Taken from the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (“Person and Act“) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003).

Wojtyla opens the forth section of the introduction with a startling claim: that one person can reproduce, in an “adequate” if not complete manner, the subjectivity of another person.  While fully admitting that the incommensurability of the other poses certain difficulties, he nonetheless argues this point on the basis of one’s observation of oneself as an integrated subjective/objective, inner/outer whole.  That is, since in observing oneself acting the experience is at once from within and from without, in observing the external act of another it is also possible to adequately recreate the subjectivity of the other.  This claim is foundational to the development of his view of person and of act.

This is essentially a restatement of what he has already said in the second section of the introduction.  There he notes that we can know nothing of the subjectivity of animals, apart from individual cases in which a dog or a horse recognizes its owner from another.  When observing another human that changes.  We simultaneously know ourselves from within and without, as subject and as object; this opens the possibility for partially understanding another human because our perceptions by which the other is given to us pass through the categories and distinctions we have through our experience of ourselves as subject and object.

The second point in the fourth section develops this further along the lines of consciousness.  Again Wojtyla points out that this is not a study of the person as constituted by the consciousness of the perceiver.  Yes, the perception of the other happens through consciousness, but Wojtyla is clear on this point: the reason by which the action of another is a conscious action is not simply because it is constituted as such by the perceiver.  Rather, in the perception of another person something adequate of the person as conscious agent is already given in the experience itself, and it is the phenomenological, intellectual engagement of these perceptions that reveals the acting person.

In chapters I and II of the work proper this relationship between consciousness and the person as actor will be explored.  In so doing the transcendency of the person will emerge through his or her actions, and chapters III and IV will explore a “possibly accurate” analysis of the person as transcendent agent.  Chapters V and VI will examine the complexity of the person not only as revealed as transcendent in the act, but also through its complement of the person as integrated in the act.

The final chapter of the work is entitled simply “Participation”.  Wojtyla notes that most of our efforts go into understanding the external world; relatively little goes into understanding ourselves.  Yet, this understanding of ourselves is critical to how we act and what we accomplish.  Because we are constantly exposed to ourselves as subject/object, we run the great risk of becoming commonplace or accustomed to ourselves.  We must constantly be recalled to marvel at ourselves, because in that we can begin a process of discovery of who we are through questions and responses.  The importance of this seems to sum up in a single sentence, emphasized in the original: “humanity cannot lose its proper place in the world that we ourselves have configured” (“l’uomo non puo perdere il posto che gli è proprio in quel mondo che egli stesso ha configurato”, p. 856). The implication that I draw from this is that unless we understand ourselves and how we act, we stand to lose that place.

Taken from the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (Person and Act) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003)

In the third section of the introduction, Wojtyla discusses two stages in the comprehension of the person, intuition and reduction.

In observing a person acting, at the phenomenal level we gather an innumerable set of facts regarding specific acts by a person.  These facts source both externally from the actions of others and internally from our own acts.  This set of facts is processed by the intellect in a sort of pre-theoretic stage in which a quantitative multiplicity of facts about a particular human are distilled into a qualitative identity of a single person as the source of the actions; this process is an intuitive induction in the Aristotelian sense (see for example http://www.friesian.com/arch.htm).  It is not necessary to first prove that a human is a person and then that what that human does is an act; in each experience the person and the act are both given in some manner.

Wojtyla specifically rejects the later, more analytic, sense of a form of argumentation or reasoning as the generalization of a set of specific cases to other yet unobserved cases (“all the ravens I have ever observed are black, therefore it must be the case that all ravens are black”).

Following the pre-theoretic intuitive induction of a person as the source of a set of (f)acts, we then want to explore that process, examining and explaining more deeply; this move to a theoretical understanding of the person is reduction.  This process is the intellectual analysis of how myriad facts and experiences are reduced to the identity of a single acting person; through deepening this understanding process the person emerges in more clear relief against the background of the variety of observed acts.

Again Wojtyla rejects the understanding that reduction is somehow limiting or diminishing the person as an entity, as can sometimes occur in analytic philosophy.  Rather than reductively diminishing the person through (for example) behaviorist or dispositional tendencies as observed in acts, Wojtyla argues for just the opposite; the acting person emerges even more clearly as a result of these analyses.

Wojtyla notes several things that follow from this approach.  One is that the proposed study of the person by means of acts is grounded in praxis; that is, it is not a study in how to act consciously, rather a study of conscious action itself and how it reveals the person.  Nor is it a study grounded so much in the person as an object as known intersubjectively, partly through our own knowledge of ourselves intrasubjectively.  Further, it is not the derivation of the person by abstracting from observed (f)acts; it is rather a penetration into and beyond the acts to the reality of the person behind them.

The object of the study then is to move from the initial inductive intuition of the person to a full explanation of the same such that the experienced reality corresponds to the theory.  The task is challenged by the incommensurability of the experienced person-act.  We proceed from the basis of our own interior knowledge of ourselves, but the experience of ourselves and of others is beyond complete comprehension.  Wojtyla sees as one of the principals tasks of his study the attempt to come to a correct integration of theory and experience.

Taken from the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (Person and Act) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003)

In the second half of the second section of the introduction to Person and Act, Wojtyla considers that the intellectual vision of the person formed in the observation of acts derives not only from the acts themselves, but also from the moral value of those acts.  The acts of a person are different than actions in general in that persons are presupposed to be agents.  The acts of an agent have an intrinsic moral property which cannot be separated from the act without artificially reducing the full dynamic experience of the act.

For Wojtyla the morality of the person is existential in nature.  Not only do we come to understand a person through the experience of moral acts, the person him- or herself becomes good or evil through the moral nature of the acts chosen through one’s agency.  Thus the person is found both at the point of departure, i.e. in the experience of a moral act as performed, as well as the end point, i.e. the person that one becomes as a result of a moral act.

Again Wojtyla notes that ethics typically considers moral values per se, in the light of which individual acts are then considered.  Neither is it an anthropological approach that sets out to discover, without valuation, the moral values of a person.  Wojtyla’s study, in difference with ethics, will reverse this to consider how we come to understand something of the person, either of self or other, through acts and their intrinsic morality.  Wojtyla notes that both ethics and anthropology are based on the unity in the experience of human acts and the experience of their morality.  By considering the morality of acts we arrive at a much fuller comprehension of the person than through acts alone; in a fully integrated phenomenology of the person morality cannot be set aside.

In concluding the second section of the introduction, to better define the methodology in this study to contrast the relationship between ethics and anthropology, Wojtyla gives the analogy of factoring common terms in a mathematical equation outside of enclosing parentheses.  In this study ethical considerations will be “placed outside the parentheses” in order to better highlight the unique qualities of the experiences which remain inside the parentheses, now unentangled from ethical considerations per se.  In so doing Wojtyla chooses to set aside essential ethical considerations in favor of essential anthropological considerations, without however altogether ignoring ethical considerations.

Attingendo al saggio del dott. Carlo Lottieri, Dall’ontologia della cosa all’etica dell’altro, vorrei proporre una breve riflessione riguardo una differenza tra Emanuel Lévinas e Karol Wojtyla sul rapporto con l’altro.

Nell’introduzione di «Persona e atto» di Karol Wojtyla (dall’antologia Metafisica della persona, a cura di G. Reale e T. Styczen, Bompiani, Milano 2003) Wojtyla considera come si viene a conoscere qualcosa dell’altro come uomo, come persona.  Nella prima sezione dell’introduzione considera cosa vuol dire «sperimentare l’uomo» ovvero «l’esperienza dell’uomo», e nota che nello sperimentare l’altro si sperimenta pure se stessi.  Cioè, nell’atto conoscitivo dello sperimentare l’altro come uomo, come esteriorità, si sperimenta se stessi simultaneamente sia come interiorità sia come esteriorità.

Per Wotyla allora, nella fenomenologia dell’altro si sperimenta pure se stessi fenomenologicamente, almeno in parte, come «altro». È da questa prospettiva dell’osservatore su di sé, sia come «uomo» che come «altro», che si può capire l’altro come «uomo». È poi da questo punto di vista che si viene ad intendere qualcosa dell’altro come «persona», dagli atti che l’altro compie.  Questa conoscenza deriva da un rapporto intrinsecamente simmetrico con l’altro, simmetrico nel senso che in un certo modo si sperimenta sia l’altro sia se stessi nella stessa maniera.

Mentre consideravo quest’argomento ho pensato al saggio di Lottieri proprio su come Lévinas considera l’altro come trascendente in modo asimmetrico rispetto a se stessi.  L’altro eccede sempre la mia capacità conoscitiva e quindi ci rimane sempre un rapporto asimmetrico (in modo reciproco, s’intende) con l’altro.  Da quando ho letto e tradotto il saggio sono rimasto un po’ perplesso come si possa mai avere un rapporto sociale più o meno uguale con l’altro, se in ogni modo l’altro sempre mi trascende.  Purtroppo non ho ancora avuto il tempo di leggere Lévinas per capire come risolva la domanda.

(In un breve scambio di mail col dott. Lottieri m’ha indicato che in Lévinas l’uguaglianza e la giustizia entrano con il terzo, cioè l’altro dell’altro.  Quindi dai suoi commenti pare che l’uguaglianza sia un rapporto non tanto interpersonale quanto societario.  Qui c’è da approfondire senza dubbio.)

Riflettendo sull’argomento di Wojtyla, mi domando se il suo approccio non preservi qualcosa d’un uguaglianza essenziale del rapporto con l’altro, basato proprio sul modo di sperimentarlo. Cioè, conoscere l’altro significa conoscere me stesso, e senza l’altro non posso neanche conoscere me stesso.  Sì, è vero che l’altro m’eccede sempre, ma è anche vero che in qualche modo io m’eccedo sempre a me stesso in quanto mi sperimento come «altro».

Mantenere una tale simmetria nei rapporti altrui non mi sembra problematico in quanto non credo che ci voglia necessariamente una trascendente asimmetria levinasiana perché non si sfrutti l’altro.  Mi pare che non è tanto la simmetria stessa il problema quanto una simmetria che possa divenire asimmetrica nell’diminuire l’altro.

È appunto perché il rapporto con l’altro è essenzialmente allo stesso tempo simmetrico, trascendente e auto-riflessivo nel modo di conoscerci l’un l’altro che non sono libero di negare l’altro, di definirlo inferiore.  Ne segue appunto che negando l’altro nego me stesso.  Nel definire inferiore l’altro, mi definisco inferiore.

Questa qualità auto-riferente del mio rapporto con l’altro nel pensiero di Wojtyla mi pare un punto cardinale della sua etica.  Insomma non credo che cambii la conclusione del saggio di Lottieri in quanto l’altro, in contrasto alla visione della persona sotto l’ottica moderna, rimane sempre trascendente.  Volevo però mettere in rilievo questa distinzione tra Wojtyla e Lévinas per meglio riflettere sugli eventuali esiti diversi dei loro sistemi etici.

Am I myself when, by an act of free choice, I deny the truth that I have established as such, having ascertained it as an eyewitness?

Did Peter, who affirmed “I do not know the man” (Mt. 26:72), deny only the truth?

Did he not also deny himself?

In betraying Christ, did he not also betray himself?

Would he not remain himself only by siding with the truth, by choosing to testify to it, and, in a certain sense, “transcending himself toward it”?

(My translation of the opening lines of Tadeuz Styczen’s Introduction to “Persona e atto” (“Person and Act”) by Karol Wojtyla, in Metafisica della persona, G. Reale e Tadeuz Styczen, eds., Bompiani, Milano, 2003.)

Taken from the Italian translation of “Persona e Atto” (Person and Act) from the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003)

In the first half of the second section of the Introduction to Person and Act, having begun from the experience of the human, Wojtyla comes to how we know something of a “person”.  We observe ourselves and others as human, and this empirical experience of the human is the starting point for how we intend, or come to know, something of a person.  In experiencing a human one of the facts which is given is that “a human acts”.  The observation that humans act is the starting point for Wojtyla’s work Person and Act.

Again, Wojtyla explicitly rejects a purely phenomenal empiricism, as the reduction of experience to the function and content of the senses alone results in profound contradictions and equivocations.  In the phenomenal experience of a human only a “surface” is directly given, nothing of the human him- or herself.  In particular what is not given in mere sense data is the human and his or her conscious action, or the act itself.  That knowledge sources from the action of the intellect of the observer in intending, or understanding, that the source of the perceived sense changes when a human acts is that a human has made a conscious decision and has done something as a result.

Nor does Wojtyla accept that the human or the act as understood by the intellect is an object constructed or synthesized by the intellect.  Rather, it is that the intellect of the observer is somehow engaged in the very experience itself, and in that engagement a direct contact with the observed is somehow established, different from but no less direct than the sensible.  In other words, what the intellect engages is not just some assembled bundle of sense data, but somehow, in the very sense experience of the other, the intellect makes a different but equally direct contact with the other.  Thus every experience is also a sort of comprehension of what is experienced.  This direct knowledge of the other will be important for his argument how we intend, or come to know, the other as person.

It is our experience of a human as acting that is the “moment of intuition” into the person of the other.  Since in the experience of another as acting we engage as well in a different but equally direct knowing of the person, the act is that which reveals the person, and the means by which we understand the person.  Wojtyla notes that the general approach is that the act presupposes the person; in ethics, as an example, consideration begins from the person and proceeds to the act.

Wojtyla however proposes to reverse that order.  His will instead be a study of the act as revealing the person, a study of the person by means of his or her actions.  This actually fits with how we experience others; it is in their actions that we understand who they are.  Were we unable to observe the actions of others, we could know nothing of the persons that they are.  We are convinced of the personhood of others because we observe that they act.  Thus it is through the acts of others that we comprehend, intend, them as persons.

In the second half of the second section of the introduction Wojtyla will take up morality as a property of human acts.

Karol Wojtyla, in his life before his election as Pope John Paul II, was a highly regarded philosopher in the Catholic University of Lublin.  His major philosophical work is Person and Act, published in 1969, to which I here begin to set myself.  What follows is drawn from the Italian translation of the original Polish by Giuseppe Girgenti and Patrycja Mikulska, contained in the Italian language compendium of all Wojtyla’s philosophical works Metafisica della Persona, Giovanni Reale and Tadeusz Styczen, eds. (Bompiani, 2003).  This is a fresh and careful translation, done with great care and recognized by John Paul II himself.

The opening sentences of the first section of the introduction, which is what I will consider in this post, state that the purpose of the work is show the objective aspect of the rich and complex cognitive process which can be defined as, in Italian, “l’esperienza dell’uomo“.  This is accurately translated as the “experience of man”, “man” in this case being clearly understood multi-dimensionally both as an individual “man”, whether myself or others, and in its collective sense of “mankind”.  For that the English “experience of man” is, I think, quite adequate.  Perhaps the best gender neutral translation is however “experience of the human”, as this seems to best capture the multi-dimensionality of the Italian; it can be at once individual of oneself, of another human and of what is common to humanity.  (“Experience of human” is not a well formed English phrase, and “experience of humanity” tends exclusively toward the collective and misses a crucial individual aspect of Wojtyla’s thought.)

A critical point must be made here.  By “experience of the human” Wojtyla does not mean an experience which a human has.  Rather he means the direct, cognitive experience of that which is human, whether of oneself or of another or others.

A brief sketch of what Wojtyla is about might be in order.  He is ultimately working toward how we know something of what a person is, whether oneself or another.  With the very rapidly deepening scientific understanding of how we as humans tick physically, contemporary philosophy has tended to reduce metaphysical entities, in this instance a “person”, to either pure sense data or to a construction of the perceiver.  Working from a phenomenological approach, he will first examine how we experience the human, and from there he will move to the phenomenology of person intended through actions.

For Wojtyla, the primary experience of the human is to be understood as one’s approaching oneself experientially, and thus establish a cognitive contact with oneself.  The experiential nature of one’s contact with oneself is not constant; it is interrupted during sleep, and in waking moments the clarity of one’s experiential self-awareness varies.  Yet, since one is ever oneself, the experience of one’s self persists in some manner.  The experience of oneself as human is constituted as the result of the manifold of experiences of oneself, at once as subject and as object.

In the course of the first section Wojtyla specifically mentions three things that what we experience as human are not.

First, a person does not reduce to a collection of phenomena or, as David Hume would have it, a bundle of perceptions, though Wojtyla does not mention Hume by name.  Wojtyla counters that while each experience is unique and unrepeatable, there exists nonetheless something that can be called the experience of the human that is based on the entire continuity of empirical sense data.  The object of experience is not only the momentary sense phenomenon, but also the human as him- or herself, which emerges from all such experiences and which is present in each one.

Second, a person is not merely an intellectual construct, formed on the basis of the current totality of individually perceived phenomena.  The experience of the human, of the particular human who I am, persists as long as there is the direct cognitive contact with myself, as both subject and object.  The object perceived as a human does not reduce to a construction formed by the intellect from continuous empirical sense data.  While the intellect does form such a construction from sense data, resulting in my understanding of who I am, my experience of myself as human is based upon a cognitive experiential contact with the human that I am, apart from what I have experienced of myself.

Third, without mentioning Kant by name, Wojtyla rejects that ascertaining the identity of a human object entails any proof of an a priori operation of the mind in constructing the object.  Rather, this is simply the proof of the indispensable operation of the intellect in the perception of the objective world and the formation of the objects of experience.  It is precisely to the intellect that we owe the qualitative identity of the object of experience of the human, whether when the subject identifies with the object, as within the same person, or when the subject differs from the object as with others.

Summarizing the first section of the introduction, in experiencing myself it is not that I somehow divide within myself to observe myself; it is rather that I experience myself simultaneously as subject and object, as observer and observed.  What I know of myself is what I have perceived in cognitive experiential contact with myself; for that to be the case, there is something which I experience that does not reduce to sense data or to a construction from sense data.

Furthermore, it is not that I experience myself “interiorly”, and I experience others “exteriorly”; it is rather that I experience myself at once interiorly and exteriorly.  Thus when I experience others as exterior to myself, there is a common aspect with how I experience myself, as part of how I experience myself is exteriorly.  Because of this common aspect of my experience of myself and others as external, I can at times, though never as immediately as in contact with myself, partially come to something of an experience of the interiority of the other.  Thus the experience of the human is the totality of my experience of myself and others, sourcing primarily in cognitive contact with myself, yet inseparably from my contact with all other humans.

For Wojtyla then the “experience of the human” is not just of the other, but both for self and other.  In the second section of the introduction he will approach how we know the person.

There has been a question in philosophical discussion since at least the time of Socrates (late 5th century BC) regarding the nature of what is good. The classic question posed by Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro is “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” The question is whether that which is pious is pious of its own essence, its own nature, and thus the gods love it, or whether the pious is made pious because the gods love it; Socrates clearly comes down on the former view.

In Socrates’ question however, the “pious” is something external to the gods. As best I know there was no sense of the Greek gods defining essential goodness; they were more about power, and they could be quite capricious. Certainly for Socrates and Plato in any case the good is something ineffable which is not directly dependent on or the nature of the gods.

The Socratic question has been historically important in the discussion of what is called the Divine Command Theory. Is something good because God commands it, or does God recognize what is good and command it?

When I first read this a few years ago I intuitively differed with the terms of the Socratic argument. As I have come to understand it now, the Socratic argument is not a formulation of a DCT in terms which would be considered across the various traditions of orthodox (little ‘o’) Christianity.

The basic difference is this: Christianity is willing to posit a God that is essentially and only good. Thus goodness is of God’s essential nature, neither accidental or contingent, and he is solely good, with nothing evil in his nature. (Yes, this begs crucial questions of God’s existence and his nature, but so does any appeal to a cosmic good or moral principle which is external to God.)

It follows from these premisses regarding God’s nature that God’s speech and his commands are good, in that they source from his essentially and solely good nature. Thus when God speaks he utters something necessarily good, and for God’s speech to be good it is sufficient that he speak. In argument form:

P1) God is essentially good (i.e. his goodness is not accidental or contingent.)
P2) God is good only (i.e. there is no evil in him.)
C1) Therefore God’s speech and commands are necessarily and only good.

An objection which is generally raised is that the DCT leaves open the possibility that God could command gratuitous evil, thus declaring something evil as if it were good. In response, Christianity posits God not only as essentially good but as good only. If God is good only, then he cannot speak evilly. If he cannot speak evilly, then the objection fails, as it then is impossible for God to command evil.

Corollary to this objection, one might object that God, as absolutely free, is free to choose good or evil; thus the DCT should be rejected, as this freedom opens the possibility of God choosing and commanding evil. In response I reject that God is free to choose good and evil. If one accepts that he is essentially and only good, that precludes God’s choosing evil, from which it follows that God is not absolutely free in the sense proposed. That may run counter to other ideas about the nature of God, but so far I think it holds.

We should note that the above objection sourcing from the absolute freedom of God is from a view in which good and evil are other than God; for God to be able to choose good and evil these must exist apart from God in order to be freely chosen by him. This is already a different argument, as in the proposed argument good does not exist apart from God, thus is not something God can choose; as essential to his nature, he is good, as is not of predication but of identity.

One might also object that in declaring creation as good, God declared something external to himself as good. That does not violate the conclusion that God’s commands are good, nor does it lead us to conclude with Socrates that good is other than or apart from God. As creation, the original cosmos was a dependent expression of God’s essential goodness; it was good contingent on God’s goodness. The goodness of the cosmos is not a goodness which is independent of God, thus does not qualify as a good apart from God in the same way as posited by the Socratic argument.

In conclusion, it is my view that a DCT based on the nature of God as essentially and only good is a different argument than the Socratic formulation of the DCT and thus survives the objections to the Socratic form. Thus when God gives ethical commands we, to be good, should act as he says; in so doing we will act as he acts.

The DCT in this form at least leaves open the question of how we determine just what God said or interpret how it might be applied; that is a different discussion.

Jean-Luc Marion, in God Without Being, has given me the first effective response to Quohelet’s charge of vanity with which I have struggled much of my life.  I read this but two weeks ago, and already I find it challenging and transforming a long held instinctive response to the world.

As I have very briefly written previously in this blog, Marion opens with an incisive discussion in chapter 1 of the idol and the icon.  He develops that theme in a remarkable way in chapter 4, “The Reverse of Vanity.”  I will attempt to sketch his arguments here.

Per Marion, to see the world is to see it idolatrously.  To see idolatrously is to have one’s gaze arrested by something in the world, to not see beyond it, to make of it something that it is not, to raise it to the status of an idol, a false god.  In that gaze there is no distance, not understood as physical distance, but as phenomenological distance, or “iconic distance”***; the observer identifies with the observed in the idolatrous gaze, and in that identification the distance between the two is closed.

(*** Thanks to Brett Saunders, a graduate student at the University of Dallas, for this comment.  After a brief conversation with him recently I think that I need to reconsider Marion’s concept of distance.)

When finally disillusioned and disappointed by the world, the idolatrous gaze becomes the gaze of boredom, and in the gaze of boredom a distance from the world opens; from that distance the world suddenly appears vain, in which the observer is detached from the observed; that detachment opens distance from the observed for the observer.  The world which idolatrously appears worthy of hope, in the gaze of boredom becomes as a mist or vapor, which though appearing substantive, is easily dispersed, vanishing in a light breath or wind.

Boredom opens distance, and in that distance the world is seen in vanity.  To see with the gaze of boredom is to see the world from the distance from which God sees it, but not as God sees it.  To see the world as vain is to see it accurately; many times in the Bible our lives are described as a mist that disperses, or as grass that withers and dies.  And in that assessment we can go no further.  We, like Quohelet, are immured in the vision of vanity.

God’s bridge closing that distance is love.  He sees the world as vanity, a mist, a vapor, but he loves, and that love bridges the distance opened in understanding the world as vain.

It is there that I find myself provoked deep within by my own cynical, detached, bored response.  I have long been quite cynical politically.  I think people tend to place a hope in democracy that is idolatrous.  Observing the Democratic national convention this week, where I find myself detached and evaluating the rhetoric as vanity, I find myself challenged by Marion’s analysis that, though God may see the vanity of unredeemed human self-actualization, in response he loves and bridges the gap.

In bridging the distance of vanity, he does not negate vanity, for the world is vain; however, he does offer his hope in the presence of his son, God become flesh, who finally closed the gap by becoming as we are that we might become as he is.  We who now follow him are to close the gap in the same way.  Without negating or denying vanity, we close that distance in love to touch the lives of those around us that either still see idolatrously or in boredom, in detachment, see vanity.

From Marion’s analysis I finally understand God’s love as the response to my all too common cynical detachment from the world, held from my teenage years when the opening of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanity – all is vanity,” accurately summed the confusion and vanity I felt when observing the world in the late 60s, a world into which I did not know where or how to fit.  Mine has since been the gaze of boredom, of detachment, of iconoclasm (or perhaps idoloclasm.)  It is not that I have not had times of deep hope and engagement, but every one of those times has proven vain, empty, only reinforcing my cynical detachment.

God changes us to love as he loves, to bridge the gap of vanity to those that still see either idolatrously or in boredom.  I understand better why we visit the prisoners we do.  I visit one with a life sentence and one with a death sentence.  As a former prison guard expressed it, they didn’t get there by singing too loud in Sunday School.  These are people that most see from the distance that Marion describes, yet the love of God closes the gap of vanity to touch them where they are.

It is love bridging the distance of the Samaritan from the one lying helpless in the road.  It is the love of God imparted to us by the Spirit of God that will transform us to bridge the gap between us and those in dire peril in this world.  It is love that will actualize the radical equality of which I wrote last week.  Without the Holy Spirit changing us to love as God loves we have no hope of effecting that.

Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991.

I’ve finally been able to set the time apart to finish the first chapter of God Without Being of Jean-Luc Marion tonight. In this first chapter his focus is on the idol and the icon as indicating “a manner of beings for beings”, or “a conflict between two phenomenologies” (7). As an all too brief summary, the chapter focuses upon the idol as that which stops, delimits, arrests the gaze (le regard,) and in so doing imposes a demarcation within the person with that which is seen (the idol) and that which it is not possible to see (l’invisable, a French neologism coined by Marion,) as the idol impedes seeing beyond itself, bounded by the limit of the gaze of the observer. In contrast the icon is the manifestation of an intention of the infinite, hence invisible, to render itself visible, not only that it be seen but that the infinite might regard the viewer through the manifest icon. Where the idol arrests and demarcates the gaze of the viewer, the icon opens the gaze of the infinite upon the viewer. Marion notes the reference from St. Paul, “We all, with face unveiled and revealed, serving as optical mirror to reflect the glory of the Lord, we are transformed in and according to is icon [eikona], passing from glory to glory, according to the spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18) (21.) I thought to comment briefly upon one particular phrase:

What characterizes the material idol is precisely that the artist can consign to it the subjugating brilliance of a first visible; on the contrary, what characterizes the icon painted on wood does not come from the hand of a man but from the infinite depth that crosses it—or better, orients it following the intention of a gaze. (21)

I found that last phrase “orients it following the intention of a gaze” (the gaze of the infinite) underdeveloped (I do not know if it will be further developed later,) for if the infinite is to render itself visible in an icon through the agency of an artist, the artist is necessarily the prime locus where the infinite, in some manner, is first made comprehensible into the finite. It is that “infinite depth that crosses” the hand of the artist that I find as the critical focus in the creation process; the artist is the living bridge who must first, by the Spirit, have apprehended the infinite into the finite such that his or her hand might be directed by that intention. This is not to say that the aperture of the icon is limited to the comprehension of the artist; if the infinite truly does open up through it, that dimension is dynamic with each viewer. Yet, if the divine intention is not first known in the artist, it seems to me that it cannot happen in the icon.

That noted, I think Marion will develop this contrast of idol and icon later in the book in some important ways that I will discover as I am able to read further.

Smart, Ninian. “Understanding Religious Experience.” Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. Ed. Steven T. Katz. New York, Oxford University Press, 1978. 10-21.

This is the first of a series of presentations on the book cited above; Prof. Smart’s is the opening essay in the book. Future essays will be presented as I can pull together time and focus. In this first I will not engage it personally, rather simply present the essay without comment.

Smart’s analysis opens considering the phrase “understanding religious experience.” While understanding may be frequently considered as all or none, Smart points out that there are degrees of understanding. This applies particularly to understanding the religious experience of another religious tradition. While one’s understanding may be limited, one need not a priori conclude that the religious experience of a tradition other than one’s own is unintelligible.

Smart goes on to distinguish two different sorts of understanding, the existential understanding of something, and the explanatory (or theoretical) understanding of something. The existential understanding is the subjective nature of a given experience, such as the experience of torture by electric shock. The explanatory understanding is the reasons why something happened. Here he cites the apostle Paul’s Damascus road conversion. There may be different explanatory theories, which might overlap and/or conflict. A central question resulting from the above is whether it is possible to have adequate theoretical understanding of a religious experience without existential experience.

He then poses the question about what might qualify as a religious experience. While some experiences do happen within religious traditions, some happen “out of the blue”, and are sometimes the reason for one joining a religious tradition. He also notes that the distinctions between religion and a well-defined ideology, such as Maoism, cannot be rigidly drawn, and ideological practice may well have a religious-like experiential component.

Smart also considers that there are some life experiences, perhaps most centrally death, which have religious significance, completely apart from any particular religious tradition.

Finally, some non-religious experiences may have religious significance. A monastic tradition may emphasize the devotional aspects of everyday work, such as gardening or washing dishes, without the work itself being religious per se.

Smart goes on to distinguish roughly between inner mysticism and mystical experience as happening within a contemplative tradition, whether Jewish, Christian, Hindu or other, and outer “numinous” experiences such as those described in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. This opens up a further discussion in which Smart turns extended attention to the matter of classification and categorization of different experiences. In difference with R.C. Zaehner, who sharply distinguishes between theistic (i.e. Christian, Jewish, Islamic) and monistic (i.e. Yogic, Hindu or Buddhist) mysticism, Smart sees rather that such a categorization tends to gloss over significant differences within the theistic and monistic traditions. Particularly, there may be less distance between certain theistic and monistic traditions than between others considered monisitic.

Smart considers a possible objection that his distinction depends upon the difference between direct experience and doctrinal interpretation. Since there is no such thing as an uninterpreted experience, Smart’s distinctions based upon doctrinal interpretation may not hold. Smart’s response is that there are differing degrees of interpretation; his is an attempt to fully engage a phenomenological analysis of mystics’ reports, “…since the existential impact and sacred context of the inner visions can naturally lead to wider claims for them than the phenomenology might warrant” (14). He notes here that the comparative study of the factual content of religion and religions is crucial. The study of mysticism is largely an empirical process, and knowledge of the factual content of various religions is necessary to that end.

Smart then shifts to consider the limits of understanding religious experience, returning to his earlier question of the necessity of having had an experience in order to understand it. His first question considered is this: “Could one have an adequate understanding of a type of religious experience if one has never had it?” (15). The focus of his response is upon the word adequate: just what constitutes adequacy to discuss origin and validity?

Here Smart argues from the possible similarity of experiences that we may be able to understand by analogy. Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy, argues for religious experience as sui generis, yet he ironically illustrates the nature of numinous experience by the clever use of illustrations. Smart draws from this that mystical experience may not be so utterly different that it cannot be understood, at least in limited fashion for analysis, by the use of the imagination trying to follow the descriptions of various mystics.

He then considers an objection that mystics frequently describe their experiences as “ineffable”, “indescribable,” “inexpressible,” and so forth; Smart responds that such expressions do not preclude indescribability. One reason is ambiguity; that God is incomprehensible must mean more that God is not totally comprehensible, rather than totally incomprehensible. If the latter were true, nothing about God could be known at all, even of his possible existence. Another reason is that similar expressions are used in non-religious contexts, such as “Words simply cannot express my gratitude”; there are many non-religious occasions where the subjective experience is not expressible. Smart calls this “performative transcendence,” or performatively using words to express intent beyond the usual or customary content of such words. The ontological transcendence of the object being described does not preclude description by analogy within the things of the world; if this were true we would be reduced to utter silence, as we could know nothing, analogically, mediately or immediately. One direct cite seems worthy of summary note: “It is incorrect t conclude either that ineffability is a unique characteristic of religious experience or that it is absolute (for herein lies contradiction)” (19).

Finally, Smart considers that religious experience may only properly be understood within a theory that can also judge the validity of the experience, that is, “understanding religious experience requires committment” (20). He acknowledges that there may be truth in this, but prior to fully yielding to it Smart counters that there is much yet to be done from a phenomenological analysis to disentangle different religious experiences, understand the degree of interpretation in description, locate them in a cultural milieu, and understand their existential import.

In Meditation V of the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes considers a second argument for the existence of God. Descartes posits that the certainty of the existence of God should have “at least the same level of certainty” as the truths of mathematics.

This phrase could possibly be interpreted to mean either “certainly as certain as” or “more certain than.” A common view seems to be that since Descartes is reasoning from the Principle of Contradiction (PoC) that he is arguing for the certainty of God to be equal to that of mathematics. That is, since it is both impossible that a triangle should have other than three sides, likewise it is equally impossible that existence not appertain to God, hence they are of equal logical certainty per the PoC.

Working with this recently, I came to understand that Descartes concluded that the existence of God is more certain than that of mathematics, on ontological rather than logical grounds, thus that the phrase should be understood as “more certain than.” As I worked with the second argument I also found that it collapses on ontological grounds, as Descartes begs the question of the existence of God in the proof of the existence of God. What follows is an excerpt from a paper on the subject.

I find the resolution to the question of what he meant by “at least the same level of certainty” by examining not the argument from the PoC per se, but in its terms, in what was proven by the argument. What we see is that Descartes considered that he proved the existence of God. It is here that we find that Descartes considered that he had established that the existence of God was more certain than mathematics.

“…apart from God, there is nothing else of which I am capable of thinking such that existence belongs to its essence.” (Meditation V, emphasis mine)

In the above statement of Meditation V we find that for Descartes the existence of God is more certain than that of mathematics, as existence belongs to God’s essence alone. That is, in Meditation V Descartes argued on the basis of the logical certainty of the PoC to the ontological certainty of God. As eternally true as mathematics and geometry may be, existence is not of their essence; God alone is ontologically certain. Thus the truths of mathematics are ontologically contingent on the existence of God, and the existence of God must necessarily be more certain than that of mathematics and geometry for the latter to be certain. We find that this is consistent with the conclusion of the first argument in Meditation III; in that argument, Descartes concluded that the objective reality of God was greater than anything else, hence more certain than any other thing.

Descartes’ summary statement in the closing paragraph of Meditation V corroborates this view.

“Thus I see plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends uniquely on my awareness of the true God, to such an extent that I was incapable of perfect knowledge about anything else until I became aware of him. And now it is possible for me to achieve full and certain knowledge of countless matters, both concerning God himself and other things whose nature is intellectual, and also concerning the whole of that corporeal nature which is the subject-matter of pure mathematics.” (Meditation V, emphasis mine)

The emphasis in the above is mine, to point out that for Descartes the truths of mathematics and geometry, as certain as they are, follow on the certainty of God. On my view, this then is how we are to understand Descartes’ phrase “at least the same level of certainty.” Descartes intends this greater certainty not as logical certainty, but as ontological certainty, and in his consideration that was exactly what he had established in Meditation V by proving existence as necessarily, and solely, belonging to God’s essence. Thus the existence of God is a fortiori more certain than the truths of mathematics.

On this basis I propose that his argument of Meditation V is fallacious, in that he begs the question of the existence of God in the proof of God’s existence.

We have seen that in the second argument for the existence of God in Meditation V that Descartes considered that he had established the existence of God via the logical certainty of God with respect to mathematical and geometric verities. Arguing from the PoC, the certainty of the existence of God was established to be as certain, and as incontrovertible, as mathematical truth. That is, the ontological certainty of God is as logically certain as the verities of mathematics. However, as we have seen, Descartes also argued forcefully in Meditation V that existence belonged to God alone as part of his essence: God alone is ontologically certain.

It is here that we find that Descartes begs the question of the existence of God in proving the existence of God. In Descartes’ argument God alone is ontologically certain, hence the verities of mathematics are contingent on the existence of God. As he argued in the closing paragraph of Meditation V, without God there is no certain knowledge of mathematical and geometrical truths. Thus we find Descartes to be arguing for the existence of God to be at least as certain as mathematical truth, yet in the same argument concluding that God alone is ontologically certain, thus the knowledge of mathematical truth is contingent on the certain existence of God. That is, the certain existence of God is presumed, and necessary, for the truths of mathematics, from which truths then the certain existence of God is established.

On ontological grounds it is impossible that the argument of Meditation V should ever succeed, precisely because what Descartes wishes to establish is the existence of God. Since a key premiss of Descartes’ argument is that existence appertains solely to God’s essence, and thus that all else is contingent on the existence of God, there is therefore no possible reference for his argument that does not depend on, and thus beg the question of, God’s existence for its certainty.

I conclude that in the argument of Meditation V that Descartes begs the question of the existence of God, and the argument of Meditation V collapses.

La settimana scorsa mi venivano domande, pensieri, della metafisica del sangue. L’esempio specifico era quello del sangue d’Abele che gridava verso Dio dalla terra. Il sangue stesso è andato sempre più disperso, ma sia per Dio sia per la terra in qualche modo il sangue esisteva ancora in modo da poter “gridare”, ovvero testimonare, dell’avvenimento violente. Ma come e in che modo però, ecco la domanda.

C’è pure il capitolo 22 di Ezechiele che parla del sangue versato nella città, ma nessun’atto descritto dal profeta tratta d’omicidio, di morte. In questo contesto versare il sangue pare che significi non tanto uccidere quanto opprimere, sfruttare l’altro al proprio vantaggio.

Poi c’è la frase di Gesù di Matteo 23 che tutto il sangue innocente da Abele a Zacharia sarebbo venuto su quella generazione. Di nuovo si capisce che il sangue innocente, parola chiave, versato per violenza perdura diacronicamente in modo che ci dev’essere una retribuzione.

Ma qui non si tratta di tutto il sangue di tutti i morti di tutti gli animali, cioè che un’animale qualsiasi muoia. Anzi, si tratta del sangue umano, sopratutto innocente, versato per violenza. Qui c’è da indagare.

–

Last week I began considering the metaphysics of blood. The initial instance was the blood of Abel crying out from the ground. The blood itself was dispersed over time, but in some way it continued to exist for both the earth and God in such a way as to be able to “cry out,” to testify, of violent death. How?

There is chapter 22 of Ezekiel that speaks of blood in the city, but the acts described do not include death. Here the blood spilled seems to be more in oppression or exploiting others.

There is also the phrase in Matthew 23 that the innocent blood from Abel to Zacharia would come on that generation. Again one sees that innocent bloodshed endures across time such that there must be retribution.

This isn’t about all blood, of all death of any animal, but primarily about innocent human blood shed by violence. There is more here to investigate.

The question of determinism as normally considered in the analytic tradition of philosophy does not consider values; the focus of the determinist discussion as I have found it so far tends to be purely on physical process and the logical analysis of alternative possibilities. After a focused study of this in the last semester, I have begun to wonder if the usual view of determinism is complete. What follows is a sketch of this relatively recent question in my own thinking.

Even with the limited exposure I have to the vast literature in both the analytic and Continental fields, after the works we read from Robert Kane’s text “Free Will,” we also read Roman Ingarden; they were very different in approach. In reading Karol Wojtyla, Person and Act (in an Italian translation in the recent anthology of Wojtyla’s work Metafisica della Persona), I see that as well. Contrasting Ingarden and Wojtyla’s works with the analytic works, different questions are asked and answered, and it isn’t easy correlating the two methods.

Ingarden’s paper started me thinking about the role of values in the decision process, along the lines of this thought from the determinist argument: things happen for a reason. I noted that mental causation was critical to Ingarden’s argument, and that surprised me; few in the analytic tradition would make that move. That difference intrigued me. As I’ve understood so far, questioning the possibility/actuality of mental causation is much more a focus of the Anglo-American analytic tradition, not of the Continental phenomenological tradition. Yet, in considering Harry Frankfurt’s Deep-Self after reading Ingarden, I noticed that desires are pivotal in Frankfurt; they are the basis of second order volitions. I eventually came to see Frankfurt’s Deep-Self as partially mapping with Ingarden’s Ego, and that opened up further thought on similarities between the two, which then led to mapping with Susan Wolf’s sanity argument, etc.

In the analytic literature I’ve read, mental causation seems to be frequently associated with some form of dualism, the traditional form of which is increasingly under pressure with current scientific discoveries in the nature of the human person, and there has been significant effort to try and locate the mental in/on the physical. Yet, while that debate has gone on, Ingarden and others, not asking the same questions, have considered things from a very different view. Ingarden assumed the mental as a functional subsystem of a person and went on to consider its role in free will. After getting past my initial difficulty with the Ingarden, what began to sink in was the role of values in his model, in contrast to the other works we read. As Ingarden well noted, responsibility is unintelligible without values.

The more I considered values, the more they seemed to be key in the question of free will. They are not causally effective in the same way that walls are in directing my path down a corridor, or Black’s mental doomsday device ready to intervene on Jones, but they do exert a sort of mental truth-force. It seems significant that values can be seen as psychologically determining, though perhaps not in the same way that walls are if I try to ignore them. I make decisions for reasons which frequently have normative components as part of their determination. As a Frankfurt Deep-Self, my second order desires and volitional choices are based on values, and I am the one that chooses the values that I want to effectuate. Yet, even if the process of choosing is determined, which seems to be Ingarden’s view, normative values still play a causal role.

This seems to make intuitive sense considering my own first person experience. Considering the discussion from the materialist world-view, which view seems to drive toward a reductive physicalism, the mental that seems so intuitively central suddenly has little more substance than a fleeting wisp. The two different views have very different starting points, and they end up in different places. That seems to be the story of philosophy; where one begins is crucial to where one ends.

If I consider values as having some sort of causal mental force that influence a person’s actions, then I think values are part of the determinist discussion, and the question must be expanded to the metaphysical. There does not seem to be a good way to integrate the discussion of values with the traditional form of the materialist discussion that either reduces or identifies the mental on the physical or considers the mental as epiphenomenal.