content on
the side of the subject. I am the one touched.68 But the intention, as with
intuition, is “centripetal”; the object is affecting me.69 Being affected is thus
distinguished from a third component of the process: the affective value-
response or “answer” (Antwort). Here I go out to the object and respond
to it with a personal “word” (Wort) of my own.70 For Hildebrand, love is an
affective value-response. It is initially, like the being affected, not volitional.
Romeo’s response of love at the sight of Juliet wells up within him without
64
Hildebrand, Ethics, 196. Centripetal or reverse intentionality where the object
comes to me is present in Levinas’s dissertation The Theory of Intuition in Husserl.
However, by Totality and Infinity and Levinas’s other mature works, reverse intention-
ality is absent. In these works, the active subject goes out to, grasps, and constitutes
objects but is not itself constituted by those objects but stands independent of them.
Unlike Hildebrand, Levinas in Totality and Infinity does not see an analogue of
language and of being spoken to in intentionality itself. See Emmanuel Levinas, The
Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology: Studies in Existential Phenomenology, trans.
Andre Orianne (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
65
Dietrich von Hildebrand, What Is Philosophy? Studies in Phenomenological and Clas-
sical Realism (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24.
66
Hildebrand, What Is Philosophy?, 24.
67
68
69
70
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Alexander Montes 93
his free conscious choice. However, it does not fully become love until the will
has come in and given its “sanction” to the affective love. When this sanction
occurs, one does not have two value-responses, the affect and the will, but
rather the two merge into a single thrust of the person toward the object of
love.71 The will takes the affect and transforms its character, making the initial
love to be love in the fullest sense of the word, a “word” of “self-donation”
(Hingabe).72 The lover gives him or herself: mind, heart, and will and, in some
forms of love, body and soul.
In this love, Hildebrand discerns two distinct but interpenetrating “inten-
tions”: intentio benevolentiae and intentio unionis.73 The first, intentio benevolentiae,
is a desire to give to the other what is objectively good for the other, to see
the Other fulfilled as a person. Intentio unionis is a desire for union with the
beloved. This is not a desire for a kind of “fusion,” where both the lover and
the beloved would lose their individuality and separateness in some kind of
more impersonal system. Nor is it a desire for the assimilation of the beloved
Other. Only two persons, independent, can enter into union far deeper than
any fusion, the very union of love. The intimacy of this union respects and
presupposes the distinctiveness of both lover and beloved.74
Included in this intentio unionis and intention benevolentiae is a care for my
own happiness that the union will bring, a care for my Eigenleben. An objector
might worry that this adds a selfish element to love. Does love not involve
self-denial, and is this not an attempt to possess the other, at least in part,
for one’s own egoist enjoyment and happiness? No, for part of the very
self-donation of myself to the Other includes making the beloved Other my
own concern, part of my Eigenleben. When my beloved suffers, her suffer-
ing becomes an objective evil for me, and conversely, what makes her
happy becomes, indirectly, an objective good for me. Love requires one to
recognize oneself as separate and as having happiness—precisely, happiness
in the Other. It requires a recognition of a sphere of one’s own concern for
what is objectively good for oneself. Only then can one make the Other the
condition of one’s own happiness. Only then can the beloved become an
objective good for one, and the happiness and misfortunes of the beloved
can become one’s own happiness and misfortunes. It is when this is done that
the self-donation to the other becomes complete. So in the intentio benevolentiae
I must care for myself, but I do so in part because as I wish to give myself—my
subjectivity, including my enjoyment—to the beloved Other.
71
Hildebrand, Ethics, 324; The Nature of Love, 54–55.
72
73
Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 50–52. See also chapter 6 for Hildebrand’s
main exposition of the intentio unionis and chapter 7 for the intentio benevolentiae.
74
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To close, what does Hildebrand’s account of love require about the

alterity of the Other—in this case, a beloved Other? It turns out there is
commonality with Levinas’s work, despite their significant divergence on
topics such as intentionality. One might be concerned that because Hilde-
brand has chosen to focus on personhood, which both I and the Other have,
he would lose sight of the alterity of the Other. Instead, it is precisely the
uniqueness of myself and the Other that makes the Other other to me. The
Other has a unique value, a content, that is entirely his or her own and that
marks his or her distinctness and separation from me. This uniqueness can
never be fully comprehended, for I can always come to greater and greater
appreciation of the Other’s value. The Other’s value cannot be exhausted.
It exceeds any grasp and is other than me. It overflows and exceeds any
concept or even cognition I may have of it. Indeed, the Other is not concep-
tualizable for Hildebrand for this same reason, just as the Other exceeds any
concept for Levinas.
Finally, the Other awakens my conscious subjectivity and brings me to
ever greater realization of my uniqueness.75 Indeed, at each stage of love,
the Other discloses both my own uniqueness and the uniqueness of the
beloved Other in tandem. In the perception of value, I am void and intuit
a call to responsibility, to give of myself. I perceive that I am “made for the
other.”76 As I experience both “being affected” by the value of the beloved
and also the affective love within me, I recognize my own “content” as
the one who is in joy over this Other. In giving love as a value-response, I
become more humble and yet more free.77 Finally, in requital, in the “mutual
interpenetration of looks,” the beloved gives me his or her Eigenleben and
returns me to mine.78 By doing so, the beloved discloses even more of her
personhood to me, and I also come to an experience of my own uniqueness
and the meaning of my life.79 The lover loved and the beloved loving, face to
75
For Hildebrand, the person from conception stands ontologically and
substantially as a full human person. In that sense, Levinas’s assertion that the Other
ontologically founds my subjectivity could be too strong for Hildebrand. However, it
is appropriate to say, as I argue later, that the Other awakens me to my full conscious
subjectivity. Absent the Other, the development of my subjectivity would be stunted,
perhaps even to an almost nonpersonal level (e.g., in the case of a child who is with-
out human contact and who has lost all ability to develop language). Special thanks to
the participants of the Summer 2019 Hildebrand Residency for pointing this distinc-
tion between founding and awakening out to me.
76
Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 52 and 122.
77
78
79
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Alexander Montes 95
face with each other, are in dialogue where the words are not the words of
any spoken tongue but their very selves as gifts.
Section 3: Levinasian Objections and Hildebrandian Replies
At this point, like Socrates in the Republic, the reader has likely already antici-
pated a wave of Levinasian objections based on what I have just mentioned.
First, Hildebrand and Levinas are clearly at odds on intentionality. Hilde-
brand is claiming that the Other is disclosed in an intentional relation. In his
Nature of Love, Hildebrand even gives an express defense of the notion that
the beloved Other is, formally speaking, an intentional object in an I-Thou
relation to me as a subject. He asserts that this formalized sense of “object”
as intentional object does not objectify the other in a problematic way—for
example, being objectified into a thing.80 Yet such a formalized sense of
object as intentional object is precisely the problematic sense of object for
Levinas. Even if the Other is not objectified as a thing, an intentional object
is always one that is made sense of, comprehended, and reduced to the same.
By regarding the Other as an intentional object, the Levinasian would worry
that the alterity of the Other is in danger of being lost. Further, Levinas
worries that intentionality places the activity of the subject, even if that is
only the passive activity of Husserl’s Sinngebung, before the expression of
the Other. If intentionality is prioritized, then my cognition of truth comes
before goodness and justice. Indeed, Hildebrand might seem to be asserting
just that when he claims that a cognitive perception of a value that gives
knowledge must come first. Cognition of truth comes first, so is it before
the relationship of justice and goodness? That would be unacceptable for
Levinas.
Further, affectivity is suspect for Levinas in three ways, which he
outlines most clearly in his Existence and the Existents. According to Levinas,
in the phenomenological works of Scheler and Heidegger, affectivity “keep[s]
something of the character of comprehension.”81 Second, affectivity is active
valuation. This affectivity, then, seems to be actively characterizing and consti-
tuting the Other as valuable in my subjectivity. This is why, for Levinas, the
concept of the Other as beautiful is so troubling. A focus on the beauty of
the Other or other affective values risks sublimating the Other into his or her
qualities. Further, beauty by itself may exist as the intentional correlate of
the active constituting sense-giving (Sinngebung) activity of the ego-subject and

80
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and the Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The
81
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2017), 68.
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thus precisely exclude alterity. Finally, emotions can overwhelm us. Levinas
states, “[They] put into question not the existence, but the subjectivity of the
subject, it prevents the subject from gathering itself up, reacting, being some-
one.”82 So Hildebrand’s identification of love with an affective value-response
would be problematic for Levinas.
These objections all ultimately hinge on a single point: the necessity for
the Other to be prior to the subject. Yet, I argue, Hildebrand has discovered a
way in which the intentional relation can maintain this priority. Recall that for
Hildebrand, in the initial process of perceiving a value, “the subject is void
as the content is on the object side of the relation.”83 This perception is
not comprehension. It is wholly passive, save for the spiritual going-with the
object, and that going-with is itself a mere opening of the subject to receptiv-
ity to the Other. It does not prevent the subject from being wholly void and
receptive in the way that arguably Husserl’s Sinngebung does. Further, while
there is an intentional “having,” what is grasped here is precisely a person
so radically unique that one could never comprehend or conceptualize the
person.
Because of this, something parallel to Levinas’s understanding of
response-ability can be found in Hildebrand. Recall that for Levinas my very
ability to act is always an ability to respond to the Other who has come before
my action, and thus ethical responsibility is just that, a response-ability. Simi-
larly, for Hildebrand, every activity of the subject, from the value-response,
to being affected, to even the activity of the spiritual going-with the object in
intuition relies on a prior passivity to what is other than the person. Whereas
Levinas contrasts the intentional relation with language and discourse, for
Hildebrand the intentional relation is language and discourse. Hildebrand’s
German is instructive here, as the word translated as response in his origi-
nally German works is Antwort, which can also be translated as answer. Thus
in a value-response, the subject receives a word (Wort) from the Other in
the intuition, is affected by the Other, and responds (Antwort) with a word
(Wort) to the Other of the subject’s own. Further, for both thinkers it is the
Other who speaks first—the Other is the first word. All subsequent activity,
whether cognitive, affective, or volitional, is in response to this first word of
the Other. These responses do not, at least ideally, “overwhelm” the subject
because they have their own intelligible relation to value. Precisely because
they have the character of “apprehending,” these affections do not hinder
the subjectivity of the subject but rather are the subject’s responses to the
value. This reply to the Levinasian objection is not meant to criticize the full
implications of Levinas’s critique of intentionality. Perhaps there must be a
82
Levinas, Existence and the Existents, 68.
83
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Alexander Montes 97
passivity prior to any intentional relation. What this reply does show is that
the intentional relation can apprehend the Other as Other without reduction
to the same. The beloved Other may be a Thou for Hildebrand, but that does
not mean the beloved Other is not on a height awakening me to my own
subjectivity, which is a response-ability to the Other.
While this grasp and perception of the value of the Other in Hilde-
brand’s philosophy does place truth first, it does not do so at the expense
of goodness. The call to responsibility, which for Levinas is goodness, is the
very truth that is apprehended. For what is grasped is precisely what is due to
the Other—namely, that I am made for this person and should love this
person. Truth does not so much precede goodness as truth is identified with
goodness; to know the truth of a value is to feel the call of justice. To grasp
the truth is to already recognize response-ability.
However, even if intentionality is cleared, a careful reader of Levinas
may still wonder whether love is the relation in which the Other is given to
me because love contains an “ambiguous” interpenetration of Desire and
need in enjoyment.84 The penultimate section of Totality and Infinity deals
with love, specifically eros, which Levinas claims has a fundamentally “ambig-
uous” and “equivocal” character.85 Whereas Hildebrand’s method is to find
the ideal essence of romantic love between man and woman, Levinas is in
a certain sense more realistic and aware of the constant threat of concupis-
cence.86 Levinas is especially concerned with the sexual aspect in eros. Levi-
nas considers eros to be enjoyment of the Other as Other. Need, considered
as egoic and seeking satisfaction, and Desire beyond all satisfaction, which
Levinas has carefully distinguished up until now, come together in eros. As
Raoul Moati comments, “Love . . . is at the point of the paradoxical meet-
ing of desire and need, where the desire for the transcendent, beyond need,
transforms into enjoyment of the transcendent.”87
In love the Other still retains alterity. Love must happen after the revela-
tion of the face, for love has an intersubjective structure and requires that the
beloved Other be separated from me.88 Yet the Other has become an object
of need in enjoyment.89 For Levinas, the beloved Other in eros is always a femi-

84

85
86
87
Raoul Moati, Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity, trans.
Daniel Wyche (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 164.
88
89
Moati, Levinas and the Night of Being, 164.
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nine Other who “presides over a regime of tenderness.”90 In this tenderness

she is frail and vulnerable precisely because as Other, she recedes from pres-
ence, and yet she is manifested in a bodily “exorbitant” and “ultramaterial”
presence to the enjoyment of eros.91 In an almost contradictory fashion, eros
seeks a secret as a secret.92 This secret remains “essentially hidden” even in its
manifestation.93 So the beloved unfolds as an essentially hidden “being-not-
yet” rather than as an existent person.94 In contrast to the ethical relation,
where the face signifies and expresses the Other univocally, the beloved’s
face expresses only the refusal to express.95 Thus in his book Levinas and the
Night of Being, Moati states, “Eros as ambiguity goes beyond the face, and its
ambiguity is expressed in this very overcoming . . . beyond the face toward
that which is hidden.”96
In this sense, eros is beyond the face in that it intends the Other not as
a particular existent or person but rather beyond those into a being-not-yet.
As Moati puts it, “The beloved evades any grasp and thus sustains pleasure
through its refusal to be possessed.”97 Need takes on the limitless direc-
tionality of Desire. So eros is a being moved by pity for the passivity of the
beloved who recedes and is yet manifest, and this being moved is “a suffering
transformed into happiness, voluptuosity.”98 The enjoyment of the Other as
Other aims at this pleasure in the evanescent tenderness of the Other. “Love
aims at the Other” for Levinas.99 However, it aims not at the Other as an exis-
tent person but at the love of the Other. It aims at a kind of fusion of senti-
ment with the Other, where the two lovers both share the one and the same
identical sentiment of love and yet remain distinct from each other.100 This
is not a desire for possession; love is not strictly lust. But it is a passion—a
passion that is compassion for the passivity of the beloved.101 For all these
reasons, Levinas asserts the following: “Love is not reducible to a knowledge
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 257. For Levinas, regardless of the beloved’s actual
90
gender, he or she is in eros feminine. This position has been criticized by feminist
authors and would likely be problematic from Hildebrand’s standpoint, as a woman
who loves a man does not love him as feminine but precisely in his masculinity.
91
92
93
94
95
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 260–63; Moati, Levinas and the Night of Being, 164.
96
97
98
99
100
101
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Alexander Montes 99
mixed with affective elements which would open it to an unforeseen plane

of being. It grasps nothing, issues in no concept, does not issue, has neither
the subject-object structure nor the I-thou structure.”102 A full comparison
of Levinas’s eros and the closest counterpart to it in Hildebrand’s thought,
romantic love of man and woman, would be very complex and have to be the
subject of another paper. For now, it suffices to show that these two notions
of love are distinct and to some degree irreconcilable. What is clear is that
Levinas assures us that love cannot play the role of disclosing the Other
that a Hildebrandian would want. Indeed, the aforementioned quote directly
rejects this position. Eros does “not disclose what already exists as radiance
and signification.”103 It is distinct from though it also presupposes the ethi-
cal relation to the Other, where I do aim at the Other as a person and find
myself responsible for giving to the Other.
The Hildebrandian, however, does have a response to the specific objec-
tion at stake here: love does not aim at the Other as a person due to the
presence of enjoyment. Hildebrand incorporates Levinas’s ethical relation-
ship of language into the very enjoyment found in romantic love. Recall that
for Levinas, the “I” is constituted as a subject by its enjoyment. In Levinas’s
understanding of the ethical relation, the Other interrupts this enjoyment in
the manifestation of the face. I find in the midst of my enjoyment that I am
called to give out of my plenitude.104 In Hildebrand’s understanding, such a
self-emptying transcendence suffices for many ethical relations, and indeed
it is part of the intentio benevolentiae in neighbor love. Here Hildebrand speaks
of “stepping outside of ” or “transcending” one’s Eigenleben, where my own
concerns are not thematic, but rather the well-being of the neighbor is the
theme of the love-relationship.105
What makes eros in its structure “ambiguous” between immanence and
transcendence for Levinas is that the enjoyment remains and becomes enjoy-
ment of the Other as Other. Yet Hildebrand, while recognizing the potential
for enjoyment of the beloved to lead to egoism or a loss of transcendence,
considers the more intimate and higher forms of love to include enjoyment
as part of the very transcendence of the lover to the Other.106 In marital
love especially I not only give from out of my enjoyment, but I give my very
102
103
104
105
106
For a detailed exposition of Hildebrand’s views on the moral dangers of sex,
but also its great value as a self-donation, see Dietrich von Hildebrand, In Defense of
Purity: An Analysis of the Catholic Ideals of Purity and Virginity (Steubenville, OH: Hilde-
brand Press, 2017), particularly chapters 6–7.
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subjectivity as constituted by enjoyment (the personal life of Levinas’s “I,”

Hildebrand’s Eigenleben) to the Other as a gift. The thick subjectivity we see
in enjoyment is the very subjectivity that is given to the Other. My giving of
my very enjoyment, my very subjectivity to the beloved, is how I am made
subject to the Other in love. This is not an enjoyment of need but rather the
joy and happiness that comes from the value of the beloved. The beloved’s
happiness becomes part of my own happiness. Indeed, were I to say to the
beloved that I did not care if I were made happy in the relationship by her,
she would rightly suspect I do not fully love her.107 I “enthrone” the beloved
in my very subjectivity (Eigenleben). I give my heart. This enthronement is
still a transcendence, one not in contradistinction to but rather fed by the
very immanence of Eigenleben. In this way, love is not only the correct and
ethical relation in which I can encounter the Other as a person but is also
the ethical relation, in Levinas’s sense, par excellence, where the richness of
my personal subjectivity is the gift to the Other.
Thus the presence of enjoyment does not interrupt the intentional
themacity of the persons in love. For Hildebrand and contra Levinas, love
is indeed a dialogue where the very word (Wort) of the beloved is perceived
by the lover who responds (Antwort) with him or herself as the very word
(Wort) of self-donation. Love does indeed aim at a union, but this union is far
greater than any fusion of two into “the same”; rather, it is a communion that
necessarily presupposes lover and beloved as separate and distinct. Indeed,
Hildebrand speaks of how love presupposes a “reverence” and respect-
ful “distance” in that the beloved Other is allowed to unfold as he or she
ought.108 So we can say that for Hildebrand, it is not enough that I step out
and interrupt my subjective enjoyment to recognize my being subject to the
Other, but rather, in the more intimate forms of love, it is that very subjectiv-
ity, that very enjoyment, that is the very response I give to the Other. I make
of my person a donation to the Other.
Section 4: The Name of the Other
We saw earlier how well the word Other fits Levinas’s conception of radical
alterity, given the limitations of any human language. What then is the word
in human language that corresponds to this personhood, this unique value,
that is perceived and given in love? What is this word for self-donation in
107
John F. Crosby, “Introductory Study,” in Hildebrand, The Nature of Love,
xxvii.
Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Reverence,” in The Art of Living, by Dietrich and
108
Alice von Hildebrand (Steubenville, OH: Hildebrand Press, 2019), 3–5.
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Alexander Montes 101
human language? It is, I submit, the personal name. The name shares with
the term Other many features. The name has illeity, expressing the Other
in the third person. It is a substantive that is indeclinable and can be used as
a vocative when addressing a person by name. A name cannot be subsumed
under a category or a concept. The name can be addressed to another,
where the vocativity of the name testifies to the saying that is so crucial for
Levinas.
However, there is one feature of the name that goes beyond the term
Other: it expresses a unique personal content. In all cultures, the name has
a content, a meaning. Joshua means “He saves,” Michael means “Who is like
God,” Jamal means “Beauty,” and Sarah means “Princess.” The name reaches
a specificity and richness beyond the word Other. It indicates that beyond
the alterity of the Other that all Others qua Others share, there is a radical
uniqueness possessed by only one “unrepeatable individual.” We often forget
this etymological feature of names precisely because of the uniqueness of
their bearers. When I refer to a person by name, especially if he or she is
someone familiar to me, I intend him or her in his or her full personhood. I
call over my friend, Michael. Indeed, I use his more familiar nickname, Mike,
when asking him to come and sit with us at the table. When I do so, there is
a greater specificity, and therefore more respect, than had I simply pointed
at him and said, “You come over here.” Had I said, “You come over here,”
it could have appeared rude. By addressing him as “Mike,” the others at the
table can, even without knowing Mike or my relationship to him, quickly
infer that he is my friend. In the simple saying of his name as Mike, it is clear
that I intend him not as some replaceable or generalizable person but as
someone who is a unique person.
Yet it is precisely the ability to speak of the name of the Other as a
content that seems to pose a danger of reduction to what Levinas calls “the
same.” First, names seem to indicate finite contents that could, in poten-
tial, be grasped by another. Second, they often contain meanings that seem
arbitrary at best. A Joshua may not save anyone; the name does not seem
to express an individual’s content or essence. Further, a name is sharable
in ways the term Other is not. Each Other is always Other from all Others,
but millions can have the same name. This suggests that the content of the
name gives the name a generalizability that would lose the sense of alterity.
Moreover, names are imposed. I did not choose my name—rather, it was
chosen for me by my parents, who themselves selected it out of a rather
limited selection of culturally appropriate names. Finally, the name can be
changed. A person may join a religious order and change her name, or change
her name for business purposes, or be enslaved and have her name changed
for her. An immigrant may change his name to reflect the change or to gain
acceptance. Yet it seems the Other is always Other; alterity cannot be altered
fus-qd1001-all.indd 101 9/21/20 11:54 AM

or abolished. So how could a particular name adequately express the alterity

of the Other?
These objections show that our current names cannot capture or ever
fully express our own unique content, though they make a kind of attempt
to do so. Yet this attempt itself indicates that a true content exists. The pres-
ence of an etymological content in the name testifies in its very failure to
express this content not that no such content exists but rather that there
is a true content so radically unique that no human name could name it.
This true content would be expressed by a true name for which we only
have an insufficient substitution or metaphor. In her work Finite and Eternal
Being, Edith Stein holds that every person is a radically unique content just as
Hildebrand does. She considers the possibility of a divinely given true name
that would fully express this content.109 No human word can really express
this content of a person, for human language “knows no genuine proper
names.”110 Reflecting on a passage of the Revelation to John where every
saint is given a stone with a new name, Stein reflects that this name given
by God would in fact express the content and essence of the person.111 Our
terrestrial names function not so much to actually express our content as to
be a “trace,” in Levinas’s sense, of such content. Viewed correctly, the name
testifies to the content of the person but then effaces this unconceivable
content by its limitations as a word of finite humans.
For this reason, a person may receive a new name that better indicates
his or her content. Abram’s name was changed by God to Abraham to indi-
cate that he would be patriarch of many nations. Stein herself accepted this
by taking on the name Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. While names can
certainly be imposed in violent manners, that is not how Teresa Benedicta
viewed her name change. Rather, her new name testified to the vocation in
which she believed she obtained fulfillment. It was a closer approximation
to that true name known only to God. She still remained Edith and she still
remained Theresa because both names contained something of her story
and content. Yet they can only indicate her content and story precisely in
the very failure to do so. So it would indeed be violent to suspect that the
human name can fully express the person. Rather, it is the very vocativity of
the name both as it exists in the mouth (my friend Mike) and as expressing a
content beyond content (Who is like God) that shows the true power of the
109
Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, 505. I should note that I first encountered this
interpretation of the biblical passage not from Edith Stein but from a discussion
with a colleague, Brenton Smith, in the spring semester of 2018. I owe much of the
initial inspiration of this work to that conversation.
110
Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, 505.
111
Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, 505.
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name in indicating alterity and personhood in its very failure to comprehend

that personhood. In this way, while millions can have the same name, the
name itself cannot be plural. Each name is a trace of the true content of
the person that no human word can ever express but that is indeed given in
self-donation.
By contrast, the word Other testifies to a content of the Other, yet this
content is simply the alterity of the Other as its identity. This identity cannot,
of course, be expressed, but it is something that every Other qua Other has.
The Other never gives us a content beyond otherness defined as Other than
the “I.” Levinas is aware of this fact: “The concept Other has, to be sure,
no new content with respect to the concept of the I.”112 The word Other
fully captures the individuality of the person involved in the sense that the
Other person is not any Other person. It is a correlate, in that sense, with
the word I. Indeed, the word Other is a positive notion unlike the word indi-
vidual, which merely indicates a thing divided against all else. The Levinasian
recognizes that the Other is not the negation of me, nor I of the Other, but
rather that the Other has a positive excess that always eludes my grasp. Yet
this positive reality could still be, as Levinas seems to assume, features of me
that are shared in a sense with all Others yet make us distinct—for example,
my freedom versus the freedom of the Other, my enjoyment compared to
the enjoyment of the Other. The content of the Other is no more, no less,
than alterity itself, for the alterity of the Other qua Other is not founded on
its identity, but rather its identity is constituted by alterity.
Because of this identification of content and alterity, the word Other has
a certain generalizability and abstractness to it. This has been criticized by
Jean-Luc Marion in his essay “The Intentionality of Love.” Marion reads
Levinas as claiming that the Other in the ethical relationship is a purely
general Other, substitutable for any other Other.113 This is because Marion
considers ethics to open up to humanity in general and to issue universal
injunctions.114 Marion argues that only love, which is constituted by a shared
interpenetration of glances, reveals the full individuality of this particular
Other, and what is more, this love “requires nothing less than haecceitas.”115
Christina Gschwandtner in her “Ethics, Eros, or Caritas?” has criticized Mari-
on’s reading of Levinas. She points out that Levinas does indicate in several
passages that the Other encountered in the ethical relation is this specific
112
113
Jean-Luc Marion, “The Intentionality of Love,” in Prolegomena to Charity,
trans. Stephen Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 9.
114
Marion, “The Intentionality of Love,” 91–93.
115
Marion, “The Intentionality of Love,” 95.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 103 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Other.116 Levinas expressly says, “The epiphany of the face qua face” opens
up humanity, and Gschwandtner argues that the face here is specifically this
particular face of this particular and concrete Other who in turn signifies to
me my relationality and responsibility to all of humanity.117
I agree with Gschwandtner that there is a thisness, a particularity, to
Levinas’s Other. One does not meet a general Other but this Other in Levi-
nas’s writings. The visage is always radically particular. Yet even granting that
Levinas recognizes the particularity of the Other, and in that sense haecceitas
specifically in the sense of thisness, one still finds what I call a certain “thin-
ness” to the term Other. In my article “Toward a Thicker Notion of the Self,”
I distinguished the “thin,” negative notion of individuality, the person’s being
divided against all others, from the “thick,” concrete uniqueness of personhood,
a person’s being an absolutely singular irrepeatable someone, a one-what
(uni-que). Personhood implies a rich, “thick,” and inexpressible content.118
Individuality as such is a purely negative notion that can have no content
beyond my not being what others are. Alterity is a thicker, more positive,
and more concrete reality than individuality, as it involves excess beyond my
grasp. Yet this positive reality could still be, as Levinas seems to assume,
features of me that are shared in a sense with all Others yet make us distinct
as discussed earlier. Because of this, all Others have alterity, and indeed each
Other has this specific alterity of this specific Other. Yet this thin alterity is
always found to be an abstraction from their richer, thicker personhood. In
experience, I never encounter mere Others any more than I encounter mere
I’s, but rather I encounter persons. Only by a kind of prescinding from this
irreducible content do we get the person to appear as the Other rather than
as Mike, Jamal, or Aiko.
This delimitation of view is often appropriate in many contexts—for
example, in a philosophy drawing out the implications of alterity qua alterity.
But that alterity, as much as my individuality, is founded upon the unique
content of personhood that the Other and I are. The Other as a person has
a unique value, a content, that is entirely his or her own and that marks his
or her distinctness and separation from me. Uniqueness entails and incor-
porates alterity. It is because the Other has a content absolutely irreducible
to anything I possess or could possess that the Other is unique and Other.
116
Christina Gschwandtner “Ethics, Eros, or Caritas? Levinas and Marion on
Individuation of the Other” Philosophy Today 49, no. 1 (2005), 75–78.
117
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 213; Gschwandtner “Ethics, Eros, or Caritas?,”
77.
118
Alexander Montes, “Toward a Thicker Notion of the Self: Sartre and
von Hildebrand on Individuality, Personhood and Freedom.” Quaestiones Disputatae
9, no. 2 (2019): 80.
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The Otherness of the Other stands as an aspect of this personal uniqueness.

For this reason, the name can capture a richer, more specific alterity than the
term Other can. Insofar as the name indicates this rich personal content, it
exceeds a mere thisness and particularity to indicate a full, rich uniqueness.
It is not the term Other but rather the name that does justice to this alterity
because it alone indicates an alterity that is not just uniquely and particularly
the Other’s own but richly the Other’s own. This content, along with alterity, is
fully revealed in love, where the Other is not just Other but specifically Sally,
my older sister, who loves me, or Jacob, my elderly father for whom I am
called to care in love. The love, the self-donation I experience, does indeed
testify to their radical Otherness from me but only insofar as that Otherness
is but one aspect of their value and content that I grasp in love.
The fact that we are given our names indicates that our subjectivity is
a gift of the Other. I noted in my previous article that small children inad-
vertently indicate the fundamentality of personhood in their inability to use
the first person pronoun “I” but rather use their own names.119 When asked,
“Do you love Mommy?” a small child, Bobby, may not use the first person
pronoun “I” but rather say, “Bobby loves Mommy.” This is an overidentifi-
cation of himself with the Other’s views of him, but that fact itself brings
out a further truth. It is through the Other’s views of him, and in particular
the love that is given to him by his mother, that brings Bobby to a growing
awareness of himself. He sees his mother’s love directed specifically at him,
not at Uncle Michael or his sister Kathy, and “is affected” by a spontaneous
child’s joy in this love. The value-perception and affection here both bring
Bobby to himself as a unique person. It is his mother’s love that allows Bobby
to respond, awakening him to awareness of that subjectivity by addressing
Bobby with his name. He then responds to love with love in a “mutual inter-
penetration of looks” as he affirms, “Bobby loves Mommy.” To put all of
this in other terms, Bobby’s subjectivity and growing self-awareness is deter-
mined by the response-ability his mother gives him. And this response-ability
is granted not just in the revelation of the face of the “Other” but rather this
specific Other who speaks Bobby’s name, his mother. So in having his name
given to him by another, Bobby’s subjectivity is awakened by the Other, but
a specific, concrete, richly distinct and primary Other. He inadvertently testi-
fies to a fact that philosophy has often failed to recognize: that behind every
I-Thou or I-Other relations are more rich, concrete, and specific person-to-
person relations—for example, Bobby-Kathy, Bobby-Mommy relations. The
relationship to the Other is a conversation between two persons. As such,
the relationship itself is completely unique in every case, containing a richness
no human word, the said, could ever do justice to. Rather, the relationship to
119
Montes, “Toward a Thicker Notion of the Self,” 80.
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the Other is itself a dialogue that is trace of the Infinite, infinitely exceeding
all human comprehension.
There is one more Levinasian insight that the name testifies to. For Levi-
nas, the Other, precisely as exceeding any and all conceptions of it, is a “trace”
of the Infinite. The very word Other achieves this—the person marked by the
term Other is always “Other” than any comprehension of this Other. Yet
the name too contains this feature. Even its content, the meaning of the
name, points to a uniqueness and therefore to an Other who can never be
fully comprehended. The true name is always elusive. The name signifies this
content and then effaces it. So the name, just as much as and even more so
than the word Other, is a trace of the Infinite. Alterity, understood correctly,
points us to the Infinite latent in personhood.
In conclusion, despite significant and to some extent irreconcilable differ-
ences in their phenomenological approaches and philosophies, there are deep
similarities between Levinas’s and Hildebrand’s approaches to the Other.
Both regard responsibility to the Other as prior to the activity of the self.
They also ascribe a rich and “thick” affective subjectivity to the person in
enjoyment over and above being the mere subject of one’s actions. Yet while
every Other is particularly and distinctly Other, this Otherness is founded
upon the rich uniqueness of personhood that the term Other is unable to
capture. It is this rich uniqueness, a trace of the Infinite in personhood, that
names with their contents testify to in their very failure to express.120
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Special thanks to Professor Jeffrey Bloechl for whose fall semester of 2018
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Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Critical
Rehabilitation of Plato’s Forms
Justin Keena
Nashua Community College
Dietrich von Hildebrand was a better Platonist than Plato. He arrived at the

central point of Plato’s metaphysics, the Forms, in a manner similar to Plato’s
own reasoning, while still managing to improve upon his position signifi-
cantly. This underappreciated development in the history of philosophy is
best illustrated by comparing Hildebrand’s assertion of Forms in What Is
Philosophy? with Plato’s argument for the existence of Forms in the Timaeus.1
This essay is accordingly divided into three main parts: (I) an explanation of
why Platonic Forms are required by Hildebrand’s epistemology in chapter 4
of What Is Philosophy?; (II) an explanation of why Forms are required by
Plato’s epistemology in Timaeus 51d, based on the views that he, or at least
his main characters, consistently defended or presupposed across the middle
and late dialogues; and finally (III), the several distinct advantages of Hilde-
brand’s position over Plato’s not only in epistemology but also in logic and
metaphysics.
1
Attributing such an argument to Plato is somewhat controversial. Certain Plato
scholars recognize no formal arguments for the Forms in the dialogues: for example,
David Gallop, Plato’s Phaedo: Translated with Notes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 95; Julia
Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),
234–35; and Verity Harte, “Plato’s Metaphysics” in The Oxford Handbook of Plato, ed.
Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 194 and 197. Others have both
recognized and interpreted the argument in Timaeus 51b–52a: namely, David Ross,
Aristotle’s Metaphysics: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1924), 1:193 and Plato’s Theory of Forms (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951), 124–25;
Robert William Jordan, Plato’s Arguments for Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge Philolog-
ical Society, 1983), ch. 3, especially 54–56; Gail Fine, On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticism of
Plato’s Theory of Forms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 136–37; and Donald
Zeyl, Plato: Timaeus (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), lxiv–lxv.
© Justin Keena, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)
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Justin Keena 111
Hildebrand’s strongest assertion of Platonism, which comes midway

through chapter 4 of What Is Philosophy?, depends on his earlier distinction
in that chapter between the three possible types of unity. For him there are,
and can only be, these three kinds: (1) chaotic or accidental unities, (2) uni-
ties of a genuine type, and (3) necessary essential unities.2 They are each
defined partially in terms of their metaphysical and partially in terms of
their epistemological status. (1) Chaotic or accidental unities, like a thought-
less scribble or “a heap of stones or a group of random tones which do
not make up a melody,”3 have no internal coherence but are merely thrown
together by external circumstance. As a result, from the perspective of our
knowledge, they are so “impoverished in meaning”4 that they can yield lit-
tle to nothing of any interest. (2) Unities of a genuine type such as gold,
water, oak trees, dolphins, and lions, on the other hand, are not arbitrary
insofar as each of these unities do have an internal, meaningful coherence.
Their features are not haphazard or random but patterned and rational. This
meaningful inner consistency also makes them more interesting objects of
knowledge insofar as they are capable of grounding universal concepts and
scientific research. However, there is an inherent limit to the kind of knowl-
edge they can yield: “Though we can grasp here, as mentioned above, that
certain features are unessential, still we can never absolutely know whether
an observed feature is essential or not.”5 Because none of the features of a
genuine type are united by necessity (else it would belong to the third kind
of unity), any single feature could, so far as we know, be absent without
destroying its integrity. As a result, we can never isolate with certainty a
single essential feature of, say, a lion that must be present in all lions insofar
as they are lions. The best we can hope for is to establish a set of merely
typical features found in lions.6 But (3) in the case of essentially necessary
2
Hildebrand devotes increasingly large sections to each of these: see What Is
Philosophy? (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1960), 100–102 for the section on “Chaotic and Acci-
dental Unities”; 102–10 for “Unities of a Genuine Type”; and 110–31 for “Neces-
sary Essential Unity.”
3
Ibid., 101.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid., 105.
6
See ibid., 107: “It may be that in one case a color is typical for a species, for
instance lions; and in another case, for instance cats, no specific color is typical.
Although we find that a certain color is typical for the species lion, it is always possi-
ble, in principle, that we may discover a lion which is black or white.” Note that what
is merely typical falls short of being essentially necessary. If the typical were the same
as the essentially necessary, it would not be possible, even in principle, to discover a
fus-qd1001-all.indd 111 9/21/20 11:54 AM

112 Hildebrand’s Critical Rehabilitation of Plato’s Forms
unities like justice, triangle, color, love, person, and will, whose features are
united by strict, internal necessity, we are able to tell with certainty which
features are strictly essential and which are not.7 We can have an authentic
insight into the essence of a necessary reality with absolute certitude. In
other words, the strongest possible metaphysical bond provides the highest
possible epistemic yield.
Having introduced the third and final kind of unity, Hildebrand now
identifies these necessary essential unities with Platonic Forms or Ideas:
“These necessary unities,” he writes, “are the only genuine ‘essences.’ They
are the ‘Ideas’ toward which Plato primarily aimed in his discovery of the
world of Ideas. They are the original source of all ratio, the highpoint of
intelligibility. With respect to them our mind is in a unique position.”8 For
Hildebrand, Platonic Forms or Ideas play a decisive role with respect to
our epistemic prospects. Because they are the “original source of all ratio”
and “the highpoint of intelligibility,” without them the highest kind of
human knowledge would be lost to us. This assertion, which comes midway
through chapter 4, is direct, memorable, and perhaps even surprising in its
boldness.9 But based on the way that Hildebrand had defined the highest
kind of human knowledge at the beginning of chapter 4, some such asser-
tion of Platonism was, as the rest of this section will attempt to demon-
strate, inevitable.
lion that is black or white. If, say, a tawny color were essentially necessary to being
a lion but a given animal did not have that color, it would lack something essential to
being a lion and therefore not be a lion.
7
For example, ibid., 111–12: “Whether the brown color and the mane are
merely accidental elements, or whether, instead, they are typical characteristics of
a lion, can be apprehended only by experience, in the sense of a blunt observation
and induction. Nor can the contemplation of the ‘appearance’ unity of the lion teach
me anything about it. But in the case of a single triangle, I can at once understand
that the size of a triangle is not constitutive for the essence, triangle. The size of a
triangle is intuitively seen to be an accidental element standing outside its necessary
such-being unity.”
8
Ibid., 116.
9
Hildebrand writes as if his assertion of Platonic Forms would be a distaste-
ful surprise to his readers on ibid., 117: “The fact that we have not yet a metaphys-
ical place at hand in which to locate these necessary such-beings does not permit
us to deny the ideal existence which justice, love, the number 3, color, etc., clearly
reveal as their property. By screaming in horror ‘That is Platonism!’ instead of
admitting, free from any prejudice, an unambiguously given feature, we act like
Procrustes who cut off the feet of men because they did not fit into the bed he
had made.”
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Justin Keena 113
In order to explain why Platonic Forms are required by Hildebrand’s

epistemology in chapter 4 of What Is Philosophy?, we must first understand
what he took the highest kind of human knowledge to be. His technical
name for this type of cognition, the original discovery of which he attri-
butes to Plato, is “apriori knowledge.”10 At the beginning of chapter 4, he
defines its nature by enumerating the essential characteristics of its content:
“Propositions such as ‘Justice cannot be attributed to impersonal beings’ or
‘One and the same thing cannot exist and not exist simultaneously’ are set
apart by three unmistakable marks: (1) their strict intrinsic necessity, (2) their
incomparable intelligibility, and (3) their absolute certainty.”11 Later on, he
also adds a fourth essential feature of the propositions required by a priori
knowledge: namely, their “synthetic character” or, in other words, the fact
that they express informative, nontautological truths.12 Now the existence
of something very much like Platonic Forms is already required just on
the basis of the kind of truths involved in a priori knowledge. If there is
such a thing as a priori knowledge in Hildebrand’s sense, it would require a
synthetic, necessary, highly intelligible, absolutely certain truth and hence
qualities in the object known that, at the very least, deserve to be compared
with Platonic Forms.
So what, philosophically, justifies this apparent leap from the epistemo-
logical starting-point of a priori knowledge to the metaphysical conclusion of
Platonism? Consider, first of all, what would be required by just two of the
essential characteristics of the content of a priori knowledge—its synthetic
character and its necessity. To be clear, Hildebrand has left both analytic and
contingent propositions to the side. A priori knowledge, by his definition,
would not be a priori knowledge if it were about merely analytic or merely
contingent truths. Now the question arises, What makes a synthetic necessary
truth necessarily true? In the case of any analytic truth, the law of noncon-
tradiction and the meanings of the terms involved in the proposition itself
suffice to make it true. The analytic proposition, “A square has four sides,”
is true simply because the meaning of the word square includes, among other
things, the meaning of the phrase “four sides,” assuming that the law of
10
Ibid., 64 (but see also 113 and 208): “Herein lies the decisive point of depar-
ture for the deep abyss which separates apriori from empirical knowledge. The great
achievement of Plato in his Meno was the discovery that within the sphere of knowl-
edge there are cases in which we grasp with absolute certainty a necessary and highly
intelligible state of facts. He saw how these cases differed profoundly from all other
kinds of knowledge, and he appreciated the decisive importance of this distinction
within the total sphere of knowledge.”
11
Ibid., 64. See also 85.
12
See ibid., 78 and 85.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 113 9/21/20 11:54 AM

noncontradiction holds. But for synthetic propositions, something beyond

the mere meanings of the terms involved and the law of noncontradiction
is required. Something beyond and outside of the proposition itself (and the
law of noncontradiction)—or, in other words, something in reality actually
being the way it is—is needed to make a true synthetic proposition true.
There must be some state of affairs, some actual thing’s being-in-a-certain-
way, to make it true. For instance, it is true that “you are reading this essay”
not because those words mean what they mean but because of a certain
state of affairs: namely, your actual being-a-reader-of-this-essay. Without that
specific state of affairs to make it true—for you could have skipped this article
in favor of one with a less preposterous opening sentence—then this partic-
ular synthetic proposition would have been false. In other words, its truth is
contingent (i.e., could have been otherwise) because the state of affairs that
grounds its truth is itself contingent (i.e., could have been otherwise). The
question then becomes, What sort of state of affairs is required to make
a synthetic necessary truth necessarily true? Not just any state of affairs will
suffice. A contingent state of affairs would fail to make a necessary (and
synthetic) proposition true, given that it could, by definition, be otherwise
than it is. But a necessary truth must be true and cannot possibly be anything
other than true. Therefore, a noncontingent—that is, a necessary—state of
affairs is required to make a synthetic necessary proposition necessarily true.
Put more simply, what makes such a proposition true is something in reality
necessarily being the way it is.
Now let us take the argument one step further. If we grant that there are
synthetic, necessarily true propositions, then we have good reason to admit
that there are also necessary states of affairs. But what do necessary states
of affairs themselves require? The only thing capable of grounding a neces-
sary state of affairs is, naturally, a necessary object, a thing that exists of
necessity. States of affairs must be grounded in some kind of reality, and a
contingent reality could not suffice to produce a necessary state of affairs.
Something that could go out of existence, even if it never does, cannot serve
as the explanatory basis of what must exist. Necessary states of affairs require
objects whose existence is absolutely guaranteed, whose features are united
not contingently but necessarily. For example, the synthetic, necessarily true
proposition that “justice can only be attributed to personal beings” requires
a necessary connection between the essence of justice and the essence of
personhood. But this necessary connection must itself be grounded in some
object or objects that exist necessarily—which in this case, according to
Hildebrand, would be the essences of justice and personhood themselves.
“For,” in his words, “essentially necessary states of facts are grounded only in
the necessary and highly intelligible unities. The necessity of the such-being
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Justin Keena 115
is presupposed whenever the members of a state of facts are joined by a

necessary link.”13
To recapitulate the argument so far: a priori knowledge in Hildebrand’s
sense requires synthetic, necessarily true propositions; synthetic, necessarily
true propositions require the existence of necessary states of affairs; and
necessary states of affairs require necessary objects. Taken together, this chain
of reasoning enables us to eliminate the middleman and simply conclude
that if we are capable of a priori knowledge and therefore have access to
synthetic, necessarily true propositions, then there must be some necessary
object as the ultimate foundation of the truth of those propositions and our
knowledge of them. If we can know such propositions, then there must be
certain necessary objects. Thus the whole question of whether there are such
necessary objects turns on the question of whether we do in fact have access
to synthetic, necessarily true propositions.
Hildebrand’s answer to this question is an emphatic “yes.”14 For him, not
only do we have access to them; we can even have absolute certitude about
their truth. And now all four distinguishing characteristics of a priori knowl-
edge are in play at once. For what justifies this absolute certitude is the fact
that we grasp the inner reason why the given state of affairs must be the way it
is.15 We can understand why, for example, color must be presented in at least
two dimensions in order to be perceived. The reason for its necessarily being
so is not hidden from us, as in the case of unities of a genuine type, but is on
the contrary outstandingly intelligible. In other words, (1) absolute certitude
about a (2) synthetic, (3) necessarily true proposition is the joint result of
an (4) incomparably intelligible and strictly necessary state of affairs. For Hilde-
brand, if we have experienced absolute certitude about a synthetic, necessary
proposition—in other words, if we have had a priori knowledge—then we are
also committed to asserting the existence of a strictly necessary object capa-
ble of grounding strictly necessary, incomparably intelligible states of affairs.
And we must look beyond the contingent world, and therefore beyond all
13
Ibid., 128. See also 68, note 2. Hildebrand habitually refers to states of affairs
as “states of facts,” likely a Germanism resulting from Adolf Reinach’s use of the
term Sachverhalt. His term such-being is another Germanism, according to Josef Seifert
in his introduction to the 1991 edition of What Is Philosophy? (New York: Routledge,
1991), 30, note 33: “The German word ‘Sosein,’ which either corresponds to essence
or to a part thereof (distinct from what-being), is translated by Hildebrand not as
so-being which might sound more English but as ‘such-being.’”
14
See especially ibid., 77–85.
15
See ibid., 73–74. Compare with Plato’s insistence that knowledge requires the
ability to give an account of what is known, both in the Timaeus (51e) and elsewhere:
Meno 98a, Phaedo 76b, Symposium 202a, Theaetetus 202c, Laws 967e, and Republic 531e,
533b–c, and 534b–c.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 115 9/21/20 11:54 AM

empirical things as well as the contingent and time-bound existence of our

own minds, to locate such necessary entities. They must, in a word, transcend
all our thoughts, all our experiences, and every contingent aspect of every
possible universe. Thus the entire argument so far can be summed up in
a single hypothetical sentence: if we have a priori knowledge, then there are
necessary, highly intelligible, extramental, transcendent objects. There must
be something comparable with, perhaps even identical to, Platonic Forms.
II
What is remarkable about Hildebrand’s Platonism in What Is Philosophy? is

just how similar it is to Plato’s own argument for the Forms in the Timaeus, at
least in terms of its purpose and basic structure. Like Hildebrand, Plato was
also concerned to save the possibility of the most exalted kind of knowledge
precisely by positing the existence of certain objects that cannot be found in
the empirical world. And like the foregoing one-sentence summary of Hilde-
brand’s view, Plato also casts his argument for the Forms in a single hypothet-
ical sentence. At 51d he has Timaeus say, “If understanding [nous] and true
opinion are distinct, then these ‘by themselves’ things definitely exist—these
Forms, the objects not of our sense perception, but of our understanding
only.”16
The question now becomes, Why did Plato think that the bare difference
between understanding or knowledge, on the one hand, and true opinion,
on the other, was reason to believe that there are Forms? There are four
presuppositions that he (or at least his main characters) made, both in the
Timaeus and in other dialogues, that explain his reasoning. First, he thought
that the highest form of human cognition, which he referred to variously as
understanding (nous or noesis) or knowledge (episteme), requires an absolutely
stable object.17 In one sense of the phrase “absolutely stable,” Hildebrand
16
Translated by Donald Zeyl in Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett,
2000), 1254. The Greek text runs εἰ μὲν νοῦς καὶ δόξα ἀληθής ἐστον δύο γένη, παντάπα-
σιν εἶναι καθ᾽ αὑτὰ ταῦτα, ἀναίσθητα ὑφ᾽ ἡμῶν εἴδη, νοούμενα μόνον.
17
For a passage that treats nous and episteme as equivalent terms for the highest
form of human cognition, see Philebus 59b. I also note the account of the Divided
Line in Republic 511d, which switches from noesis as the power set over the top section
of the Line to that in Republic 533e, which says that episteme is set over that same
section, without Plato apparently noticing the change in vocabulary. Hence the terms
were interchangeable in his mind.
This privileged kind of knowledge has been named “High Level Thought”
(HLT) by Gail Fine in her article, “The Object of Thought Argument,” Apeiron
21, no. 3 (September 1988), 108, and in chapter 9 of On Ideas, 121. For instances
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Justin Keena 117
would have agreed with him. But while Hildebrand would have parsed stabil-
ity as necessity, Plato identified stability with what is immutable or at least
perpetually unchanging. In several dialogues, including the Timaeus, Plato
insisted that immutable objects, sometimes identified as Forms, are the only
proper objects of understanding or knowledge. See, for instance, Timaeus 52a:
“Since these things are so, we must agree that that which keeps its own form
unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed,
which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself
enters into anything else anywhere, is one thing. It is invisible—it cannot be
perceived by the senses at all—and it is the role of understanding [noesis] to
study it.”18 Changeable objects, on the other hand, are typically associated in
the dialogues with true opinion.19
Plato’s second presupposition explains why he thought that genuine
knowledge requires an immutable object. Like Aristotle, Plato held and
even, on occasion, partially articulated the position that the truth-values of
statements can and do change when the objects to which they correspond
change.20 One of these partial accounts comes just before the argument for
the Forms in Timaeus 50a–b, when Timaeus tries to explain the nature of the
Receptacle: “Suppose you were molding gold into every shape there is, going
on non-stop re-molding one shape into the next. If someone then were to
point at one of them and ask you, ‘What is it,’ your safest answer by far, with
respect to truth, would be to say, ‘gold,’ but never ‘triangle’ or any of the
other shapes that come to be in the gold, as though it is these, because they
change even while you’re making the statement.”21 Other partial accounts
of nous by itself in the dialogues, see Timaeus 51d3, Republic 511d8, and 533e–534a
(all three of which are among Fine’s examples of HLT in “The Object of Thought
Argument,” 108, note 2, and On Ideas, 309, note 3). For an instance of noesis alone,
see Timaeus 52a.
18
Translated by Donald Zeyl in Plato: Complete Works, 1254–55. See also Republic
477a–479e, Phaedo 78c–79a, Philebus 59a–d, and Cratylus 439c–440a.
19
See, above all, Republic 477a–479e.
20
For this belief in Aristotle, see Categories, ch. 5, 4a24–29: “For the same state-
ment [logos] seems to be both true and false. Suppose, for example, that the state-
ment that somebody is sitting is true; after he has got up this same statement will
be false.” Translated by J. L. Ackrill in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan
Barnes (1984; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1:7. See also
Metaphysics, book 9, ch. 10, 1051b13ff., as well as Jaakko Hintikka, “Time, Truth, and
Knowledge in Ancient Greek Philosophy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 4, no. 1
(January 1967), 6, where he suggests that such a view may have been common to the
ancient Greeks more generally.
21
Translated by Donald Zeyl in Plato: Complete Works, 1253. I call this a “partial
account” of Plato’s presumed theory of truth-bearers because it focuses more on
fus-qd1001-all.indd 117 9/21/20 11:54 AM

of this view come in Timaeus 49d, Theaetetus 182d, and Phaedrus 247c–e. As
a consequence of this theory of truth-bearers, the only way to securely fix
the truth of a statement would be to securely fix the being of the object or
objects referred to by that statement. Unchanging truths, in other words,
would require corresponding unchanging realities, not unlike the way in
which, for Hildebrand, necessary synthetic truths require corresponding
necessary states of affairs.
Notice what happens when this theory of truth-bearers is combined with
a third presupposition that Plato made. As both he and Hildebrand recog-
nized, knowledge is infallible.22 But if, as Plato’s position on truth-bearers
compelled him to think, statements about changeable objects that are true at
one time could become false at another time, then we could possibly come
to be mistaken about this sort of claim. Therefore, such unstably true claims
could not possibly be securely and infallibly known. The best we could hope
for, in Plato’s scheme, is a temporarily true opinion. As he has Socrates ask in
Philebus 59a–b, “How could we assert anything definite about these matters
with exact truth if it never did possess nor will possess nor now possesses
any kind of sameness? . . . There can be no reason [nous] or knowledge [epis-
teme] that attains the highest truth about these subjects!”23 According to this
view, only a statement whose truth is securely anchored in an unchanging real-
ity could be known in the strict sense. Changeable things prevent knowledge,
but unchanging realities make it possible. For Plato, therefore, knowledge or
understanding requires an unchanging reality, just as for Hildebrand, a priori
knowledge requires a necessary reality.
Only one more presupposition is required to complete Plato’s ellip-
tical argument for the Forms in Timaeus 51d: namely, the idea that the
names than propositions. Then again, when the imaginary interlocutor in this passage
says “triangle” or “gold,” those names stand for the propositions “it is a triangle” and
“it is gold,” respectively.
22
For evidence in Hildebrand, see What Is Philosophy?, 70ff., which begins the
section on absolute certainty as an essential aspect of a priori knowledge, and 116,
where he argues that the insights into necessary states of facts “themselves justify the
grasping at as not contaminated by error.”
For evidence in Plato, see Republic 477e, where he uses the word ἀναμάρτητον
(anamarteton) to describe knowledge; Gorgias 454d, in which Socrates and Gorgias
agree that there is no such thing as false knowledge; and Theaetetus 152c, 186e, and
200e, which all assume that knowledge, however it is being defined at the moment,
is of what is true. The impossibility of “false” or fallible knowledge may ultimately
be a Parmenidean insight (see Parmenides fragment 2, lines 7–8), as Hintikka,
“Time, Truth, and Knowledge in Ancient Greek Philosophy,” points out on page 7,
note 31.
23
Translated by Dorothea Frede in Plato: Complete Works, 448.
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Justin Keena 119
sensible world is inherently unstable. It would be wrong to attribute to

Plato the maximal claim that all physical things are always changing in every
respect, since he has Socrates criticize the theory of radical flux both in
the Theaetetus (181c–183a) and in the Cratylus (439b–440d).24 But Plato did
at least think that physical objects are inherently unstable insofar as they
are all changeable and that many of them are in fact changing in some
respects; that they never truly attain to the level of completely immutable,
unified, Parmenidean being but only manage to become; that they never
remain fully the same at all times but are subject to coming to be and
passing away. Such a view can be found, for example, in Timaeus 27d–28a:
“As I see it, we must begin by making the following distinction: What is
that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but
never is? The former is grasped by understanding [noesis], which involves a
reasoned account. It is unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which
involves unreasoning sense perception. It comes to be and passes away,
but never really is.”25 Just as Hildebrand would maintain that everything in
the created world is contingent, so would Plato maintain that everything
in the sensible world is changeable.
Combining Plato’s view of the empirical world with his other three
presuppositions produces the following result. If knowledge or understand-
ing in the highest, most privileged sense requires an immutable, inherently
stable object (since it must deal with inherently stable, unchanging truths)
but everything in the sensible world is by nature unstable, then nothing in
the sensible world can function as an object of knowledge. This is a conclu-
sion that Plato repeats across the middle and late dialogues, for example in
Republic 529b–c: “If anyone attempts to learn about sensible things, whether
by gaping upward or squinting downward, I’d claim—since there’s no knowl-
edge [episteme] of such things—that he never learns anything and that, even
if he studies lying on his back on the ground or floating on it in the sea, his
soul is looking not up but down.”26 In seeking to ground knowledge, which
in his view required immutable objects, he is therefore compelled to posit the
24
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 987a31–987b1, book 1, ch. 6, translated by W. D. Ross in
The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2:1561: “For, having in his youth first become familiar
with Cratylus and with the Heraclitean doctrines (that all sensible things are ever in a
state of flux and there is no knowledge about them), these views he held even in later
years.” However, it is possible that Aristotle did not have as radical a theory of flux in
mind as Plato describes and critiques in the Theaetetus and the Cratylus.
25
Translated by Donald Zeyl in Plato: Complete Works, 1234. See also Timaeus 52a,
Symposium 207d–e, and Phaedo 78e.
26
Translated by G. M. A. Grube and revised by C. D. C. Reeve in Plato: Complete
Works, 1145. See also Republic 477a–479d, Cratylus 439a–440a, Philebus 59a–d, and
Phaedrus 247c–e.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 119 9/21/20 11:54 AM

existence of immaterial, nonsensible things—things that are, in the literal,

etymological sense of the term, “metaphysical.” And that is why, for Plato,
“if understanding and true opinion are distinct, then these ‘by themselves’
things definitely exist—these Forms, the objects not of our sense perception,
but of our understanding only.”27
III
Now with both Plato’s and Hildebrand’s accounts of ideal Forms in mind,
we can finally take stock of how far the latter’s position improves upon the
former’s. There are at least three areas of philosophy in which Hildebrand
corrects or refines what is in Plato. First, consider the realm of logic and
semantics. Hildebrand is not committed to the position that supposes that
truth-values can change. Thus he avoids the problems generated by that older
system, such as Aristotle’s puzzle in De Interpretatione 9 about whether state-
ments in the future tense are true or false or neither. But more importantly,
Hildebrand, unlike Plato, does not depend in his argument for the Forms on
the view that propositions are tensed. The modern view that propositions are
tenseless is fully compatible with Hildebrand’s argument, whereas it invali-
dates Plato’s.
Second, consider the realm of epistemology. The ramifications of Hilde-
brand’s position are more attractive than Plato’s because they are far more
minimal and much more consonant with our everyday experience. Whereas
Plato, or at least Plato’s Socrates, famously suggests in the Meno that knowl-
edge, because it cannot be derived from sensible things, must have come to
us via non-sense-based experiences in a previous life, and thus what seems to
us to be learning must in fact be recollection of those disembodied experi-
ences, Hildebrand does not argue for recollection or pre-existence or reincar-
nation of any kind.28 He is content with the admission that we do experience
27
And thus we read Aristotle’s account of “the ideal theory” in Metaphys-
ics book 13, ch. 4, 1078b10–17, translated by W. D. Ross in The Complete Works
of Aristotle, 2:1705: “Now, regarding the Ideas, we must first examine the ideal
theory by itself . . . treating it in the form in which it was originally understood
by those who first maintained the existence of Ideas. The supporters of the ideal
theory were led to it because they were persuaded of the truth of the Heraclitean
doctrine that all sensible things are ever passing away, so that if knowledge of
thought is to have an object, there must be some other and permanent entities,
apart from those which are sensible; for there can be no knowledge of things
which are in a state of flux.”
28
For a classic statement of recollection, see Meno 81c. Hildebrand rejects
recollection in What Is Philosophy? but still prefers it to another well-known solution
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Justin Keena 121
genuine knowledge in this life, just as he is content with the admission that
ideal objects exist, without trying to develop the consequences of such a view
in detail or to explain the precise mechanics of how it is possible. It is pref-
erable to acknowledge the fact that we do have direct access to ideal objects
in this life, which, as Hildebrand admits, has its own problems, than to argue
for pre-existence and recollection, which introduce even more.29 In this way,
Hildebrand’s phenomenological procedure, his characteristic loyalty to what
is given in experience, obviates two of the most conspicuously unfavor-
able concomitants of Plato’s epistemology.
Third and finally, consider the realm of metaphysics. It is here that the
advantages of Hildebrand’s argument truly shine. The key point is that he
relies on the categories of necessity and contingency instead of changing
and unchanging. This allows him to solve a major problem in Plato. Iden-
tifying Forms as necessary unities enables Hildebrand to explain the range
or extent of the Forms, which Plato had given no final or definitive account
of. What sorts of things have Forms, and why? In addressing this question,
Plato is inconsistent or at least unclear.30 Hildebrand resolves the whole
issue by restricting Forms to what can yield insights into necessary states
of affairs—that is, to necessary essential unities. Thus there is not a Form
for each collection of things that have a common name, as Socrates says in
to the problem of a priori knowledge: “Compared with the theory of innate ideas,
Plato’s theory of reminiscence would, relatively speaking, serve as a better explana-
tion for the absolute certitude and intelligibility of apriori knowledge. In presuming
that a perfect intuition into the ideas was granted to us in a preexistence, Plato at
least tries to trace this intelligible knowledge to a previous higher experience. His
explanation is superior to innatism in that it traces the source of apriori knowledge
back to a perfect experience, and includes the disclosure to our mind in a most
perfect intuition of the being in question. The contact with reality, as well as the
intelligible character of this reality, is here implied. To this extent, therefore, Plato’s
theory does justice to the facts.” See also 113–14 for another critique of Plato’s
position in the Meno.
29
Ibid., 117.
30
Plato himself may have been aware of his lack of clarity on this point: see
especially Parmenides 130b–e, where Parmenides presses Socrates on the extent of
the Forms. Socrates cannot provide a reason why he is sure there is a Form of
justice, beauty, and goodness, but not of hair, dirt, and mud. He also cannot make
up his mind about whether there is or is not a Form of human being, fire, and water.
Compare this with Hildebrand’s similar critique of Plato in What Is Philosophy?, 91:
“But apart from the erroneous assumption of a previous existence, his explanation
has other great weaknesses. It does not at all explain why an apriori knowledge is
possible with respect to certain objects and impossible with respect to others. Why
does such a reminiscence occur in the case of geometrical figures and not in the case
of a dog or of an oak?”
fus-qd1001-all.indd 121 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Republic 596a; nor a Form of physical elements like Fire, as it says in Timaeus
51b; nor of artifacts like the archetypal Bed in Republic 597a–d or the Form
of the weaving Shuttle in Cratylus 389b–d, all of which would merely be
“unities of a genuine type” in Hildebrand’s classification; but there would be
a Form of Goodness, Piety, Beauty, and Justice as well as mathematical and
geometrical objects because these are essentially necessary unities, capable of
yielding genuine insights.
There are at least two other metaphysical problems in Plato that Hilde-
brand is able to advance significantly though not fully resolve. First, while it
is unclear to what extent Plato recognizes different kinds of ideal objects or
structure within the ideal realm, Hildebrand decisively recognizes different
kinds of ideal objects, such as Essences, propositions, numbers, and values
as well as a certain amount of structure within the ideal realm. For example,
he maintains that there is a certain amount of organization among value-
families: moral, aesthetic, and vital. Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
Hildebrand admits ideal objects without undermining the ontological status
of objects in the empirical world. For Plato, sensible objects are inherently
inferior to intelligible ones, and there is a great divide between them. But
for Hildebrand, real being and ideal being each have their own characteristic
perfections; and in his words, “The link between individual, real existents
and these realities which possess, thanks to their necessary essence, an ‘ideal
existence,’ is a very deep and close one.”31
Hildebrand’s phenomenological achievement in What Is Philosophy? is
much more than a footnote to Plato. It is a critical rehabilitation, yet also a
decisively original development: a return to, but also an advancement beyond,
the essential insight of the greatest of the ancient philosophers—the “discov-
ery of the world of Ideas.”32 Hildebrand’s distinction between the three
kinds of unity, and especially the connection between necessary essential
unities and a priori knowledge, ranks alongside Kant’s distinction between the
analytic and the synthetic, Aristotle’s distinction between substance and acci-
dent, and Plato’s distinction, to speak somewhat anachronistically, between
empirical and a priori knowledge itself. A comprehensive study of the close
kinship between Plato and Hildebrand, as well as between Plato and realist
phenomenology in general, has yet to be written.33 But no dissertation is
31
What Is Philosophy?, 220.
32
Ibid., 116.
33
Though significant strides have been made by Josef Seifert: see his “Essence
and Existence: A New Foundation of Classical Metaphysics on the Basis of
‘Phenomenological Realism,’ and a Critical Investigation of ‘Existentialist Thom-
ism,’” Aletheia: An International Journal of Philosophy 1 (June 1977): 17–157; Back to
“Things in Themselves”: A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism (New York:
fus-qd1001-all.indd 122 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Justin Keena 123
required to recognize that the heart of their connection lies in their joint
belief that the possibility of the highest kind of human knowledge depends
on the existence of ideal Forms.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); “Die Realistische Phänomenologie als Rückgang
auf Platon und als kritische Reform des Platonismus,” Aletheia: An International Jour-
nal of Philosophy 6 (1993–1994), 116–62; “Platón y la fenomenología realista: Para una
reforma crítica del platonismo,” Logos: Anales Del Seminario de Metafísica 29 (1995),
149–70; Ritornare a Platone: La fenomenologia realista come riforma critica della dottrina platon-
ica delle idee (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2000).
fus-qd1001-all.indd 123 9/21/20 11:54 AM

ffirmation of Different Forms of
A
Individual Subjectivity in Karol Wojtyła
and Dietrich von Hildebrand
HrvojeVargić
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
Introduction
Emphasis on the subjectivity of the human person can be considered one

of the common traits of the personalistic movement to which both Karol
Wojtyła and Dietrich von Hildebrand belong.1 Both philosophers also use
the phenomenological method, which focuses on the phenomenon as it is
given in conscious experience. Receiving inspiration from personalism and
phenomenology, Wojtyła and Hildebrand make some of their most import-
ant philosophical contributions in affirming and illuminating the subjectivity
of the human person.
Still, a careful reading of both authors shows that they affirm subjectivity
in several different meanings. Besides deepening the understanding of the
matter, elucidating these different meanings can help us avoid possible equiv-
ocations with using the term subjectivity. Wojtyła himself notes that divergent
tendencies in philosophy give diametrically opposed form and meaning to
subjectivity.2 In this regard, it is worth noting that one of the characteris-
tic traits of Hildebrand’s philosophizing is to clarify different equivocations
1
See Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson, “Personalism,” in The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, spring 2020 edition, forthcoming, https://plato
.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/personalism/.
2
Karol Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and Community,” in Person and Community:
Selected Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 219.
© HrvojeVargić, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)
fus-qd1001-all.indd 124 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Hrvoje Vargić 125
present in philosophy, such as the equivocation of the terms feeling,3 will,4

being rooted in nature,5 bonum6 and the term subjectivity itself.7
We will follow a similar path, showing that there are at least three
different forms of individual subjectivity or three senses in which Wojtyła
and Hildebrand affirm subjectivity.8 We will analyze only individual subjec-
tivity in its different meanings, and we will leave aside all possible forms
of collective subjectivity, both because it remains underdeveloped in both
Wojtyła9 and Hildebrand10 as well as because collective subjectivity poten-
tially also contains manifold meanings that would demand a separate detailed
investigation.
3
Cf. Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affec-
tivity (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), 47.
4
Cf. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethics (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1972),
200.
5
Cf. ibid., 219.
6
Cf. ibid., 53–54.
7
Cf. Dietrich von Hildebrand, What Is Philosophy? Studies in Phenomenological and
Classical Realism (London: Routledge, 1991), 205.
8
John F. Crosby already recognized that the term subjectivity can have different
meanings. He distinguishes between the broader meaning of subjectivity (as opposed
to “cosmological,” or “objective” in the terminology we use in this paper) and
narrower meaning (as opposed to “collective” subjectivity). See John F. Crosby, The
Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1996), 83. We are also not excluding the possibility of discovering further meanings
of subjectivity either in Wojtyła and Hildebrand or generally.
9
In chapter 7 of his book Person and Act, Wojtyła notes that he will investi-
gate “acting-together-with-others” both objectively and subjectively. There he also
touches upon the notion of “quasi-subjectiveness” of the community, even though
he does not further develop the understanding of it. See Karol Wojtyła, Osoba i
čin (Split, Croatia: Verbum, 2017), ch. 7. On the basis of chapter 7 of the book
Person and Act, Wojtyła writes a paper, “The Person: Subject and Community,” where
he wants to re-examine the connection that exists between human subjectivity
and the structure of the human community. See Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and
Community.”
10
In his Metaphysics of Community, Hildebrand speaks about the “we” commu-
nities in contrast to “I-Thou” communities, even though he is not explicit in devel-
oping the understanding of any possible subjectivity of “we” communities, at least
not in this terminology. Still, he explicitly speaks about the Eigenleben as an individual
form of subjectivity. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft, Unter-
suchungen über Wesen und Wert der Gemeinschaft (Regensburg, Germany: Josef Habbel,
1955).
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126 Different Forms of Individual Subjectivity in Karol Wojtyła
Threefold Meaning of Subjectivity
Another one of the characteristic traits of Hildebrand’s philosophizing is

that he takes a certain via negativa to elucidate a phenomenon first by distin-
guishing it from many different ways in which it can be misunderstood.11
In this way, we can start by saying that the affirmation of subjectivity in
Hildebrand and Wojtyła should in no way be conflated with subjectivism.
In his book Person and Act, Wojtyła invites us to distinguish clearly between
man’s “subjectivity,” which he is considering together with the analysis of
consciousness, and “subjectivism” as a mental attitude that he wants to avoid.
Subjectivism, as Wojtyła defines it, consists in the “complete separation of
experience from the act and in reducing moral values to the status of mere
contents of consciousness.”12 It absolutizes a certain aspect of the human
person—his consciousness—thus turning the person into a Cartesian res
cogitans. Consciousness, instead of being one aspect of the human person,
becomes identified with the subject himself. Subjectivism therefore necessar-
ily ends up in idealism, since the whole of reality is understood merely as a
content of consciousness and so loses its reality.
Here we can already see that subjectivism is also an analogical term that
appears in different senses, partially similar and partially different. We can
speak about anthropological subjectivism that identifies the human person
with consciousness, but there can also be epistemological, ethical, aesthetic,
and other subjectivisms. For example, epistemological subjectivism would
say that there is no truth independent of our subjectivity, that all claims are
merely subjective; ethical subjectivism would reduce the content of moral
values to subjective experiences; and so forth.
In his work, Hildebrand deals with several different meanings of the term
subjective that have a negative connotation.13 These meanings Hildebrand calls
“epistemological” in contrast to “ontological” subjectivity. The first among
these negative meanings refers to the situation when someone’s judgement
is determined by prejudice and not by objective reality. The second negative
meaning refers to a kind of egocentric self-reflection in which the person is
always interested in himself and never in the world outside him. The term
subjective is also used when some object is grasped as existing in reality, but it
11
For example, when speaking about the happiness of love, he starts by clarify-
ing two misunderstandings of happiness. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Nature of
Love (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), ch. 10. A similar approach we can
find in many other places in Hildebrand.
12
Wojtyła, Osoba i čin, 92.
13
For different meanings of the term subjective, see Hildebrand, What Is Philoso-
phy?, 205–9.
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Hrvoje Vargić 127
exists merely in our minds (like in a dream or hallucination). Here subjective

means that the object is relative to my individual mind at a given moment.
The fourth meaning goes a step further and says that all objects are relative
to man’s mind. This is a Kantian approach that argues that the noumena
are inaccessible to our mind, and we can only reach phenomena.14 All these
negative meanings of the term subjective share essential features with the
subjectivism we spoke of earlier. For this reason, when we speak of subjec-
tivism in this paper, we will also refer to these four negative meanings of the
term subjective.
Both Hildebrand and Wojtyła would clearly oppose subjectivism in all its
forms. One of Hildebrand’s most important ethical contributions is bringing
to light the important in itself, or value, which exists independently of us. In
his Aesthetics, he similarly argues in favor of the objectivity of beauty.15 At the
same time, avoiding subjectivism does not mean negating the subjectivity of
the human person; neither does it mean that subjectivity does not play a role
in comprehending truth, beauty, or goodness. Avoiding subjectivism means
not absolutizing the subjective aspect and not reducing the whole realm of
being to the aspect of subjectivity (and consequentially negating objectivity),
but it does not mean denying that subjectivity needs to play a role in under-
standing what is true or doing what is good.
If we focus on the anthropological realm, Wojtyła informs us that the
human person is both the subject and the object, both someone and some-
thing.16 Thus the dichotomy between subjectivism and objectivism breaks
down on the basis of the experience of human being.17 By investigating
the experience of the human person, we find both the subjective and objec-
tive aspect. Affirming subjectivity in its different senses also does not mean
negating objectivity. By putting focus on the subjectivity of the human
person, we can also discover his objectivity, since the person is objectively
14
Hildebrand speaks of one more positive sense of the term subjective that refers
to the fact “that the co-operation of a human mind is presupposed for certain data.”
For example, this is the situation with colors or the notions of “above” and “below.”
This is also an epistemological meaning, since it explains how some objects consti-
tute themselves only for a human mind. See ibid., 210. Let us also note that we are
not including this meaning of the term subjective to one of the meanings of subjectivity
affirmed by Wojtyła and Hildebrand. Even though it is a positive term, this term
does not refer to the subjectivity of an individual person we are dealing with here but
to an epistemic character of objects of cognition.
15
See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics, vol. 1, trans. Brian McNeil (Steuben-
ville, OH: Hildebrand Project, 2016), ch. 1.
16
Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981), 21.
17
Cf. Karol Wojtyła, “Subjectivity and Irreducible in the Human Being,” in
Person and Community: Selected Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 210.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 127 9/21/20 11:54 AM

someone. Wojtyła will even go so far as to claim that the analysis of subjectivity
is foundational for grounding realistic positions in philosophy.18
So by analyzing the subjectivity of the human person in its different
meanings, neither we nor Wojtyła and Hildebrand fall into subjectivism. All
three forms of subjectivity, which will be analyzed here, need to be distin-
guished from subjectivism and also from immanentism and egocentricity.
This will become clearer as we further develop our analysis.
1. Subjectivity as the “I” Given in Self-Experience
In his early “Lublin Lectures,” Wojtyła criticizes the modern tendency to

absolutize consciousness and subjectivity and seems to affirm traditional
Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy without any reservations.19 In his later
philosophical works, he offers more explicit critique of Saint Thomas’s “very
objectivistic view of the person,” in which “it almost seems that there is no
place . . . for an analysis of consciousness and self-consciousness as totally
unique manifestations of the person as a subject.”20 This typically modern
analysis is lacking in Saint Thomas, since he analyzes the objective existence
of the person and not his lived experience.
Later this line of criticism in Wojtyła becomes even more apparent.
In his paper Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being, he criticizes the
“cosmological” anthropology, which characterized the history of philosophy
“from Greeks through the Scholastics to Descartes” and which implied that
the human being can be reduced to the rest of the world.21 The cosmo-
logical understanding of the human person, which culminated in B oethius’s
definition of the person as rationalis naturae individua substantia, marked a
“metaphysical terrain” for the proper understanding of the human person
but nevertheless failed to grasp that which is uniquely human and thus irre-
ducible to the rest of the world—human subjectivity. Thus Wojtyła’s mature
18
19
For example, in the paper “The Problem of the Separation of Experience
from the Act in Ethics,” Wojtyła criticizes Kant and Scheler and affirms Aristo-
tle and St. Thomas: “At this point I am convinced that the ethics of Aristotle and
St. Thomas Aquinas is based on a proper relation to experience and, moreover, that
their view of the ethical act is the only proper and adequate description of ethical experi-
ence.” See Karol Wojtyła, “The Problem of the Separation of Experience from the
Act in Ethics,” in Person and Community: Selected Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1993),
42–43. He maintains this position throughout the early period.
20
Karol Wojtyła, “Thomistic Personalism,” in Person and Community: Selected
Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 170.
21
Wojtyła, “Subjectivity and Irreducible in the Human Being,” 211.
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Hrvoje Vargić 129
work is centered around the attempt to interpret the personal subjectivity of

the human person.22
In order to understand the human person in his fullness, Wojtyła suggests
that we need to understand his lived experience.23 Man’s lived experience is
not captured by Aristotelian categories, not even those that seem closest to
it, such as agere and pati. In Wojtyła’s words, “When the dynamic reality of
the human being is interpreted in Aristotelian categories, there is in each
case . . . an aspect not directly apprehended by such a metaphysical interpre-
tation or reduction, namely the aspect of lived experience as the irreducible,
as the element that defies reduction.”24
For this reason, Wojtyła argues that the cosmological understanding of the
human being must be complemented by the personalistic one. To understand
the human being—as a unique and unrepeatable person—personalistically, meta-
physical interpretation is insufficient. Instead, what is needed is the phenome-
nological method, which enables us to permeate cognitively the “whole essence
of the lived experience.”25 Phenomenological analysis allows us to stop at that
which is irreducible and to apprehend the subjective structure of lived expe-
rience. This subjective structure of the lived experience is connected to the
ontological structure of the person, so through the lived experience, we are
also able to know the human person as a personal subject (in the third meaning
of subjectivity we will come to later). Thus phenomenological analysis is not
just description of the individual phenomena in consciousness but is a penetra-
tion into the personal structure of the human being. As was noted earlier, the
subjectivity of the human person is also something objective.
The subjectivity of the human person that becomes apprehended
through the phenomenological method is that which is uniquely human and
which should be adequately grasped. Due to the uniquely human charac-
ter of this form of subjectivity, in his later works Wojtyła calls it “personal
subjectivity.”26 Lived experience discloses here the person as a subject who
experiences his acts and inner happenings, and with them he also experi-
ences his own subjectivity. To be able to understand the human being in
22
See Wojtyła, Osoba i čin.
23
Wojtyła here relies on the Husserlian distinction between Erfahrung and Erleb-
nis, where Erfahrung signifies the objective content of experience or of man’s direct
contact with reality and Erfahrung signifies the subjective dimension of experience
reflected in consciousness. When Wojtyła speaks about the lived experience, he is
referring to Erlebnis. Cf. Alfred Wierzbicki, “Introduction,” in Man in the Field of
Responsibility (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011), 8.
24
25
Ibid., 216.
26
Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and Community,” 224–25.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 129 9/21/20 11:54 AM

the context of lived experience, the aspect of consciousness needs to be intro-

duced. In consciousness the human being is revealed as a concrete self, as a
self-experiencing subject.
This irreducible subjectivity also refers to “everything in the human being
that is invisible and wholly internal and whereby each human being, myself
included, is an ‘eyewitness’ of his or her own self—of his or her own human-
ity and person.”27 My lived experience discloses not only my actions and
my inner happenings but also my personal structure of self-determination by
which I possess and govern myself. Thus I appear to myself as assigned to
myself and in need of continuously monitoring and affirming myself. This
self-possession and self-governance is completely internal and immanent.
Even more, Wojtyła adds, “it is a real endowment of the personal subject; in
a sense, it is this subject. In my lived experience and self-possession and self-governance,
I experience that I am a person and that I am a subject.”28 This self-possession and
self-governance are the root of morality, and for this reason, morality is the
extension of personality.
Since the man is given to himself in the lived experience as an “I,” analy-
sis of this experience can open up new possibilities for understanding man’s
subjectivity.29 The human person can be understood both objectively, as a
being, and subjectively—through consciousness. This consciousness we need
to investigate if we want to understand the man as a subject, as a personal
“I.” Since the man not only acts consciously but also has the conscious-
ness of himself acting, analyzing man’s acts allows us to reveal the aspect of
consciousness.30 Consciousness is present in the man’s act; it both precedes
the act and comes after it.
For Wojtyła, consciousness does not have the function of cognizing the
object; its function is not to deepen the intellectual intuition of the object,
as some phenomenologists maintained. Indeed, it is not only cognitively
that man enters into the world of other men and objects and even discovers
himself there as one of them: he also has as his possession all this world
in the image mirrored by consciousness, which is found in his innermost
personal life. For consciousness not only reflects but also interiorizes in its
own specific manner what it mirrors, thus capturing it in the personal “I.”
Consciousness needs to be distinguished from and connected to self-
knowledge in which the man objectifies his “I” and cognitively penetrates
27
28
Ibid. (emphasis in original).
29
30
Wojtyła distinguishes between two ways of using the words conscious and
consciousness. The first is attributive, and it refers to conscious acting. The second is
used as a noun when we are speaking about consciousness of acting. See ibid., 57.
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Hrvoje Vargić 131
it, so to speak, from the “outside.” The “object” of self-knowledge is the

“I” as the object. Self-knowledge coincides with consciousness insofar as
the “object” of consciousness is also “I,” with which it is subjectively (and
not objectively, like in self-knowledge) connected.31 Consciousness does not
objectify the “I” as self-knowledge does, but it appears “on the back” of the
cognitive process of objectifying knowledge by mirroring it. It also appears
more on the “inside” in the personal subject, and precisely for this reason,
consciousness interiorizes and subjectifies cognitive data.
For Wojtyła, consciousness has two basic functions: the mirroring and
the reflexive function.32 Consciousness mirrors the acts and their relation
to the “I” on the basis of self-knowledge. Thus the mirroring function rests
on the objectifying knowledge of the “I” as an object. Still, consciousness
does not just reflect everything that is the object of cognition, but in a special
way it penetrates and illuminates it, and in this illumination, it also mirrors it.
Moreover, consciousness is the sphere in which the “I,” manifesting itself as
an object of self-knowledge, at the same time, from the inside lives its own
peculiar subjectivity in its fullness. This brings to light the second function
of consciousness, the reflexive one.33 This function, even more foundational
than mirroring, forms man’s lived experience, which allows him to experi-
ence his own subjectivity in a special way. For this reason, consciousness
allows us not just to observe our acts from the inside (introspection) but
also to experience from the inside the acts as acts and as our own. In this
way, consciousness is able to subjectify that which is objective. This subjec-
tification is to some extent identifiable with lived experience, or at least in
lived experience we become aware of it. This is also true about objective
moral values. Here the act and the objective moral good and evil become a
man’s full subjective reality and reach their fulfilment in man’s subjectivity. In
this way, also, consciousness subjectifies the whole intentional world of the
person directed toward the world of objects. We can analyze this world in
its objective content and in its mirroring in consciousness. At the same time,
after this world becomes the content of experience, it definitely enters the
world of subjectivity of every human “I.”
This reflexive function of consciousness is naturally oriented toward the
subject, and it brings to prominence his subjectivity in lived experience. In
this way, consciousness constitutes the subjectivity of the experienced “I”:
31
Obviously, the “I” for consciousness is not an “object” in the strict sense like
in the case of self-knowledge, since “I” in consciousness is experienced subjectively.
The term object is here used analogically. Cf. ibid., 66.
32
Cf. ibid., 72–84.
33
In his later works, Wojtyła calls this function the “function of internalization.”
See Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and Community,” 231.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 131 9/21/20 11:54 AM

“In mirroring (due to self-knowledge), the man, who is a subject and consti-
tutes his own ‘I’, always presents himself as an object. The reflexive turn of
consciousness causes that the object, just because it is from the ontological
point of view the subject, by experiencing from the inside his own ‘I’, at the
same time experiences himself as a subject.”34 In this sense, then, we can
say that subjectivity is the “experienced ‘I,’” but it is always in the integral
connection to the ontological stratum of the person of which we will speak
more later. Consciousness is then not just an aspect but an important dimen-
sion of the “I” insofar as it constitutes its subjectivity in the experiential
sense.35 It makes possible that the human suppositum can be constituted as
an “I.” It also discloses the man “inwardly,” and because of that, it discloses
him in his specific distinctness and unique concreteness. The reflexive func-
tion of consciousness consists in this disclosing, and because of it, man can
live “inwardly.”36 In the lived experience, all of man’s potentialities actualize
themselves in a subjective way.
To conclude, we can say that consciousness is grounded in being, but it
does not just mirror being: it is a specific subjectification and personalization
that demands a separate and distinct analysis. We can describe certain character-
istic traits of subjectivity in this sense: it is manifested in lived experience, and
to an extent identified with it, it is constituted by consciousness in its mirroring
and especially reflexive function. It enables the human being to experience his
“I” from the inside, and in it, the personal subject fully actualizes himself.
2. Subjectivity as Eigenleben
In Hildebrand, we find the affirmation of subjectivity in the second sense.

He also makes a turn to personal subjectivity, which characterizes the mod-
ern way of philosophizing. Similarly to Wojtyła, Hildebrand takes very seri-
ously the characteristic acts of the person, such as knowing, responding,
and loving, and “tries to understand the person through his many analyses
of the acting of the person.”37 One of Hildebrand’s biggest philosophical
34
35
Cf. ibid., 78.
36
This “inwardness” is accompanied by a certain “in-selfness” or a non-transitive
dimension of subjectivity, connected to ontological subjectivity of the human being
or suppositum (the third meaning of subjectivity in this paper). See Wojtyła, “The Person:
Subject and Community,” 227.
37
John F. Crosby, “The Philosophical Achievement of Dietrich von Hilde-
brand. Concluding Reflections on the Symposium,” Aletheia: An International Journal
of Philosophy V (1992): 321.
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Hrvoje Vargić 133
contributions is the affirmation of the transcendence of the human person

in a response to value. Nevertheless, he did not affirm this transcendence
at the expense of the subjectivity of the person.38 He clearly elucidated the
fact that subjectivity and transcendence do not exclude but complement
each other.
Hildebrand encapsulates one form of the subjectivity of the human
person with the term Eigenleben. The direct meaning of this term would be
“one’s own life” or “the life proper to oneself,” but an appropriate transla-
tion for this term is hard to find in the English language. Still, John F. Crosby
in his translation of Hildebrand’s book The Nature of Love proposed that
Eigenleben should be translated as subjectivity, even though he himself was
not completely satisfied with this translation.39 One of the concerns with
translating Eigenleben as subjectivity is the often negative connotation that the
term subjective bears. It is worth touching upon this point briefly in order to
elucidate the positive sense in which Hildebrand affirms the subjectivity of
the human person.
Hildebrand himself makes a striking contrast between “important in
itself ” and “merely subjectively satisfying.” To describe these different cate-
gories of importance,40 Hildebrand brings forth a highly intuitive compari-
son of two situations. In the first, someone gives us a compliment, and in the
second, we witness a generous action of someone forgiving a grave injury.41
The two situations clearly motivate us in different ways. The compliment
motivates us as something merely subjectively important, since we are aware
that it has the character of importance only if it pleases us, while the act of
forgiveness strikes us as something important in itself, since its importance is
not drawn from any relation to our pleasure or satisfaction. In other words,
subjectively satisfying acts are always pleasurable or agreeable for someone, while
the act of forgiveness is not noble or good first and foremost for someone,
but it is intrinsically such.42
One of essential differences between the important in itself and the
subjectively satisfying is that they address different spheres in the human
person. This fact also increases the negative connotation associated with
38
Cf. ibid., 323.
39
Cf. Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 200. Since no better translation was offered
by other authors, we will mostly use the German term Eigenleben without translation,
and in some places we will follow Crosby by using subjectivity in the same meaning as
Eigenleben.
40
Importance is that what lifts the being out of neutrality and gives it a character
of bonum or malum. Cf. Hildebrand, Ethics, 24.
41
See ibid., 34.
42
The intrinsically important Hildebrand terms value. ibid., 35.
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“subjectivity” in that which is “subjectively satisfying,” since the important

in itself addresses the free spiritual center of a person, and the attraction of
the subjectively satisfying tends to dethrone this center by lulling us into a
state where we yield to instinct: “Its appeal is insistent, ofttimes assuming the
character of a temptation, trying to sway and silence our conscience, taking
hold of us in an obtrusive manner.”43 Even though there can of course be
legitimate as well as illegitimate ways of enjoying the subjectively satisfying
goods,44 indulging in subjectively satisfying goods has the tendency to further
close us in on our self-centeredness, while the intrinsically important elevates
and liberates us from our self-centeredness.45 In responding to the important
in itself, there is a submission of ourselves to it, while we conform subjec-
tively satisfying objects to ourselves.46 From these two facts we can already see
why “subjective” in the “subjectively satisfying” bears negative connotations.
Nevertheless, there is a different and positive sense in which subjectivity
is affirmed by Hildebrand, as in the term Eigenleben. Hildebrand mentions
in the very beginning that Eigenleben can be used in a broader and narrower
sense. The first sense is being equated with conscious existence of a person
or all the conscious experiencing of an individual person considered apart
from the content that is experienced.47 It seems that this sense can be iden-
tified with the first form of subjectivity we analyzed in this paper—namely,
subjectivity as conscious self-experience. The focus here is on the conscious
experience of the person and not on the objective content of that which
is experienced (even though we highlighted that these two aspects are always
integrated in the human person who is both the subject and the object).
The second sense in which the term Eigenleben can be used relates not
to all things that I consciously experience but only to those that specifically
“have to do with me and my concerns and that refer in particular to my
happiness.”48 These are the things that concern me as this unrepeatable indi-
vidual and stand in relation to my happiness. For those things, it can be said,
“Tua res agitur” (“Your personal concern is at stake”). They are addressed
43
Ibid., 38.
44
Cf. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Moralia: Nachgelassenes Werk, Gesammelte Werke,
IX (Regensburg, Germany: Josef Habbel, 1980), 135–44.
45
Cf. Hildebrand, Ethics, 39.
46
Cajthaml and Vohánka rightly note that this contrasting feature between the
subjectively satisfying and important in itself is “not another essential distinction of
the two kinds of importance. Rather, it concerns the different types of responses
that are given to these kinds of importance.” See Martin Cajthaml and Vlastimil
Vohánka, The Moral Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand (Washington, DC: Catholic
47
Cf. Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 201.
48
Ibid.
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Hrvoje Vargić 135
specifically to me and not to another person. Hildebrand affirms and further

elucidates subjectivity in the second, narrower sense. At the same time, he
insists that subjectivity in this meaning should not be equated with egocen-
tricity. To have Eigenleben in this sense is something entirely positive; this kind
of subjectivity is a characteristic of a man as a spiritual person, and it is
deeply connected with his metaphysical condition and his dignity.
In the deepest part of this Eigenleben is the dialogue between man and God,
where “tua res agitur” applies most profoundly. This subjectivity confronts
us with the metaphysical situation of man in the most serious sense. Obvi-
ously, this dialogue with God represents the deepest possible subjectivity, but
the term can also legitimately apply to everything that grows out from natural
and instinctive solidarity we have with ourselves, and in this way, it is ordered
to the sphere of happiness. This solidarity comes from the fact that “I need
no self-love to take an interest in my well-being,” whereas “the interest of
another person does not necessarily affect me” if I do not have a loving
attitude toward that person.49 This subjectivity encompasses my being; my
life; my health; and things such as professional and personal success, welfare,
and economic conditions as well as all that which traditionally was captured
under the term appetitus, such as bodily drives and spiritual strivings rooted in
human nature. Nevertheless, Eigenleben can never be completely reduced to
appetitus or the natural solidarity we have with ourselves. These spheres, even
though not necessarily egocentric, are necessarily enclosed in the immanence
of the human person. On the other hand, Eigenleben is by no means confined
to the sphere of immanence, since higher kinds of happiness can only be
acquired by transcending oneself. To become truly happy, Hildebrand argues,
we need to transcend the immanence. Also, in love, Eigenleben can be closely
tied to benevolence. For example, when we love another person in Christ,
concern for the other becomes my personal concern to such an extent that
through it, the being of the beloved person becomes for me equally thematic
as my own being.50
Hildebrand develops his notion of Eigenleben precisely to clarify the
importance of subjectivity with regards to love (and not just conscious-
ness).51 This kind of subjectivity is so essential to the human person that it
should not be disregarded or suppressed in the name of false virtue or false
love. To understand more clearly what subjectivity means in this sense, we
can contrast it with examples that do not belong to subjectivity.52 The first is
49
Cf. ibid., 202.
50
Cf. Hildebrand, Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft, 109.
51
Cf. John Zizioulas, “An Ontology of Love: A Patristic Reading of Dietrich
von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love,” Quaestiones Disputatae 3, no. 2 (2013): 22.
52
Cf. Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 204–5.
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the example of someone taking an office (such as a judge or a public repre-

sentative) who is so taken by this role that he ceases to have any real Eigen-
leben. His subjectivity is completely identified by his role. A second example
is that of the person who lives for others to such an extent that his or her
own Eigenleben diminishes. These are so-called background persons who have
“modest” aspirations in relation to happiness and the goods that life has to
offer. The second example is not so dehumanizing as the first, and it is often
falsely presented as an ideal of a love of neighbor. But the self-transcendence
we find in the love of neighbor has nothing to do with the loss of Eigenleben
found in these two distortions. Eigenleben can also be diminished in the loyal
citizen of a totalitarian state who does not acknowledge any duty except that
to the state. He does not consider interest in his happiness as something
legitimate and completely abandons his subjectivity in order to become the
instrument of the collective.
Misunderstanding of Eigenleben can also go in the direction of eudae-
monism and altruism.53 Eudaemonism goes against man’s transcendence by
making him incapable of taking interest in something intrinsically important
and limits his motivation only to things that are beneficial for himself. Radi-
cal altruism, on the other hand, holds that man can achieve self-fulfillment
only if he abandons everything that is beneficial for him and lives only by
responding to the important in itself. Both are disastrous errors according
to Hildebrand. Failing to acknowledge man’s transcendence means failing to
recognize what distinguishes man from all other impersonal beings.54 Never-
theless, this capacity for self-transcendence should not be equated with radi-
cal altruism. Just as much as eudaemonism, altruism fails to understand the
specificity of man as a subject who possesses a center ordered to beneficial
goods and intrinsically tied to his human dignity. The altruistic misconcep-
tion is most visible in the example of love. Let us imagine that someone
says to the beloved person, “I love you for what you are, for your own sake,
but whether you love me in return I don’t care, and I don’t care if our love
is mutual and is a source of happiness for me; I want nothing for myself, I
just want your good and your happiness.”55 It is clear that such a statement
would not make the addressee happy; it could even insult him or her. Involv-
ing my subjectivity and expecting to be loved in return is the essential trait
53
Cf. ibid., 206.
54
Hildebrand criticized such positions already in his earlier ethical works, where
he claimed that “the capacity to transcend himself is one of man’s deepest charac-
teristics” and that “the specifically personal character of man as a subject manifests
itself in his capacity to transcend himself.” See Hildebrand, Ethics, 218.
55
John F. Crosby, “Introductory Study,” in Nature of Love (South Bend, IN:
St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), xxvi.
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Hrvoje Vargić 137
of some forms of love, especially love between man and woman.56 Altruistic
selflessness, which would negate this interest in my happiness in love, would
not elevate love to a higher and more noble plane but would twist its proper
meaning.
Understanding these errors leads us to see that Eigenleben represents
something essential for a man. Also, Eigenleben does not close man in on his
immanence, but it is complementary with transcendence. This is especially
visible in the moral sphere. When a moral call is addressed to a person by
the morally relevant value, he clearly needs to transcend himself in order to
commit to the morally relevant value. At the same time, this morally obliga-
tory call “pre-eminently contains the element of ‘tua res agitur’. In a certain
sense this call is my most intimate and personal concern, in which I experi-
ence the uniqueness of my self. Supreme objectivity and supreme subjectivity
interpenetrate here. One can even say that we have here the dramatic high-
point of the ‘tua res agitur’ in our earthly existence.”57 Even though I commit
to something valuable in itself, since the moral obligation is ultimately the call
of God, following the call or not is the decision that profoundly concerns
my own subjectivity.
A similar altruistic error is found with regards to the love of neighbor,
which has an element of stepping out of my subjectivity—but this “in no
way means abandoning it, losing interest in it or dying to it.”58 What happens
here is the change of theme, not dying to my Eigenleben. Love of neighbor
and the good of the other become a central theme, but my Eigenleben also
becomes actualized. Similarly, in the value-response, I transcend my subjec-
tivity, but I in no way abandon it. Negating or abandoning the Eigenleben
in radical altruism would in fact undercut the very possibility for a genu-
ine value-response, since there should be a “substance” of personality that
constitutes a healthy Eigenleben and that is essential to the subject making a
value-response.59 Eigenleben and transcendence in the value-response again
become organically interpenetrated. In every true value-response, volitional
56
Not all forms of love involve expecting to be loved in return so deeply and
explicitly as the love between a man and a woman. We can see this in parental love
and even more in the love of neighbor. See Hildebrand, Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft,
pt. 1, ch. 5.
57
58
Ibid., 210.
59
Cf. Matthew Lu, “Universalism, Particularism, and Subjectivity—Dietrich
von Hildebrand’s Concept of Eigenleben and Modern Moral Philosophy,” Quaestiones
Disputatae 3, no. 2 (2013): 187.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 137 9/21/20 11:54 AM

or affective, the submission of myself to value results in a greater degree of

self-possession.60
The importance of Eigenleben can also be clearly seen in other forms of
love. Every great love, whether love for a child, a friend, or a spouse, involves
a self-donation as a gift to the other person. In this self-donation, I do not
step out of my subjectivity, but I grant the beloved person the dominant
place inside this subjectivity. The other person in a way becomes the “lord”
of my subjectivity, and my happiness becomes dependent on his or hers. This
element is found in all forms of love except the love of neighbor, and it is
characterized by giving my heart to the other, my mysterious individual self,
which is a dimension of self-giving that precisely presupposes and includes
the full actualization of my subjectivity. Still, it must be stressed that the
happiness and salvation of the beloved person take priority over the happi-
ness of my union with him. Therefore, Eigenleben is subordinated to the need
to transcend myself. This is also important to avoid the danger of becoming
“stuck” in my Eigenleben, which Hildebrand warns about.61
Finally, Eigenleben plays an important role in handing myself uncondition-
ally to God. Here the most radical transcending happens, and I indeed give
away my subjectivity. Nevertheless, this does not result in the final death of
my subjectivity. As some authors have argued, “Christ’s call for a surrender
of one’s being is not a contradiction of life and existence. It is much rather
an affirmation of them.”62 In the free self-emptying of my subjectivity, I
receive it back from God “purified and transfigured and at the same time
tremendously enhanced and enriched.”63 Here we find the highest expres-
sion of the self-transcendence (which is here more self-abandonment) and
reconstituting of our Eigenleben in a fully new sense, which also actualizes it in
a qualitatively different and higher way.
3. Ontological Subjectivity
The third form of subjectivity is affirmed both by Wojtyła and Hildebrand,

even though it was already present in the philosophical tradition. It can be
argued that this form is the most “objective” among all three forms of sub-
jectivity. When Wojtyła criticized traditional philosophy for disregarding
60
Cf. Damian Fedoryka, “Authenticity: The Dialectic of Self-Possession, Reflec-
tions on a Theme in St. Augustine, Heidegger and von Hildebrand,” Aletheia: An
International Journal of Philosophy V (1992): 225.
61
See Hildebrand, The Nature of Love, 212–17.
62
Fedoryka, “Authenticity,” 235.
63
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Hrvoje Vargić 139
subjectivity, he nevertheless affirmed that it marked out the “metaphysical

terrain” on the level of the being in which subjectivity can be realized. Even
though the traditional conception treated the human being primarily as an
object, it still had to postulate that the human being is a separate suppositum (a
subject of existence and action) and a person (persona).64
In order to understand the whole dynamic reality of the person, Wojtyła
invites us to distinguish between being a subject, being cognized or objectivized
as the subject, and experiencing one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts
and experiences.65 This experiencing of one’s self is subjectivity in the first
sense we analyzed earlier. But this subjectivity depends on a deeper level of
subjectivity, on being a subject.
The man is first and foremost the subject of his being and acting. This
subject of the being and acting, which the human being is, was traditionally
marked by the term suppositum. The term suppositum defines the subject in a
completely objective way, by “abstracting from the aspect of lived experi-
ence, and especially from the lived experience of the subjectivity in which
the subject is given to himself as his own ‘I.’”66 The term suppositum abstracts
from the element of consciousness in which the man experiences himself
“inwardly” as a subject and where he lives his subjectivity though the lived
experience.
The term suppositum is used to express the subjectivity of the human
being in the metaphysical sense.67 This type of subjectivity under the term
suppositum is approached from the point of view of dynamism68 of the human
person understood metaphysically. In other words, to understand the suppos-
itum, we need the metaphysical analysis, while, as we noted earlier, to under-
stand subjectivity as given in self-experience, we need the phenomenological
method.69 Subjectivity in this sense represents the acting subject as an agent
of acts. Naturally, this metaphysical (or ontological) subjectivity of the
64
Cf. Wojtyła, “Subjectivity and Irreducible in the Human Being,” 211.
65
Cf. Wojtyła, Osoba i čin, 76.
66
Ibid.
67
Cf. Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and Community,” 222.
68
In Wojtyła’s terminology, dynamism is from the phenomenological point of
view what the potency is from the ontological point of view. They both refer to the
same reality in different ways: “Dynamism speaks of the structure of the acting and
the happening, potentiality of the underlying reality of such a structure.” See Rocco
Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyła: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 139.
69
Metaphysical in this sense Wojtyła does not understand as “beyond-the-
phenomenal” but as “through-the-phenomenal” or “transphenomenal,” which implies
that through the phenomena given in experience, we must also perceive the subject as
suppositum. See Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and Community,” 222.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 139 9/21/20 11:54 AM

human being is essentially connected to the subjective structure of the lived

experience, even though the term suppositum abstracts from it. Suppositum is
the ontological basis for experiential subjectivity.
Now the human being is always a concrete person, and the concrete
person is marked by the personal pronoun “I.” This “I” is broader in content
than the term suppositum because it encompasses both the subjectivity as self-
experience and ontological subjectivity, while suppositum expresses only the
second type: being as subjective foundation of being and acting.70 We can say
that in the “I,” the real subject and the experienced “I” are integrated in one
concrete whole. This way the “I” is the real subject who lives his subjectivity
“inwardly” and at the same time becomes constituted in the dimension of
consciousness. Every man, including myself, is given in experience as a total-
ity, as a real individual being, or as a suppositum, and at the same time as an “I.”
But to come to the full development of its actualization, suppositum needs the
dimension of consciousness. Also, prior to that, consciousness would not be
able to exist without the suppositum.
To further shed light on the ontological subjectivity, it is useful to intro-
duce another distinction. Wojtyła distinguishes between two objective struc-
tures: “man acts” and “something happens in man.”71 The first symbolizes
the activity of man and the second a certain passivity. These two structures
reflect two fundamental Aristotelian categories: agere and pati. This distinc-
tion was already present, at least to an extent, in the traditional concepts of
actus hominis and actus humanus. “That which merely happens in man” can be
connected with the concept of actus hominis, since these are happenings in a
man (not actions of a man) in which the man is, so to speak, passively “endur-
ing” these happenings, and he is not their conscious and primary cause. On
the other hand, “man acts” represents the acts (and not mere happenings) in
which the man experiences himself as effective cause of the act (actus huma-
nus). Only the latter can be called “acts” (actio), while the former Wojtyła calls
“activations” (passio).
The basis for this distinction is the experience of efficacy, or the expe-
rience “I am the one who acts.” This is often reflected in the saying, “Man
is the subject of his acts.” In this context, subjectivity (as lived experience) is
structurally connected to that which merely happens in man, while the efficacy
is structurally connected to man’s acting. When I act, the “I” is the cause of
the dynamization of the subject. On the other hand, subjectivity is the “I” that
is “below” the givenness of its dynamization.
We can see that subjectivity as lived experience and efficacy cannot be
reduced to each other, but both of them have to be founded on the more
70
Cf. Wojtyła, Osoba i čin, 77.
71
Cf. ibid., 97–99.
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Hrvoje Vargić 141
fundamental subjectivity, the ontological one. This ontological subjectivity

comes from the fact that it is the same man in his identity and unity who both
acts and to whom something happens. Man is thus, a “dynamic subject.”
When we say that “man is a subject” in this sense, we are expressing this
ontological subjectivity. As it was noted, this ontological subjectivity was
expressed under the term suppositum in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy.
The word itself comes from the Latin “sub-ponere,” which means “to put
under.” Ontological subjectivity symbolizes the fact that “under” every acting
and every happening in man is the man as a subject himself. For this reason,
ontological subjectivity is also the guarantor of the identity of this human
being in existence and activity.72 Subject as a being is the foundation of every
dynamic structure, every acting and every happening in man. This subject is
a real being that exists as concretely real.
This fact also enables the traditional adage, “Operari sequitur esse,” or
“action follows being.” Something firstly needs to exist in order to be able
to act. This could lead us to conclude that esse is identical with ontologi-
cal subjectivity. Still, this is not the case. In Wojtyła’s words, “Esse is not
suppositum, it is only its constitutive element. If that ‘something’ would not
exist, it would not be the source nor the subject of its whole characteristic
dynamism, acting and happening.”73 Suppositum is the being insofar as it is a
subject of existence and acting. Esse is the first act of every being and the first
and foremost factor of its dynamization.
In the fundamental analysis, the man-person should be recognized as an
ontological subject, as suppositum. The person is always a concrete man,
an individual substance in the Boethian definition. Nevertheless, we can also
see that there are other concrete individual substances in the world, so being
a person cannot just be reduced to it. Nor can the person be fully grasped
only through the rational nature it shares with other humans. The person is
something more than individualized nature, and it is also more than the Aris-
totelian natura rationalis. The person is someone (in contrast to something), and he
is also a suppositum. Still, human suppositum cannot be structurally identical to
all other supposita in the world.74 Its distinctive feature is that human suppositum
is always personal.
72
Cf. Wojtyła, “The Person: Subject and Community,” 223.
73
74
It is worth noting that in traditional scholastic philosophy, all self-subsisting
beings, and not just human beings, are supposita. This means that all self-subsisting beings
are ontological subjects, so by claiming without additional qualifications that a
human being is a suppositum, we would still not grasp its uniqueness. See, for example,
Kenneth L. Schmitz, “The First Principle of Personal Becoming,” Review of Metaphys-
ics 47, no. 4 (1994): 761.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 141 9/21/20 11:54 AM

The “being someone” of a person stretches deep down to the man’s

ontological subjectivity, to the very root of the being who is a subject. “The
person, or the man as a person, is a suppositum, the subject of a being and
existence,” and the man’s “esse is personal, not just individual in the sense
of an individualized nature.”75 Therefore, the ontological subjectivity of a
man is always a personal subjectivity. The man as a personal suppositum is very
different from any other nonpersonal suppositum.76
This is also a meaning in which Hildebrand affirms subjectivity. He speaks
of subjectivity that “refers to the ontological feature of being a ‘subject,’ a
person, and not to the epistemological feature of being an appearance for
a subject.”77 Subjectivity in this sense refers to something belonging to the
personal subject of knowing, willing, loving, and so forth. In this sense, we
can say that the act of knowing or willing is subjective, while things such
as buildings or roads are objective. This meaning, which Hildebrand calls
“ontological,” is obviously nothing negative or pejorative, Here the term
subjective can be used almost interchangeably with the term personal. From
this interchangeability, we can see that this is the same meaning as Wojtyłian
ontological subjectivity, which refers to personal suppositum. Hildebrand also
notes that the subjective acts of knowing, willing, loving, and so forth are at
the same time full objective realities. Also, because they are personal, these
subjective beings (or personal entities) are ontologically superior to objective,
nonpersonal beings.
Finally, we should explain the relationship between ontological subjec-
tivity and human nature. Human nature is often understood to be something
objective and universal in man that underlies all his subjective experiences,
actions, and other more “superficial” aspects of the human person. Since the
suppositum also underlies the actions and happenings in man as their basis,
the two might be conflated. In his philosophy, Wojtyła uses the Aristotelian-
Thomistic understanding of human nature. The Latin term natura comes
from nascor (to be born), and therefore nature is everything that is based on
the fact of birth as it’s possible consequence.78 In its different meanings, the
term nature always denotes some fundamental property of a subject, which
can sometimes (although not always) mean the same as “essence.” However,
75
Ibid., 112.
76
What mostly distinguishes the personal suppositum of a man from the higher
animals is his interior life. See Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility, 22. This insight is at
least partly at odds with traditional scholastic conception, which attributed some
form of interiority not just to animals but to all beings. See Schmitz, “The First Prin-
ciple of Personal Becoming,” 760–68.
77
78
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Hrvoje Vargić 143
it must be noted that nature can only be the abstract subject. We are abstract-
ing human nature from the concrete human beings in which it exists. We
understand it as an abstract being that remains in the relation to all human
beings. On the other hand, a human suppositum is always a concrete subject
of being and acting. The nature is integrated in the suppositum, and it is mani-
fested in that “which happens in man.” On the other hand, the “acts” disclose
the man as a person. The acts contain efficacy that reveals the concrete “I”
as the cause of acting conscious of itself.79 The nature, which is integrated
in suppositum—that is, the man who is a person—is a source of “activations”
when something that merely happens in man is actualized. On the other
hand, the person or the “I” of the personal suppositum is the source of “acts”
of a man. In Wojtyła’s words, “Nature itself does not act; it is the suppositum
that acts . . . and this suppositum is a person.”
Nature is, therefore, a different causal foundation of a subject than the
person. Nature and the person are the causes of different kinds of human
dynamism, but both are founded in the same “I.”80 Nature is a causal dyna-
mism of happenings in man, and the person is a causal dynamism of man’s
acts. This makes them distinct, and being founded in suppositum makes them
connected. This connection also calls for ever deeper integration of nature
and the person.
Conclusion
The investigations made in this paper have led us to discover three differ-
ent forms of individual subjectivity affirmed by Karol Wojtyła and Dietrich
von Hildebrand. This understanding allows us to avoid possible equivoca-
tions with using the term subjectivity as well as to avoid different kinds of
misunderstandings of the term. In the first meaning, subjectivity is given
in conscious self-experience, where I both interiorize and subjectivize the
intentional contents of the world of objects and at the same time experience
myself subjectively as an “I.” Analysis has also shown that this subjectivity is
something especially human that should not be left out of the equation if we
want to fully understand the human person. A merely objectivistic view of
the human person has been shown to be inadequate, and the same is the case
for subjectivism. Subjectivism absolutizes the aspect of consciousness and
reduces intentional contents to mere phenomena in consciousness (without
Cf. ibid., 117.

79
Jarosław Kupczak, OP, Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of
80
Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,

2000), 106–7.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 143 9/21/20 11:54 AM

any “outside” objectivity). It fails to realize that consciousness and personal

subjectivity are necessarily grounded in a more fundamental, ontological sub-
jectivity, which is a basis for all man’s acts and happenings and which grounds
his unity and identity. The man is always both subject and object. Finally,
there is also a narrower understanding of subjectivity that refers to all things
that address me personally and not someone else, such as my own happiness
or well-being. Understanding this form of subjectivity helps us understand
that there exists a legitimate interest in my well-being, which is not necessar-
ily egocentricity. It also helps us understand the importance of this kind of
subjectivity for love or morality and avoid false theories such as altruism or
eudaemonism, which either negate the importance of subjectivity or absolu-
tize it at the expense of the transcendence of the human person. Deepening
the understanding of subjectivity should also help us understand the human
person more fully and avoid erroneous theories that do not do justice to his
dignity.
Hrvoje Vargić
The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
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Dietrich von Hildebrand and
C. S. Lewison the Rationality
of Affective Value-Response
Arthur Martin
Eastern Kentucky University
Frequently, our responses to the objective world have been understood

through the faculties of the intellect or will; hence our responses to that
objective world have been understood exclusively in terms of belief and voli-
tion. When affectivity enters the account, it is understood as a side effect or
as a positive hindrance. This position, however, fails to properly account for
our experience of value as something that not only calls us to proper belief
and volition but also calls us to feel. For instance, we would find something
lacking in the man who is unable to rejoice at the birth of his child or mourn
the death of his friend. In this paper, I will argue that C. S. Lewis and Diet-
rich von Hildebrand offer us complementary accounts of value-response,
which when taken together paint a more wholistic portrait of human life.
Both understand affectivity not as merely irrational responses but as properly
grounded rational responses to objective values.
On February 24, 1943, at King’s College, Newcastle, C. S. Lewis presented
the first of three lectures that became his book The Abolition of Man. Lewis
critiques the work of two men, whom he refers to only as Gaius and Titius,
the authors of an English textbook for upper forms students, which Lewis
calls The Green Book. Lewis admits that he “shall have nothing good to say of
them”1 and critiques The Green Book for creating “men without chests.”2 For
Lewis, the chest represents the faculty capable of rationally grounded feelings,
or what he calls “sentiment.” Lewis argues that The Green Book, regardless of
Gaius’s or Titius’s intentions, strips students of the capacity to experience
feelings as proper responses to the real value of the world.
Gaius and Titius cut the chest out of their students by reducing all pred-
icates of value to mere emotional states. They tell the story of Coleridge at
the waterfall, where Coleridge approves of one tourist describing the cataract
1
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Harper Collins, 1974), 1.
2
Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 25.
© Arthur Martin, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)
fus-qd1001-all.indd 145 9/21/20 11:54 AM

146 Dietrich von Hildebrand and C. S. Lewis
as “sublime” and disapproves of another tourist who describes the same

cataract as “pretty.” Gaius and Titius contend that while the man who says,
“This is sublime,” appears to be commenting about the waterfall itself, he, in
fact, is not. Rather, the man is merely making a statement about his own feel-
ings. The man is actually saying that he has feelings associated with the word
sublime. In other terms, he has sublime feelings. They contend that we are
commonly victims of linguist confusion—we think we are ascribing some
value to an object, when in fact we are merely commenting about our own
feelings toward an object.
Lewis aptly points out that Gaius and Titius cannot actually hold the
position they claim to hold, or at least they cannot hold it with any consis-
tency. Gaius and Titius have mistranslated the emotional states of the person
speaking. The man who says, “This is sublime,” cannot actually mean, “I have
sublime feelings.” If it was granted that all predicates of value are merely
projections of a person’s feelings, those predicates are still an attempt to
describe the object. It is the waterfall that he perceives to be sublime. What he
feels within himself, even if mistaken, are feelings of response to this sublim-
ity. Lewis notes, “The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are
not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration.”3 If Gaius and Titius were
taken literally, it would lead to obvious absurdities.
Lewis sets the consensus of ancient wisdom against Gaius and Titius:
“Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the
universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be
either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not
merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence,
our contempt.”4 He calls this the “doctrine of objective value.”5 Accord-
ing to this doctrine, values are real features of the world; they exist indepen-
dent of human perception and human value-laden language.
The Green Book, despite only being an English textbook, exemplifies a
whole range of philosophical tendencies prominent in the twentieth century
with which Lewis takes issue. We may give these tendencies the broad label
“subjectivism,” a meta-ethical theory that denies the existence of objective
moral properties or moral “facts.” Subjectivism instead claims that objec-
tive moral properties or moral “facts” are the projections of our subject
onto the external world. In the second lecture, Lewis argues that someone
must either accept the “the doctrine of objective value,” which he now
calls the “Tao,” or reject it entirely. Everyone who argues that we should
reject the “doctrine of objective value” implicitly relies upon it. Lewis says,
3
4
5
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Arthur Martin 147
“The Innovator attacks traditional values (the Tao) in defense of what he first

supposed to be (in some special sense) ‘rational’ or ‘biological’ values. But
as we have seen, all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even
claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao.”6 Any
attack on the Tao requires that one position is better than another and thereby
relies on some notion of objective goodness.
Throughout The Abolition of Man, Lewis concerns himself with ratio-
nally grounded feeling and sentiment, primarily as a response to his oppo-
nents attempts to reduce all objective value to mere subjective feelings. His
comments about “feelings of veneration” are suggestive of affective value-
response, but he does not here provide a detailed phenomenology of affec-
tive response to apprehended objective value. What he does provide is the
insight that there is an objective Way, or Tao, of the cosmos that commands
all elements of human psychology. For the detailed phenomenology of affec-
tive value-response, we must turn to Dietrich von Hildebrand.
Hildebrand’s Phenomenology of the Heart
Hildebrand criticizes philosophy for frequently neglecting the affective sphere

and its center, the heart, as if the heart is a proverbial stepson, while the intel-
lect and will garner the full attention of sonship. Historically, the affective
sphere, if it was given any attention at all, was subsumed under the heading
of the passions, and thereby, “its irrational and nonspiritual character was
emphasized.”7 For us, however, to treat the entire effective realm under the
broad label of “feelings” would be a grievous failure to properly distinguish
between the vast diversity of “feelings,” which range from mere bodily sensa-
tions to spiritual experiences of love, deep contrition, or holy joy. Hildebrand
says, “The variety of experiences in the affective is so great that it would
be disastrous to deal with the entire sphere as something homogenous.”8
In order to avoid equivocation, Hildebrand introduces three main types of
affective experience or “feelings.” They are bodily feelings, psychic feelings,
and “affective value-response.”
Bodily feelings possess what Hildebrand calls “a clearly experienced rela-
tion to our body.”9 Take, for instance, the pain of a headache: when we have
a headache, we feel the pain as taking place in the body, and in the case of
6
7
Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity
(South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007), 4.
8
Hildebrand, The Heart, 5.
9
fus-qd1001-all.indd 147 9/21/20 11:54 AM

the headache, we feel the pain strictly limited to a particular part of our body.
Sometimes people who are suffering from a severe headache will point to
their temple or some specific part of their forehead and say, “I feel a splitting
pain right here.” They emphasize the exact bodily location of the pain, while in
other cases, we are unable to pinpoint the part of our body where the feeling
occurs. For example, after a long day of manual labor, the entire body feels
weary; every part of us suffers under a general physical fatigue. This “clearly
experienced relation to our body,” however, is present not only in pain
but also in pleasure. We can easily imagine the pleasure of a warm shower
or the pleasantness of sitting down to rest when we are tired. We experience
the pleasures as occurring within our bodies. In order to better understand
the unique “bodily index” of bodily feelings, it may be useful to contrast, as
Hildebrand does, the experience of sorrow and the experience of a head-
ache. As mentioned previously, the headache is felt as taking place in the
body itself—the sorrow, however, lacks this bodily character. When we expe-
rience sorrow, where do we feel it? Most certainly we do not experience it as
occurring in our bodies. Hildebrand says, “This bodily index is to be found
in the quality of these feelings as much as in the structure and nature of their
being experienced. This type of feelings and the bodily instincts are the only
kinds of feelings which have this phenomenological relation to our body.”10
In contrast to bodily feelings, there are psychic feelings or psychic
moods, which are simply the nonbodily feelings. Hildebrand uses the jolly
mood one might experience after several alcoholic drinks, a jolly tipsiness,
as an example of these feelings. He says, “This euphoria or its opposite state
of depression (which may follow real drunkenness) is certainly not simply
a bodily feeling, in distinction to bodily feelings connected to tipsiness, for
instance, a certain heaviness . . . These states of ‘high spirits’ or depression
are moods which do not have the index of bodily experiences.”11 In this
case, jolliness, while related to the body, does not actually occur in the body
as a localized or nonlocalized sensation does. rather, it is located nowhere in
the body. Unlike bodily feelings, psychic moods do not need to be caused by
bodily process; they can be entirely caused by psychic experiences. We can
slip into a depression or bad humor on account of a great stress or painful
conversation from the previous day. Even if the moods are caused by bodily
process, they do not present themselves in the same bodily index as pains
or pleasures; rather, we experience them as taking place in our subjective
inner experience. Hildebrand says, “But even if such moods are caused by
our bodies, they do not present themselves as the ‘voice’ of our bodies, for
they are not located in the body, nor are they states of the body. They are
10
11
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Arthur Martin 149
much more ‘subjective,’ that is, they are much more in the subject than the
bodily feelings.”12 Despite their separateness, often physic and bodily feel-
ings accompany and interpenetrate one another. For example, the person
who is jolly from alcohol may feel a warmth in his body as he drinks, which
in turn may contribute to his jolliness.
The third kind of affective experience Hildebrand calls “affective value-
responses.” This kind of affective experience differs even more from psychic
feelings than psychic feelings differ from bodily feelings and is distinguished
from mere psychic states because they possess “intentionality.” Unlike what
we commonly mean when we call something “intentional,” we do not mean
“intentional” in the sense of it meaning “purposefully.” Rather, intentionality
means a “conscious meaningful relation between a subject and an object.”13
While our bodily feelings are part of our subjective experience, our mood
seems to be much more “subjective” or “internal” to us as something that
comes from within us, while our bodily experiences seem to come more from
the outside. Here it may be easier to understand intentionality through the
lens of other faculties, such as the intellect or will.
When we say a person’s understanding is an intentional act, we simply
mean that the act of understanding has an object; understanding is always an
understanding of something, and it could not exist as the act that it is separate
from the thing understood. We mean the same thing when we call the act of
willing intentional; the act of willing is a willing of something and could not be
the act that it is apart from the conscious relation to the thing that is willed.
The same structure of intentionality is also present in an affective value-
response; Hildebrand says, “The character of intentionality is to be found
in every act of knowledge, in every theoretical response (such as conviction
or doubt), in every volitional response, and in every affective response.”14
We affectively respond to something. For instance, we may feel joy at the birth
of our niece, or we may feel sorrow about a friendship that is now broken.
We can, as Hildebrand does, contrast an affective response, which possesses
the structure of intentionality, with demonstrably nonintentional mood, such
as jolliness from alcoholic beverages. The reason for the tipsy person’s jolly
mood is not a consciously held object but merely the alcohol; they are not
jolly about something; rather, they are just jolly.
This distinction leads us to the second important difference between
psychic feelings and affective value-responses. Psychic feelings are always
“caused,” while affective responses are always “motivated.” According to
their intentional nature, affective responses are always conscious of their
12
Hildebrand, The Heart, 24–25.
13
14
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object—the object is the very reason for their response. For example, Hilde-
brand gives the example of joy at the recovery of a friend. He says, “In the
case of joy over the recovery of our friend, the link between this event and
our joy is so intelligible that the nature of this event and its value calls for joy.
And this means that our joy presupposes the knowledge of an object and its
importance, and the process by which the object in its importance engenders
the response is itself a conscious one.”15 Contrast this with the noninten-
tional state of jolliness after consuming alcoholic beverages. We know only
by experience that alcohol will produce feelings of conviviality in us. There
exists between our drinking and our jolliness “a link of efficient causality
only.”16
Additionally, intentionality distinguishes between spiritual states and
nonspiritual states; it is an essential element of any spiritual state. Hilde-
brand says, “Intentionality . . . is precisely one essential mark of spiritual
ity.”17 Therefore, nonintentional states, such as tipsy conviviality, are definitely
nonspiritual. For Hildebrand, while intentionality is a necessary condition of
spirituality, it is not sufficient for spirituality in its full sense. He says, “Inten-
tionality does not yet guarantee spirituality in its full sense.”18 In addition to
intentionality, a state must acquire the character of transcendence in order
to reach the fullness of spirituality. This kind of transcendence is best exem-
plified in value-response. Hildebrand says, “The spirituality of an affective
response is not yet guaranteed by formal ‘intentionality,’ for it requires in addi-
tion the transcendence characteristic of value-response.”19 When we respond
to value, we take our eyes off ourselves, our own subjective needs and desires;
we turn from that which would only be subjectively satisfying and focus on
those things that are intrinsically good. Hildebrand explains, “In the value-
response, it is the intrinsic importance of the good which alone engenders
our response and our interest; we conform to value, to the important in itself.
Our response is transcendent—that is, free from the merely subjective need
and appetites and from a merely entelechial movement—as is our knowledge
which grasps and submits to truth.”20 In all value-responsive acts, we resist
the temptation to turn back upon ourselves and measure everything in accor-
dance with our own subjectivity. Instead, we rise above ourselves, conforming
ourselves to the values that stand outside and above us.
15
16
17
18
19
20
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Arthur Martin 151
There is a great danger if we relegate the heart to proverbial stepson

status and place it in a secondary position behind the intellect and will. Lewis
says, “Famished nature will be avenged,” and we should not expect that we
can deny affectivity its rightful place in our lives and long escape the conse-
quences of our choices.21 The spiritual centers of man, the intellect, the
will, and the heart, interpenetrate one another. If we deny the role played
by any one of the three spiritual centers, it will not be long before the other
two centers cease to function properly and afflict us. A denial of affectiv-
ity’s proper place can only be the source of intellectual failures and voli-
tional shortcomings. The greatest danger in denying the heart, however,
lies in the atrophy of the heart itself. The atrophy of the heart will not result
in the complete annihilation of our subjectivity, but we stunt an unfolding
of a depth of our being, which is present only when every element of our
psychology properly responds to value.
The Heart and Its Place
An unwillingness to give the heart a place in our lives is a failure to com-

prehend the way value presents itself to us. Unless we encounter value as
something that commands our intellect, our will, and our affection, we do
not yet understand value. For instance, we would find something lacking in
the man who is unable to feel sorrow at the death of his friend; or to use an
example from Hildebrand, we would think the man who is unable to rejoice
at the recovery of a sick friend to be in error. If we were to reproach that
man for his lack of rejoicing, would we not challenge his apprehension of the
situation? There may be another reason behind his lack of joy, but in looking
for the cause, we would begin with his understanding of the situation. The
intuitive connection between the recovery of the man’s ill friend and the joy
is so intimate that we would be dumbstruck to find someone who does not
immediately perceive the connection. Hildebrand says, “In the case of joy
over the recovery of our friend, the link between this event and our joy is so
intelligible that the nature of this event and its value calls for joy. And this
means that our joy presupposes the knowledge of an object and its impor-
tance.”22 Our knowledge of an object falls short if we do not apprehend
the connection between its value and a proper affective response. The heart
needs the head, and an ill-functioning heart can be indicative of inaccurate
beliefs. Hildebrand says, “Spiritual affective responses always include a coop-
eration of the intellect with the heart. The intellect cooperates insofar as it
21
22
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is a cognitive act in which we grasp the object of our joy, our sorrow, our
admiration, our love. Again, it is a cognitive act in which we grasp the value
of the object.”23
Lewis also believes that when we encounter and apprehend value, it
places demands upon us; we are commanded to respond in certain ways, and
whether or not we are obedient to the demands of value, the call remains.
He says, “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes
are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is
and the kind of thing we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call
children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psycho-
logical fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but
to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we
make it or not.”24 In a moment of frank honesty, Lewis confesses he does not
enjoy the company of small children, but he admits that because he stands
within the Tao, the objective Way of the cosmos, his lack of enjoyment is
a fault. He compares himself to someone who is tone-deaf or color-blind,
to a person who fails to perceive reality in its fullness.25
True affective value-response requires an apprehension of the intimate
connection between value and the response that it demands lest affectiv-
ity be reduced to merely the unfolding of some biological or psychological
process and not a conscious intentional response to value. The heart needs
the intellect, and by keeping careful watch over our affective experiences, we
might be able to discern some dissonance between what we claim to believe
and what we actually feel. By these means, our affective states can be judged
to be rational or irrational. Lewis says, “Because our approvals and disap-
provals are thus recognitions of objective value responses to an objective
order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we
feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason
(when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in
itself, a judgement; in that sense emotions and sentiments are alogical. But
they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can and should obey
it.”26 There are many philosophical positions contrary to affectivity; Lewis
singles out a kind of man, the “common place rationalist,” who holds an
affective attitude because he believes affectivity is opposed to objectivity and
in the spirit of “being more objective,” separates the heart from intellect. For
the commonplace rationalist, affective response is only a positive hindrance
23
24
Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 18–19.
25
26
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Arthur Martin 153
to understanding an object, a stumbling block in the pathway to truth. The

second kind of philosophy that is opposed to Lewis and Hildebrand’s view
of affectivity is a range of philosophical tendencies we might call “stoicism.”
The stoic in this sense slights the role of affectivity on the grounds that if we
really understood the cosmic order, then we would see there is no real reason
to feel anything; there is no reason to rejoice in the birth of one’s son, nor is
there a reason to mourn the death of our friend. True happiness is a matter
of only the intellect and will; we ought to put our affections aside because
they hamper our freedom and lead us away from correct belief and proper
action.
The Enlightenment’s favor toward epistemological sources that it
deemed to be more “rational”—namely, the scientific method and its affec-
tively detached processes—thrust a kind of “rational scientism” into the
mainstream of Western thought. For example, Dr. Spock from the 1966 Star
Trek is an extreme caricature of the man I have in mind. Before we go on,
it is worth giving the rationalist his due. He can be a well-intended person
with a real desire for the truth; he does really believe that truth stands over
and above him and places real demands on his beliefs, that truth cannot
be whatever he merely wills to believe. In this way, the commonplace ratio-
nalist is the enemy of the whole range of philosophical tendencies known
as “subjectivism,” hence he possesses some nobility. Nevertheless, he has
built up in his mind a tension between objectivity and affectivity because he
fears affectivity is too subjective and will only cloud his vision and hamper
his pursuit of objectivity. The commonplace rationalist fears being moved
by his own personal feelings into an incorrect view of reality, and to some
degree, his fear is justified.
The revelation that our affections can be in conformity to reason gives
us the corollary that our affections can be out of conformity with reason;
we are equally capable of irrational feelings as we are of rational feelings.
For instance, how often do we make mountains out of molehills because
we skipped lunch or because we simply did not get enough sleep the night
before? We may mistake unintentional psychic moods as rationally grounded
responses when their origins are in nothing more than a poor night’s sleep
or an uncomfortable discussion from the day before. When our intellect and
wills do not conform to the intelligible order of value in the cosmos, when
they fail to conform to the Tao, we act irrationally. Just as it is important to
free our intellects and wills from irrationality, so it is important to free our
hearts from emotions that are not motivated by value-response.
What the commonplace rationalist fails to understand is that the very
nature of value essentially demands affective response along with an intellec-
tual response and volitional response; he builds a false dichotomy between
the intellect and the heart solely because the heart may usurp its proper place
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and guide the intellect. The commonplace rationalist shares some ground
with Gaius and Titius, who also fear an excess of sentimentality and propa-
ganda. Lewis thinks, “Gaius and Titius may have honestly misunderstood the
pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them
swayed by emotional propaganda—they have learned from tradition that the
youth is sentimental—and they conclude the best thing they can do is to
fortify the minds of young people against emotion.”27 While their intentions
are to respond to legitimate concerns, they are nevertheless misguided. Hilde-
brand also criticizes those who hold antiaffective attitudes: “The people who
are always on the lookout for sentimentality and emotionalism direct their
suspicion against the most specific realm of the affectivity, namely the voice
of the heart. Legitimate as their fight against sentimentality is, they unfor-
tunately condemn the entire sphere of tender affectivity as being merely
subjective, ridiculous, and soft.”28 The commonplace rationalist, however,
has failed to make an important distinction between difference senses of
the word subjective.
There is a pejorative of subjective and personal sense of subjective. In the
pejorative sense, to call something “subjective” means it subscribes to the
meta-ethical theory of subjectivism. On the other hand, there is the personal
sense of “subjective,” which describes the inner life of persons who experi-
ence phenomena from their interiority; it is a defining characteristic of our
personhood. Hildebrand says, “To see all tender affectivity in the light of all its
possible perversions is in reality a manifestation of a certain anti-personalism
for which everything personal is necessarily ‘subjective’ in the pejorative sense
of the term. For these anti-personalists the very notion of the person bears
the character of bad subjectivity, something which is egocentric and cut off
from what is ‘objective’ and valid.”29 The commonplace rationalist, in view-
ing the heart only as aided perversions of the intellect, views the elements of
personal subjectivity as necessarily being “subjective” in the pejorative sense.
As we have seen already, there is an intimate connection between the
apprehension of a value and experiencing the demands put on us by that
value. Once we apprehend the value in the birth of a child or the marriage
of a friend, we can see that these events are things over which it is proper to
rejoice and improper to feel nothing or something negative. True objectivity
must take the object as it is in itself and respond accordingly. Hildebrand
says, “True objectivity implies, as we have pointed out in several works, that
an attitude conforms to the true nature, theme, and value to which it refers.
An act of knowledge is objective when it grasps the true nature of the object.
27
28
29
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Arthur Martin 155
In this case objectivity is equivalent to adequacy, validity, and truth. Again, a

judgement is objective when it is determined by the matter or theme in ques-
tion and not by any prejudice. And an affective response is objective when
it corresponds to the value of the object.” In his quest for objectivity and
truth, the commonplace rationalist rejects this intimate link between value
and affective responses. He does not take the object as it presents itself, and
his perception of the situation falls short of the way things really are. He
does not seriously entertain the question, How might this value command
me to feel? True affective response is aware of the object as the very theme
of the rejoicing or sorrow, and as soon as the object is removed and the
act loses its formal intentionality, it collapses upon itself and ceases to be a
value-response. The true affective value-response is permeated and pene-
trated with an awareness of the value that motivates it; this is in fact proper
to the value itself, to the value’s nature and theme. For instance, the lover
firmly fixes his eyes on his beloved and knows the beloved motivates his joy.
This is contrary to the pejorative meaning of “subjective” response in which
a person consults his own feelings and whims and is only concerned with
how he reacts to events. He does not care for values present in the events and
how, by their very nature, they might command him. Rather, in an improperly
subjective response, he closes his eyes, withdraws into himself and his own
feelings, and imagines himself above the values that command and judge
him.
The commonplace rationalist in his disdain of the personal sense of
“subjective” present in affectivity ironically falls into the pejorative sense
of “subjective.” he refuses to take objects as they actually exist with their
affective call and instead prefers his own ideas. He stands above them
and justifies his coldness and lack of affectivity in the name of neutrality and
objectivity but lacks any reason for his conclusions other than his own pref-
erence. Ironically, he is not a lover of truth but a lover of his own ideas.
He is what he claims to detest: he is a subjectivist. The commonplace ratio-
nalist like the “debunkers” and “innovators” lampooned by Lewis cannot
select parts of the Tao without accepting the whole Tao. The commonplace
rationalist, who rightly ought to love truth and denounce subjectivity, can
only appeal to the goodness of truth to justify his claims, but he rebelliously
rejects truth’s continuous call for his affective response. Hildebrand wonder-
fully denounces the cool, commonplace rationalists and his ironic fall into
subjectivism:
It is high time that we free ourselves from the disastrous equat-

ing of objectivity and neutrality. We must free ourselves from
the illusion that objectivity implies an exclusively observing
and exploratory approach. No, objectivity is found only in the
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attitude which corresponds adequately to the object, its meaning

and its aura. To be neutral, or to remain noncommittal when an
object and its value demands an affective response or the inter-
vention of our will, is to be utterly unobjective. Therefore, every
anti-affective trend is in reality sheer Subjectivism because, in
responding to the cosmos, it fails to conform to the real feature
and meanings of the cosmos, to the beauty and depth of the
created world and its natural mysteries.30
Among those who are opposed to the affective realm is the kind of per-
son we might call the “stoic.” The stoic, in this sense, is not actually a fol-
lower of Stoicism proper, but rather he is someone who denies the place of
affectivity in all situations. He attempts to deliberately cut himself off from
all affectivity. Typically, he focuses on denying a place to negative emotions
such as anger or sorrow. Unlike the commonplace rationalist, who would
admit the validity of some emotions in response to certain events, like sor-
row at the death of one’s parents, but does not grant affectivity any place in
the realm of objectivity and truth, the stoic sees affectivity as a positive hin-
drance to right belief and right action. The stoic is seeking after eudaimonia,
and for him eudaimonia lies only in virtue, and virtue consists only in right
belief and right action.
Again, there is some nobility in the attitude of the stoic. The intellect and
the will must respond according to the cosmic order of value, and as we have
seen, the affective response collapses when its object is removed or becomes
illegitimate when the affective response is improper to apprehended value.
Joy at the death of our friend or sorrow over their recovery from an illness
are obviously illegitimate affective responses. We also must admit that our
feelings can sometimes be a positive hindrance to the operations of intellect
or our volition. For instance, euphoria from multiple alcoholic drinks can
lead us to see everything with rose-colored glasses and thereby fail to see real
problems present to us. In another example, how many times do we fail to
do something that we ought to do merely because we do not feel up to it for
whatever reason, whether it be a long week at work or some other reason
for our laziness? A nonintentional anger or irritation is another way in which
affectivity might unduly influence our intellect and will. When we are angry,
we often misinterpret the actions or words of others as slights or personal
attacks against us, which are usually met with a snarky response. We also find
that in anger we experience a lack of self-possession; we feel our will overrun
as if something comes over us and possesses us. If a person is apologizing
for an angry outburst, that person might say, “I am sorry. I do not know
30
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Arthur Martin 157
what came over me. That was not really me.” We can find the kind of domi-
nating affectivity that is present in severe anger in many other places, and its
influence over us is always an illegitimate expression of affectivity. The stoic,
however, mistakenly extends his proper condemnation of one kind of affec-
tivity to the entire affective sphere.
True expressions of affectivity will never overwhelm what Hildebrand
calls our “free spiritual center.” Contrary to overwhelming us, all legitimate
affective value-responses require the explicit sanction of our free spiritual
center. Affective experiences are beyond our direct control; we cannot, by the
strength of our volition, simply will feelings. Like belief, we cannot directly
command our affective experiences, but we can indirectly influence them,
and one of our best tools is action. If we find ourselves struggling with
doubt often, if we live as if we fully believe what we doubt, if we act in
faith, we find our disbelief dispelled by the resulting experience. We seem
to be able to do something analogous to this with our heart. Lewis in Mere
Christianity says,
But though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it

would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable
is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people
are ‘cold’ by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them,
but it is no more a sin than having a bad digestion is a sin; and
it does not cut them out from the chance, or excuse them from
the duty, of learning charity. The rule for all of us is perfectly
simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your
neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one
of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved
someone, you will presently come to love him.31
While attitudes and actions may stir up affectivity in us, affective experiences
do not become fully our own until they are met with an inner “yes” from
our free spiritual center. For instance, a deep love only fully becomes ours
when we sanction it from our free spiritual center. Hildebrand explains, “Our
deep love for another person is a gift from above—something which we
cannot give ourselves; yet only when we join this love with the ‘yes’ of our
free spiritual center does it have the character of full self-donation. We not
only endorse this love, but by this freely spoken ‘yes’ we make it the full and
express word of our own.”32 Rather than overwhelming or overriding our
freedom, true affective response respects and requires the cooperation of
31
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 130.
32
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our free spiritual center. Hence when we are legitimately moved or affected
by value, these experiences are, in reality, some of the highest exercises of
our freedom. Hildebrand says, “The deepest manifestations of our freedom
are to be found in cooperative freedom. However great and admirable free
will is as lord and master of our actions, nevertheless, the free cooperation
with the ‘gifts’ from above, which as such are only indirectly accessible to our
free power, is the deepest actualization of our freedom . . . The highest man-
ifestation of cooperative freedom is to be found in sanctioning—in the ‘yes’
of our free spiritual center which forms from within our ‘being affected’ by
values and, above all, our affective response to them.”33 The stoic, just like the
commonplace rationalist, has ironically fallen into the very pit that he wished
to avoid. Like the commonplace rationalist, he fails to apprehend the con-
nection between value and the demands it places on our affective response.
He thereby subjects himself not only to epistemological failure but to moral
failure. Even if he performs the right action, in his stubborn refusal to give
value its due, there is a distinct lack of moral perfection. Hildebrand says,
“If a man were compelled by a Kantian duty ideal to help suffering people
by efficient actions of all kinds but did so with a cool indifferent heart and
without feeling the slightest compassion, he certainly would miss an import-
ant moral and human element.”34 Without a doubt, it is better for someone
to give to charity with a cool, indifferent heart than to not give anything at all;
such action may even be the first step in directing the heart toward a proper
affective response. Instead, the stoic, who wishes to respond correctly to the
order of the cosmos, sets himself against the Tao in the same pejorative sense
of “subjective,” which is present in any antiaffective attitude.
At the core of his antiaffective attitude is a pride and fear, a pride that
desires to place eudaimonia completely under his control and chase away the
creeping fear of heartbreak. The stoic’s belief in a eudaimonia that is only
willed or thought is no happiness at all; happiness can only exist as felt
experience. Hildebrand says, “Happiness by its very nature has to be felt.
A happiness which is only ‘thought’ or ‘willed’ is no happiness. Happiness
becomes a word without meaning when we sever it from feeling, the only
form of experience in which it can be consciously lived.”35 But if it happened
to be the case that happiness really could be thought or willed, then it would
be under our direct control. It might take some great effort, but in the final
account, our happiness would be directly under our control and without risk
of heartbreak. Here lies the fundamental pride of the stoic: he does not want
to be vulnerable, to be subject to the lack of control we endure as humans.
33
34
35
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Arthur Martin 159
Our life itself, however, is constantly an experience of risk, for to live, to

exercise our freedom, is a risk. Hildebrand says, “If we wanted to avoid risk,
we should have to stop living for to live is to take risks. The very fact that
God gave us freedom of will implies the greatest of all risks. If we want to
avoid every risk, we should have to strive for the state of suspended anima-
tion!”36 Affectivity, however, involves a unique risk, the risk of heartbreak.
Arguably the deepest form of affectivity, love for another person, almost
inevitably, will bring us sorrow. In love, especially a deep love like spousal
love or friendship, we give our heart to the beloved, and in our hearts there
appears to be a sensitive intimate depth, which does not seem to appear in
the intellect or will. To love is to give your heart to something and is a great
risk, great vulnerability. The stoic wishes to be happy but avoid the inher-
ent risk of affectivity, thus he chooses to reject affectivity and pays that terri-
ble price. Lewis, in The Four Loves, understands the risk in love and illuminates
the price one pays for keeping their heart locked up. He says, “To love at all
is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly
broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no
one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxu-
ries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your
selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change.
It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeem-
able.”37 If the stoic could accomplish his project, if he could successfully
completely cut out his heart, he would not ever have to endure the pain of
heartbreak, but neither would he experience joy, happiness, or love.
The greatest danger in cutting out hearts, whether by ignorance or by
willful scorn, lies in the loss of an unfolding of our personal nature, which
only comes about through value-response in all places where value-response
is demanded, in the intellect, will, and heart. Lewis laments the tragic
effects of creating men without chests: “And all the time—such is the tragi-
comedy of our situation—we continue to clamor for those very qualities
which we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without
coming across the statement that what our civilization needs more is ‘drive’,
or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity,
we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests
and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked
to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the fledglings to be fruit-
ful.”38 Lewis’s concern remains painfully poignant seventy-seven years later.
36
37
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), 121.
38
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If we rob the heart of its rightful place, we lose the benefits that affective
value-response affords to the intellect and will.
A Well-Formed Heart
Not only do we miss important knowledge of value when we fail to affec-

tively respond, but we also rob ourselves of a deeper, intuitive means of
knowing. This means of knowledge often struggles to be expressed in for-
mal, rational means like mathematics or logic. This means of knowing is
what Pascal expresses by his famous dictum, “Le Coeur a ses raisons que ne
connait pas,” or “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”
Cardinal John Henry Newman calls our capacity for this kind of reasoning
the “illative sense.”39 A hardened or malformed heart loses this capacity to
aid the intellect, for when we allow ourselves to be moved by the value in an
object, we enter into a union with the object that goes beyond mere intel-
lectual contact. Hildebrand says, “The fact that our heart conforms to the
value, that the important in itself is able to move us, brings about a union
with the object which goes even further than in knowledge. For in love the
totality of the person is drawn more thoroughly into the union established
with the object than in knowledge.”40 John Henry Newman calls this deeper
kind of knowing a kind of knowing that touches not only the intellect but
the whole of the human person—“real apprehension.” Real apprehension
includes a feeling of existential urgency, a tua res agitur that fundamentally is
felt.41 Surely we would be denied access to this realm of reason if we were
to scorn the heart.
A well-formed heart, which rejoices in obedience to value, is also a great
boon in drawing the intellect toward truth. There would be an incomplete-
ness in our love if we did not rejoice in seeking out and gaining truth. This
delight not only is proper to the value of truth but actually serves to draw
us to the truth itself because we are drawn to the thing in which we delight.
To begin to climb the mountain of truth is narrow and arduous; only a mind
motivated by love will muster the courage.
Additionally, an awakened heart, responsive to the world of value,
empowers the will in a way that the intellect cannot. Lewis says, “Without
the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal
John Crosby, The Personalism of John Henry Newman (Washington, DC: Catholic
39

40
41
Crosby, The Personalism of John Henry Newman, 51.
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Arthur Martin 161
organism.”42 Many of us may be familiar with the sentiment expressed by

Saint Paul in Romans 7 and the powerlessness we can have in struggling to
do what we know to be right. Trained emotions, however, can also spur us
on to do what is noble but difficult. Lewis says, surely reflecting on his own
battlefield experience, “In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluc-
tant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.
The crudest sentimentalism about a flag or country or regiment will be of
more use.”43 If the affective response is purely subjectively satisfying, rather
than value-responsive, the heart tyrannizes the will and diminishes our free-
dom. Conversely, legitimate affective value-responses, as mentioned earlier,
inherently involve a high level of freedom, and rather than tyrannize our
will, it makes us freer. Hildebrand says, “It is a gift which implies an eleva-
tion to a higher freedom in which our heart (and not only our will) responds
in the way in which it should respond. It is a liberation from the fetters
holding us down.”44 Once again, the transcendent character of the affective
value-response draws us away from cramped egoism and guides us into a
mode of being where we find ourselves actualized in a manner that lends
us to a greater depth, a fuller possession of ourselves. Contrast this expe-
rience with our experience of living for only whatever happens to please
us; there is a great loss of our own self-possession and freedom as we are
tyrannized by whatever happens to be our strongest present desire. This
experience of helplessness reaches its peak in the addict who wishes to quit
but, nevertheless, finds himself unable to let go. For instance, the alcoholic
who compulsively drinks even though he desires to quit drinking. Value-
response, and affective value-response included, has precisely the opposite
character. Rather than experiencing ourselves as helpless or possessed, we
know that the response is sanction from ourselves; that it is us from our very
depths who says “yes.”
Finally, the greatest risk we take in denying the heart its rightful place is
a loss of our true selves. We have already explored the ways in which our
intellects and wills are hampered if we do not give affectivity its full due,
but beyond losing the ways that the intellect, will, and heart cooperate and
complement one another, we lose a certain unique depth to ourselves that
is present only in the heart. Lewis recognizes a unique role the heart plays
in man: “It may be said that by this middle element that man is man: for by
his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”45 Hildebrand
goes even further: It is “in this affective sphere, in the heart, that the treasures
42
43
44
45
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of man’s most individual life are stored. It is in the heart that the secret of
a person is to be found; it is here that the most intimate word is spoken.”46
We have already seen that we must submit ourselves to vulnerability when we
open ourselves up to the affective sphere, and for this reason, someone may
choose to close himself off from affectivity. When we read Lewis’s warning
from The Four Loves, it is hard not be filled with a dread of the prospect of
losing the ability to rejoice, or love, or even merely feel happiness. Intuitively,
we seem to know that our flourishing is deeply connected to love; we desire
to love and be loved. While we cannot neglect the fundamental self-donating
character of love, neither can we neglect the deep affectivity of love: cor
ad cor loquitur. What we desire to give to the beloved is our very selves, our
intimate personal interiority; we desire to give our hearts to the beloved and
in turn have his heart. Hildebrand says, “The heart is here not only the true
self because love is essentially a voice of the heart; it is also the true self
insofar as love aims at the heart of the beloved in a specific way. The lover
wants to pour his love into the heart of the beloved, he wants to affect his
heart, to fill it with happiness; and only then will he feel that he has really
reached the beloved, his very self.”47 Hildebrand points out that the lover
will be dissatisfied if the beloved does not return with his heart as well; the
lover will not feel as if he has reached the beloved if the beloved only wills
benevolence toward him.48 The loss of the heart means we lose our capacity
to experience the fullness of loving and being loved. This is the thinness that
I mentioned earlier.
Not only will our intellect and volition suffer, but as our ability to love
and be loved diminishes, as we slip further into that pit of isolation, we expe-
rience what Lewis describes in The Four Loves. There will be a hole in our
chest where there should be an infinite depth. We will slide closer to being
an automaton than a living person. There will be a deadness in our eyes that
betrays a cold, vacuous space that longs to love again but cannot. For we find
that we are quickened to life in value-response; we become authentically our
own in value-response, and in the ultimate form of value-response, love, we
become fully ourselves.
Ultimately, all value terminates in God himself, from whom all good-
ness flows, and rebellion against affective value-response is a rebellion
against God.49 If we separate ourselves from the one in whose likeness we
are made, if we separate ourselves from Being and Life himself, we fade
into a cramped narrowing of our inner life, where we find shallowness in
46
47
48
49
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Arthur Martin 163
ourselves as we are dominated by our lusts and passions. We become slaves

rather than free persons. Let us, therefore, give ourselves up to true value-
response and all its affective calls. Let us irrigate the gardens of our hearts
with the waters of love and joy. Let us heed the warnings of Lewis and
Hildebrand as we walk down the Way with clear heads, awakened hearts,
and strengthened wills.
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Dietrich von Hildebrand’s
Concept of Value
Martin Cajthaml
Sts Cyril and Methodius Faculty of Theology, Palacký University, Olomouc
Introduction
Arguably, Dietrich von Hildebrand’s most important and original contribu-

tion, not just to a general value theory but to philosophy as such, is his discov-
ery of the three “categories of importance”—that is, three viewpoints under
which the importance of an object moves our emotions or will. Although the
basic philosophical insight on which this discovery hinges can be traced back
to an early stage of his thinking,1 the most comprehensive account of the
three “categories of importance” is presented in his mature work on moral
philosophy—namely, in his Christian Ethics.2
1
The existence of a principal, unbridgeable difference between “the merely
subjectively satisfying” and “the objectively important” is asserted in his 1911
dissertation. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung (Darmstadt,
Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 48–52. In the rest of this arti-
cle, I quote this work under the abbreviation “IsH.”
2
Dietrich von Hildebrand, Christian Ethics (New York: David McKay, 1953),
23–63. In the rest of this article, I quote this work under the abbreviation “ChE.”
Also, many of his extant lecture courses—namely, those from the period during
which he was teaching and living in the USA—start with a distinction between the
three “categories of importance.” Cf. Ana 544, VI, 1; 1, 11, 48. The manuscript
in the last cited folder, namely 48, starts with a distinction between the three catego-
ries of importance, although its title is “Aristotle’s Ethics.” Clearly, Hildebrand was
convinced that even an interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics is impossible without a
basic distinction between the three “categories of importance.” Here an explanatory
note regarding the manuscripts, as they are quoted in this paper, is in order: the manu-
scripts are preserved in Hildebrand’s Nachlass at the Bavarian State Library (BSB)
in Munich. In referring to the materials from the Nachlass, I first mention the signa-
ture of the Nachlass at BSB, and the ensuing roman number is that of the thematic
group. All the manuscripts quoted in this chapter are from group “VI”—that is,
Ethics. The first Arabic number indicates the number of the box (there are four
boxes comprising manuscripts for ethics). The subsequent Arabic number is the
number of the folder(s) in which the manuscript is contained. To make the indication
© Martin Cajthaml, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)
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Martin Cajthaml 165
The distinction between the three “categories of importance” has been

rightly labeled “a kind of cornerstone of the entire philosophy of von Hilde
brand.”3 The argument for this contention can be put forward in a rather
straightforward manner: Hildebrand’s thought is based on his theory of
(material) values, the backbone of which is his account of value as the import-
ant in itself. This account can only be properly understood on the basis of his
distinction between “the important in itself ” and the “the merely subjectively
satisfying”—that is, the distinction made in the context of his analysis of the
three types of importance.
The overall aim of this article is to present a critical evaluation of Hilde-
brand’s account of value. In its first part, I will explain this account follow-
ing the simple logic just stated by first explaining and commenting on the
distinction between the three “categories of importance.”4 In the second
part of the article, I will critically examine the question of the philosophical
originality and merit of Hildebrand’s account of value. I will do so by arguing
against his claim that value, in the sense of the important in itself, is not in
the center of “traditional ethics.”
1.The Three “Categories of Importance”
Hildebrand starts his investigation of the fundamental types of importance

with a seemingly trivial observation: whereas some events, states of affairs,
objects, and so forth are given in our experience as (more or less) important,
others are given to us as almost or entirely neutral. For example, I experience
the fact that the water in Lake Baikal is deep and cold as neutral. This fact is
not able to stir my emotion or move my will in any way.
more synoptic, I have separated the number of the box from the numbers of the
folders with a semicolon.
3
John F. Crosby, “Introductory Study,” in Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Nature
of Love (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), xxi. In his recent article,
Crosby confirms this assessment: “Von Hildebrand’s discussion of the categories of
importance in chapter 3 of his Ethics [ . . . ] is foundational for everything that he has
written in the area of ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of community, and philosophy of
love. It is foundational like no other passage in his writings is foundational.” John F.
Crosby, “Is Love a Value-Response? Dietrich von Hildebrand in Dialogue with John
Zizioulas,” International Philosophical Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2015): 458.
4
In the following exposition of this tenet, I will draw on the texts quoted in the
first paragraph of this article. I will also make use of one archival source—namely,
the typescript entitled “General Ethics” (Ana 544, VI, 1; 11). For a fine recent
English written survey of Hildebrand’s three categories of importance, see Crosby,
“Introductory Study.”
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166 Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Concept of Value
Against the background of countless facts, events, or objects that I experi-

ence as neutral, there also stand out equally numerous facts, events, or objects
that I experience as, in some sense, important. The interesting philosophical
question Hildebrand raises is whether the experienced importance of such
facts, events, objects, and so forth is homogenous or heterogeneous—that is,
whether there is, ultimately, only one type of importance or whether there is
more than one such basic type. The implication of this question is that for
there to be more than one type of importance, the types must be mutually
irreducible and fundamentally different in the sense that will be explained
here.
Having already distinguished two such basic types of importance in
his dissertation, in Christian Ethics, Hildebrand adds a third. In his eyes,
the discovery of the three types of importance is a crucial contribution to
philosophia perennis. By deliberately using the term “categories of importance,”
Hildebrand suggests that, in its philosophical importance, his discovery is on
the same footing with that of Aristotle.5
Such an ambition certainly whets the reader’s appetite. So what, after
all, are these three “categories”? According to Hildebrand, the distinction
between them hinges on our intellect’s ability to draw a sharp line between
the importance we ascribe to an object in virtue of its ability to satisfy our
cravings or needs and to fulfill our tendencies or desires on the one hand and
the importance an object has in virtue of its intrinsic worth on the other. In
his dissertation, Hildebrand elucidates this distinction by starting with the
following two examples: the importance a greedy man ascribes to a financial
speculation that is likely to significantly enlarge his wealth and the impor-
tance that a human life has to someone who rushes to help his imperiled
neighbor. In Christian Ethics, he uses as examples the experience of a compli-
ment and the experience of witnessing someone’s generous forgiveness of
a grave injury. In Christian Ethics as well as in the course “General Ethics”
(Ana 544, VI, 1; 11), he points out what he considers to be four essential
differences between the two types of importance illustrated by the aforemen-
tioned pairs of examples.
The first difference, he contends, concerns the source of the importance.
In the case of the compliment, it is the satisfaction that the addressee draws
from his/her experience of being lauded. In the case of the financial specu-
lation, it is the interest in the speculation on behalf of the potential profiteer.
In both cases, the source of the importance is subject-rooted. This can be
seen in the fact that once it is eliminated, the same object is experienced as
indifferent. Once the addressee of the compliment becomes immune to the
appeals to his or her vanity (a rare situation!) and takes no pleasure in them
5
Hildebrand, ChE, 31, 61.
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Martin Cajthaml 167
anymore, he or she will experience compliments as indifferent. Once the man

interested in financial speculation ceases to be greedy and rests satisfied with
what he has amassed, he will experience the financial speculation as indiffer-
ent to him. It will neither attract his attention nor stir his emotions anymore.
Hildebrand expresses the subject-rootedness of this type of importance by
saying that the subjective satisfaction is principium (the determining), while the
importance is principiatum (the determined).6
This contrasts sharply with the relationship between importance and
emotion that is at stake when someone admires a morally noble action. In
this case, “the act of forgiving . . . is given as something important in itself.
The importance is by no means dependent upon any effect it exerts on us.
Even if we abstract completely from the fact that it moves us, it remains
thrown into relief out of the indifference—it keeps its importance.”7 Hilde-
brand reserves the term value exclusively for this type of importance—that is,
to “the important in itself ” or “the intrinsically important” as he also calls it.
He observes that the essential subject-rootedness of “the merely subjec-
tively satisfying” as opposed to the object-rootedness of “the important in
itself ” is reflected in our language. While we say that something is agreeable
to or satisfying for someone we do not say that something is “noble,” “beau-
tiful” or “sublime” to or for someone.
In his dissertation, Hildebrand points to the difference between the
meaning of the terms absolute and relative when used to contrast the two kinds
of importance and the meaning these terms have in the debate about the
relativity or absoluteness of values. To say that values are relative means, in
the context of this debate, to deny their objective, absolute existence—that
is, their existence outside of human (individual or collective) consciousness.
To call them “absolute” means to ascribe them such transcendent existence.
Contrastingly, in the context of the analysis of the categories of importance,
the predicates “relative” and “absolute” express a “qualitative feature” that,
in each of them, is, according to Hildebrand, phenomenally present. To say
that “the important in itself ” is “objective” or “absolute” does not mean to
ascribe to this type of importance a mind-independent existence. In fact,
“the important in itself ” is equally absolute irrespective of whether one only
dreams about it or whether one encounters it in reality.8 One could also say
that both “the merely subjectively satisfying” and “the important in itself ”
are mind-dependent insofar as they represent two points of view through
which we humans approach reality—not two different kinds of properties of
6
Hildebrand, ChE, 38.
7
Ana 544, VI, 1; 11, 1.
8
Hildebrand, IsH, 52.
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real objects. So much then for the first “essential difference” between the two
types of importance.
Hildebrand starts his exposition of the second difference between “the
merely subjectively satisfying” and “the important in itself ” by granting
the point that both the pleasure that we take in what is merely subjectively
satisfying and the noble joy that is bestowed on us by the experience of
“the important in itself ” may be rendered by the term happiness. I can say,
“The success of my financial speculation makes me happy.” But I can also
say, “Your kindness and generosity make me happy.” However, Hildebrand
warns his readers that these two kinds of happiness are essentially differ-
ent. And he thinks that this essential difference of both kinds of happiness
throws light on the essential difference of the two kinds of importance to
which each of the two is related.
The happiness brought about by “the important in itself ” “essentially
presupposes the consciousness that the importance of the object is in no
way dependent on the delight it may bestow on us.”9 In the archival source,
he adds that “the specific character of this joy involves the participation with
something which is above us, important in itself, noble, good, as such, inde-
pendently on all subjective reactions.”10
Happiness in the sense of the subjective satisfaction never has this
character—that is, it neither contains the (explicit) consciousness of the
object-rootedness of the importance to which it is related nor has the subject-
transcending character that is characteristic of the happiness over values. For
this reason, says Hildebrand, no augmentation or intensification of the plea-
sure deriving from the subjectively satisfying can ever be transformed into
the bliss we gain by participating in a value. He writes, “A life which consisted
in a continuous stream of pleasures, as derived from what is merely subjec-
tively satisfying, could never grant us one moment of that blissful happiness
engendered by those objects possessing a value.”11
In fact, Hildebrand thinks that a life filled merely with the former kind
of happiness would lead to boredom and emptiness. It would “imprison
us within ourselves.”12 In contrast, the happiness that is engendered by the
participation in values “liberates us from self-centeredness, reposes us in
a transcendent order which is independent on us, of our moods, of our
dispositions.”13
9
10
Ana 544, VI, 1; 11, 2.
11
12
13
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Martin Cajthaml 169
Hildebrand summarizes this second essential difference between the two

kinds of happiness (or delight) by saying that in the case of the noble happi-
ness, “the value is principium (the determining) and our happiness, the principi-
atum (the determined). Contrastingly, in the case of the subjectively satisfying
good our pleasure is the principium and the importance we ascribe to its agree-
able character is the principiatum.”14
The third essential difference between the two kinds of importance
concerns the way in which each of them addresses us. In the following
passage, Hildebrand presents this point so effectively that the best exposition
is a full quote:
Every good possessing a value imposes on us, as it were, an obli-

gation to give to it an adequate response. We are not referring to
the unique obligation which we call moral obligation and which
appeals to our conscience. This obligation issues from certain
values only. Here we are thinking of the awareness which we
have as soon as we are confronted with something intrinsically
important, for instance, with beauty in nature and art, with the
majesty of a great truth, with the splendor of moral values. In all
these cases we are clearly aware that the object calls for an ade-
quate response. We grasp that it is not left to our arbitrary deci-
sion or to our accidental mood whether we respond or not, and
how we respond. On the other hand, goods which are merely
subjectively satisfying address no such call to us. They attract
us or invite us, but we are clearly aware that no response is due
to them, that it is up to us whether we heed their invitation or
not. When a delectable dish attracts us, we are quite aware that
it is completely up to our mood whether or not we yield to this
attraction. We all know how ridiculous it would be for someone
to say that he submitted to the obligation of playing bridge, and
overcame the temptation to assist a sick person.15
So, according to Hildebrand, any instantiation of “the important in itself ”

issues an obligation to give an adequate response to its intrinsic worth.16 This
14
15
16
In the dissertation, he expresses this point in a very Platonic manner: “Jeder
Wert besitzt seine ideal ihm gebührende Antwort, unabhängig davon, ob in Wirklichkeit je
eine solche stattfindet.” This ideal Zugehörigkeitsbeziehung does not obtain between
the value as phenomenally given— that is, experienced—and the content of a
response but between the value as a property of a being and the content of the
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obligation is, however, morally obligatory only in case of so-called morally

relevant values.17 The response can be of different types, depending on the
value and the situation in which it addresses us. In his dissertation, the topic
of which is the nature of moral action, he is concerned primarily with the
response of the will—that is, with situations in which a value summons us
to act in a certain way. In Christian Ethics, his main preoccupation seems to be
with different kinds of “affective responses” to values.18
In sharp contrast to the “due relation”19 that obtains between values and
value-responses, the subjectively satisfying issues no obligation whatsoever.
response (Hildebrand, IsH, 39–40). So the ideal “belonging” of a particular kind

of response to a particular kind of value is not a relation between our responses
and the values as we perceive them—that is, within the conscious sphere—but in the
“platonic” realm of ideal objects and the laws governing them. In Christian Ethics,
this platonic underpinning of Hildebrand’s value theory is latent but not absent.
17
The idea of “morally relevant values” is inspired by Scheler’s insight that the
end at which the intention of the agent aims must never be the realization of a moral
value itself but rather the realization of a nonmoral (material) value. Presupposing
this distinction, Hildebrand wished to further distinguish between those nonmoral
(material) values of which realization is a source of genuine moral value in the strict
sense of the term on the side of the realizing act/agent and those of which real-
ization is not the source of such value. He also draws the same distinction in the
sphere of responses (Stellungnahmen) and attitudes (Haltungen). There are responses
and attitudes to values and disvalues that are morally good or evil in the strict sense
of the term and those that, however genuinely valuable, are not morally good or
evil in this sense. If, for example, I fall asleep during a masterful performance of
Beethoven’s Eroica, I surely do not give a proper response to the aesthetic value
of the composition in general or the value of the actual performance in particular.
By this “omission,” however, I do not become morally bad in the strict sense of the
term. If, however, I fail to keep the promise I gave, without any overriding reason,
my omission bears a disvalue of a strictly moral nature: by not keeping my promises
without any overriding reason, I become morally bad in the proper sense of the
term. According to Hildebrand, the reason for this difference in evaluation of our
actions, responses, attitudes, and so forth is because, only in the latter case, a morally
relevant value (keeping one’s promises) is violated, while, in the former case, the
violated value (the aesthetic value of a musical composition) is not a morally relevant
one. The term morally relevant value is first mentioned in Hildebrand’s dissertation. In
all other works, including the late ones, Hildebrand considers the concept of morally
relevant values of crucial importance for any convincing explanation of moral
goodness and wrongness of actions, omissions, or attitudes. See Hildebrand, ChE,
265–81; Hildebrand, Moralia (Regensburg, Germany: Josef Habbel, 1980), 21–50.
18
Cf., for example, the attention given to various forms of “affective responses”
in chapter 17 (Hildebrand, ChE, 191–243).
19
The whole of chapter 18 of ChE is devoted to analyzing the nature of this
relation.
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Martin Cajthaml 171
Describing the way this form of importance addresses us, Hildebrand speaks
of “attraction” or “invitation.” The subjectively satisfying does not oblige us
to act or to take the particular stand toward itself; it “invites” us to enjoy the
pleasure it offers us, leaving it entirely to our freedom whether we accept this
invitation or not.
This third essential difference between “the merely subjectively satisfy-
ing” and the intrinsically important has, however, still another aspect that is
only hinted at in the respective passage in Christian Ethics. For not only is
the appeal of value essentially different from the appeal of “the merely
subjectively satisfying.” Hildebrand is convinced that each of the two types
of importance also addresses, as it were, a different layer, a different side of
the human person. Hildebrand fleshes out what is just a remark in this passage
by introducing, later in the book, the notion of a “spiritual center” of the
human person.20 He suggests that, given a “qualitative affinity between” vari-
ous morally positive and negative attitudes in the human person, we may
suppose an existence of three “spiritual centers” as their source. There is
one positive center, “the reverent, humble, loving center,” and two negative
centers: the center of pride and that of concupiscence.21 In light of these
later explorations and explanations, Hildebrand’s early remark that values
“appeal to our free spiritual center” becomes more understandable.22
Contrastingly, “the merely subjectively satisfying” can appeal to one or the
other (or both) negative centers. Note that this later explanation gives some
justification to the term temptation used to characterize the appeal of “the merely
subjectively satisfying.” However, the use of the term temptation is justified
20
21
According to Hildebrand, the role of concupiscence as a root of moral evil
was already recognized by Plato. It is not clear which passages in Plato’s works Hilde-
brand has in mind, as the quotations are only generic and even confusing (he quotes
“Phaedro” and “Phaedrus” as two separate dialogues, even though these are just two
different versions of the title of the one and the same dialogue). Still, Hildebrand’s
point is historically sound, since Plato certainly does identify concupiscence as a root
of moral evil and imperfection. This is true on a quite general level. It is implied by
Plato’s idea of the order in the tripartite soul. This order consists in the fact that the
appetitive part of the soul follows, under the guidance and constraints imparted to it
by the spirited part, the orders of the rational part. Since this order or harmony in the
soul is, for the Socrates of the Republic, the highest virtue—namely, justice—one may
conclude that, indeed, the destruction of this order is the root of the greatest moral
evil. And this evil is precisely the situation where the urges of the various instincts
and appetites overthrow the rule of the rational part (appetite is primarily concerned
with food, drink, and sex—Republic 439d, 580e). Pride is, according to Hildebrand,
shown to be the main root of moral evil only by the Judeo-Christian tradition.
22
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only in regard to the illegitimate form of “the subjectively satisfying”—that is,

it presupposes a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of “the
subjectively satisfying” introduced later in the book. Thus fully comprehend-
ing this third contrasting point is possible only upon first becoming familiar
with some later sections of Christian Ethics.
The fourth contrasting feature Hildebrand mentions is actually not
another essential mark that would distinguish the two kinds of importance.
It concerns the different types of responses that are typically given to them.
The essential difference in the responses is supposed to “mirror” the essential
difference in the types of importance. The description Hildebrand offers for
the difference in the responses develops further what has already been said
regarding the difference between the two kinds of happiness in the second
distinguishing point. The joy or enthusiasm that is characteristic of a value-
response “has the character of an abandoning of ourselves, a transcending
of the boundaries of our self-centeredness, a submission of some sort.”23
This contrasts sharply with the self-centeredness of the satisfaction we get
from “the merely subjectively satisfying.” Here we do not conform ourselves
to “the noble logic of value” but conform the object to our own desires,
immanent tendencies, or subjective interests. In this fourth point, Hildebrand
basically repeats the same observation he makes in the second point when
distinguishing the two kinds of happiness. So much for the four essential
differences between “the subjectively satisfying” and value.
Even a reader who appreciates the aptness of Hildebrand’s distinc-
tions and the fine sense he has of various forms of affective conscious-
ness in their correlations to intentional objects, including their axiological
dimension, might ask critical questions every now and then. For example,
he might be struck by the boldness of the epistemological presupposition
involved in the contraposition of the two kinds of “happiness” on which
the second point of difference between the two kinds of importance hinges.
This presupposition is that we can grasp the “qualitative content” of these
affective conscious states with such clarity as to warrant universal claims such
as the following: “Every act of noble joy presupposes a consciousness of
the object-rootedness of the importance of its object.” Here one might wish
to ask whether our cognitive access to the “contents” of our affective life is
indeed such as to experientially back up claims of this degree of universality
and apodicticity. No doubt, the controversial Cartesian heritage transmitted
to Hildebrand through Husserl and other early phenomenologists has a vital
bearing on this epistemological optimism regarding the possibility of grasp-
ing the essence of various cogitata.
23
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Martin Cajthaml 173
Moreover, not only is there the consideration that our grasp of the “qual-
itative content” of these acts might not be sufficient to back up such univer-
sal claims, but more specifically, the very claim that in all our experiences of
noble joy we have the explicit consciousness of the object-rootedness of the
object’s importance does not seem to be confirmed by experience. For it
does not seem to be the case that in each and every case of noble happi-
ness we experience the object-rootedness of the object’s importance. And
if a noble joy can be experienced without the explicit consciousness of the
object-rootedness of the object’s importance, then, clearly, the claim that this
consciousness is the necessary condition of noble joy is not backed up by
experience.
Another puzzling point in Hildebrand’s analysis can be found in his use
of examples. Take the example of morally noble (and base) deeds to which
particular affective responses are due. The example, as presented by Hilde-
brand, implies that by “witnessing” an act of moral significance, we imme-
diately grasp its very nature. But is it not the case that, by admiring morally
noble acts, what we actually respond to is not so much the value of these acts
themselves but rather the value of the acts as we (intuitively) grasp them?
Now in every such “grasping” there is an element of interpretation—that is,
of going beyond what is strictly given in experience. So it can often happen
that, because of our prejudices, lack of comprehension, and so forth, we
respond with admiration to an act or action that, in itself, is not admira-
ble. And vice versa we might, for whatever reasons, be prone not to admire
actions that, by their nature, deserve to be admired.
This objection is relevant, but it does not present an insurmountable diffi-
culty for Hildebrand, since he argues that the distinction he draws between
the two types of importance is not one between two distinct properties of
a given thing (agreeability versus intrinsic preciousness in the sense of what
he later in Christian Ethics calls “ontological values”); rather, it is between two
perspectives from which the importance of a being may be viewed. There-
fore, the distinction he elaborates in his analysis of the “categories of impor-
tance” is not ontological but phenomenological. The ontological perspective
enters later on in chapter 7. Therefore, he could say that even if someone
misconceives the true nature of an action, he witnesses by interpreting it as
morally noble although it is, in reality, morally base and possibly even inten-
tionally deceitful; the distinction between the two categories of importance
is not affected by this error.
In fact, it would not be affected even by admitting the principal possi-
bility of erring in the interpretation of any action. For this distinction is not
warranted by the reliability of our assessment of concrete actions but by
the fact that, in the content of human experience taken as a whole, a spec-
imen of both types of importance can always be found. Hildebrand thinks
fus-qd1001-all.indd 173 9/21/20 11:54 AM

that virtually nobody is entirely missing the experience of “the important

in itself.” This holds true also for persons who, in their worldview, have no
adequate theoretical explanation for the possibility of the intrinsically import-
ant.24 The only exceptions are persons who are fully taken either by satanic
pride or by an absolute egocentrism in viewing everything from the point of
view of their subjective satisfaction only.25 But even the presupposition that
these two monstrous character types are not just literary fictions but do exist
in reality would not annihilate the essential difference between “the merely
subjectively satisfying” and “the important in itself.” It would merely imply
that a personal being is actually possible without the experience of transcen-
dence present in the value-response.
Now before moving to the third “category,” it must be mentioned that,
according to Hildebrand, both “the important in itself ” and “the subjectively
satisfying” have a positive and a negative form. The negative pendant of the
intrinsic preciousness of a being (value) is a disvalue. This means that against
moral values, such as forgiveness, stand moral disvalues, such as hatred, envy,
meanness, and so forth. This is the case for all other kinds of values in Hilde-
brand’s value theory (aesthetic, ontological, intellectual, vital, and so forth).
Similarly, to “the subjectively satisfying” in the positive sense (that is, to all
forms of the agreeable) corresponds, as its negative counterpart, the subjec-
tively dissatisfying (that is, all forms of the disagreeable).
In Christian Ethics, Hildebrand completes the list of the “categories
of importance” by introducing a third category. As previously mentioned,
this third “category of importance” is neither reducible to the first two nor
deducible from them. It has its own eidos (intelligible essence) distinct from
the intelligible essence of the first two categories.26 Hildebrand calls this cate-
gory of importance “the objective good for the person.” Similar to the first
two, it has its specific negative pendant: “The objective evil for the person.”
In the respective passage of Christian Ethics, the author spends much time
arguing that it is precisely this notion of the bonum that is implied in the
famous Socratic dictum defended in Plato’s Gorgias—namely, that it is better
to suffer injustice than to commit it.27 In the second German edition of his
Ethik, which, precisely in the passage concerning the objective good for the
person, is rather a German version of the same material, including para-
graphs that are not present in the English version, Hildebrand suggests this
Hildebrand, ChE, 76–77.

24
Hildebrand’s favorite example of this attitude is Don Giovanni as portrayed

25
in De Ponte’s libretto of Mozart’s famous opera.

26
27
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Martin Cajthaml 175
third category of importance be approached by reflecting upon the object of

two kinds of acts: gratitude and forgiveness.28
According to Hildebrand, if I reflect upon the object of my gratitude for
the good that someone has done to me, I discover that it can be subsumed
under neither “the merely subjectively satisfying” nor “the important in
itself.” The good for which I am grateful is distinct from the first in that it
contains an element of objectivity that is lacking in “the subjectively satisfy-
ing.” It must be a good that is in accordance with my true, ultimate interest,
or at least it must not contradict it. Now there could be many forms of “the
merely subjectively satisfying” that go against my true interest. To use Hilde-
brand’s own example, if someone clandestinely procures for me a hypoder-
mic needle while I undergo curative treatment from drug addiction, he offers
me the subjective satisfaction that is quite contrary to my true interest. For
this reason, his action cannot be an object of my gratitude, unless, of course,
I am totally confused about what my true interest is.
Contrastingly, if a friend reproaches me for my misbehavior, to use
another example of Hildebrand, he inflicts something upon me that I may
very likely find to be subjectively dissatisfying. Yet, after overcoming the
initial irritation provoked by the reproach, I should hopefully discover that
the reproach has been justified. I discover thereby that I should be grateful to
my friend for what he has done to me, although it was by no means agreeable.
Both examples show that the good for which I am grateful (or better: for
which I can and should be grateful) is not identical with “the merely subjec-
tively satisfying.”
The good for which I am grateful is, however, also distinct from value in
Hildebrand’s sense of “the intrinsically important.” The reason is its relation-
ality. The good for which I am grateful is the good done to me—that is, it is
the good seen from my perspective, not from an impartial point of view. This
implies that what, from the impartial point of view, can be of the same value
can for me be an objective evil while for another one be an objective good.
If, for example, I am not given the Fulbright fellowship I compete for, this
decision of the committee is an objective evil for me while being an objective
good for my colleague who actually obtained the fellowship. The decision
of the jury, judged from an absolute perspective, is, in itself, a bearer of a
positive value insofar as, objectively, the most suitable candidate is chosen.
My colleague is fully entitled to be grateful for the outcome of the compe-
tition. I, however, can hardly be grateful for it and certainly not immediately
after I find out. Perhaps, I can later discover that the decision was in my true
28
Hildebrand, Ethik (Stuttgart, Germany: Kohlhammer, 1973), 55–56.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 175 9/21/20 11:54 AM

interest, but this brings in a dimension that lies outside the scope of philo-
sophical analysis.29
Let me sum up: It is this relationality of the good for which I can be
meaningfully grateful that makes it unmistakably different from the value as
the intrinsically important. Still, the good for which I can be grateful, while
being essentially different from both the subjectively satisfying and the intrin-
sically important, is, to both, in some sense similar or related.
It is similar to “the merely subjectively satisfying” in that both types of
importance are subject-relative or subject-relational, yet each of them is such
in a profoundly different way. “The merely subjectively satisfying” is simply
what gives satisfaction, independent of the normative anchor of values and
of the true interest of the person at stake. It is, therefore, entirely relative to
the person’s whims or desires, however perverted these might be. Contrast-
ingly, the good for which I am grateful is relative; or better, it is relational,
in the sense that the evaluative criterion is my true, objective interest. This,
however, is quite a stern criterion compared to the utter relativity of “the
merely subjectively satisfying.” For what lies in my true interest is certainly
not dependent on the contingencies of my moods, tendencies, or urges.
The good I can be grateful for is similar to value in that it contains the
aforementioned “objective element,” which is constituted by my true interest.
At the same time, however, as the example with the fellowship illustrates, this
“objective element” is by no means identical to the nonrelational, absolute,
“God’s-eye” perspective that is characteristic of “the intrinsically important”
and of the evaluation made from its point of view.
For all these reasons, the good I can be grateful for is a representative,
or perhaps even an archetype, of the type of importance that is not reduc-
ible to and not deducible from the first two categories of importance. It is a
representative of the “objective good for the person,” a third “category of
importance.”
This category, similar to the first two, has its negative pendant too. Hilde-
brand calls it “the objective evil for the person.” It has a similar relationship
to the disvalue and to “the merely subjectively dissatisfying” that the objec-
tive good for the person has to value and “the merely subjectively satisfy-
ing.” It is also a relational type of (negative) importance without, however,
being entirely subjective, since it is determined by what is objectively, truly
detrimental for the person. Hildebrand argues that this kind of evil is the
“formal” object of forgiveness.
Hildebrand states this point in traditional Christian terms: it is only in light of

29
God’s judgement on our eternal life that we can know for sure which of the events in
our life were an objective good for us and which were not (Hildebrand, ChE, 84–85).
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Martin Cajthaml 177
In the second edition of Ethik, he explains this by drawing on the seman-

tic distinction present in German but absent in English. In German, there are
two words with a meaning normally covered by the English word forgiveness:
Verzeihung and Vergebung. Although the actual usage of both terms in today’s
German does not suggest the strict semantic distinction Hildebrand intro-
duces, the distinction does not do violence to the actual usage of these terms
today. Hildebrand uses the term Verzeihung to designate an act relating to the
objective evil for the person. I can verzeihen only the objective evil done to me
as the result of someone else’s morally wrongful action. So, for example, if
Edmund Dantes had not decided to revenge himself but instead forgave his
wrongdoers, he might have forgiven them for all the suffering they caused
him over fourteen years of imprisonment and for the separation from his
beloved Mercedes, or he might have forgiven the pain brought about by
his later discovery that Mercedes married Mondego, and so forth. What lies
outside the scope of his Verzeihung is the moral disvalue of the action of his
wrongdoers—that is, of writing the denunciatory letter on the basis of which
he was wrongfully imprisoned. He also would not have been able to verzeihen
the envy of Danglars that made the latter participate in the wrongful action.
These moral disvalues can only be an object of God’s Vergebung. Hildebrand
refers here to the German expression, “Ich verzeihe Dir, möge Gott dir
vergeben.” In this sense, then, the “formal object” of forgiveness (verzeihung)
is the objective evil for the person, not the moral disvalue of the wrongdoing
as such.
2. Is Hildebrand’s Account ofValue as Original

as Its Author Thought It to Be?
In the second part of this article, I would like to raise the question of the
philosophical originality and merit of Hildebrand’s account of value. I will
do so by critically evaluating Hildebrand’s understanding of the traditional
doctrine of the good in Plato and Aristotle. This is a critical issue because, as
I will argue, part of the alleged originality of Hildebrand’s account of value
is due to a not quite adequate interpretation of Plato’s and Aristotle’s account
of the good.
This critical approach to Hildebrand’s account of value is inspired by
Michael Waldstein’s study of the relationship between Hildebrand’s account
of value and happiness and the Thomistic account of the respective notions.30
Michael Waldstein, “Dietrich von Hildebrand and St. Thomas Aquinas on

30
Goodness and Happiness,” Nova et Vetera 1, no. 2 (2003): 403–64.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 177 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Also, the overall result of my analysis is similar to Waldstein’s. I will argue, like
Waldstein does on the basis of his comparison with the notion of the good
in Aquinas, that Hildebrand’s account of value does not differ from that of
Plato and Aristotle as much as the author of Christian Ethics thought.
After concluding his exposition of the third category of importance—that
is, the objective good and evil for the person—Hildebrand states the rela-
tionship of his theory of value to the “traditional account of the good.”31
Although the only thinker quoted in this passage is Plato’s Socrates with his
famous dictum that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, from the
overall context of Christian Ethics, especially from the critique of what Wald-
stein dubs “Entelechial Thomism,”32 it seems to be clear that what is meant
by “the traditional account of the bonum” is the basic understanding of the
good both in Greek classical philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) and in
some scholastics, particularly in Aquinas.
Against this tradition and the concept of bonum present in it, Hildebrand
raises a serious objection. He says that it most often “revolves around” that
category of importance he calls the objective good for the person, “at least
insofar as man’s motivation is concerned.”33 Similarly, in his unedited lectures
on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,34 despite the recognition of the validity of
many insights Aristotle had in the field of practical philosophy, Hildebrand
contends, “It is difficult to understand that Aristotle with all these insights
never clearly grasps the nature of value as such but always again confuses it
with the notion of what is good for man.”
To realize the seriousness of this objection, one needs to think of its
implication. It implies that Hildebrand’s account of value signifies a major
philosophical achievement in the field of moral philosophy, comparable
only to very few in the history of moral philosophy. This objection means
effectively that the most important notion of good went largely unnoticed
by classical thinkers, not to mention the modern ones (supposedly with the
exemption of Scheler). Therefore, this objection deserves careful scrutiny.
As an argument for his claim that the traditional notion of good “revolves
around” the objective good for the person, and not “the important in itself,”
Hildebrand uses the Socratic dictum defended not just in Gorgias but also
31
32
Waldstein, “Hildebrand and Aquinas,” 404.
33
34
Ana 544, VI, 1; 17. On the evidence of the archival materials, it is impossible
to exactly date this manuscript. The headline of the handwritten material included
in folder 17 is “Aristotle-America.” Presumably, it is linked with the lecture course
“Aristotle’s Ethics” included in folder 48. Possibly, it is even a part of it.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 178 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Martin Cajthaml 179
in the Republic35—namely, that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit

it.36 Hildebrand is right in arguing that the dictum itself is convincing only if
Socrates argues from the perspective of the objective good and evil for the
person. For it is only from this perspective (and not from that of “the merely
subjectively satisfying” or that of “the important in itself ”) that it is better to
suffer injustice than to commit it.
However, even a quick confrontation with the immediate context in
which the Socratic dictum appears in the Republic casts Hildebrand’s critical
remark concerning the traditional notion of good into doubt. This context
is the speech in defense of justice, which, at the beginning of the second
book, Glaucon asks Socrates to deliver in view of his previous discussion
with Thrasymachus.
In asking to defend justice, Glaucon wants Socrates to do two things.
First, he wants him to show that justice is something superior (kreitton) to
injustice. Second, he wants him to show the effects of both justice and injus-
tice on their possessor.37
The distinction between these two viewpoints is by no means a marginal
point. It is made at the very beginning of the second book (357b–d, Lee).
In this passage, three types of goods are distinguished. First, “there is one
kind of good which we want to have, not with a view to its consequences
but because we welcome it for its own sake. For example, enjoyment or plea-
sure, so long as pleasure brings no harm and its only result is the enjoyment
it brings” (357b9–12, Lee). Second, “another kind of good which we desire
both for itself and its consequences . . . Wisdom and sight and health, for
example, we welcome on both grounds” (357c1–3, Lee). “And there is a third
category of good, which includes exercise and medical treatment and earning
one’s living as a doctor or otherwise. All these we should regard as painful but
beneficial; we should not choose them for their own sake but for the wages
and other benefits we get from them” (357c4–8, Lee).
35
Republic 2.358e–359a. The Socratic dictum is included in the required speech
in defense of justice that, at the beginning of the second book, Socrates is asked to
deliver.
36
37
See Plato, Republic. Translated with and introduction by Desmond Lee
(London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 2.367b2–4: “What we want from you is not only
a demonstration that justice is superior (kreitton), but a description of the essen-
tial effects, harmful or otherwise, which each produces on its possessor.” The same
requirement is repeated below, still on the same page of the Republic: “Prove to
us therefore, not only that justice is superior to injustice, but that, irrespective of
whether gods or men know it or not, one is good and the other evil because of its
inherent effects on its possessor” (Republic 2.367e1–3, Lee).
fus-qd1001-all.indd 179 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Immediately after this distinction is made right at the beginning of the

second book, Socrates says he places justice “in the highest category, which
anyone who is to be happy welcomes both for its own sake and for its conse-
quences” (Republic 2.358a1–2, Lee). And at the end of Glaucon’s speech in
favor of injustice, Socrates is presented as having taken a clear stand on the
question on which of the two reasons for desiring justice is more important:
“You have agreed [sc. Socrates] that justice falls into the highest category
of goods, of goods, that is, which are worth choosing not only for their
consequences but also and far more, for themselves” (Republic 2.367c7–9, Lee;
emphasis added).
Clearly, then, the Socrates of the Republic is portrayed as defending the
position that justice is to be desired far more for its own sake than for the sake
of the good it brings to its possessor. The only way this can be expressed
in Hildebrand’s terms is that while justice is also recognized to be a high
objective good for the person, it is to be seen and valued primarily from the
viewpoint of its intrinsic goodness. It is therefore not true that the Socrates
of the Republic would consider the positive importance of justice primarily
from the point of view of the objective good for the person and not from
the viewpoint of its intrinsic preciousness.
Notoriously, justice in the Republic is depicted (1) as “psychic harmony”
of the tripartite soul—that is, as the most central of the four cardinal virtues
discussed there—and (2) as the proper societal order according to which
each stratum of the society and each individual citizen does his or her proper
job (ta heautū prattein). It has been argued that both orders, the psychic and the
societal, are, ultimately, specific articulations of the One-Good as the highest
principle of Plato’s metaphysics.38 According to this interpretation, the ulti-
mate source of any value, including moral ones such as justice, is the meta-
physical principle of unity and order in all beings—namely, the One-Good
of the “unwritten doctrines.” It is, therefore, implicit in this interpretation
that Plato’s notion of good does not revolve around the category of objec-
tive good for the person. Rather, it revolves around a metaphysical notion
of the One-Good, which is seen as the ultimate source of unity (order),
intelligibility, and goodness in all beings.
Most of Plato’s scholars who are skeptical about the possibility of admit-
ting such a robust metaphysics in Plato would, nevertheless, still agree that
in the Republic, justice is depicted, both in its psychic and societal dimen-
sions, as a kind of order within each of these realms. Justice, to focus just
on the psychic realm, is construed as the highest virtue (aretē ), the virtue
that ensures proper order between the three parts of the soul (cf. especially
Giovanni Reale, Per una nuova interpretazione di Platone (Milan: Vita e Pensiero,
38
1997), 248–52.
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Martin Cajthaml 181
Republic 4.443c–e). It is not an order and harmony imposed on the soul

from the outside; rather, they correspond to its nature (to what is natural to
each of the soul’s parts). Although natural, this order is to be acquired by
means of the proper education (the content of which is discussed extensively
in the second and the third book) and by virtuous actions.
The passage that is particularly illustrative of the nature of psychic justice
in Plato is the one in which Socrates claims “an exact analogy” between
justice and health, both being good (best) states—the former of the soul, the
latter of the body:
“And if we know what injustice and justice are, it’s clear enough,
isn’t it, what acting unjustly and doing wrong are, or, again, what
acting justly is?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “there is an exact analogy between these
states of mind and bodily health and sickness.”
“How?”
“Healthy activities produce health, and unhealthy activities
produce sickness.”
“True.”
“Well, then, don’t just actions produce justice, and unjust
actions injustice?”
“They must.”
“And health is produced by establishing a natural relation of
control and subordination among the constituents of the body,
disease by establishing an unnatural relation.”
“True.”
“So justice is produced by establishing in the mind a similar
natural relation of control and subordination among its constit-
uents, and injustice by establishing an unnatural one.”
“Certainly.”
“It seems, then, that excellence [aretē] is a kind of men-
tal health or beauty or fitness [hygieia tis kai kallos kai euexia
psychēs], and defect [kakia] a kind of illness or deformity or
weakness.”
“They must be.”39
Now if justice is the state of the soul in which the natural order between the
soul’s parts is maintained, and if we are told by Socrates at the beginning of
39
Republic 4.444c1–e3. Translation by Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Classics,
2003).
fus-qd1001-all.indd 181 9/21/20 11:54 AM

the second book that justice is to be desired far more for its own sake than
for the beneficent consequences it has for its possessor, the most sensible
reading of this—in Hildebrand’s terms—is that justice (and all moral virtue)
is, according to Plato, to be viewed and valued from the point of view of
its inherent preciousness (value) and not primarily from the point of view
of its beneficence (its objective good for the person).
Now moral virtue is certainly one of the primary goods (if not the
primary good in the absolute sense) of “traditional ethics.” We see now that,
according to Plato, this primary good is to be viewed and evaluated primarily
from the point of view of its inner preciousness, not from the point of view
of its beneficent consequences for its possessors. This conclusion speaks
against the claim that traditional ethics revolves around the objective good
for the person.
Obviously, it is possible to question the premise that the literary figure
“Socrates of the Republic” expresses the opinion of the author of this
dialogue. However, doing this would also undermine the tacit presupposi-
tion of Hildebrand—namely, that from the analysis of the notion of good
implied in the Socratic dictum, it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it;
conclusions can be drawn with regard to the content of “traditional ethics.”
For also this dictum is defended by Socrates, the literary figure in Plato’s
Gorgias and the Republic.
With these conclusions in mind, let me now turn to Aristotle. Notori-
ously, Aristotle’s moral philosophy revolves around an idea of the highest
good, “the most complete good”—teleion agathon.40 This good is the highest
because it is choiceworthy for its own sake and never for the sake of some-
thing else (NE 1.1094a18–22, 1097a30–35). This highest good is eudaimonia,
which, due to a lack of more accurate translation, we render as “happiness.”
All other goods, says Aristotle, are lower compared to eudaimonia because
either they are choiceworthy for the sake of something else (mere instrumen-
tal goods) or they, although choiceworthy for their own sake, are also desir-
able for the sake of something else—namely, for the sake of eudaimonia (NE
1.1097a30–b6).41 It is, therefore, hardly contestable that Aristotle’s so-called
eudaemonistic ethics revolves around the notion of the good that is most
properly (albeit still quite formally) characterized as that which is choice
worthy (or desirable) for its own sake.
40
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1985), 1.1097a30–35. This translation is used throughout. In the following, the Nico-
machean Ethics is quoted under the abbreviation “NE.”
41
Here I have omitted the question of what kind of relationship there is between
goods, such as “honor, pleasure, understanding, and virtue” (NE 1.1097b3), which
are choiceworthy in themselves but also for the sake of eudaimonia.
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Martin Cajthaml 183
In this respect, Aristotle’s account of good is similar to Plato’s, since, as I

have argued, Plato views justice (and moral good in general) as that which is
choiceworthy for its own sake. True, the conceptualization of good is not in
both cases strictly identical. In the passage from the beginning of the second
book of the Republic quoted earlier, the good that is to be desired for its own
sake is opposed to what is desired for the sake of its consequences for its
possessor. In the first chapter of the first book of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristo-
tle opposes the good that is choiceworthy for its own sake to the good that
is to be sought for the sake of something else. Still, this conceptual differ-
ence is a minor point, since the good desirable in the context of its “conse-
quences” for its possessor is just a special case of a good that is desirable for
the sake of something else.
Now if we compare this conceptualization of the primary good to Hilde-
brand’s notion of “the important in itself,” we see immediately that the two
are quite distinct, although both are sometimes designated as “intrinsic.”42
Indeed, anything that is endowed by positive importance in Hildebrand’s
sense is choiceworthy in itself in the sense that it can motivate our will or
engender an affective response in us. Thus goods falling under all three cate-
gories of importance can be called “intrinsic” in the sense of being desirable
(or choiceworthy) for their own sake. However, only goods falling under the
category of “the important in itself ” can be called “intrinsic” in Hildebrand’s
sense of the term. In other words, not everything that is choiceworthy for its
own sake is “valuable” in Hildebrand’s sense of the term.
Pleasure is a good example for illustrating this. Both Plato and Aristotle
consider pleasure a good that is desirable for its own sake (cf. Plato, Republic
357b8–10; Aristotle, NE 1.1097b2) and in that sense “intrinsic.”43 Also, in
Hildebrand’s conceptual framework, pleasure, in the sense of “the merely
subjectively satisfying,” can be chosen for its own sake. For example, I care
that I am surrounded by people who flatter me. With such an attitude, I seek
the pleasurable for its own sake. However, this attitude is by no means moti-
vated by “the important in itself.”
Despite this difference between the two notions of “intrinsic,” there is
also a deep connection between them, since the intrinsically important in
Hildebrand’s sense is also desirable for its own sake. In fact, it is more rightly
so than “the merely subjectively satisfying.” Also, Aristotle would consider
virtue to be more desirable than pleasure.
42
Hildebrand sometimes uses the term intrinsically important or intrinsic importance
as equivalent to “value” or “the important in itself” (Hildebrand, ChE, 35)
43
“Intrinsic” is, for Aristotle, not just the noble pleasure that the lover of the
beautiful (filokalos) draws from virtuous actions but also the more primitive pleasures
of the many (cf. NE 1.1099a11–15).
fus-qd1001-all.indd 183 9/21/20 11:54 AM

The distinctness of the two notions of “intrinsic” implies, however, that

from the premise that Plato’s and Aristotle’s ethics revolve around the notion
of the intrinsic good in the sense of that which is desirable (choiceworthy)
in itself, no conclusions can be drawn for or against Hildebrand’s claim that
traditional ethics revolves around the notion of the objective good for the
person. In particular, what cannot be inferred is that, by basing their ethical
theories on a notion of the intrinsic good in their sense, Plato and Aristotle
base it ipso facto on the notion of the intrinsic value in Hildebrand’s sense of
the term. For this reason, the argumentation regarding Plato’s account of the
good formulated earlier does not aim at showing merely that Plato’s ethics
revolves around the choiceworthy in itself but rather that it centers on “the
important in itself ” in Hildebrand’s sense of the term. Now it is time to
argue for the same conclusion regarding Aristotle.
Let me start with the most obvious objection against such an argumen-
tation. Aristotle’s moral theory, so the objection goes, revolves around the
notion of eudaimonia as the highest good. Eudaimonia, as understood by Aris-
totle, is the activity of the soul according to virtue (“psyches energeia . . .
kat’aretēn,” NE 1.1098a17). It is always the eudaimonia of someone. There-
fore, independently of whether it is to be understood more in the sense of
an active contemplation as the dominant end or as inclusive of some other
(intrinsic and perhaps also extrinsic) goods, it is, fundamentally, an objective
good for the person in Hildebrand’s sense. For it is, after all, the flourishing
of a human being, and as the flourishing of a human being, it is always seen
and valued from the point of view of the objective good that it presents for
this human being.
This objection, despite being at face value quite conclusive, is surmount-
able. To show this, however, requires starting with a short methodological
excurse, pointing to the difference in the methods used by Plato and Aristo-
tle. Aristotle approaches the topic of the good differently than Plato. Plato
determines the goodness (justice) of the soul against the background of his
metaphysical system. The soul is good insofar as it is ordered, harmonious,
unified, and identical with itself. As with all other beings (sensible or intelli-
gible alike), it is good insofar as it reflects, in its own peculiar way, the meta-
physical principle of the One-Good.
To be sure, Aristotle agrees with Plato that beauty and goodness are to
be found in a higher degree in the suprasensible realities than in the sensible
ones. For, despite the fact that he refutes Plato’s core metaphysical teachings,
he also is a metaphysician. He thinks, however, that in proving this metaphysi-
cal standpoint, we must not start from these unchangeable realities but rather
from the things that all consider to be good—for example, health, (physical)
strength, temperance, and so forth. We must start with what is known to
us—that is, with what is given in sense experience or, in the case of the
fus-qd1001-all.indd 184 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Martin Cajthaml 185
good, with the endoxa. From there we can ascend to what is less known to us,
ultimately to the suprasensible (the eternal principles). Regarding the good,
this approach is clearly expressed in the following passage of Eudemian Ethics:
They ought in fact to demonstrate [the existence of] the good-

itself in the opposite way to that in which they do now. As
things are, beginning with objects not agreed to possess the
good, they demonstrate what are agreed to be goods; starting
with numbers, [they prove] that justice is good, and health, on
the grounds that they are forms of order and numbers, good
belonging to numbers and monads because the one is the good-
itself. They ought to start with agreed [goods], such as health,
strength, and temperance, [in order to show] that the fine is
present even more in unchanging things. For all those things
are [examples of] order and state of equilibrium; so if [they are
good], those things must be even more so, as these properties
belong even more to those things.44
Because of this methodological approach, Aristotle, in his ethics, does not

start from the metaphysical notion of the good but from the scrutiny of
the endoxa—that is, common opinions about the good (NE 1.3). From this
starting point, he moves in the direction of the suprasensible. The endpoint
of this movement, which, however, in his ethical writings is not discussed
as explicitly as in his metaphysical treatises, is the prime mover—the highest
good (Metaphysics 12.7.1072a26–b2). The prime mover moves everything hōs
erōmenos—namely, as an object of desire or, more precisely, as an object of
thought. It is always in the best possible state, the state in which humans can
find themselves only temporarily (diagōgē d’estin hoia hē aristē mikron chronon
hēmin). This state is life (zoē), actuality (energeia), and thinking (noēsis) of what
in itself is the best. The respective passage ends with the following sentences:
“Moreover, life belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life (hē gar nū
energeia zoē), and God is that actuality; and the essential actuality of God is
life most good and eternal. We hold, then, that God is a living being, eternal,
most good; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to
God; for that is what God is.”45
The implication of this image of the divine is that human eudaimonia
consists in living a life as similar to that of God as possible—that is, in living
44
Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. and commentary by Michael Woods (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.8.1218a15–25.
45
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997), 12.7.1072b13–31.
fus-qd1001-all.indd 185 9/21/20 11:54 AM

a life of contemplation. This implication is made explicit in the tenth book

of Nicomachean Ethics: “If happiness, then, is activity expressing virtue, it is
reasonable for it to express the supreme virtue, which will be the virtue of
the best thing. The best is understanding (nūs), or whatever else seems to be
the natural ruler and leader, and to understand (ennoian echein) what is fine and
divine, by being itself either divine or the most divine element in us” (NE
10.7.1177a10–17, Irwin).
Now do we desire, according to Aristotle, the life of contemplation
because we understand it to be the highest objective good for us? Obvi-
ously, Aristotle does not raise this question as he does not use this termi-
nology. Still, on the basis of Aristotle’s approach to human eudaimonia, seen
as a human and therefore essentially limited participation in the divine life
of contemplation, we might guess what Aristotle’s response would be: we
desire the life of contemplation because it is the best form of life absolutely
speaking. Eudaimonia, to cast this presumable answer in Hildebrand’s terms,
is the highest objective good for the person because, from the perspective of
“the intrinsically important,” it is the best form of life in the absolute sense.
This hypothetical response very much recalls Hildebrand’s claim that every
objective good for the person presupposes “the important in itself.” Note
that this conclusion is valid mutatis mutandis even if we construe Aristotle’s
notion of eudaimonia as inclusive of other goods besides the dianoetic virtues.
A less hypothetical way of showing that the notion of the intrinsically
important in Hildebrand’s sense is central to Aristotle’s moral theory is to
look more closely at his understanding of the morally noble (virtuous) action.
Hildebrand overlooks this point because he thinks that Aristotle teaches that
between a moral action and the eudaimonia of the agent there is a means/end
relationship. In other words, he understands Aristotle saying that the agent
chooses to act morally because he considers his action to be a means toward
eudaimonia as his final end.46
Now if this were the view of Aristotle, it would certainly fit into the
picture of Aristotle as the philosopher whose moral theory is centered on
the objective good for the person (eudaimonia), not the intrinsic good. But
Aristotle says more than once that fine action is chosen for its own sake (NE
1.1098b18–19: “praxeis tines legontai to telos”; 2.1105a31–32: “proairūmenos
di’auta”). It is not excluded that Hildebrand, who knew Nicomachean Ethics
quite well, disregarded these passages because he thought that they contradict
Aristotle’s central assertion—namely, that eudaimonia is the only good that is
desirable only for its own sake and never for the sake of something else. If
“No, it is not true that in every case our will always aims at our own happi-
46
ness as the end and that everything else is merely considered as a means to this end”
(Hildebrand, ChE, 302).
fus-qd1001-all.indd 186 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Martin Cajthaml 187
this were Hildebrand’s view, it would again be controversial, since Aristotle

says explicitly—in the passage already quoted in the section on eudaimonia
(NE 1.1097a30–b6)—that there are goods that are desired both for their own
sake and for the sake of the eudaimonia. This gives him, in principle, concep-
tual elbowroom for accommodating the claim that virtuous action—while
not being the highest good—is still desirable for its own sake. But what does
it actually mean to say that something can be desired both for its own sake
and for the sake of something else? Certainly, one and the same good cannot
be both a means and an end at the same time and in the same respect. This
is, however, not what Aristotle says. He claims only that the very same good
can be desired (or chosen) both for its own sake and also for the sake of
something else.
The first thing to consider in order to make this assertion of Aristotle
plausible is that the conceptual pair “for its own sake” / “for the sake of
something else” is not quite equivalent to the pair “means”/“end.” This can
be seen from the fact that by desiring something for its own sake, you do not
have to consider it eo ipso to be an end, since for something to be an end, it
must be conceived, as it were, through the prism of the relation to something
that is considered a means to it. Now I can, for example, pursue pleasure or
beauty for its own sake without conceiving of it as an end to which some-
thing else is a means.
Similarly, something can be desired for the sake of something else with-
out being related to it, in the order of being, as a means to an end—that is,
as an instrument to its proper sphere of usage (say, as the hammer is related
to hammering). For example, I desire a concert guitar that costs EUR 3,000.
Since I have this desire but not enough money in my pocket, I choose to save
EUR 100 each month in order to have, after thirty months, the sum I need
for buying the guitar. Now I can say that I set myself the maxim of putting
aside EUR 100 each month for the sake of generating the sum of money
needed to buy the guitar. Of course, the resulting sum of money is, ontolog-
ically speaking, nothing but a means for buying the guitar (the relationship
between money and anything that is for sale, is, essentially, a means/end rela-
tionship). Still, the relationship between each EUR 100 and EUR 3,000 as
the sum total is not that of a means/end but that of a part/whole (money,
while being essentially a means, is also a quantity and thus allows for a part/
whole relationship). Despite this ontological fact, nothing stands in the way
of saying that I choose to save each month EUR 100 for the sake of eventually
accumulating the sum of EUR 3,000. Nothing stands in the way of doing this
either, although the relationship between EUR 100 I save each month and
the sum of EUR 3,000 is that of part/whole and not means/end.
Similarly, if I desire to water the tree in my garden, I desire it for
the sake of having a full-grown, beautiful tree. Still, in the order of being, the
fus-qd1001-all.indd 187 9/21/20 11:54 AM

relationship between the watering of the tree and its growth is that of cause/
effect, not that of means/end. It seems that Aristotle’s implicit under-
standing of the relationship between virtuous action and eudaimonia of the
agent is best conceived along the lines of this second example—namely, as
that of cause and effect—since this best fits his teaching on moral virtue
as acquired through habituation. If eudaimonia, for Aristotle, is “the activity
of the soul according to virtue,” and if (moral) virtue is acquired through
habituation—namely, repeated good action—the moral action is one of the
causes of eudaimonia. Obviously, the notion of causality involved here is
the broad one implied in Plato’s or Aristotle’s usage of the term aitia, not the
modern reductive notion of efficient causality.
In light of these clarifications, we can understand why Aristotle says
that the virtuous action is desired both for its own sake and for the sake of
eudaimonia, since the former expresses the fact that virtuous action is chosen
for the sake of its inner worth (for its being kalon, as Aristotle puts it), while
the latter indicates the cause/effect relationship between the action and the
agent’s eudaimonia. The latter also indicates that the agent chooses virtuous
action in view of his own eudaimonia. But to recognize that his virtuous action
contributes to his eudaimonia does not mean that his primary motive for choos-
ing virtuous action is this recognized positive effect on his eudaimonia, since
to act virtuously means, for Aristotle, to act for the sake of the kalon, not for
the sake of the agent’s eudaimonia. In other words, unless I act for the sake
of the kalon, my action cannot be considered virtuous. And if it is not virtu-
ous, it cannot enhance or enforce my virtue and hence also my eudaimonia.
Therefore, in this interpretation, Aristotle expresses the fundamental
idea of transcendence in moral action quite similarly to how it is described
by Hildebrand himself, even though the conceptual frameworks are consid-
erably different. According to Hildebrand, moral action is motivated by the
call for an adequate response issued by a morally relevant value. However, to
have a full moral value, the action must also be motivated by the general will
to be (morally) good. This general will, while itself a pure value-response
and as such called for by the intrinsic worth of moral values, implies as a
“secondary element . . . the consciousness that it is in our ultimate interest
to tread the paths of the Lord.”47 Now if we abstract from the difference
between Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia and the Christian perspective implied
in Hildebrand’s account, we can also say that in Hildebrand’s explanation of
the due motives in moral action, there is a secondary moment—that is, the
consciousness that by acting morally well I act in accordance with what is in
my own objective interest.
47
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Martin Cajthaml 189
Someone might grant this point while arguing that Hildebrand, unlike
Aristotle, is much more explicit about this transcendence that ought to be
present in a morally good action. This is in many ways true. Still, one should
note that there are passages in Aristotle in which the transcendence in moral
action is presented with an admirable vigor and clarity.
Probably the most outstanding in this regard are passages from the eighth
and ninth books of Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle speaks about friend-
ship. The good form of self-love, he discusses in the ninth book, consists in
striving for fine (virtuous) actions. And the finest actions are those in which
we renounce an objective good for us (money, honors, and offices) for the
sake of the good of our friends (NE 8.1169a19–b3).
The premise of this passage is Aristotle’s understanding of friendship
formulated in the eighth book. In the purest expression of friendship—namely,
complete friendship (teleia filia)—friends wish each other goods for the
friend’s sake.48 In Hildebrand’s terms, if Peter is Paul’s true friend, he desires
goods for Paul insofar as they are objective goods for Paul. Aristotle does
not suggest that Peter’s actions aiming at the augmentation of Paul’s objec-
tive good (possibly even at the expense of Peter’s own good) are chosen as a
means to Peter’s own eudaimonia.
This, in fact, would go against Aristotle’s idea that true friendship is a
virtue. As we have seen earlier, the virtuous agent chooses a virtuous action
for its own sake, which means not for the sake of one’s own eudaimonia. Simi-
larly, but even more “transcendently,” Peter, acting upon the virtue of true
friendship, desires goods for Paul for Paul’s own sake.49 In other words, for
Aristotle, it is constitutive of the virtue of true friendship to desire goods
for your friend and to desire them for his own sake.
Now one might overlook this crucial point by focusing on certain state-
ments read in isolation. For example, Aristotle says that, in loving their
friend, “they love what is good for themselves; for when a good person
becomes a friend he becomes a good for his friend” (NE 8.1159a b33–34).
He also says that, in sacrificing money so that my friend may profit, I “award
myself with the greater good” (NE 9.1169a27–29). This latter explanation is
the reason why, according to Aristotle, friends are “needed” for one’s own
48
“Hence, they [true friends] wish goods to each other for each other’s own sake”
(hoi de būlomenoi tagatha tois filois ekeinōn heneka malista filoi; NE 8.1156b9–10,
Irwin).
49
“And what makes [good people] wish good to the beloved for his own sake
is their state, not their feeling” (kai tagatha būlontai tois filūmenois ekeinōn heneka,
ū kata pathos alla kath’hexin; NE 8.1157b31–32). In fact, Aristotle goes as far as
saying that friendship consists “more in loving than in being loved,” giving as an
example the relation of a mother to her own child (NE 8.1159a27–28, Irwin).
fus-qd1001-all.indd 189 9/21/20 11:54 AM

eudaimonia, since it is only by having friends that you can benefit them. In
other words, only in having friends can you have the occasion to perform acts
that are finer and more praiseworthy than if you would, say, benefit, strangers
(9.1169b11–14).
All this might be misunderstood as denigrating the transcendence of
Peter’s desire in which he longs for the goods for Paul for Paul’s own sake.
Such a reading is erroneous, however, because Aristotle does not say, nor
even suggests, that one should choose or affirm the goods for one’s friend
as a means to one’s own eudaimonia. What he implies, in saying that once
these goods are affirmed or willed this affirmation or will is a bearer of
higher value than the affirmed goods themselves, is that these goods must
be willed or affirmed with the right intention—that is, for the sake of your
friend’s objective good. This is implied by the fact that they are affirmed
or willed by the true friend—that is, the person who has the virtue of true
friendship—since such a person, as already explained, will desire his friend’s
goods for his friend’s sake.
And by claiming that one “needs” friends for his own eudaimonia, Aris-
totle merely points to the fact that it is only by having friends that one is
able to commit actions of such a degree of moral laudability that would be
impossible without having them (and doing the same beneficial deeds for
foreigners). Thus neither of the two assertions postulates or implies that
there is a means/end relationship between the desire to have friends (and to
benefit them) and one’s own eudaimonia.
Now it is true that wishing good to a friend for his own sake, to put it
again in Hildebrand’s terms, is a motivation centered on the category of the
objective good for the person. But it is not centered on the objective good
for oneself but for a friend—that is, for another person. In wishing the other
his own objective good, I truly step out from the kind of self-centered atti-
tude that Hildebrand finds objectionable in what he takes to be Aristotle’s
understanding of the relationship between morally good action and the
agent’s eudaimonia.
Conclusion
The virtue of justice in Plato and the key notions of eudaimonia and virtuous
action in Aristotle revolve around the idea of intrinsic good in Hildebrand’s
sense of the term. The idea of true friendship in Aristotle “revolves around”
the idea of the objective good for the person but for the other person. There-
fore, we can conclude that, in highlighting quite rightly the need for transcen-
dence in moral action and in our responses in general as something that must
be centered on value as “the important in itself ” and not just on the objective
fus-qd1001-all.indd 190 9/21/20 11:54 AM

Martin Cajthaml 191
good for us, Hildebrand’s contribution is not that of breaking entirely new
ground in ethical reasoning but rather in highlighting an important point
that, although already present in “traditional ethics,” was never articulated
with such conceptual clarity. In light of this conclusion, we may see, on one
hand, the genuine philosophical achievement of Hildebrand, since he was
arguably the first to elaborate on this level of clarity and explicitness the
crucial distinction between the three essentially different types of importance
involved in human motivation. At the same time, however, the limits of his
scholarship on the classical authors, including not just Aquinas but also Plato
and Aristotle, made him erroneously believe that what he had philosophically
discovered was far more novel and revolutionary than it actually was.
Sts Cyril and Methodius Faculty of Theology,

Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
fus-qd1001-all.indd 191 9/21/20 11:54 AM

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS
Habits and Holiness

Ethics, Theology, and Biopsychology
Thomistic Ressourcement Series
Ezra Sullivan, OP
Available December 2020
Paper $34.95
cuapress.org
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Quaestiones

fus-qd1001-all.indd 1 9/30/20 12:59 PM

Contemporary Engagement with the

Further Development of the Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand

Hildebrand, Hypostasis, and the Irreducibility of Personal Existence

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics and the Value of Modern Art

The Intersubjectivity of Love and the Structure of the Human Person

Toward the Name of the Other

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Critical Rehabilitation of Plato’s Forms

Affirmation of Different Forms of Individual Subjectivity in

Dietrich von Hildebrand and C. S. Lewis on the Rationality of

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Concept of Value

fus-qd1001-all.indd 2 9/21/20 11:53 AM

This volume brings together a number of scholars working on topics ranging

Hildebrand remained committed to two strands of philosophical method

© DT Sheffler, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 2019)

fus-qd1001-all.indd 3 9/21/20 11:53 AM

when we do philosophy is a reality beyond us, transcending our subjective

Value and Value-­Response

Hildebrand is well known for his philosophy of value and value-­response,

fus-qd1001-all.indd 4 9/21/20 11:53 AM

appears in nearly all his works. Value, according to Hildebrand, is a basic

fus-qd1001-all.indd 5 9/21/20 11:53 AM

fus-qd1001-all.indd 6 9/21/20 11:53 AM

fus-qd1001-all.indd 7 9/21/20 11:53 AM

with an unrepeatable personal existence. Hildebrand’s contribution is to

The Work Left to Do

Hildebrand’s philosophy touches upon several critical areas of live inquiry. In

fus-qd1001-all.indd 8 9/21/20 11:53 AM

I. Appropriating Hildebrand’s Insights

II. Systematic Presentations of Hildebrand’s Thought

A second form of adding to the thought of Hildebrand lies in providing sys-

1. Presentations of his thought in general, perhaps in a work analo-

fus-qd1001-all.indd 9 9/21/20 11:53 AM

2. Presentations on different topics on which systematic accounts are

fus-qd1001-all.indd 10 9/21/20 11:53 AM

III. Presentations of the Philosophical and

Hildebrand’s philosophy forms a coherent whole from his earliest writings to

IV. Historical Influence of Hildebrand’s

Such a study could begin with expounding Husserl’s exceedingly positive

1. Hildebrand exerted great influence on generations of direct and

fus-qd1001-all.indd 11 9/21/20 11:53 AM

his students taught at the University of Dallas as well as the Uni-

VI. Comparison of Hildebrand’s Insights with

There exist important relations between Hildebrand’s insights and those

fus-qd1001-all.indd 12 9/21/20 11:53 AM

1996, ch. 1) as well as the many Aristotelian elements in Hildebrand’s philos-

fus-qd1001-all.indd 13 9/21/20 11:53 AM

Hildebrand’s critique of Aquinas’s and Aristotle’s ethics chiefly regards

fus-qd1001-all.indd 14 9/21/20 11:53 AM

VII. Making Hildebrand’s Philosophy Fruitful

know not whence, should be brought in us by what is unsubstantial,

fus-qd1001-all.indd 15 9/21/20 11:53 AM

to Kant’s and Hume’s critiques of any objective knowledge of the essences

VIII. Contributions toward Continuing Hildebrand’s

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tinguished, counting for example the fundamental moral attitude as a fourth

IX. A Study of and Publication of Hildebrand’s

One should edit and complete the incomplete writings of Hildebrand on

X. Additional Fields in Which Hildebrand Has Done Little Work

On this topic, Alice von Hildebrand-­Jourdain 1970 has made significant

contributions. See also Ciril Rütsche 2017.

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XI. Critical Thoughts on Some Erroneous

Value and Value-Response

Hildebrand is well known for his philosophy of value and value-response,

On this topic, Alice von Hildebrand-Jourdain 1970 has made significant

Católica de Chile en Santiago, Seminarios de Filosofía, vols. 17–18. San-

On one reading, twentieth-century Christian personalists such as Max Scheler,

purposes of each blade of grass existing as a unique, self-subsisting being,