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The Phenomenon of World-Openness and God-Openness

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The Phenomenon of World-Openness and God-Openness OPENNESS The Phenomenon of World-openness and God-openness by Bulcsú K. Hoppál A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Reader: Prof. Dr. János Boros University of Pécs, Hungary University of Pécs, Hungary April 2013 The Phenomenon of World-openness and God-directedness Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 4 1.1. Introduction to the Problem ................................................................................................. 4 1.2. The Notion of Openness in Anthropologies of the 20th Century ........................................ 9 1.3. Taking Philosophical Anthropology as a Key to Philosophy ........................................... 18 1.4. Anthropologies of “Openness” (Offenheitsanthropologien) versus Anthropologies of “Closedness” (Endlichkeitsanthropologien) ............................................................................ 21 The Phenomenon of World-openness ...................................................................................... 24 2.1. Preliminary Meaning of World-openness ......................................................................... 24 2.2. The Phenomenon of World-openness in Max Scheler ...................................................... 59 2.3. Aspects in the Person that can be open: Intellect, Will, Heart, Attitudes, Faith ............... 73 2.4. The ultimate Understanding of World-openness as God-directedness ........................... 124 2.5. Being-in-the-world and World-openness ........................................................................ 132 2.6. Openness of the non-living World and the organic, but non-spiritual World ................. 143 2.7. What World-Openness is not: World-openness is not Instinct ....................................... 150 2.8. World-Openness is not World-view ................................................................................ 157 2.9. World-Openness and Tolerance ...................................................................................... 162 2.10. Attention paid to Things vs. World-openness ............................................................... 169 2.11. Responsibility for the World and World-openness ....................................................... 172 2.12. Antitheses of World-openness ...................................................................................... 175 2.13. The pseudo Forms of World-openness .......................................................................... 183 The Object of Man's World-openness – the “World” ............................................................ 188 3.1. What the Concept of the “World” means? Interpretations of the Concept of the World 188 3.2. Pre-philosophical Understandings of the Notion of the World ....................................... 193 3.3. The Concept of the World in the Phenomenological Tradition ...................................... 201 3.4. The natural World ........................................................................................................... 211 3.5. The Object-World ........................................................................................................... 216 3.6. The linguistic and the cultural World .............................................................................. 220 3.7. The social World ............................................................................................................. 228 3.8. The World of the Non-being and Fiction ........................................................................ 235 3.9. The limited “World” of Surroundings of Animals .......................................................... 240 3.10. The World as Being ....................................................................................................... 248 3.11. The World as Cosmos and God ..................................................................................... 253 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 257 2 Bibliography: .......................................................................................................................... 268 3 Introduction 1.1. Introduction to the Problem The present essay is a phenomenological analysis of a fundamental human characteristic. The phenomenon, which serves as the focus of our investigation, is man’s openness and what is, in the final analysis, man’s God-directedness. There have been many philosophers who dealt with this phenomenon in the history of philosophy after Max Scheler who was the first to introduce the term “world-openness” (Weltoffenheit). We are tempted to identify the somewhat wider concept of man’s openness with world-openness. At least what Scheler’s concept of man’s world-openness seems more or less to cover what we generally mean by the phenomenon of man’s openness. In this sense, by saying that man is open to the world (weltoffen), we do not imply merely one single form or interpretation of man’s openness (that is, we don’t single out one specific object such as the ‘world’ and describe man’s openness toward it), but we refer to the whole of the phenomenon of man’s (general) openness. In my view and understanding of the term, man’s openness to the world and his God-openness are not two separate phenomena. I shall argue in this essay that God-directedness (God-openness) is the ultimate and full understanding of world-openness. World-openness is a many-faceted term: it entails a structural metaphysical essential trait of man as a finite person, which has no proper opposite except the absence of it in animals and in other non-personal beings; it has a contradictory opposite but lacks any contrary opposite. Every human person is characterized by this structural world-openness regardless of his acts and attitudes. In other words, world- openness in this sense constitutes man’s ontological structure. World-openness can also mean, however, something else that indeed requires human intellectual and volitional or affective conscious acts and culminates in the attitude of world-openness, an attitude which is free and which not every human person possesses actually and which is opposed to many forms of 4 closedness. With this in mind, we will analyze different acts, attitudes, etc., in which man can be open or closed. My analysis aims at being a classical analysis in the sense that the character of its argumentation is of a classical phenomenological nature. By this I mean the method of the early phenomenological movement (Munich-Göttingen-circle or Münchener Phänomenologie) and its later development. One of its main characteristics is that which Max Scheler emphasized in his seminal essay “Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition” as “radical empiricism”. By the term radical empiricism he understands an immediate contact with different phenomena as they are given to us, and their detailed analysis, that is, a radical differentiation of one phenomenon from the other. The main difference between the phenomenological empiricism and the so-called classical empiricism is that, for classical empiricism, experience means sense experience and modes of consciousness that result from the stimulation of the five senses. As a final result of this, classical empiricisms generally end up in materialism or sensualism. For Scheler and for the majority of the thinkers of the early phenomenological movement “lived experience” (taken again in a fundamentally empirical sense) is exceptionally important. As Scheler says: A philosophy based on phenomenology must be characterized first of all by the most intensively vital and most immediate contact with the world itself, that is, with those things in the world with which it is concerned, and with these things as they are immediately given in experience, that is in the act of experience and are “in themselves there” only in this act.1 From this it follows, that this essay is empiricist in the sense that it goes through and lists different aspects and appearances of the phenomenon of the openness of man. On the other hand, however, the most important issue of this thesis involves the application of whatever method in obtaining knowledge of essence(s) of the phenomenon of world-openness. The first method of the thesis is like the “empiricist” method of a classical religious scholar, who 1 Max Scheler, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Cognition” in: Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays. Evaston: Northwestern University Press, 1973: 138. 5 exploring the notion of “holy place”, goes through all occurrences and typical features of holy places in the world from Japan to Patagonia – geographically as well as theoretically. This method must not be misunderstood as a mere empirical surveying of facts and conceptions of things, nor as an empiricist inductive method in the normal sense of the term. Rather, such as survey and multitude of examples should help us to reach an experience of the intelligible authentic essence of a “holy place.” Only after having gained access to the intelligible nature of the specific form of “sacredness” that can be attributed to a place is one able to tell what the phenomenon of “holy place” is in itself; what its characteristics look like; in what sense different types of “holy” places differ from each other and from less holy places, unholy, or
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