A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO JOSEF SEIFERT’S PHILOSOPHY
Marcelo López Cambronero
I. Realist Phenomenology
In this text, I will sketch a brief outline of Josef Seifert’s philosophy as an introduction to the excellent volume that Journal of East-West Thought has so timely dedicated to his figure. The Austrian professor Josef Seifert (Seekirchen am Wallersee, Salzburg, 1945) is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. His style and vision represent, without doubt, one of the most important philosophical paradigms in recent history. His formative years from adolescence and throughout university were marked by the key influence of Dietrich von Hildebrand, eminent philosopher of the Göttingen Circle, whose deployment of phenomenology from a realist standpoint would always remain a source of inspiration. Alongside von Hildebrand, Seifert’s friend Baldwin Schwartz was also a great influence. Schwarz attempted to reintroduce phenomenology in Austria from the same perspective of going “back to things themselves”, through an Academy of Philosophy for which there was little appreciation at a time when the country’s cultural climate showed more interest in absorbing Wittgenstein’s legacy. Largely Professor Seifert’s life has been devoted to perpetuating the work of these two great masters. This is apparent from very early on with the publication of his doctoral dissertation, where he argues to demonstrate the possibility of attaining objective truths (1972). In it, he points out that there exist necessary states of things in reality, and the human person can ascertain these states as they themselves are, that is, in their own essence. However, in order to reach this knowledge, it is necessary to grasp the specific character of human understanding as a capacity, which cannot be reduced to a chain of material facts. These ideas are the core of his work, articulating the innumerable issues he has dealt with in is many books, articles and talks: the possibility of synthetic
MARCELO LÓPEZ CAMBRONERO is the Director of the International Academy of Philosophy in Spain. He thanks Guillermo Peris for his help in translating this text.
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knowledge about necessary states of things, wherein Philosophy as a rigorous science grounds itself.1 In order to understand how this is possible we must engage in discussion with the philosopher that discovered the possibility of a priori synthetic knowledge not limited to mathematics, geography, or the so-called “exact sciences”, but as something that also applies to other realms of reality: Immanuel Kant. At the same time, one must understand the philosophical work of Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. After confronting these authors, Seifert highlights four main points that together make realist phenomenology possible. He understood it as the most appropriate instance of a type of philosophy that seeks to know “the things themselves”, or as stated by the motto of the International Academy of Philosophy “the love of truth, every truth and in everything”. The first point is that the characteristic necessity found in necessary states of things (one might think of Pythagoras’ theorem, or of the proposition pointed out by von Hildebrand “justice cannot be ascribed to impersonal beings”) is not the correlate of a linguistic sign or the product of a subjective state. Nor does it entail that it is beyond our power to think of such things in a different way (perhaps due to the structure of our brain, as psicologism would hold). It is the necessity that attends the thing itself as its own trait, that is, it is completely objective. “In fact” —Seifert states— “philosophy can be an authentically philosophical science only if it attains knowledge of the intelligible objective essence of things, which is its object”.2 The second point is that this necessity found in the essence of things makes itself manifest in a demonstrable and doubtless way —that is, it is supremely intelligible. The third point held by Seifert is that this necessity can be known directly through intuition of the essence, or indirectly through deduction or logical proof. Seifert here is not speaking about an instance immanent to the subject, or about
1See Josef Seifert, “La Filosofia come Scienza Rigorosa. La fondazione di un método fenomenológico realista in dialogo critico con le Idee sulla filosofía come scienza rigorosa de Edmund Husserl”, Interpretative essay included in the bilingual italian edition of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s capital work Che cos’è la filosofía?, Bompiani, Milano, 2001, pp. 537-568. (Original title: What is Philosophy? Bruce Publishing, Milwaukee, 1960). 2Op. cit., p. 551.
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innate ideas, but rather —and this is a crucial element for any phenomenology that wishes to consider itself realist— about proof of the transcendence of knowledge, of the fact that it is capable of grasping, knowing, and comprehending reality in its own essence. Lastly, the necessary states of things, about which one can have a priori knowledge, do not confine themselves to the ones pointed out by Kant —categories or a priori forms of sensibility. Rather philosophy also discovers many other objects whose necessary essence can be accessed a priori: “there are a priori objective essences of color, and of [musical] tones, as well as of odors and the quality of taste. There are essential, necessary laws of beauty, of its modes and channels, of the literary artwork, of art, of moral virtues and actions, of doubting and asking, of freedom, love, life and death. In all these fields, we find an inexhaustible world of such necessary essences with their corresponding essential relations. Therefore, not just in mathematics, but in philosophy as well an investigation must be carried out in order to discover all of them”.3 The whole of Josef Seifert’s philosophical research, with its great range and depth, finds its basis in these points, which he has developed and clarified throughout time. Proof of this is the fact that some of the fine books he later produced —where we find the maturity of a great philosopher— evolve from texts done during his early years as professional philosopher. For example, Sein und Wesen4—perhaps with Essere e Persona5 and Back to Things in Themselves,6 his most important book about metaphysics and theory of knowledge— is based on two articles originally published in English in Aletheia,7 periodical which he himself founded.
3Op. cit., p. 556. 4Heidelberg Universitätsverlag, 1996. 5Essere e Persona, verso una fondacione fenomenológica di una metafísica classica e personalistica. Vita e Pensiero, Milano, 1989. (There is no English translation, although the title could be translated as “Being and Person. Towards a Phenomenological Foundation of a Classical and Personalistic Metaphysics.”) 6Back to the “Things in Themselves”. A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism. Routledge, New York, 1987. 7“Essence and Existence: A New Foundation of Classical Metaphysics on the Basis of Phenomenological Realism”, en Aletheia 1,1 (1997), pp. 17-157 y “A Critical Investigation of Existentialist Thomism”, en Aletheia 1,2 (1997), pp. 371-459. The latter is a
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Another of his important books, Gott als Gottesbeweis8 —in this case concerning the ontological argument— is the outcome of long reflection about this important philosophical issue addressed previously in earlier texts.9
II. Moral Philosophy
The lines of work we have sketched evidence the influence of von Hildebrand, but also, without a doubt, Kant, Husserl, and, as Rocco Buttiglione has pointed out10, Max Scheler as well. The turn given to phenomenology by Scheler is correlated with his particular outlook: his take on phenomenology does not include a priority of logical-mathematical essences, but a stress on moral experience. Values, a reality not confined to the realm of ethics, take their place in a reality as something different from us, and not as projections of the subject. According to Seifert, they enforce themselves upon us through their own meaning and essence, being in themselves sufficient motivation for moral action:
When the object of the act ‘demands’ our moral action, by giving through it the corresponding answer to a being, we are in fact motivated by the importance of our action’s object, by the state of things that is to be realized in moral acts. It does not motivate us because of subjective pleasure nor primarily because of the true gratification that it supplies, but rather because of the valuable character and the fullness of the value that resides in it. Our volition as agent corresponds
re-elaboration of a text he had worked on for a debate or Common Seminar at the University of Dallas in 1974. 8 Gott als Gottesbeweis: Eine phänomenologische Neubegründung des ontologischen Arguments. Heidelberg Universitätsverlag, 1996. 9For instance: “Kant und Brentano gegen Anselm und Descartes. Reflexionen über das ontologische Argument”, en Theologia (1985), pp. 878-905. (There is an English translation by the Seifert himself in his page on the web academia.edu: “Kant and Brentano against Anselm and Descartes. A Phenomenological Defense of the Ontological Argument”) 10See, “Ser y Persona de Josef Seifert. Fondo teórico y significa de esta obra” in Carlos A. Casanova (ed.), El amor a la verdead, toda la verdad y en todas las cosas. Ensayos en honor a Josef Seifert (The love of truth, every truth and in every thing. Essays in honor of Josef Seifert). Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile, 2009, pp. 19 y ss.
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to this aspect. At the same time, it is clear that, with it, our will, inasmuch as it is an answer that corresponds to the object of the action, as a `stance taken’ objectively, is certainly motivated by the object, but its value is completely independent of the success and the utility of our action. The value of a taken stance that corresponds to a Good remains completely untouched, even when there is no result whatsoever for that will.11
The end of an action, for Seifert, cannot be neither the moral perfection of the subject, nor the good we expect from the realization of the value —regardless of the particular value at hand, whether spiritual happiness or economic benefit. This does not mean that values are not connected with goods, but rather it means values lie in a superior sphere, which prevents ethics from being “teleological” or consequentialist. A teleological ethic demands judgment of the foreseeable consequences of the action within the specific historical circumstance. Therefore it would not allow for moral norms with absolute, unconditional, and hence, universal validity. When it comes to moral philosophy, we cannot overlook the influence Karol Wojtyla, today Pope St. John Paul II had on a philosophically mature Seifert. Wojtyla pointed to him an important limit of Scheler’s material ethics of values: its emotionalist nature. Seifert shared this criticism and labored to overcome this problem trying to find the adequate place of duty within ethics. This way, he sought to avoid an interpretation of Christian ethics as a “supernatural utilitarianism,” that is to say, as a group of recommendations about what is needed to ensure the salvation of the soul. It must be taken into account that the experience of value takes place within the subject’s conscience, and in this sense, is accompanied with emotion. However, although emotion can aid in endowing relevance to values, it cannot explain their importance. It therefore becomes necessary to reflect upon one’s own experience so that the subject may be capable to formulate the type of moral judgments sought by Seifert.
11“¿Qué es y qué motiva una acción moral?”, pp. 44-45. (“What is and What Motivates a Moral Action?”). Paper written by Professor Seifert in 1975, during his first year at the University of Dallas. It can be found in German and Spanish on his academic webpage.
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III. Personalism
For Seifert it would be more proper to speak of a “Metaphysics of the Person”, but in any case, it is of interest to show that, with his premises, not all philosophies that call themselves personalist are really personalist, or at least not in the appropriate degree. A true personalism would have at least the following foundations.12 An irreducible difference between persons (rational subjects) and irrational beings. The recognition of the rationality of knowledge and of the person’s transcendence in attaining truth. The acknowledgment of the freedom of the person, understood therefore as the proprietor of his own acts. The discovery of the human heart as ‘locus’ of affections. Personalism is not possible if rationality is reduced to intellect and free will. The relation of the person with “the world”, with the totality of being, and with God. An understanding of person as rational substance: a person is a being in itself, not the function of some other instance or entity —not even of God. The unique value (dignity) of the person. Persona est affirmanda propter seipsam: “person” refers a characteristically intrinsic objective value, an “of itself”. Absolute primacy of moral and religious values, since the fundamental values of the person not only reside in the intellect. Conscious intellectual life reaches its fulfillment in religious and moral values. The person is essentially ordered towards community (and relation). It cannot be reduced to a relation, but without this essential trait, the distinction between man and woman, and realities like family, community, the Church, etc… would be unaccountable. The moral drama of the fundamental choice between good and evil. Philosophies, which reduce this choice to an intellectual issue (Socrates) or to a choice concerning the means to a final end (Aristotle), are not true personalisms.
12 See “El concepto de persona en la renovación de la teología moral. Persona y personalismos” (“The concept of person in the renewal of moral theology. Person and personalisms”), which can be found at the Digital Academic Deposit of the University of Navarre (dadun.unav.edu), or in the personal page of the autor in the web academia.edu. See also “A propósito del libro Introducción al Personalismo de Juan Manuel Burgos” (“On the book Introducción al Personalismo by Juan Manuel Burgos”), which can be consulted at the digital repository of the University of La Rioja (dialnet.unirioja.es).
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Personal being as pure perfection and divine attribute: “Being person is a pure and absolute perfection,13 and therefore personality and personal perfections must be attributed clearly and without reservations to God, and only to him in a perfect, non-restricted way”.
IV. Decisive Contributions to Public Life
With these few strokes, we have barely sketched the main aspects of the thought of a man as prolific as Professor Josef Seifert (currently head of the John Paul II chair at the Institute of Philosophy “Edith Stein” in Granada, Spain.) However, I would like to finish by pointing out the important contribution played out by his thought in certain practical issues during the last few decades. Seifert has given a lot of thought to the life of the Church, and to the relations between faith and reason, as attested by such relevant works as “Conocimiento contemporáneo y fe. Significado, evidencia, certeza y creencia.”14 San Pablo y Santo Tomás sobre Fides et Ratio15, Erkenntnis del Vollkommeren. Wege der Vernunft zu Gott,16 or Filosofia Cristiana e libertá,17 which will soon be translated into English as Christian Philosophy and Free Will with an introduction by John Finnis. One of his most memorable contributions took place at the Vatican, where he was summoned to participate in the debate concerning whether the so-called “Harvard protocol” about brain death should be accepted. According to this protocol, brain death is equivalent to complete death of the subject, a circumstance that would make organ extractions for transplants permissible. Leaving aside the complications entailed by this difficult issue, the fact is that Seifert’s forceful reflections made many scientists, the Vatican, and other countries accept that in extreme instances it may amount to murdering a subject in order to use his organs.
13See Rogelio Rovira’s article in this same number of Journal of East-West Thought. 14The translation of the title would be “Contemporary knowledge and faith: meaning, evidence, certainty and belief”, in Revista Española de Teología 60 (2000), pp. 203-238. 15Publicaciones “San Dámaso”, 2009. 16Lepanto Verlag, Bonn, 2010. In English: Knowledge of the Perfect One: Ways of Reason to God. 17Morcelliana, Brescia, 2013.
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Therefore, it is not a minor issue.18 He also had great influence in the position taken by the Conference of Bishops of Chile concerning the “morning after pill”, arguing strongly about its abortive nature. Besides these two decisive contributions, his active participation as member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and his interest in ecclesial problems have led him to engage in numerous problems, many of them with a great public impact19. In conclusion, Josef Seifert is the most eminent representative alive of realist phenomenology —a way to conceive philosophy in the understanding that it represents the most adequate interpretation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations before his idealist turn. From this point of view, he is doubtless one of the peaks of modern thought.
18See “Is ‘Brain Death’ Actually Death” in The Monist 76.2 (1993), pp. 175-202; “Brain Death and Euthanasia”, in M. Poots, P. A. Byrne & R. G. Nilges (eds.), Beyond Brain Death. Kluwer Academic, Netherlands, 2000, pp. 201-227; “Consciousness, mind, brain, and death”, in C. Machado & D. Shewmon (eds.), Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness. Kluwer Academic, New York, 2004, pp. 61-78; The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure. Springer, New York, 2004; etc. 19This is not the place to discuss whether his contributions were always correct or not, especially in recent times.
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AUTO-PRESENTATION OF MY PHILOSOPHY
Josef Seifert
Philosophical Autobiography. I fell in love with philosophy very early. A decisive event and great gift in my life was that the great philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, one of the most outspoken intellectual enemies of Nazi ideology,1 was a close friend of my parents and visited our house regularly from 1948 on, when he first returned to Europe. I was then only three years old. 2 After having had to flee Germany in 1933 and Austria in 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria and sent immediately their death squad to his apartment in Vienna, from where he had fought Nazi ideology in Austria 1933-1938, in order to murder him, he emigrated first to Switzerland, then to France, and finally to the US (New York). Due to his unique, kind, brilliant mind, and radiant, loving and joyful personality, I discovered his unique lovability and loved him deeply already as a child. At twelve years of age, when passing through a kind of philosophical and religious crisis due to my contact with young relativists, materialists, and atheists, Hildebrand’s philosophical lectures and discussions with young people and adults in our home provided me with a strong antidote against these errors. At the same age, I read Hildebrand’s most difficult book Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft, and he assured me in our conversations that I had understood it very well. Although Hildebrand, and his indefatigable quest for philosophical truth, exerted an enormous impact on awakening my philosophical thinking, it was not he alone who stirred my interest in philosophy. I remember at nine years of age spending whole nights being tormented by the seeming incompatibility between my free will and divine foreknowledge; I almost despaired over not finding some ultimate philosophical answer to this profound puzzle that involves such deep
Dr. JOSEF SEIFERT, Professor, International Academy of Philosophy Spain–Instituto de Filosofía Edith Stein Granada, Spain. Email: [email protected]. 1See Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle against Hitler. Transl. by John Henry Crosby with John F. Crosby, (New York: Image, 2014). 2See Alice von Hildebrand, The Soul of a Lion: Dietrich von Hildebrand, a Biography (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000).
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questions as those about the nature of time, eternity, God, and free will.3 Between age 12 and 14, I was fascinated and deeply moved by Plato’s works, especially the Apology of Socrates (of which I did dramatic public readings with friends), Crito, Phaedo, and Gorgias. I would say that my love and admiration for Plato clearly outweighs my great admiration for Aristotle - both regarding Plato’s epistemology, his philosophy of the soul and its immortality, and his ethics. I also was, and always remained, profoundly impressed by Kant’s genius manifested in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and fascinated by his distinction between synthetic and analytic propositions a priori, by his formulation of the fate of metaphysics depending on knowing synthetic a priori propositions and by some of his great ethical insights. At the same time, his Copernican turn and subjectivist interpretation of synthetic a priori propositions filled me with a deep shock. I felt that this view shook the very foundation of everything I valued and of objective truth. I read at the same time Hildebrand’s Der Sinn philosophischen Fragens und Erkennens,4 a book which defends a realist phenomenology and elaborates the “necessary essences” that cannot be explained as mere subjective categories or as constructs (such as Kant’s “transcendental ideas” of God, soul, and world). These essences are intrinsically and absolutely necessary, supremely intelligible, and can be known with absolute certainty. I felt called to serve a philosophy that offers a liberation from what I perceived at age fourteen, and still keep perceiving, as Kant’s destructive subjectivist Copernican turn in philosophy. Around that time, I also read some major works of Hildebrand’s main teacher Reinach that impressed me and inspired my epistemology and philosophy of law deeply. At age 14, I wrote my first philosophical essay on forgiveness and asking for forgiveness, an original and still unpublished work, inspired by Reinach’s discovery of the social acts (acts such as promising, thanking, or asking, that must
3I addressed this question much later in “To Be a Person – To Be Free,” in: Zofia J. Zdybicka, et al. (Ed.), Freedom in Contemporary Culture. Acts of the V World Congress of Christian Philosophy. Vol I (Lublin: The University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin, 1998), pp. 145-185; and in other works such as Where was God in Auschwitz? (Irving, TX/Gaflei, Liechtenstein/Santiago de Chile/Granada, Spain: The International Academy of Philosophy Press, Create Space, Kindle-Books, 2016). 4Later published in English and other languages in a more definitive version: Dietrich von Hildebrand, Che cos’è la filosofia?/What Is Philosophy?, English-Italian (Milano: Bompiani Testi a fronte, 2001).
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be perceived by their addressee in order to exist). I applied these insights to the acts of asking for forgiveness and forgiving (when the latter does not remain a mere inner act but addresses itself to its addressee, destroying, as it were, a claim or debt the other person has towards him who forgives). In writing this essay on forgiveness, I had the overwhelming experience of the joy and greatness of a philosophical analysis of things themselves. Hildebrand praised this first work very highly, and with its basic results, I still agree 57 years later. Inspired by my great love for beauty and especially for classical music and Renaissance art, another Essay on the Objectivity of the Beauty of Music was born at the same time, in which I drew a lot from two articles of Hildebrand on beauty.5 My interest in philosophy wholly overshadowed my dedication to school work, such that I was punished, for example, by my math Professor in high school, because I read a book on Ethics during his class, which he obviously found a particular appalling contradiction between my actions and what I read about. My parents had at that time a hard time keeping me from leaving high school at age 14 to go to New York in order to study philosophy with Dietrich von Hildebrand during the last years of his academic teaching activity at Fordham. At that same time, I also founded a private philosophical circle that met in part during joint vacation and in part in my parents’ home where we discussed, with friends that included the later philosopher Fritz Wenisch, many philosophical subjects including central topics of ethics, and confronted Nietzsche’s philosophical nihilism, of which some members of our circle were very fond. Diligere veritatem omnem et in omnibus: (To love all truth and to love it in everything as goal). From my earliest youth on, my interest in philosophy was directed to “things themselves,” and not centered on the opinions of various philosophers, however fascinating also their study was for me. But my raison d’être of philosophizing has always been the search for truth: in the philosophical and realist-phenomenological circle I founded in my youth, the doctoral program I directed at the University of Dallas 1973-1981, and the International Academy of Philosophy I founded in four different locations, always with the generous help of relatives, friends, and foundations. The first site of the International Academy of Philosophy, this school to learn “philosophize about things themselves,” was
5See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Die Menschheit am Scheideweg, (Regensburg: Habbel, 1955).
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Dallas (Irving).6 Then it was transferred and founded anew in Liechtenstein (with the most generous help of Prince Nikolaus of Liechtenstein, Mr. Alphons Horten and many others), thereafter in Chile (with the most generous help of the PUC under its Rector Pedro Pablo Rosso), and now in Granada (IAP-IFES, 2011-), with the generous support of Don Javier Martínez, the archbishop of Granada. It was always inspired by this motto diligere veritatem omnem et in omnibus, to love all truth and to love it in everything. Realist Phenomenology and Epistemology - Receptive Transcendence of Knowledge of Things in Themselves and Critique of Relativism, Skepticism, Kant and Later Husserl: Given my prime interest in truth, it was logical that my first major philosophical work, my doctoral dissertation, was entitled Knowledge of Objective Truth. The Transcendence of Man in Knowledge, a topic I repeatedly took up in later works.7 In these writings, I tried to refute relativism in any of its many forms,
6Our first donor there was my mother who left us a large portion of a small inheritance she had received and Mr. Harry John, President and Founder of the De Rance Foundation, who was our main benefactor. Causing great harm to the IAP, Mr. John was later deprived of his money and influence by his wife and Vice-President Dr. Gallagher, which cost us our Princeton Campus directly facing Princeton University, which we had already picked out. 7Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit. Die Transzendenz des Menschen in der Erkenntnis (Salzburg: A. Pustet, 21976). The title of the dissertation was only Die Transzendenz des Menschen in der Erkenntnis. In an abbreviated and revised edition: Unbezweifelbare Wahrheitserkenntnis. Jenseits von Skeptizismus und Diktatur des Relativismus. (Mainz: Patrimonium-Verlag, 2015). Back to Things in Themselves. A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism (London: Routledge, 1987, 2013), Vissza a magánvaló dolgokhoz, (Budapest: Kairosz Kiadó, 2013). This Hungarian edition of Back to Things Themselves, translated and introduced by Mátyás Szalay, represents the most definitive and considerably enlarged edition of the work. The latest short presentation of its central thoughts or, as I believe, true insights, is the second chapter of my book Wahrheit und Person. Vom Wesen der Seinswahrheit, Erkenntniswahrheit und Urteilswahrheit. De veritate – Über die Wahrheit Bd. I (Frankfurt / Paris / Ebikon / Lancaster / New Brunswick: Ontos-Verlag, 2009) on the truth of knowledge; and my „The Receptive Transcendence of Knowledge and the ‘Fourth Cogito’: Towards a Content-full Notion of ‘Early Phenomenology’.“ Journal of East-West-Thought (JET). Spring Number 1, Vol. 4, March 2014, 1-26.
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including the “transcendental relativism” present in Kant and in the late Husserl.8 My critique addresses not only, and not even mainly, the inner contradictions of relativism, even though I believe that they, too, constitute a clear refutation that neither Russell nor Heidegger or Gadamer were able to refute in spite of their subtle theories. Rather, above and beyond their contradictions, relativism and skepticism deny what I consider the most profound epistemological datum and essential trait of knowledge: the receptive transcendence of knowledge that allows any person, including the human person, to go beyond the confines of his immanent conscious life and to reach the being and essence of things in themselves. Relativists deny this; and yet, in whatever cognitive claim relativists make, they presuppose this essential mark of knowledge that, when deeply thought through, as by Augustine, overcomes any relativism. I tried to show that the capacity for a receptive transcendence of human knowledge, reaching things themselves and things in themselves is so evidently given, that it is even presupposed by any attempt of Kant, Gadamer, and others to deny it. In order to substantiate this claim, I made many distinctions between different notions of “things in themselves,” making it clear that I do not defend the absurd or, as Gadamer puts it, diabolical claim to know the entirety of reality. (Obviously only an omniscient being could possess complete knowledge of things in themselves in the sense of the entirety of their being and the entirety of all their dimensions and aspects). No, I show, not by postulates or empty claims, but by indubitably certain rational cognitions, that in the first place with regard to “necessary essences” and eternal truths, which I call the first Archimedean point of indubitably certain knowledge, we can gain apodictically certain knowledge about certain necessary essences of things in themselves in all areas of being. There is also a second Archimedean point, accessible with equally indubitable knowledge to us: the real existence of my own person, and therefore of one person, in the “cogito”: cogito; ergo sum; ergo esse est. I think; I am; therefore being (a person) is. I am speaking of the phenomenological “fourth cogito” that bears many similarities to Augustine’s “first cogito”. Through it, we reach our own
8See my „Kritik am Relativismus und Immanentismus in E. Husserls Cartesianischen Meditationen. Die Aequivokationen im Ausdruck ‘transzendentales Ego’ an der Basis jedes transzendentalen Idealismus.“ Salzburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie XIV, 1970. Der Widersinn des Relativismus: Befreiung von seiner Diktatur. (Mainz: Patrimonium-Verlag, 2016).
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being as a being that is entirely autonomous with respect our human knowledge of it (in this sense a “thing in itself”), even though this being is our own and we can only know it through our own conscious acts and within the limitations of our cognitive powers. The rediscovery and further phenomenological development of the cogito-argument that combines insights into eternal truths with the immediate mental perception of really existing being in its highest form, the person, was another tremendous experience for me of philosophizing on my own, on Augustine’s and on Descartes’ shoulders. Fascinated by the original Augustinian texts, I later developed this realist “fourth cogito” further, showing that the Cartesian claim that only knowing “I exist” is indubitable while all eternal truths could be doubted is contradictory and that both kinds of indubitable knowledge (of general essences and of existing being) must be fully recognized. In addition, that this fourth Cogito completely refutes the subjectivist and relativist interpretation of Husserl’s “third cogito”. 9 The real existence of God and the necessary divine essence can likewise be known by human reason with indubitable certainty. I shall call this the “third Archimedean point” of philosophical knowledge and will explain it below. Philosophy of Truth and of Being: Logic and Metaphysics. Another related main interest of mine lies in a philosophy of being and of truth in a very comprehensive sense. Such a philosophy of truth that entails metaphysics, epistemology, and logic, includes a philosophy of ontological truth (truth of
9Dietrich von Hildebrand, during guest lectures at the University of Salzburg in 1964, expounded this realist version of the Cartesian insights (quite contrary to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations) that I called the “fourth cogito”. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, „Das Cogito und die Erkenntnis der realen Welt. Teilveröffentlichung der Salzburger Vorlesungen Hildebrands (Salzburg, Herbst 1964): ‘Wesen und Wert menschlicher Erkenntnis’: (7. und 8. Vorlesung), Aletheia 6/1993-1994 (1994), 2- 27. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, hrsg. u. eingel. von S. Strasser, in: Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke E. Husserls, auf Grund des Nachlasses veröffentlicht vom Husserl-Archiv (Louvain) unter der Leitung von H. L. Breda. (Den Haag, Nijhoff 1950 – 1962), Bd. 1, 1950, and Josef Seifert, „Kritik am Relativismus und Immanentismus in E. Husserls Cartesianischen Meditationen. Die Aequivokationen im Ausdruck ‘transzendentales Ego’ an der Basis jedes transzendentalen Idealismus.“ Salzburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie XIV, 1970, as well as Josef Seifert, Der Widersinn des Relativismus: Befreiung von seiner Diktatur. (Mainz: Patrimonium-Verlag, 2016).
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being),10 of cognitive truth,11 of logical truth (the truth of judgments).12 Above and beyond this, the metaphysical status of the comprehensive truth of all judgments including ideal judgments no man can think of,13 and of the absolute Truth as Person, is a topic of metaphysics and philosophy of religion at once that interested me passionately.14 There is also a clear need for extensive studies into the nature of the truth of propositions (judgments) and critique of many false truth theories. Some of these identify the truth of the judgment with the object of a consensus. Some are reached by rational discourse (Habermas), others with usefulness, still others with coherence, and again others with the correspondence of our judgments with those of a subject who judges with evidence, etc. I try to show that all efforts to substitute the fundamental essence of the truth of propositions as the adequation between judgments and states of affairs fail. They fail because they are intrinsically contradictory, and they cannot liberate themselves from the archdatum of truth as a peculiar correspondence between judgment and being (state of affairs). This contradiction presupposes in each affirmation or negation. I show this by means of an extensive critique of many truth theories and forms of relativism, which reinterpret truth in terms of what it is not.15 This critique gains weight if we elaborate the positive insights hidden in such false and flawed theories of truth and explore the many truly existing
10See my Wahrheit und Person, ch. 1. 11Ibid., ch. 2. 12Ibid., ch. 3, and Der Streit um die Wahrheit. Wahrheit und Wahrheitstheorien. De Veritate – Über die Wahrheit, Bd. II/The Controversy about Truth. Truth and Truth Theories (Frankfurt / Paris / New Brunswick: 2009). 13See "Is the Existence of Truth dependent upon Man?" in Review of Metaphysics (March 1982); Wahrheit und Person, ch. 4. 14See my Wahrheit und Person, ch. 4 and 5. In the latter, I present a detailed critique of Michel Henry’s book, Je suis la Vérité, in which he claims that each person IS the truth. On the question of the dependence of propositional truth on human acts of thinking and objective thoughts see my "Is the Existence of Truth dependent upon Man?" in Review of Metaphysics (March 1982). 15See Josef Seifert, Der Widersinn des Relativismus: Befreiung von seiner Diktatur. (Mainz: Patrimonium-Verlag, 2016). (Mainz: Patrimonium-Verlag, 2016).
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objective relations between evidence, coherence, consensus etc. and truth.16 My investigations into the truth of the judgment consisting in a peculiar correspondence or coinciding between the judgment and the states of affairs are linked also to my observations at the border between logic and aesthetics of literary works of art. Roman Ingarden made a great discovery important for understanding literature and logic. He discovered in literary works of art there are many propositions that seem to be judgments and therefore, according to the principle of excluded middle, at least if they are free of ambiguities and equivocations, would have to be either true or false, but they are neither true nor false. He called them “quasi-judgments”. He found that these quasi-judgments do not assert states of affairs even though it belongs to them that they seem to do so and apparently do so. However, in fact, they are not judgments but tools to create the world of fiction. These peculiar creative thoughts play a crucial role in literary works of art. I tried to elaborate this great discovery of Ingarden,17 but criticized Ingarden for making the unjustified claim that all declarative sentences in literary works of art, which seem to express judgments, express solely such quasi-judgments that build up the fictional world but are neither true nor false. There are not only the “unreal judgments” of represented characters in literary works of art that differ from quasi-judgments. Literary works also contain many real judgments, which make full truth-claims. One such example is Manzoni’s marvelous description how secrets entrusted only to one’s best friend keep spreading in a single day and reach on the same evening, via many other “best friends,” just those persons from whom we want to guard a secret.
16See my Der Streit um die Wahrheit. Wahrheit und Wahrheitstheorien. De Veritate – Über die Wahrheit, Bd. II/The Controversy about Truth. Truth and Truth Theories (Frankfurt / Paris / New Brunswick: 2009). 17See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, transl. by George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); see Josef Seifert, “Ingarden’s Theory of the Quasi-Judgment. An exposition of Its Logical Aspects and a Critical Evaluation of Its Value in the Context of Understanding the Literary Work of Art,” in: Roman Ingarden. A filozofia noszego czasu (Cracow: Polskie Towarzystwo Filozoficzne, 1995); also (with Barry Smith) “The Truth about Fiction,” in: Kunst und Ontologie. Für Roman Ingarden zum 100. Geburtstag, Hrsg. v. Wìodzimierz Galewicz, Elisabeth Ströker, Wìadysìaw Stroúewski, in: Elementa, Hrsg. Rudolph Berlinger und Wiebke Schrader (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994).
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First Principles of Ontology and Logic and Apories, Antinomies and Logical Paradoxes. My philosophical interests in truth and knowledge are intimately linked to an interest in logic, not in the formalisms and different systems of logistics and symbolic logic and logical games, but rather the essence of logic, in its radical distinction from, and irreducibility to, psychology. I see these insights magnificently unfolded in Husserl´s Logical Investigations and Pfänder’s Logic. Building on their understanding of the objectivity and a priori character of logical laws, I go beyond Alexander Pfänder and Edmund Husserl in developing, in a more Platonic upsurge. This transcendent plenitude of ideal meaning units, concepts, and objective thoughts are the ultimate bearers of the truth of judgments and cannot be reduced to thoughts actually thought by men. This infinity of truth and the perfections of utmost clarity, unity, logical interconnections, and freedom of contradictions cannot have their ground in human intentional acts, as Husserl and Pfänder – in spite of their sharp critique of psychologist logic – believed. No, human logic can only comprehend a tiny fraction of the infinite realms of logical meaning units and logical laws.18 Within logic in such a purely philosophical understanding, I also have a special interest in the relationship between general (formal) ontology and logic. As Pfänder has shown, the four first principles of logic that all refer to propositions and their truth and falsity differ sharply from the first metaphysical or ontological principles of the same name but depend on them. This applies to the principles of identity, contradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient reason. On their difference and relationship, the logical laws being grounded in ontological ones, I have worked a great deal, in both published and even more in unpublished writings.19 Within this sphere, I am particularly fascinated with the problems of logical paradoxes and apparent antinomies, which I sharply distinguish from apories and seeming antinomies in nature. Thus, this interest is closely related to metaphysical problems. By investigating these, I tried to show that in logic itself or mathematics, when they are based on truth, no contradictions
18See especially my "Is the Existence of Truth dependent upon Man?" in Review of Metaphysics (March 1982). 19See my Essere e persona, cit., ch. 5; “El papel de las irrealidades para los principios de contradicción y de razón sufficiente,” Ibáñez-Martín, J.A. (coord.), Realidad e irrealidad. Estudios en homenaje al Profesor Antonio Millán-Puelles, (Madrid: RIALP, 2001), pp. 119-152.
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can arise, which can only be due to intrinsically false and contradictory assumptions; and I showed that the famous paradoxes of set theory and others are due to equivocations and other errors. Through these examinations, I refute Kant’s chief argument for introducing the subjectivist transcendental turn in philosophy: namely, his claim of antinomies arising inevitably from the nature of things, which can only be solved by denying philosophical realism. On the contrary, in a truly realist philosophy it is impossible that contradictions and antinomies arise. They arise only due to false assumptions and equivocations about space, time, matter, and free will, not from taking them to be real. In this context, I also discuss the Kantian treatment of antinomies and the modern attempts of Frege, Russell and others to solve them. Also the significance of Alexius Meinong, a protohenomenologist, in showing the false and contradictory assumptions that lead to the antinomies of set theory and others, are evaluated by me, in published as well as in a large unpublished book on logical paradoxes. 20 Philosophy of Games and of Chess. My hobby of playing (badly) chess and having been President of the Liechtenstein Chess Federation for 10 years, prompted me to lecture various times at the Liechtenstein Chess Open and to publish a book on a philosophy of chess which also represents an introduction to philosophy.21 In this work, I analyze the essence of games and the special reasons for the fascination with chess: the fundamentally different laws that govern chess: conventional ones, prudential ones, absolutely necessary mathematical and logical laws, and necessary laws that result from the combination of conventional rules and eternal truths. I also deal with the ethical questions regarding chess and the relation between chess and art. Philosophy of Law and Political Philosophy. My two main works on political philosophy, a vastly critical book on Machiavelli (which I intend to publish together with a defense of Machiavelli by Rocco Buttiglione, a text he lost and we are looking for) and on the relations between ethics and politics, and
20See my Das Antinomienproblem als ein Grundproblem aller Metaphysik: Kritik der Kritik der reinen Vernunft in Prima Philosophia, Bd. 2, H 2, 1989; El problema de las antinomias considerado como un problema fundamental de toda Metafisica: Critica de la ‘Critica de la Razón Pura,’ Revista de Filosofía 3.* epoca, vol 6 (1993); traducción de Rogelio Rovira, pp. 89-117; see also Überwindung des Skandals der reinen Vernunft. Die Widerspruchsfreiheit der Wirklichkeit – trotz Kant, (Freiburg/München: Karl Alber, 2001). 21 Schachphilosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989).
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an analysis of Aquinas’ De Regimine Principum and on the different forms of government. Neither one of these have been published yet. My main published works in the philosophy of politics encompass the indispensable role truth and value, and the sinister role, ideologies play in politics. This required defining the nature of ideology in politics and in private life. In several articles, I liberated some true insights of Marx and Engels, according to which ideologies have causes and reasons foreign to the object of their assertions, from their huge error of imprisoning man entirely in ideologies that make truth claims that are not motivated by truth but by foreign interests. Instead of making correct and incorrect truth claims for motives other than their truth, the political life of man should and can wholly rest on truth and on the quest for truth.22 In Philosophy of Law, I have dedicated many reflections to the foundation of basic (natural) human rights in the different levels of human dignity,23 as well as to the question as to how we know values and human rights.24 I also dealt with specific forms of human dignity and human rights in women and children (youths).25 A particular focus of my philosophy of law, however, centers on
22See my “Ideologie und Philosophie. Kritische Reflexionen über Marx-Engels ‘Deutsche Ideologie’ - Vom allgemeinen Ideologieverdacht zu unzweifelbarer Wahrheitserkenntnis“ in Prima Philosophia, Bd. 3, H 1, 1990. „Die Philosophie als Überwindung der Ideologie“, in: Al di là di occidente e oriente: Europa, a cura di Danilo Castellano (Napoli/Roma/Benevento/Milano: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiniane, 1994), pp. 27-50. 23“Philosophische Grundlagen der Menschenrechte. Zur Verteidigung des Menschen“, Prima Philosophia V. 5 (4) (1992), pp. 339-370; “Die vierfache Quelle der Menschenwürde als Fundament der Menschenrechte,” in: Burkhardt Ziemske (Hrsg.), Staatsphilosophie und Rechtspolitik. Festschrift für Martin Kriele zum 65. Geburtstag (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1997), S. 165-18. 24“Zur Erkenntnis der Menschenrechte und ihrer axiologischen und anthropologischen Grundlagen”, In: (Ed.), Wie erkennt man Naturrecht? Mit Beiträgen von Rocco Buttiglione, Franz Bydlinski, Theo Mayer-Maly, Josef Seifert, Wolfgang Waldstein. In: Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology. Bd. VI (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), S. 65-106. 25“Zu den Menschenrechten und Pflichten der Jugendlichen. Philosophische Reflexionen über die universale Erklärung der Rechte und Pflichten der Jugendlichen,” with an English and an Italian summary, Medicine, Mind and Adolescence 10 (1995), 187-211, actually published in 1997;
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which one is the most fundamental human right, a question that can be understood in three different senses and receive an answer from quite different viewpoints:
1. That of the condition of the possibility of all human rights and goods (that I identify with the right to life). 2. That of those rights that refer to the highest goods (which I interpret as the rights to the freedom of conscience and of religion), and: 3. That of the most universal human right from which all others logically follow such as the right to be always treated as an end in itself.26
Having always been fascinated with Adolf Reinach’s philosophy of the a priori in civil law, I unfolded the distinction Reinach draws between a priori law and “natural law,” though I see many more parallels between them than Reinach admits. Moreover, while appreciating his insights into possibilities of modifying laws, legal obligations, and duties that follow a priori from certain acts, through positive law, I criticized his claims about an almost infinite possibility to change the a priori legal effects of fundamental acts such as promises or contracts by positive law.27 Aesthetics and Philosophy of Beauty. Questions of aesthetics have
26“Dimensionen und Quellen der Menschenwürde” in: Walter Schweidler, Herbert A. Neumann, Eugen Brysch (Ed.), Menschenleben – Menschenwürde. Interdisziplinäres Symposium zur Bioethik, Hans-Jürgen Kaatsch and Hartmut Kreß (Ed.), Ethik Interdisziplinär, Vol. 3, (Hamburg/München/London: LIT Verlag, 2003), pp. 51-92; “Menschenwürde – Fundament der Grundrechte” in: Gudrun Lang und Michael Strohmer (Ed.), Europa der Grundrechte? Beiträge zur Grundrechtecharta der Europäischen Union, edition pro munis Bd. 9 (Bonn: Culture and Science Publisher, 2002), pp. 18-38; “Is the Right to Life or is another Right the most Fundamental Human Right? - das ‘Urgrundrecht?’: Human Dignity, Moral Obligations, Natural Rights, and Positive Rights?” Journal of East-West Thought, Winter Nr. 4 Vol. 3, December 2013, pp. 11-31. 27See Adolf Reinach, “The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law,” transl. by J. F. Crosby, Aletheia III (1983), pp. xxxiii-xxxv; 1-142; see also Josef Seifert, “Is Reinach’s ‘Apriorische Rechtslehre’ more Important for Positive Law than Reinach Himself Thinks?” in Aletheia. An International Journal of Philosophy 3 (1983), pp. 197-230.
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interested me since my earliest youth, as already mentioned in the autobiographical part of this essay. I dedicated special effort to elaborate two great aesthetical discoveries of Dietrich von Hildebrand, the higher beauty of forms, and a critique of aesthetic relativism. Both aesthetic investigations I published first in Greece,28 but the second one I recently expanded in my new book Der Widersinn des Relativismus and for the first time published it in German.29 Philosophy of Nature and of Life. In philosophy of nature, I have dedicated investigations to space, time (and eternity), and movement30 and to life. I seek to demonstrate life as an irreducible and ultimate datum that can in no way be explained, nor produced by lifeless matter. Its understanding requires a metaphysics of life found on all levels of being, and a phenomenology of biological life of plants, animals, and of men as persons-in-a-body, as well as the elaboration of soul as source of all life and of rational human souls that can have life also separated, through death, from the body.31 About Different Philosophers and Philosophy in Literature. As already mentioned, I wrote books and articles on different philosophers, but mostly from a purely thematic-systematic philosophical point of view: on Plato,32 Aristotle,33
28“Beauty of Higher Forms (Second Potency) in Art and Nature” in Annales d’Esthetiques, vol. 21-22 (1982-83); “The Objectivity of Beauty in Music and a Critique of Aesthetic Subjectivism,” XRONIKA AISTHETIKHS Annales d’Esthéthique Tom. 31-32/1992-1993, 33-61. 29Josef Seifert, Der Widersinn des Relativismus: Befreiung von seiner Diktatur. (Mainz: Patrimonium-Verlag, 2016), ch. 6. 30See my “Das Antinomienproblem als ein Grundproblem aller Metaphysik: Kritik der Kritik der reinen Vernunft“ in Prima Philosophia, Bd. 2, H 2, 1989; Essere e persona, cit. Ch. 10. 31What is Life? On the Originality, Irreducibility and Value of Life. (Value Inquiry Book Series - VIBS), ed. by Robert Ginsberg, vol. 51/Central European Value Studies (CEVS), ed. by H.G. Callaway (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). 32See my Ritornare a Platone: la fenomenologia realista come riforma critica della dottrina platonica delle idee. In appendice un inedito di Adolf Reinach, ed., Preface and trad. by Giuseppe Girgenti, (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2000). This book is a translation and first publication of the first of four parts of my (largely unpublished) book on Plato. I wrote as well a hitherto unpublished book of defense of the Platonic Ideas against Aristotle’s criticisms. Besides his doctrine in the eternal forms and indubitable knowledge, and proofs
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Anselm, 34 Bonaventure, 35 Duns Scotus, 36 Kant, 37 Nietzsche, 38 Hegel, 39
of the soul and its immortality, the great ethical insights of Plato in the Apology, in Crito, and in the Gorgias enthused and deeply influenced my philosophical ethics. See my “Philosophizing with Plato about the Immortality of the Soul,” Philosophical News. No. 8 marzo 2014. “Nemirtingumas” (Lithuanian: “Immortality”), Logos 12 (1997/12), mit einer Einführung von Magister Aivaras Stepukonis, S. 81-109; “¿Tenemos y somos un alma espiritual e inmortal?” in: Carlos A. Casanova (Ed.), Carlos Casanova, Josef Seifert, Daniel von Wachter, El alma, la providencia y el derecho natural (un ejercicio de filosofía como capacidad de juzgar). Las tres conferencias de cierre de la International Academy of Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de CHILE, pp. 11-40. See also my “The Idea of the Good as the Sum-total of Pure Perfections. A New Personalistic Reading of Republic VI and VII,” in Giovanni Reale and Samuel Scolnikov (Ed.), New Images of Plato. Dialogues on the Idea of the Good, (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2002), pp. 407-424; “Moral Goodness Alone Is ‘Good Without Qualifications’: A Phenomenological Interpretation and Critical Development of some Kantian and Platonic Ethical Insights into Moral Facts which Contribute to the Moral Education of Humanity,” in The Paideia Project (20th World Congress of Philosophy in Boston August 10-15, 1998); “Philosophizing with Plato about the Immortality of the Soul,” Philosophical News. No. 8 marzo 2014. Anima, 140-162; ”Salvezza e condanna come problemi filosofici: riflessione sul Gorgia di Platone,” Revista Teologica di Lugano III, 2 (1998), 265-289; “Platón y la fenomenología realista. Para una reforma critica del Platonismo,” Anales del Seminario de Metafísica 29 (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1995), pp. 149-170; “Alcune pagine della Postfazione all'edizione tedesco di questo libro di Josef Seifert” in: Giovanni Reale, Per una nuova interpretazione di Platone, 16th ed., Appendice VI, (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1996), pp. 859-870; “Nachwort des Herausgebers zu Giovanni Reale,” Zu einer neuen Interpretation Platons. Eine Auslegung der Metaphysik der großen Dialoge im Lichte der ‘ungeschriebenen Lehren’ übers. v. L. Hölscher, (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1993), pp. 541-558. 33“A Phenomenological and Classical Metaphysics of the Person: Completion and Critique of Aristotle’s Metaphysics” in: Richard P. Francis and Jane E. Francis (Ed.), Christian Humanism. International Perspectives (New York/Washington, D.C./San Francisco/Bern/Frankfurt a.M./Berlin/Vienna/Paris: Peter Lang, 1995), pp. 213-22; “Persons and Causes: beyond Aristotle,” Journal of East-West Thought, Fall Issue Nr. 3 Vol. 2, September 2012, pp. 1-32; 34Large portions of my books, for example of Gott als Gottesbeweis, cit.; or Of Essere e
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persona, cit., ch. 5, and several articles dealt with Anselm: “Der Vergessene Protophänomenologe Anselm: Anselm von Canterburys‚ ‘Ontologisches Argument' und die Methode der Realistischen Phänomenologie von Edmund Husserl bis zur Gegenwart,” The Paideia Project (20th World Congress of Philosophy, Boston: August 10-15, 1998) http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Meth/MethSeif.htm; "Kant und Brentano gegen Anselm und Descartes. Reflexionen über das ontologische Argument” in Theologia (Athens 1985), 3-30; “Kant y Brentano contra Anselmo y Descartes. Reflexiones sobre el argumento ontológico,” Thémata 2 (Universidades de Malaga y Sevilla, 1985): 129-147. 35 “Bonaventuras Interpretation der augustinischen These vom notwendigen Sein der Wahrheit” in Franziskanische Studien, H 1 (1977), 1. Halbj., 59; “Si Deus Deus est, Deus est. Reflections on St. Bonaventure’s Interpretation of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument” Proceedings of the PMR Conference (8) (8th Conference on Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Villanova) (1983), pp. 119-129; 36“Essere Persona Come Perfezione Pura. Il Beato Duns Scoto e una nuova metafisica personalistica,” De Homine, Dialogo di Filosofia 11 (Rom: Herder/Università Lateranense, 1994), pp. 57-75; “A volontade como perfeição pura e a nova concepção não-eudemonística do amor segundo Duns Scotus,” traduzido do inglés por Roberto Hofmeister Pich, Veritas (Philosophische Fakultät, PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Brasilien: September 2005), pp. 51-84. “Duns Scotus’ Philosophie des Individuums und Kritik am Abstraktionismus der aristotelischen Erkenntnistheorie als grandioses Beispiel einer mit dem christlichen Glauben vereinbaren Philosophie,” Intus legere. Filosofía Año 2015. Vol. 9/No 2, 111-124. 37 Überwindung des Skandals der reinen Vernunft. Die Widerspruchsfreiheit der Wirklichkeit – trotz Kant, (Freiburg/München: Karl Alber, 2001); “Grandezas Y insuficiencias de la filosofía kantiana de la dignidad humana. Un análisis crítico” in: Ignacio García de Leániz (ed.), De nobis ipsis silemos. Homenaje a Juan Miguel Palacios, (Madrid: Encuentro, 2010, pp. 173-204. 38 “Friedrich Nietzsches Verzweiflung an der Wahrheit und sein Kampf gegen die Wahrheit” in Rehabilitierung der Philosophie (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1974), ed. Dietrich von Hildebrand, pp. 301-332; “Wahrheit als Orientierungspunkt menschlicher Entscheidungen” in: G. Gelhaer (Ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Beiträge zur Nietzsche-Forschung anläßlich des Jubiläumsjahres, 2. erw. Auflage (Traude Junghans Verlag, 1995).
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Brentano,40 Husserl,41 Vico,42 Scheler,43 Hildebrand,44 and others.
39“Truth and History. Noumenal Phenomenology (Phenomenological Realism) defended against some Claims made by Hegel, Dilthey, and the Hermeneutical School” in Diotima XI, Athens 1983, 160-181. 40“Eine kritische Untersuchung der Brentanoschen Evidenztheorie der Wahrheit,“ Brentano Studien XII - 2006/09; 307- 356. 41Apart from the mentioned works, “The Significance of Husserl’s Logical Investigations for Realist Phenomenology” and a critique of several ‘Husserlian Theses’ on phenomenology, In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Publication of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1901/01-2001/2),” in: Instituto de Filosofía, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile en Santiago, Seminarios de Filosofía, Vols. 17-18, (Santiago de Chile: Instituto de Filosofía, 2004-2005), pp. 133-190. 42 “L’Uomo comprende meglio le cose fatte da lui stesso che non quelle non create da lui? Riflessioni critiche sul principium verum factum di Giambattista Vico” (Riassunto in Italiano) in: Studi italo-tedeschi/Deutsch-Italienische Studien XVII, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), pp. 91-93; Versteht der Mensch das von ihm selbst Gemachte besser als das nicht von ihm Geschaffene? Kritische Reflexionen über Giambattista Vicos Verum-Factum-Prinzip?” in: Studi italo-tedeschi/Deutsch-Italienische Studien XVII, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), pp. 53-90. 43“Schelers Denken des absoluten Ursprungs: Zum Verhältnis von Schelers Metaphysik und Religionsphilosophie zum ontologischen Gottesbeweis,” in: Christian Bermes, Wolfhart Henckmann, Heinz Leonardy und Türingische Gesellschaft für Philosophie, Jena (Hg.), Denken des Ursprungs – Ursprung des Denkens. Schelers Philosophie und ihre Anfänge in Jena. Kritisches Jahrbuch der Philosophie 3 (1998), S. 34-53; “Scheler on Repentance” in: John F. Crosby, (Ed.), Max Scheler, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 79, 1 (Winter 2005), 183-202; “Max Schelers Denken über Frieden und Solidarität“, in: Christian Bermes/Wolfgang Henckmann/Heinz Leonardy (Hrsg.), Solidarität. Person und soziale Welt, (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2006), pp. 87-106 44I refer to him in almost all of my writings, but wrote a number of papers about him, for example, ”Dietrich von Hildebrand and seine Schule” in Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. E. Coreth, W.M. Neidl, G. Pfligersdorffer, vol 3 (1989), pp. 172-200; Wert und Wertantwort. Hildebrands Beitrag zur Ethik” in Prima Philosophia, Sonderheft 1, 1990; “Personalistische Philosophie und Widerstand gegen Hitler.” Zum Kampf Dietrich von Hildebrands gegen den
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Philosophy of the Person: Philosophical Anthropology, Soul, Body, Immortality. Besides these moral, epistemological and logical questions, my philosophical interest and work centers also, and in a special way, on philosophy of man, philosophical anthropology and philosophy of the person. I dedicated many works to this topic, starting with my books of defense of the existence of a real, living, spiritual and rational human soul, and its radical distinction from the body. At the same time, I showed the deep unity of man as a new composite substance composed of body and soul can only be comprehended if the difference between body (brain) and mind (soul) is clearly understood.45 To defend this view, I distinguish many quite different meanings of the confusing term “dualism.” Just as the radical difference between a concept and the conceptual logical meaning of a word and the physical word does not counteract their profound union, but renders it possible, so the radical difference between the body/brain from the soul does not in any way jeopardize their unity. On the contrary, the substantial and radical distinction between body and soul is the condition of their unity. Understanding this also involves distinguishing different types of unity, only two of which are or presuppose identity. My main work on philosophy of the person (soon to be published in English and in Spanish) is Essere e persona,46 which Giovanni Reale, who “commanded
Nationalsozialismus, seine Ideologie und seinen rassistischen Antisemitismus” in: Josef Seifert (Ed.), Dietrich von Hildebrands Kampf gegen den Nationalsozialismus, Reihe Akademie-Reden/Internationale Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum Liechtenstein (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), pp. 107-163. 45See my Leib und Seele. Ein Beitrag zur philosophischen Anthropologie (Salzburg: A. Pustet, 1973); Das Leib-Seele Problem und die gegenwärtige philosophische Diskussion. Eine kritisch-systematische Analyse (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 21989).; What is Life? On the Originality, Irreducibility and Value of Life. Value Inquiry Book Series (VIBS), ed. by Robert Ginsberg, vol 51/Central European Value Studies (CEVS), ed. by H.G. Callaway (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); ”Sind Geist und Gehirn verschieden? Kritische Anmerkungen zu einigen Neuerscheinungen zum Leib-Seele-Problem,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 18.2 (1993), 37-60. 46Essere e persona. Verso una fondazione fenomenologica di una metafisica classica e personalistica. (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1989); Fiinôá ói persoaná. Spre o fundamentare fenomenologicá a unei metafizici clasice ói personaliste, trad. N.I. Marió, (Bucureóti,
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me to write it”, called my Summa. In it, I showed that being in the most proper sense and in the absolute sense is being-person.47 I offered many reasons to defend this thesis:
a) Persons are substances in a far higher sense such that Aristotle’s description of being in the most proper sense as “substance” is quite incomplete; b) All essential features of the person show that it is an insuperable perfection of being to be person, and that the highest values and perfections of being can solely be possessed by persons. That the acts and accidents that Aristotle excluded from metaphysics belong there, which is most clearly seen through the person; that God must necessarily be a personal being.48
The interest in anthropology entails also many published and unpublished works on the immortality of the human soul, a question which, from my reading of Plato’s Phaedo and my earliest philosophical works on (for example an unpublished dialogue Orpheus and Eurydice – On the Immortality of the soul written in 1964) occupied me deeply. Agreeing with Blaise Pascal and Gabriel Marcel, it also appeared wholly astonishing and shocking to me how little interest so many human beings, including philosophers, have on a question on which “our whole or our nothing” depends. Distinguishing between the religious faiths, for example the Christian faith in resurrection and eternal life that transcends entirely philosophical demonstrations, and natural human reason, I develop many purely philosophical proofs for the immortality of the soul. Some of them are more abstract metaphysical ones based on the simplicity and indestructibility of the soul proposed by Plato. Others are more deeply personalist and existential and I give precedence to these, arguing for the immortality of the human soul based on the moral life, knowledge, love, hope, gratitude, etc. rather than on the grounds of the soul’s mere spirituality, lack of composition of parts and indestructability of
Romúnia. Editura Yes, 2004). Rumanian translation. The book will be published in 2017 by IAP-Press, and based on this enlarged edition, in Spanish. 47Ibid., ch. 9. 48Ibid., 10-15.
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simple substances. Such proofs of immortality have two major flaws: they do not prove a lived and experienced immortal life and could even prove an immortality of energy quants. They do not contribute to know a positive value content of life after death. They would just as much apply to heaven as to hell. Therefore, I prefer by far the personalist proofs for the immortality of the soul. Their first premise is that the meaning and vocation of the human person, his aspiration to the fulfillment through knowledge, love, happiness, love of God, etc. is inseparable from immortality.49 This meaning of human existence would be frustrated and absurdly contradicted if his life ended like that of an insect or rat. A metaphysical disharmony to its innermost essence would result if death were the destruction of personal human life. The reason to reject that reality could contain such an absurdity and tragic contradiction, can be found, on a first level, in the inner essence and inner truth of those aspects of personal life, which promise immortality. In virtue of their inner truth they are as it were “prophetically announcing” immortality with authority instead of us just being captured by unrealistic wishful thinking. By its nature, the soul is ordained to an immortal life.
49 Among other works see my Filosofie, Pravda, Nesmrtlenost. Tòi praúskå pòednáóky/Philosophie, Wahrheit, Unsterblichkeit. Drei Prager Vorlesungen/ Philosophy, Truth, Immortality. Three Prague Lectures (tschechisch-deutsch), pòeklad, úvod a bibliografi Martin Cajthaml, (Prague: Vydala Kòestanská akademie Òim, svacek, edice Studium, 1998); “Philosophizing with Plato about the Immortality of the Soul,” Philosophical News. No. 8 marzo 2014. Anima, 140-162; “Nemirtingumas” (Lithuanian: Immortality), Logos 12 (1997/12), mit einer Einführung von Magister Aivaras Stepukonis, S. 81-109; “Anima, morte e immortalità,“ in: L’Anima, Seconda Navigazione. Annuario di filosofia 2004, (Mailand: Mondadori, 2004), S. 157-182; “¿Poseemos y somos un alma inmortal?”, Philosophia, 73, 1 (2013), 13-42; “¿Tenemos y somos un alma espiritual e inmortal?”, in: Carlos A. Casanova (Ed.), Carlos Casanova, Josef Seifert, Daniel von Wachter, El alma, la providencia y el derecho natural (un ejercicio de filosofía como capacidad de juzgar). Las tres conferencias de cierre de la International Academy of Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de CHILE, pp. 11-40; „Das Unsterblichkeitsproblem aus der Sicht der philosophischen Ethik und Anthropologie“, Franziskanische Studien, H 3 (1978); ”Unsterblichkeit,” in: Evangelisches Lexikon für Theologie und Gemeinde, ed.v. H. Burkhardt und U. Swarat Bd. III. (Wuppertal und Zürich: R. Brockhausverlag, 1994), pp. 2061-2064. A whole book on the immortality of the soul is still unpublished.
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Marcel formulates “To love someone is telling him you will not die.” An even deeper ground of affirming philosophically and apodictically the immortality of the soul can be reached, if we can know the existence of God, an infinitely good being who cannot possibly mock human persons by making death have the last word. I try to show the fundamental differences between philosophical proofs of the immortality of the soul and the authoritative message of the Christian faith of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and our resurrection. This message answers profound human aspirations and questions pure philosophy is unable to answer. Philosophy, confronted with the ultimate mysteries of human life, gets only to the threshold. To go beyond requires a further leap and act of faith on our side, and a revelation of truths inaccessible to purely human rational efforts. When philosophy forgets this, it turns into violent constructions, unsupported theories and its rationalism ends up with a deep irrationalism. Thus, confronted with these ultimate questions about persons, philosophy ends up recognizing both the immense greatness and the abysmal misery and poverty of human reason, left solely to its own resources of wisdom. Death and “brain death”. I have dedicated a large number of writings to a critique of a redefinition of human death in terms of “brain death”.50 Philosophy of God and the Third Archimedean point in the Ontological Argument. In two major books and many articles, I have also shown that the real existence of God as well as the uninventible and necessary divine essence can likewise be known by human reason with indubitable certainty. I wish to call this the “third Archimedean point” of philosophical knowledge. I defended many ways
50For example (among many more): ”IS ‘Brain death’ actually death?” The Monist 76 (1993), 175-202, or: “Brain Death and Euthanasia” in: Michael Potts, Paul A. Byrne, and Richard G. Nilges (Ed.), Beyond Brain Death. The Case against Brain Based Criteria for Human Death, (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 201-227; “Consciousness, Mind, Brain, and Death,” in: Calixto Machado/D. Alan Shewmon, (Ed.), Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness, (New York/Boston/Dordrecht/London/Moscow: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004), pp. 61-78; “On ‘Brain Death’ in Brief: Philosophical Arguments against Equating It with Actual Death and Responses to Arguments in favor of Such an Equation” in: Roberto de Mattei (Ed.), Finis Vitae: Is Brain Death still Life? Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, (Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2006, 2007), pp. 189-210.
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of reaching indubitable knowledge of God from the world, both classical cosmological arguments that I defended in a new personalist perspective, and specifically personalist proofs of the existence of God from the essence of gratitude, of moral values and of love. 51 However, the center and most profound foundation of all proofs of the existence of God is the Anselmian-Cartesian ontological argument, which I meticulously considered and defended against its many critics. I demonstrated that this proof has four fundamental philosophical preconditions, all of which can be known to be true, and thus allow a refutation of the objections Aquinas, Kant, Brentano and others have raised against it. 1. Its starting point must not be a mere arbitrary concept or subjective idea, in which case it would be guilty of the many logical mistakes Aquinas, Kant, Brentano and others identified. Rather, it proceeds in its valid form from the objectively necessary and supremely intelligible (though mysterious) divine essence. This starting point, once recognized, makes the argument immune against a series of objections that would be perfectly valid as long as this first precondition is not established. 2. It presupposes that we have a true and sufficient knowledge of this divine essence to know God’s existence from its mere contemplation. By means of complex epistemological analyses and distinctions between different perfections and imperfections of human knowledge of God, I reached the conclusion that the knowledge of the divine essence accessible to human reason is sufficient to ground the ontological proof of the existence of God. The following are the key steps and distinctions that serve establishing this second precondition: a) The divine essence and its infinite perfection is co-given to human knowledge in the knowledge of the world in its finitude. The latter could not be known without possessing some knowledge of the former, as Bonaventure and Descartes pointed out. b) The fact that we neither possess a complete, nor a perfectly deep, nor an immediate knowledge of God that would not be in some way mediated by the experience of the world, is perfectly compatible with possessing a sufficient knowledge of God to turn this knowledge into a valid second column of the ontological argument.
51See my Erkenntnis des Vollkommenen. Wege der Vernunft zu Gott, (Bonn: Lepanto Verlag, 2010); Conocimiento de Dios por las vías de la razón y del amor. (Traducido por Pedro Jesús Teruel, revisado y aumentado por el autor), (Madrid: Encuentro, 2013).
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3. The ontological argument presupposes that existence is a real predicate and that the necessary existence of God can be known to be inseparable from the divine essence and is not extrinsic to it in the way it is in all contingent beings, inasmuch as what they are (essence) could never have existed. That existence (being) is a real predicate I showed by first refuting the Kantian claim that existence is not any predicate and adds nothing to the concept of a thing.52 Apart from contradicting Kant’s own assertion that existential propositions are always synthetic (which presupposes that, logically speaking, the concept of existence “adds something to the concept of a thing”), the evident meaning of asserting or denying the existence of certain things refutes Kant through the evidence of things themselves. It is certainly true that existence (Sein) does not as such add essential predicates and constitutes, ontologically speaking, quite a unique predicate. It is also true that in all contingent beings’ existence somehow falls outside the essence or is a gift that does not simply flow from their essence. Nevertheless, Kant falsely universalizes this truth and applies it precisely to the divine being to whom it evidently does not apply. He fails to see, furthermore, that, if the “extrinsic relation” of existence to essence, its falling in a sense “outside of essence,” would be the only relation existence could have to essence, and if existence never were bound inextricably to essence, no really existing being could have a sufficient reason for being, instead of not being. Thus, the evidence of the principle of sufficient reason would be violated in a most grievous manner.53 4. The ontological argument, finally, presupposes that the infinite goodness and value perfection (greatness) of the divine essence entails His existence. No limitedly and finitely perfect being, such as the ‘lost’ island of Gaunilo, could exist
52A preliminary study of this metaphysical relation between essence and existence that was planned as first part of Gott als Gottesbeweis, cit., was my work Sein und Wesen, (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996). It was preceded by my English debate with “existentialist Thomism” (Gilson and others): „Essence and Existence. A New Foundation of Classical Metaphysics on the Basis of ‘Phenomenological Realism,’ and a Critical Investigation of ‘Existentialist Thomism’,“ Aletheia I (1977), pp. 17-157; I,2 (1977), pp. 371-459. 53On this see, besides Gott als Gottesbeweis, cit., my Sein und Wesen (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996), ch. 2; „Essence and Existence. A New Foundation of Classical Metaphysics on the Basis of ‘Phenomenological Realism,’ and a Critical Investigation of ‘Existentialist Thomism’,“ Aletheia I (1977), ch. 2.
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necessarily, but beyond that: infinite value-perfection is the very nucleus and heart of the divine essence. Harkening back to Plato, the name of God “id quo melius (maius) nihil esse sive cogitari possit” (that better than which nothing can be or even conceived) is not dissimilar to the Biblical assertion “God is Love”, a name of God more intimate than “I am He who is”. One may summarize this fourth precondition of the ontological argument with Augustine: “This good and that good: take away this and that, and look at the good itself if you can; then you will see God, who is not good by another Good but the quintessence and sum-total of the Good (literally: the good of any good).”54 I presented, on 700 pages, detailed analyses and a phenomenological metaphysical defense of these four conditions under which the ontological proof of the existence of God is not only perfectly valid but the deepest of all of them, and implicitly presupposed by all others (as also Kant saw; but while he rejected it, I defended it).55 Discours des Méthodes: Radical Rethinking of the Phenomenological Methods. It is clear that presenting all of these epistemological and metaphysical results with the claim that they can be known by a rigorous phenomenological return to things themselves and things in themselves (i.e., by a phenomenological
54Augustine , De Trinitate VIII, 3 (CCL 50 p. 273/44, Corpus Augustinianum Gissense a C. Mayer editum): “Bonum hoc et bonum illud: tolle hoc et illud, et vide ipsum bonum si potes; ita deum videbis, non alio bono bonum, sed bonum omnis boni.” I tried to defend the interpretation of Plato’s ‘Idea of the Good’ as coinciding with a living God-Creator in “The Idea of the Good as the Sum-total of Pure Perfections. A New Personalistic Reading of Republic VI and VII” in: Giovanni Reale and Samuel Scolnikov (Ed.), New Images of Plato. Dialogues on the Idea of the Good, (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2002), pp. 407-424. 55 See my Gott als Gottesbeweis. Eine phänomenologische Neubegründung des ontologischen Arguments, (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996), 2. Aufl. 2000; “Kant und Brentano gegen Anselm und Descartes. Reflexionen über das ontologische Argument” in Theologia (Athens 1985), 3-30; “Kant y Brentano contra Anselmo y Descartes. Reflexions sobre el argumento ontologico” in Thémata 2 (Universidades de Malaga y Sevilla, 1985); “Über das notwendige Dasein Gottes. Eine kritische Antwort auf Franz Brentanos Kritik des ontologischen Gottesbeweises” in: Ion Tánásescu (ed.), Franz Brentano’s Metaphysis and Psychology.Upon the Sesquicentennial of Franz Brentano’s Dissertation, (Bucharest: Zelta Books, 2012), pp. 180-224.
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method) requires a radical rethinking of phenomenology. One must understand as well the phenomenological method and clarity about the limited role of epoché. The leading principle of this new realist phenomenology is that the only decisive principle of phenomenology is the return to things themselves, (i.e., moving away from all kinds of confusions, constructs, arbitrary and false assumptions, unexamined prejudices, and premature systematizations). In other words, the only goal is a pure seeing of things as they truly are. A phenomenological method apt to reach, or at least to approach, this goal, allows a rigorous scientific metaphysics, ethics, and realist epistemology. I explicitly dedicated to the elaboration of such a realist phenomenological method, besides the mentioned works, a book and several articles on methods of philosophy.56 In my book, I distinguished thee general meanings of methods and many subspecies of each of them: 1. Method as type of knowledge used, which entails in philosophy immediate vision of necessary essences, insights into essential states of affairs, logical demonstrations, and others. 2. Methods in the sense of elements of these kinds of knowledge, such as distinctions of a datum from similar or opposite phenomena, dialogue, dialectics and responses to objections. 3. Tricks and devices to reach philosophical knowledge such as epoché, free variation, methodic doubt, linguistic analysis of word-meanings, or the “negative test” of Gabriel Marcel. I think that the quest for rigorous and indubitable scientific philosophical knowledge is no mere modern prejudice, as many traditional philosophers claim, but exists since Plato and Aristotle, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Husserl, Hildebrand and the present, and is a perfectly legitimate and praiseworthy desire of human reason. This does not deny that a restriction of philosophical knowledge to solely indubitably certain knowledge is a dangerous rationalist and inhuman error.57
56 Discours des Méthodes. The Methods of Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology, (Frankfurt / Paris / Ebikon / Lancaster / New Brunswick: Ontos-Verlag, 2009); Discurso sobre los métodos. Filosofía y fenomenología realista, (Madrid: Encuentro, 2008); “Was ist Philosophie? Die Antwort der Realistischen Phänomenologie,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 49 H 1 (1995), 92-103. 57 See my “Phänomenologie und Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft. Zur Grundlegung einer realistischen phänomenologischen Methode – in kritischem Dialog mit Edmund
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Ethics: Foundations and Applications – 4 Dimensions of Human Dignity: A further chief field of my philosophical investigations is ethics, both the foundation of ethics and applied ethics or concrete ethical questions. On the foundation of ethics, I have published two books and several articles.58 Some of my articles defend strongly our human capacity to know what is morally good and what is morally evil without presupposing any religious faith. In fact, if we did not have some rational knowledge of moral values and disvalues, faith would be
Husserls Ideen über die Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” in: Filosofie, Pravda, Nesmrtlenost. Tòi praúskå pòednáóky/Philosophie, Wahrheit, Unsterblichkeit. Drei Prager Vorlesungen/ Philosophy, Truth, Immortality. Three Prague Lectures (tschechisch-deutsch), pòeklad, úvod a bibliografi Martin Cajthaml, (Prague: Vydala Kòestanská akademie Òim, svacek, edice Studium, 1998), S. 14-50; “La filosofia come scienza rigorosa. La fondazione di un metodo fenomenologico realista in dialogo critico con le idee sulla filosofia come scienza rigorosa di Edmund Husserl,” Saggio integrativo, in: Dietrich von Hildebrand, Che cos’è la filosofia?/What Is Philosophy?, Englisch-Italienisch (Milano: Bompiani Testi a fronte, 2001), 535-568; also published in Russian, Czech, and Lithuanian. I also wrote an unpublished book-length manuscript on sense perception and knowledge of other persons (both of which include less than apodictically certain knowledge). 58 Josef Seifert, Was ist und was motiviert eine sittliche Handlung? (What is and What Motivates a Moral Action?), (Salzburg: Universitätsverlag A. Pustet, 1976); Qué es y qué motiva una acción moral?, presentación de Alfonso López Qintás, tradd. de y ensayo introductorio de Mariano Crespo (Madrid: Centro Universitario Francisco de Vitoria, 1995); an English edition will come out in 2017. The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure. Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine. Vol. 1: Foundations. Philosophy and Medicine, vol. 82 (New York: Springer, 2004) – Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure. Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine. Vol. 1: Foundations. Philosophy and Medicine, vol. 82, Kluwer online e-book, 2005; “Natural Law: Persons Are United through Ends: Seven Different Relations between Persons and Ends and Their Relation to Natural Law and Community of Persons,” Revista Española de Teología Vol. 67, cuad. 2-3, Facultad de Teología “San Damaso,” 67 (2007), pp. 149-163; and several unpublished ones, especially a large German book of critique of the “purely teleological foundation of ethics.”
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deprived of its natural presuppositions.59 I also wrote a number of papers in revealing that, underlying religious faith, there are also some rational intuitions into divine holiness, without which authentic religious faith would be without foundation.60 In Was ist und was motiviert eine sittliche Handlung?, cit., I investigate only a small portion of the moral sphere, namely actions in the rigorous sense that aim at the realization of states of affairs in the world. They differ from purely inner acts such as gratitude as well as from general attitudes such as virtues and vices or fundamental moral attitudes, which are other important topics of ethics on which I have written later.61 Within moral actions in that narrow sense, I investigate again only a portion, namely morally obligatory actions, sparing good but not obligatory (supererogatory) actions for other ethical investigations. I propose the thesis that the kind of motive I have, or better said, should have, for obligatory and free moral actions to be morally good, is of the essence of the moral action and inseparable from the question, whether, and to which degree, an action is morally good and obligatory. I distinguish between indispensable motives for a moral action to be morally good, ideal motives, and accidental superadded motives, which are not indispensable for the moral value of the action, and in a sense, do not belong to its essence. Excluding critically the eudemonistic, hedonistic, utilitarian and other theories regarding the motivation of moral actions,
59See Josef Seifert, San Pablo y Santo Tomás sobre Fides et ratio. ¿Fue San Pablo el crítico más severo o, con Santo Tomás, el defensor más grande de la filosofía? Saint Paul and Saint Thomas. Was Saint Paul the most severe Critic, or, with Saint Thomas the greatest defender of Philosophy? (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Facultad de Teología “San Dammaso,” 2009). 60See, for example, my “Transcendent Holiness as Divine Perfection: Its Importance for Understanding Theistic Religions and Interreligious Dialogue” in: Abraham Kovács and James L. Cox, New Trends and Recurring Issues in the Study of Religion. (Budapest: L´Harmattan, 2014), pp. 203-230. 61Josef Seifert, “Grundhaltung, Tugend und Handlung als ein Grundproblem der Ethik. Würdigung der Entdeckung der sittlichen Grundhaltung durch Dietrich von Hildebrand und kritische Untersuchung der Lehre von der ‘Fundamentaloption’ innerhalb der ‘rein teleologischen’ Begründung der Ethik,” in: Clemens Breuer (Hg.), Ethik der Tugenden. Menschliche Grundhaltungen als unverzichtbarer Bestandteil moralischen Handelns. Festschrift für Joachim Piegsa zum 70. Geburtstag, 311-360.
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I propose a complex motivational structure of the morally good and obligatory action. Against Kant, I show the object to be realized decisively motivates moral actions, but this must not be identified with Kant, as a eudemonistic or hedonist view of ethics. Rather, the good to be protected or realized through our actions can motivate us also and principally, because our action is due to its intrinsic value. It deserves respect or love for its own sake. I also argue, however, that Kant’s intuition of a moral action, which must be done “from duty”, points out a moment that motivates a morally obligatory action and cannot be reduced to the morally relevant object we realize. Above the object whose realization we intend, appears the moment of moral obligation to which we owe an absolute obedience that never can be accounted for in terms of an adequate response to the object we realize in our action. Moreover, against Scheler, I argue that the moral value of our own actions can also be a motive of the moral act, that there are, furthermore, different universal objects of the morally obligatory action whose missing would destroy the morality of the moral act. Finally, moral experience of conscience, as documented by Plato’s Apology of Socrates, also gives witness to the fact that, at least implicitly, God as the supreme good and as Lord over our moral life, must be responded to for the moral action to retain its proper value.62 I argue as well that happiness can play a legitimate motivating role for moral actions as long as it is not their primary motive but a subordinated motive that presupposes a first motive in the intrinsic value of the object of the moral act and in other intrinsically important motives of the moral action. Ending up with a theory of a six-fold motivation of a morally obligatory action that is truly adequate to its object, I propose the unity and fullness of the moral action requires the presence and appreciation of each of these motives that, in their right order and unison, constitute the morally good action. In my book on the foundations of ethics and, more specifically, of medical ethics,63 I delve more deeply into the essence of moral values and their absolutely evidential link to free will. On the question of free will, I have also directed a
62See also Juan-Miguel Palacios, “Cur honeste vivere? Los motivos de la acción moral en la ética de Josef Seifert” In: Bondad, moral e inteligencia ética: nueve ensayos de la ética de los valores, (Madrid: Encuentro, 2008).
63The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure. Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine. Vol. 1: Foundations. (New York: Springer, 2004).
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two-year research project financed by Fondecyt in Chile. In many articles, and in particular in a dialogue with Benjamin Libet and other brain scientists and determinists,64 I defended the indubitable evidence that we possess a free will and described wherein it resides.65 In this book, I treated also a decisive value necessary to understand in order to reach the foundation of ethics: human dignity.66 I distinguish four dimensions of human dignity, which is possibly the most significant new contribution I made to the axiological and ontological foundation of ethics: (1) The ontological dignity, an intrinsic and sublime value rooted in the being and essence of the person as such, not restricted to, but including, the human person. To be a living human being, whether unborn or born, healthy or sick, awakened and conscious or unconscious, is enough to possess this dignity. It has no degrees and imposes an absolute obligation never to violate it in attitudes or actions. It also gives rise to fundamental human rights such as the right not to be killed or the right never to be used solely as a means and others that are grounded in this ontological dignity. (2) The dignity of the person awakened to rational conscious life: Pascal
64For example Benjamin Libet, “Do we Have Free Will?”, in: Robert Kane (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 551-564. 65See articles: “In Defense of Free Will: A Critique of Benjamin Libet,” Review of Metaphysics, Volume LXV, Nr. 2, December 2011, pp. 377-407; “Can Neurological Evidence Refute Free Will? The Failure of a Phenomenological Analysis of Acts in Libet’s Denial of ‘Positive Free Will’,” Pensamiento. Revista de investigación e información filosófica, vol. 67, núm. 254, Ciencia, filosofía y religión. Serie especial no 5 (2011), 1077-1098; “Persons, Causes and Free Will: Libet’s Topsy-Turvy Idea of the Order of Causes and ‘Forgetfulness of the Person’,” Journal of East-West Thought, Summer Nr. 2 Vol. 4, June 2014, pp. 13-51. “Are We Free? Are We Persons? 5 Ways to Obtain Certain Knowledge About the Existence of Free Will,” Asian Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities. Bi-annual Journal of the School of the Humanities. Ateneo de Manila University. Vol. 1, No. 2 2011, pp. 39-79. See also my earlier work, “To Be a Person – To Be Free” in: Zofia J. Zdybicka, et al. (Ed.), Freedom in Contemporary Culture. Acts of the V World Congress of Christian Philosophy. Catholic University of Lublin 20-25 August 1996, Vol I (Lublin: The University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin, 1998), pp. 145-185. 66The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure, cit., ch. 2.
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insists on this dignity, making the dangerous claim that our whole dignity consists in thought. To recognize the tremendous dignity of the thinking human person is very important, as long as one sees also the first source of human (ontological) dignity. In the dignity of actually conscious rational persons many rights are grounded, which neither the embryo nor any unconscious person possess: the right to education, to freedom from coercion, the right to marry, to political participation, and countless others. (3) While also demons possess the first two dimensions and sources of dignity, they fail to possess a third one that requires the good use of human reason and free will. This dignity culminates in moral dignity (and holiness) and constitutes the vocation of the person. Without ever reaching this third, acquired dignity, the first two dimensions of human dignity are of no use to man. Unlike the ontological dignity of the person that is the same in all human persons, the second and third dignities of persons have countless degrees of perfection. (4) There is, fourthly, the “bestowed dignity” as a pure gift that comes from some origin outside the person endowed with it, such as the dignity a person receives by being loved. This dignity assumes an extreme importance on the religious level of human existence: the dignity of being redeemed, of being loved by God, of living in a state of grace, exceeds in a certain sense all other dimensions of dignity but requires their interrelations and many mutual dependencies. In The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure, I made two other contributions to the foundation of ethics, which I further developed in many articles: 1) First, I showed that an understanding of the moral action as motivated by values and goods to be realized (instead by a mere formal, empty Kantian moral law that is not based on values and goods) in no way gives rise to a kind of utilitarian or pragmatic ethics. It in no way reduces the moral quality of a moral action to the result of a calculus that shows that the expected overall consequences of a given action exceed in goodness those of all alternative courses of action. I showed this by completely refuting the claim that moral actions can be considered as mere means to causing certain goods. Such “teleological” or consequentialist ethics totally overlook the specific moral values born from the encounter of a conscious and free person with these goods or evils that demand an adequate response to them. In this moral value lies a far higher value than values realized in extra-moral effects and consequences of moral actions. Moreover, the
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incommensurability of this value with non-moral values and consequences of human actions implies also that there are intrinsically wrong actions, even actions that have finite goods as their object. These actions must never be done, whatever their good consequences may be.67 2) Another major error to refute is that content-full ethics (“non-formal value ethics”)68 cannot be philosophically or rationally founded, but can have solely religious foundations. This radically fideist position, proposed by T. H. Engelhardt, Jr., negates to human reason any capacity to grasp a “natural law” and divorces entirely a content-full purely religious ethics of “private strangers in a public and pluralistic universe” from a philosophical ethics, a position I sharply criticized.69 It proposes the idea; going far beyond the formalism of Kantian ethics, that human reason cannot establish any human action to be intrinsically wrong. While Kant in his personalist formulation of the categorical imperative (that was adopted by Polish ethical personalism as fundamental principle of ethics) still holds to the absolute value of personal dignity in the foundation of ethics, Engelhardt proposes a purely formalistic content-less philosophical ethics
67See The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure, cit., ch. 6. See also my “Absolute Moral Obligations towards Finite Goods as Foundation of Intrinsically Right and Wrong Actions. A Critique of Consequentialist Teleological Ethics: Destruction of Ethics through Moral Theology?” Anthropos 1 (1985), pp. 57-94. “Der Glanz der sittlichen Wahrheit als Fundament in sich schlechter Handlungen. Die Enzyklika “Veritatis Splendor” von Johannes Paul II,” in: Clemens Breuer (Hg.), Ethik der Tugenden. Menschliche Grundhaltungen als unverzichtbarer Bestandteil moralischen Handelns. Festschrift für Joachim Piegsa zum 70. Geburtstag, (Eos, 2000) pp. 465-487; “The Splendor of Truth and Intrinsically Immoral Acts I: A Philosophical Defense of the Rejection of Proportionalism and Consequentialism in Veritatis Splendor”. Studia Philosophiae Christianae UKSW 52 (2015) 2, pp. 27-67; “The Splendor of Truth and Intrinsically Immoral Acts II: A Philosophical Defense of the Rejection of Proportionalism and Consequentialism in Veritatis New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1996). Splendor. Studia Philosophiae Christianae UKSW 51 (2015) 2, pp. 7-37. 68See Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. A New Attempt Towards the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, transl. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1973). 69Josef Seifert, The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure, cit., ch. 5.
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AUTO-PRESENTATION OF MY PHILOSOPHY 39
that allows to secular bioethics in a pluralist society any moral horror. Pushing for an extreme liberalism and formalism in secular ethics, he calls in his Christian Bioethics the same acts that his secular ethics allows, for example abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, etc. deadly sins that deserve hell.70 The United States Constitution, which Engelhardt interprets as abstaining from any natural law position, can serve as an extremely successful model for such a modern pluralistic society in which private moral codes of certain groups in society are not imposed on anyone else. According to it, if it is more and more applied, the standards of a public morality derive only from limited consensus, but more so from agreement, permission, and toleration. Therefore, they can be kept so liberal that, as far as humanly tolerable, within them anything is legally and ethically permitted. Any members or groups within this pluralistic society might choose to adopt this as their life-style. Engelhardt proposes “a public ethics for moral strangers” (that is, for individuals who do not participate in ‘a common moral vision’) when they meet on the marketplace and in the public cultural space of a pluralistic, non-coercive society.71 He himself holds a ‘private ethics’ which he accepts for the sphere of his own personal life and which condemns, for example, abortion and infanticide which his public ethics permits, as horrible crimes. This position leads him to an almost schizophrenic opposition between his private ethics and the public secular ethics and laws he proposes.72 One could hardly go farther in the separation between reason and faith. Fides et Ratio - Philosophy of Religion. The critique of such a destruction of philosophical “secular” ethics is closely linked to another area of my philosophical investigation into the philosophy of religion. As a Catholic
70T. H. Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, (Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2000); The Foundation of Bioethics, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1996). 71The Foundations of Bioethics, 1986. 72 He propounds this ethics in several articles in the journal Christian Bioethics. Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality. As a matter of fact, Engelhard states in the preface to the 2nd edition of his The Foundations of Bioethics, p. x, that the eternal fires of hell expect those who carry out what he proposes for ‘public ethics’, such as abortion on demand: “I am of the firm conviction that, save of God’s mercy, those who willfully engage in much that a peaceable, fully secular state will permit (e.g., euthanasia and direct abortion on demand) stand in danger of hell’s eternal fires.
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philosopher, I have dedicated many investigations to the topic of the relations between reason and faith. I rejected five very different and widespread interpretations of these relations between reason and faith, and five corresponding notions of “Christian philosophy”. One of them is a completely fideist and skeptical one of the sort Engelhardt proposes, so as if human reason could know truth solely by means of religious faith. Another one, represented by Hegel and many Gnostics throughout the centuries, is its opposite, as if philosophy could rationally prove, usually by entirely reinterpreting them, the mysteries of Christian faith. I identify eleven positive relations between philosophy and faith, which justify the misleading term “Christian philosophy”.73 My basic understanding of their relation is that many ethical and other truths our faith teaches us, are also known by rational philosophical evidence which per se does not depend on faith, but in a certain way is even objectively presupposed by faith: Gratia supponit naturam (grace presupposes nature). Thus, I think that the relation between philosophy and faith is only valuable, if both are distinguished and neither reason rationalizes and falsifies revealed truth, denying or transforming it into an entirely different system such as Hegel’s “Christian philosophy” and other forms of rationalistic dissolution of mysteries of faith, nor reason loses its purity and autonomy. My new book, Filosofía cristiana y purísima razón (Granada: Nuevo Inicio, submitted 2016, to be published by 2018) expresses this most clearly. I propose that the purest, most rational philosophical knowledge can profit from faith and is needed to understand and defend faith. For example, the truths about birth control, the dignity and sanctity of human life, and the intrinsic and grave moral wrongness of any form of abortion and euthanasia, expressed in Humanae Vitae, Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae, are fully open to pure philosophical knowledge. The relation between reason and faith can of course prompt the Church to condemn philosophical errors that are opposite to faith. Likewise, their complex mutual relationships entail, in virtue of the autonomy of human reason, elements of a critique of religion, with which the relation between reason and faith began in Xenophanes, Plato, and others. As a believing Christian, the philosopher has no doubt the task of criticizing the countless errors and
73See my “Filosofia cristiana e libertà. A cura di Gian Paolo Terravecchia." (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013); Christian Philosophy and Free Will. (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 2016).
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confusions Christian philosophers and theologians have defended. Practically each Christian heresy has its roots in philosophical errors. Even as a believing Catholic who believes in the gift of infallibility given to the Church as a whole and to the Pope when he pronounces dogmas of faith, I believe that philosophical knowledge retains the task to criticize beliefs of Catholic theologians, and even utterances of the ordinary magisterium of the Church. When Popes are not infallibly pronouncing a dogmatic teaching, which they most rarely did, they can clearly contradict rationally known or also revealed truths, even committing heresies such as Pope Liberius or John XXII.74
74See, for example, my “Der sittliche Unterschied zwischen Empfängnisregelung und Kontrazeption” in Menschenwürde und Elternschaft (Hg. Ernst Wenisch), (Valendar: Veritas-Verlag, 1983); “The Problem of the Moral Significance of Human Fertility and Birth Control Methods. Philosophical Arguments against Contraception?” in Humanae Vitae: 20 Anni Dopo, Acts of the Second International Congress of Moral Theology, Rome, 1988,, pp. 661-672; “Il Dono dell’ Amore e Il Dono di Una Nuova Vita. Verso una visione più personalistica dell’ Matrimonio. Humanae Vitae - Familiaris Consortio. 1968-1988” in: Per una transmissione responsabile della vita umana, a cura di Anna Cappella. IVo Congresso internazionale per la famiglia d’Africa e d’Europa (Rom: Università dell’ Sacro Cuore, 1989); “Problem moralnego zcaczenia ludzkiej plodnosci i metod kontroli pocze’c,” transl. J. Merecki SDS and P. Mikulska, in: Bp K. Majda’nski/T.Styczeî, Dar ludzkiego Zycia Humanae Vitae Donum. W swudziesta rocznice ogloszenia encykliki Humanae Vitae (Lublin: KUL-Verlag, 1991), 247-259; “Una reflexion filosófica y una defensa de Humanae Vitae. El don del amor y de la nueva vida” in: Benedicto XVI, Karol Wojtyìa, Carlo Cafarra, Antonio Me Rouco Varela, Angelo Scola, Livio Melina, Alfonso López Trujillo, Fernando Chomali, Josef Seifert, A cuarenta años de la Encíclica Humanae Vitae, Cuaderno Humanitas No 19, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Octubre 2008, pp. 49-59; “El aborto ‚terapéutico‘ a la luz de la encíclica Evangelium Vitae,” Humanitas, Cuaderno No 24, Marzo 2011, pp. 112-122. “Der Glanz der sittlichen Wahrheit als Fundament in sich schlechter Handlungen. Die Enzyklika “Veritatis Splendor” von Johannes Paul II” in: Clemens Breuer (Hg.), Ethik der Tugenden. Menschliche Grundhaltungen als unverzichtbarer Bestandteil moralischen Handelns. (Eos, 2000) pp. 465-487; “The Splendor of Truth and Intrinsically Immoral Acts I: A Philosophical Defense of the Rejection of Proportionalism and Consequentialism in Veritatis Splendor.” Studia Philosophiae Christianae UKSW 52 (2015) 2, pp. 27-67; “The Splendor of Truth and Intrinsically Immoral Acts II: A Philosophical Defense of the Rejection of Proportionalism and
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Consequentialism in Veritatis Splendor”. Studia Philosophiae Christianae UKSW 51 (2015) 2, pp. 7-37. I have also criticized assertions made by Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, on brain death, ethics, and other issues. For outside the sphere of what I take as infallible Papal teachings, there are errors possible. With respect to them, also philosophy retains its critical function in relation to religion, which is not restricted to the erroneous Greek religion which Xenophanes and Plato already have sharply criticized. It also refers to what I accept as true religion, but this does not exclude that private publications, or even the ordinary but not infallible magisterium of Popes, can contain errors which philosophers have the task to examine critically. In other words, even the most orthodox Catholic who adheres to any dogma of the faith, should avoid any kind of false respect for utterances of bishops or even Popes when they clearly contradict philosophically knowable truth. In many publications and letters written during decades, which I will not list here, I exerted, as I believe, this critical function of philosophy as a watchdog of human reason that Church and Pope need very much and for which some Popes thanked me.
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DOES SEIFERT'S PERSONALISM HOLD WATER?
By Rocco Buttiglione
Does Seifert's personalism hold water? (1) The question is rather provocative but my answer will be clear: yes, it does. Not only it holds water but can be continued and stands in need of being continued. This paper will put Seifert within the phenomenological tradition and in particular within the tradition of realistic phenomenology. Then we will describe Seifert's discovery and its meaning for contemporary philosophy. In the end, we will defend why we think it can be continued and stands in need of being continued and in which direction it should be continued.
I. Seifert within the phenomenological tradition
Max Scheler has put the experience of values in the centre of the philosophical attention. We perceive the reality around us charged with values and the perception of the object is accompanied by the perception of the value. Kant had considered human emotions as obstacles to the discovery of the truth. Scheler tells us that emotions are an essential component of our perception of reality. We discover reality (and moral reality in particular) in our emotions and through our
Dr. ROCCO BUTTIGLIONE, Italian philosopher, politician, the minister for EU policies (from 2001 to 2005) and then the Minister for Cultural Assets and Activities (from 2005 to 2006) in Silvio Berlusconi's governments; current Italian senator; was nominated to become Italy’s European Union Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security (but he withdrew himself from the nomination in 2004); the author of Dialettica e nostalgia (1978), La crisi dell’economia marxista: Gli inizi della scuola di Francoforte (1979), Il pensiero di Karol Wojtyla (1982), Ethik der Leistung (1988; co-edited with Hans Thomas), La crisi della morale (1991), Die Verantwortung des Menschen in einem globalen Weltzeitalter (1996; co-edited with Rocco Buttiglione, Radim Palouš, Josef Seifert), Wie erkennt man Naturrecht? (1998; co-edited with Josef Seifert), Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II (1997), The moral mandate for freedom: Reflections on Centesimus Annus (1997); taught philosophies and political science at Saint Pius V University, International Academy of Philosophy at Liechtenstein-Switzerland.
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emotions. This discovery introduces us to a world, which is thoroughly different from the moral world of Kant and of Hume. Think for example of the famous "natural fallacy" of Hume: you cannot derive an ‘ought judgement’ from an ‘is judgement. Scheler could answer that moral judgements are not derived from judgement’ of fact. They are given together with judgement of fact. They possess an inner intimate relation with judgement of facts but this relation is not that of a logical deduction. The discovery of value leads us towards the person. In this sense, Scheler is one of the main sources of modern personalism, as John Crosby has recently and so convincingly pointed out. The values are perceived in the person, and they constitute the interiority of the person. The person is the space constituted by the values. So far Scheler. One point is not, however, in Scheler completely clear. The person is both the stage upon which the values are projected and within which they are perceived. However, is the person a value in them self? Moreover, if the person is a value in them self which kind of value are they? It seems that in Scheler the person is the condition of all values but is not a value in them self. The values appear in the experience of the person, and in this very experience are consumed and disappear. One could make a comparison between Scheler and Sigieri of Brabant. In Sigieri, the person in the act of knowledge participates of the "intellectus possibilis" and the act of knowledge takes place in the person. The act does not remain in the person and does not enter to constitute the substance of the person. The act takes place in the person but is not an act of the person. It seems that the situation is similar in Scheler as what regards the knowledge of values. Scheler could be an averroist of values. I use the dubitative form "could be" and not the affirmative "is" because it is not always clear what Scheler really means and it is equally unclear whether he has remained of the same opinion throughout his philosophical career. Dietrich von Hildebrand and Karol Wojtyla have made one step forward. They have done in relation to Scheler the same operation St. Thomas Aquinas has done with Sigieri. Aquinas says "hic homo intelligit," the person is the subject of the act of the intellect. Von Hildebrand and Wojtyla say: "this man is the subject of the experience of the values." This is possible because the person is a substance and the act remains in the substance and changes the substance. I shall not deal now with the differences
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between von Hildebrand and Wojtyla on this point. It suffices to say that Wojtyla relies more directly upon the Aristotelian concept of substance and upon the Aristotelian metaphysics of potency and act. The substance is the precondition of the act, in the sense that it contains the potency of that act. Moreover, the act remains in the substance, meaning through the act the substance is perfected through the fulfillment of its potency or remains unfulfilled and misses its due perfection. If we consider the person as substance, we make one fundamental step towards a personalistic philosophy. Now the person is no more just the stage on which the experience of values takes place. Now the person is a value in herself and all values experienced by the person remain in the person and qualify the person. The destiny of the person is that to summarize in herself all values through her experience of the world. This changes also the way in which we see values and obliges us to take a certain distance from Scheler on the decisive issue of duty. Scheler does not love the idea of duty. It seems to him to contain an element of Pharisee morality. Von Hildebrand has stressed the idea of Gebührenbeziehung. The Gebühren is a duty, yet a particular kind of duty, clearly different from the Solenn of Kantian morality. It is a kind of completely passive duty. Imagine Hamlet watching the performance of Euripides’ drama The Women of Troy. He clearly perceives that compassion is due to these women who are so disgraced without any fault of their own. Compassion is due in particular to Ecuba. The compassion due to Ecuba exemplifies a Gebührenbeziehung in its purity because it does not imply any active involvement of the person. There are values and relations among values that do not concern in any way living, really existing persons. This is the reason why Hamlet asks of the actor: "what is he to Ecuba or Ecuba to him?" Than Hamlet draws a comparison to another tragedy, his own tragedy. Here we find again a Gebürenbeziehung: compassion is due do the assassinated father of Hamlet. Compassion but also justice as well as a punishment is objectively due to the unfaithful wife and to the murderous brother. This time, however, we have not just a Gebührenbeziehung. We have something more. Hamlet as an acting subject, as the son of the victim and the legal heir of his kingly power, has the responsibility of giving everybody his or her due. The recognition of the person as substance (subject. The two words share the same etymological meaning. Substare, subiacere in Latin means to lay under) and as value implies that the person as value is consigned to the person as subject as a
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responsibility and as a task. Now we discover from the experience of the Gebührenbeziehung the experience of duty as responsibility for the the value of my own person. In this discovery is contained something that overcomes the traditional understanding of eudemonism that has opposed often Thomists to realist phenomenologists. The interest to myself or to my self-realization is not egoistic. It is rather an assumption of responsibility for the value of my person. This value is entrusted to me in a unique way. To better understand this experience we may look at the example of a man who is in love with a woman. He has married this woman and has children with her. He lives himself and has the experience of himself in the relation to the persons he loves. He takes care of himself, not because of the egoistic relation to himself, but because of his love for his wife and children. There is a non-egoistic relation of man to himself if this is mediated through the relationship to others. This relation does not imply only the subject but the totality of the world of values. Values appear and manifest themselves in the person and through the person. The responsibility for the value of the person contains in itself the responsibility for the totality of the world of values as far as they are entrusted to the person. All values are entrusted to the person, to each human person. They are not entrusted to each person in the same way. Each one is in one sense the centre of the world of values, and these values are entrusted to each person in a unique way. Let us consider again the case of the loving husband and father. He is sensible to the value of all children of the world, but he is responsible for his own children in a way which is different from that in which he is responsible for all the children of the world. There is an axiological order of values if you consider them in themselves and there is a different order of values if you consider them as objective goods for the person, that is if you consider the way and the order in which they are entrusted to the responsibility of each human person. At this stage the personalist philosophy encounters the great tradition of Neoplatonism and of the Italian Renaissance philosophy of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola or of Leonardo da Vinci. Man is a microcosm which reproduces in itself the macrocosm. The totality of the values is reflected, and also realized, in a unique way in the life of each human person. Each human person decides through the acts of their life the meaning of the whole universe. Since the acts remain within the person, each person becomes, in one sense, the whole universe in a unique perspective.
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II. The Philosophical Discovery of Josef Seifert
Through Wojtyla (and von Hildebrand) we have discovered the person as substance. Josef Seifert draws upon, in one sense, the consequences of this discovery. What is the impact on metaphysics and ontology of the fact that the person is a substance? In one sense we could say that the process of the thought of Seifert is opposite (and complementary) to that of Wojtyla. Wojtyla uses the ontology of Aristoteles and St. Thomas to give a firmer foundation to the phenomenological discovery of the person and to deepen in this way our interpretation of the phenomenological evidence regarding the person. Seifert goes from the person to ontology and asks the question: how must we change and integrate our general ontological concepts in order to formulate at the level of ontology the consequences of the discovery of the person? The person is not a being like all other beings which possess the quality of being in the same way. This quality is possessed and expressed differently in all other beings. This is a break in the history of ontology. Since Parmenides we have been thinking that things either are or are not, and being is essentially equalitarian: the same in all and always equal to itself. Plato, especially if you read him according to the new interpretation of the Tübingen School and of Reale, already introduces a difference. You can consider being as it is in itself in its ideal form, and you can consider being as you see it in the things of this world that are a defective reproduction of the real being. The ideal being is the real being and the being of this world is a faint imitation of the real being. St. Augustine teaches us the centrality of the idea of order. Not only is there a difference between ideal and empirical being, but beings have among themselves a hierarchy of order. Dante has expressed this idea in beautiful verses:
Le cose tutte quante Hanno ordine fra loro e questa è forma Che l'Universo a Dio fa simigliante. (All things have order among them and this is the form which makes the Universe similar to God).
There is here a difference between the Being of God and the Being of the Universe. God possesses in Himself the totality of Being, and this totality in the
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created world constitutes an analogy to the Being of God. Cornelio Fabro has stressed that in St. Thomas Aquinas the notion of actus essendi gives to this distinction further insight: God possesses Being as act and communicates the perfection of being to all things in so far as they are. One problem remains open: what is the place of the human person in the order of being? Does man participate being in the same way in which all living things participate being? In one sense - yes. Man receives being as well as all other created beings. Man however as person participates in another sense of the creative act of God. Through his actions man creates the order of values that constitutes his own person. He creates the whole of the world in so far as the whole world is reproduced in his interiority through his acts and transformed in the exterior material dimension through his work. The person is creative in man in a way that is analogous to that in which the person of God is creative. The person gives us then an access to Being, which is different from the access to Being given to us by all other objects of the earth. This is in one sense also the meaning of the vision of man as microcosm. Seifert makes one decisive step forward along this route. He says “Being is Person.” Let us try to exfoliate different levels of meaning for this expression. At the first level “God is Person.” In Plato (and in Aristotle) this is not so clear. In Plato the divinity is not of theos. It is rather to theion. The use of the neutral form implies that God is not a person or should be understood beyond all categories, the category of person included. O theos is the lesser God, the Demiurgos, who shape the objects of this world according to the pure forms contained in the divine. For Christians, it may seem natural to think the Demiurgos and the divine are one and the same. St. John tells us that the Logos (Word) of God, through Whom all things were done, is one and the same with the Father. But shall we consider this formulation as a pure object of Christian revelation, which as such, stands beyond the realm of philosophical reflection? The phenomenological research on the person allows us to discover a particular richness of content of the person - as the place in which all values are reflected but are also substantiated through the acts of the person. This specific wealth of the person leads Seifert to qualify personhood (the fact of being a person) as pure perfection. Since God is the subject of all pure perfections than God must possess also the perfection of personhood, and then “God is a Person.” How could God communicate to man, the perfection of personhood, if he did not possess this perfection Himself? Pure perfection is a quality which is always better to possess
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than not to possess. Such pure perfections are beauty, truth and goodness. Such a perfection is also the Person in a particularly eminent way, since beauty, truth and goodness are fully themselves in the person. Another pure Perfection is oneness, to which the other pure perfections are inherent. Now the person qualifies the one. God is one as person, is the absolute person or is person in a unique and incomparable way. “Being is Person” means that “God is Person.” The second level is that Man is Person (although in a lesser form) and therefore man is being in a way incomparable to that in which other created objects are beings. Man, for instance, is a subject as a person, and human subjectivity as such has a specific ontological consistency and a peculiar structure. It belongs to personhood - a particular openness. The person is substance, but at the same time relation to other persons. Man is a person in relation to God and is creative in this relation and together with God. This overcomes a difficulty that is proper to many forms of existentialist philosophy and also of German idealism. They thought that either God or man is creative and free. This implies however a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the person who is creative and free in the relation to others. The reception of the gift of being from God implies a certain passivity but also a certain activity or an act of freedom in the relation to God. “Being is Person” means that man is being in a unique way, incomparable to that of all objects of the earth. The third level is that human experience gives us an inroad into the intimate structure of being which is incomparably wealthier than that offered by formal ontology. According to a long and established tradition primo quod cadit in intentione est ens. The starting point of the ontological reflection is then Being in the sense of ‘what is the object.’ Seifert now suggests that the person is a better starting point. Being as revealed in the person tells much more about oneself. The experience of value is clearly linked with the experience of the person, is one of the main components of the experience of the person. All this becomes relevant for the inquiry into the essence of Being in a way which could not be imagined within the framework of traditional ontology. The explanation of Being must take into account the experience of the person, and Being must contain in itself the potentiality of what appears in the experience of the person. Traditional ontology begins with the ontos on, or the quality of being an object in the most abstract and general form. Seifert suggests that we should put in the centre of our ontological investigation the on chat'exochèn, Being in its most elevated form in which it manifests itself with the utmost depth.
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The inroad into the realm of Being begins with the person. This has important consequences for the methodology of ontological investigation. The ontos on stands in a certain contiguity with the formal object of physics and more broadly with those of natural sciences. A traditional interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics sees a certain continuity between Aristotelian physics and Aristotelian metaphysics. The crisis of modernity begins, among other things, with the assumption that the crisis of Aristotelian physics involves Aristotelian metaphysics. Now Seifert suggests that the being that stands at the beginning of metaphysics is completely independent upon being in the sense in which it is the formal object of natural sciences. This is an actio finium regundorum (procedure determining the borders) between natural sciences and philosophy that eliminates all possibility of contradiction. Natural sciences cannot say anything neither in favor nor against, for example, the existence of God. This approach is absolutely modern, very similar to that of Descartes. In Descartes also being is found in the experience of the human subject and the movement beginning with the finite (human) subject ends with the infinite Subject of God through the ontological argument. Not by chance we find in Seifert also the ontological argument in the centre of metaphysics. There are, of course, many differences between the Cartesian approach and that of Seifert. The most important one is perhaps the fact that in Descartes the subject remains an abstract ego while in Seifert the subject is a person and has all the wealth of determinations that phenomenology (and especially realist phenomenology) detects in the person.
III. In which Directions Should the Personalist Vessel Steer its Course? Some Suggestions for Young Philosophers.
We come now to the last and most controversial part of this contribution. I do not know if Josef Seifert agrees with this interpretation of his philosophy. Even less sure I am that he will agree with my suggestion of possible paths to continue his philosophical work. I take however this liberty because I have led for thirty years (in presence or at a distance) an intensive dialogue with Seifert. It appears Seifert's personalism gives us a new foundation of modern philosophy which reconciles it with the classical heritage. For a long while we have been used to oppossing classical philosophy to modern philosophy as if they were two opposite forms of thought which cannot in any way be reconciled with one another: classical objectivism vs modern subjectivism. One philosophy
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DOES SEIFERT'S PERSONALISM HOLD WATER? 51
begins with being (primo quod cadit in intentione ext ens), the other with the subject (cogito ergo sum). Now we find two unexpected moves in Seifert: the first one tells us that Man is Person (not only subject), the second one says that Being is Person. Does the name of another philosopher come to your mind who may have said something similar to (but at the same time thoroughly different from) this in the past? G.W.F. Hegel, of course. He said that the conscience (the subject) is substance (the object). You do not find many quotations of Hegel in the works of Seifert, and it is not difficult to understand why. Seifert is an international philosopher but remains 100% Austrian at heart. Hegel was never very popular in Austria. Hegel was a kind of official philosopher of the Kingdom of Prussia. He was a Suabian by birth but ended his career as professor in Berlin. His philosophy can be seen as a prophesy of a Protestant/Prussian/German unification and a new German/Prussian stage in the history of civilization. In the Austrian empire these ideas could not be met with great enthusiasm. They wanted a Catholic/Austrian unification and were the major opponents of Prussian hegemony. Austrian philosophy remains hostile to Hegel and to German idealism in general (with a partial exception for Schelling). It is rather the ‘broth culture’ from which, in the end, phenomenology will emerge. It is of course apparent that between Hegel and Seifert there are enormous differences. I believe they all lead back to one fundamental divergence that is the same which opposes Seifert to Descartes. This divergence is the concept of the Person. Hegel sees the human subject as relationship but does not see the person as substance or as substance in relationship. The result is immanentism and totalism. The relation obtaining between God and man must become indistinct and immanentism must arise in which both the transcendence of God and the autonomy and responsibility of man ‘go lost.’ Man, on the other hand, is seen just as a member of the social totality and the ontical priority of the person vs the state goes equally lost. It is undeniable however, that Hegel has developed an enormous wealth of concepts that help us to understand the human world, the world of human action, of history and of politics. Large parts of the human sciences depend (although human scientists do not like to admit this) upon the Hegelian conceptual heritage. A traditional defect of the classical philosophy has been a certain incapacity of
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concretely thinking history and of understanding the philosophical meaning of change in history. Is it possible to use the ontological personalism of Seifert in order, not just to criticize, but also to correct Hegel? A usual confutation limits itself to explaining what is wrong and why and discards the whole work of the author because of its defects. A methodological correction sees the roots of the error and explains how the positive discoveries of a philosopher (of Hegel in this case) can be saved and founded on a more reliable ground. Can we read Hegel with new eyes? The question is not irrelevant and is not just a problem of philosophical archeology. The Hegelian philosophy was in a certain sense the definitive form of modernity and the crisis of modernity coincides largely with the crisis of Hegelian philosophy. It is not just a theoretical issue. That philosophy has been incarnate within the culture, in the uses and customs, in the institutions of a whole civilization. Some philosophers expected after the crisis of immanentism, philosophy would go back to classical realism and, society would retreat to the past. The contrary happened: philosophy moved forward towards postmodernism and the dominant social ideology became absolute relativism. A revision of Hegel's philosophy could disclose new horizons for a reform and a critical defense of modernity reconciled with classical realism. Perhaps it is worth the while to try it.
Reference
J. Seifert. 1976. Back to things themselves, Routledge and Kegan, London.
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PERFECTION AND IMPERFECTION OF JOSEF SEIFERT’S THEORY OF PURE PERFECTIONS
Rogelio Rovira
“Now if cattle, horses or lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and perform works like men, horses like horses and cattle like cattle would draw the forms of gods, and make their bodies just like the body each of them had… Africans say their gods are snub-nosed and black, Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired.”1 The criticism levelled by the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes against the anthropomorphic way of representing the divine in his era has been constantly reiterated throughout the history of thought. Is it not really man who “created God in his own image and likeness,” as we read on the sarcophagus of the nineteenth-century atheist thinker Ludwig Feuerbach? Is not all idea of God’s being an idol, as the contemporary Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion appears to suggest?2 The question as to whether and how a finite understanding like ours can adequately conceive the infinite being of God is perhaps the central problem of philosophical theology and of metaphysics in general. If our knowledge were essentially reduced to analysis of purely inner-worldly being, metaphysics (as a science of being qua being as well as a rational science of God) would be completely impossible. To provide an answer to this fundamental problem, Josef Seifert has had the perspicacity to direct his gaze to an ancient doctrine of medieval origin: the so-called doctrine of pure perfections. It is no exaggeration to assert that Josef Seifert is the foremost contemporary defender of this metaphysical theory of simpliciter simplices perfections, and the one who has managed to extract the greatest philosophical riches from it.3
ROGELIO ROVIRA, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. 1“Xenophanes,” Frag. B15, B 16, in Daniell W. Graham (ed. and transl.), The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy. The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109-10. 2See Jean-Luc Marion, Dieu sans l‘Etre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991). 3Josef Seifert deals with the doctrine of pure perfections in many of his works, for example: “Gott und die Sittlichkeit innerweltlichen Handelns. Kritische philosophische Reflexionen über den Einfluß anthropomorpher und agnostischer Gottesvorstellungen auf Ethik und
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In the following analysis, I propose to carry out three tasks. First, to give a brief account of the essence of pure perfections as described by the first philosopher who grasped them with full philosophical awareness, Anselm of Canterbury, and by the thinker who perhaps entered most deeply into their nature, Duns Scotus. Second, to identify the corrections and clarifications that Josef Seifert has introduced into the traditional doctrine of pure perfections, as well as
Moraltheologie,” Forum Katholische Theologie, I, 1 (1985), 27-47; Essere e persona. Verso una fondazione fenomenologica di una metafisica classica e personalistica. Translated by Rocco Buttiglione (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1989), cap. V, 203-49; “Transcendentals and Pure Perfections,” in H. Burkhardt-B. Smith (ed.), Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology (München: Philosophia Verlag, 1991, 2, 909-11; “Essere persona come perfezione pura. Il Beato Duns Scoto e una nuova metafisica personalistica,” in M. Sánchez Sorondo (ed.), Peri psych s, De homine, Antropologia: Nuovi approcci (Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di Filosofia. Pontificia Università Lateranense; Collana “Dialogo di Filosofia” 11, Roma: Herder, 1994), 57-75; “Die natürliche Gotteserkenntnis als menschlicher Zugang zu Gott,” in Franz Breid (ed.), Der Eine und Dreifaltige Gott als Hoffnung des Menschen zur Jahrtausendwende (Steyr: Ennsthaler Verlag, 2001), 9-102; Gott als Gottesbeweis. Eine phänomenologische Neubegründung des ontologischen Arguments (Heidelberg: Universtitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996, 20002); “The Idea of the Good as the Sum-total of Pure Perfections. A New Personalistic Reading of Republic VI and VII,” in: G. Reale and S. Scolnikov (eds.), New Images of Plato. Dialogues on the Idea of the Good (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2002), 407-424. “El amor como perfección pura: una metafísica del amor como himno filosófico del amor,” Humanitas (Anuario del Centro de Estudios Humanísticos, Universidad Autónoma del Nuevo León) 2004, 65-82; “A vontade como perfeição pura e a nova concepção não-eudemonística do amor segundo Duns Scotus,“ Veritas (Porto Alegre), 50 (2005), 51-84; “Scotus’ Analyse der ‘reinen Vollkommenheiten’ und zeitgenössische Religionsphilosophie,” in R. Hofmeister Pich (ed.), New Essays on Metaphysics as “Scientia transcendens”. (Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Medieval Philosophy, held at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre-Brazil, 15-18 August, 2006, Louvain-La-Neuve: Fédération internationale des Instituts d'Études Médiévales, 2007), 249-282. Erkenntnis des Vollkommenen. Wege der Vernunft zu Gott (Bonn: Lepanto Verlag, 2010). Spanish translation by Pedro Jesús Teruel, with revisions and aditions by Josef Seifert, Conocimiento de Dios por la vías de la razón y del amor (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 2013).
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to indicate the main ways in which he has used or applied this ancient theory. In this way, I shall consider the “perfection” of Seifert’s theory of pure perfections. Third, to indicate issues, which remain open within this metaphysical doctrine and the broad scope Seifert has given to it. In this way, I shall discuss the “imperfection” of Seifert’s theory of pure perfections, not in the sense that it is in any way flawed, but in the sense that there are aspects, which still need to be developed.
I. The Essence of Pure Perfections as Described by Anselm and Duns Scotus
As Josef Seifert notes, Anselm of Canterbury (also known as Anselm of Aosta) was the first to grasp with philosophical clarity the essence of the so-called pure perfections.4 In Chapter XV of Monologion, Anselm sought a criterion for discerning, among the different predicates we attribute to things, which ones are substantively (substantialiter) or properly characteristic of the divine essence.5 To find a solution, Anselm first distinguished two basic types of predication: the relative and the absolute. In the relative, attributed perfection is valued in terms of how much and to what degree of excellence an object possesses this quality. With the absolute, the predicated perfection is judged according to the ontological dignity of the quality in question. Relative predication involves comparing the extent and degree of excellence to which an attribute is possessed by two or more beings. For this reason, no relative or comparative predicate will be able to describe the divine nature adequately. It is certainly true that we can say that God is, in Anselm’s own words, “the highest of all beings, or greater than those which have been created by Him.”6 However, this does not describe God’s nature in itself, for if the term of
4See Seifert, “Transcendentals and Pure Perfections,” 910, and Essere e Persona, cap V, 216. 5For what follows see Anselm of Canterbury, Monologion, cap. XV, in St. Anselmi Cantuarienses Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia (ed. F. S. Schmitt), Edinburghi: apud Thomas Nelson et Filios, 1946, I, 28-29. English translation by Sidney Norton Deane, in St. Anselm, Proslogium; Monologium; An appendix in behalf of the fool by Gaunilon; and Cur deus homo (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1939), 61-64; and Josef Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap V, 215-218. 6Anselm, Monologion, cap. XV, 28 (English translation, 61).
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comparison, namely everything that has been made by God, never existed, then God would not be the supreme essence at all. Moreover, He would not have lost any of His ontological greatness and dignity. The same is true of other, similar relative predicates. The positive criterion for the attributes of the substance of the divine essence must be sought, then, within an absolute predication of perfections. Absolute predication, in fact, involves comparing the possession of a perfection by a being with the same being not possessing this quality; in such a way, that we can say it is better (or not better) for this being to have such an attribute than not to have it. Moreover, it is precisely within the absolute predicates that Anselm discovered a fundamental difference. There are, on the one hand, cases where, for some beings, it is better not to have a certain predicate than to have it, even if this predicate is present in its highest degree. Anselm says of a predicate or perfection of this kind that, “in some cases, ‘not to be it’ is better than ‘to be it’ (non ipsum in aliquo melius est quam ipsum).” On the other hand, there are cases where it is absolutely better for an object to possess a given predicate than not to possess it. Anselm suggests that, in the case of a predicate or perfection of this type, “to be it is in general better than not to be it (ipsum omnino melius est quam non ipsum).”7 The opposition between “to be it” (ipsum esse) and “not to be it” (non ipsum esse) does not refer to the opposition between a perfection and its respective imperfection, but rather to the opposition between a perfection and its respective absence or privation. Anselm’s discovery specifically involves showing that the absence of some perfections is, in some beings, a perfection, while the lack of certain perfections is necessarily an imperfection. To use Anselm’s own examples, although it might be better for something to be gold, it is better for man not to be gold than to be gold, as man is much better than gold. If he were gold, he would be of lower nature. On the other hand, to be wise is better than not to be wise, “for everything that is not wise, simply in so far as it is not wise, is less than what is wise, since everything that is not wise would be better if it were wise.”8 Conditioned absolute predicates, i.e. those it is better in some cases not to have than to have, are termed mixed or limited perfections (limitatae perfectiones). The root of the limitation they encapsulate explains the fact that, in some beings, it is better not to possess them than to possess them. On the other
7Anselm, Monologion, cap. XV, 28 (English translation, 62). 8Anselm, Monologion, cap. XV, 28 (English translation, 63).
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hand, unconditioned absolute predicates, i.e. those it is unconditionally better to have than not to have are termed pure perfections or perfections in an absolute way (perfectiones simpliciter). The fact that possessing them is absolutely better than not possessing them shows that, in fact, these perfections do not contain in himself or herself any imperfection or limitation; they are perfections par excellence. In this light, it is easy to establish a positive criterion for the perfections, which correspond properly or substantively to divine nature. Anselm himself explains it as follows: “As it is impious to suppose that the substance of the supreme Nature is anything, than which what is not it is in any way better, it must be true that this substance is whatever is, in general, better than what is not it.” The essence of God can be seen, therefore, as all pure perfections in the highest degree. “Hence,” Anselm concludes, “this Being must be living, wise, powerful, and all-powerful, true, just, blessed, eternal, and whatever, in like manner, is absolutely better than what is not it.”9 According to Josef Seifert, Duns Scotus is the philosopher who perhaps explored the essence of the pure perfections in the most depth and, through progressive refining, attempted to distinguish the pure from the mixed perfections most clearly.10 As Seifert states: “Scotus’ subtle analyses of the pure perfections remain as the most significant historical contribution to a phenomenology of the pure perfections.”11 Duns Scotus summarises the description of the nature of pure perfections offered by Anselm in these terms: “A pure perfection is said to be something which is better in everything than what is not it (Perfectio simpliciter est quae in quolibet est melius ipsum quam non ipsum).” Alternatively - “A pure perfection is that which it is better to possess than not to possess in whatever possesses it (Perfectio simpliciter est quae in quolibet habente ipsam melius est ipsam habere quam non ipsam habere).”12 In the opinion of the Subtle Doctor, however, two
9Anselm, Monologion, cap. XV, 29 (English translation, 64). 10See Seifert, “Transcendentals and Pure Perfections,” 910, Essere e Persona, cap V, 218 and “Scotus’ Analyse der ‘reinen Vollkommenheiten’,” 251-262. 11Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap V, 231. 12The first definition is found in Tractatus de primo principio, cap. IV, Tertia conclusio; the second one in Quaestiones Quodlibetales, q. 5, n. 13. For what follows see, besides the mentioned passages of Duns Scotus’s works, Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 218-20 and
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possible misunderstandings obscure the true meaning of these Anselmian formulae. The first possible ambiguity concerns that which is to be considered a pure perfection and that which is not. Anselm himself had already considered this possible misunderstanding, at least implicitly. The question is that the opposition between “to be it” (ipsum esse) and “not to be it” (non ipsum esse) cannot be understood as a contrary opposition, that is, as an opposition between something positive and something negative. If it were understood in this way, Anselm's description would be false and even absurd. Rather, the opposition between ipsum and non ipsum has to be understood as an incompatibility between something positive and another something, which is also positive. This latter is called non ipsum only on the grounds of its incompatibility with the former. In order to avoid this confusion, Duns Scotus proposes a more appropriate characterisation of a pure perfection as that which, in any being, is better than everything else is incompossible or incompatible with it (in quolibet melior quocumque sibi incompossibili). The second possible misunderstanding refers to that to which a pure perfection is ascribed, to the “bearer” of a pure perfection. The question is that the term “in any being” (in quolibet) in Anselm’s description cannot be interpreted as meaning “for any being” (cuilibet). If this were the case, Anselm’s formula would be false. According to the famous example by Duns Scotus, it is no better for a dog to be wise than not to be wise. Interpreted in this way, Anselmian description would mention the relationship of a pure perfection to a certain nature, which, by its own limitation, may be incompatible with such a pure perfection. The excellence of such perfection prevents the nature in question from being such a nature, so to speak. Therefore, Anselm’s statement has to be understood in the sense of a relationship between a pure perfection and a nature not yet determined, which the Subtle Doctor, following the scholastic tradition, calls substance or subject (suppositum), i.e. something which subsists (subsistens), but whose subsistence is considered independent of the nature in which or of which it is a substance. To avoid this ambiguity, a pure perfection can be more properly defined as that which, in any substance, regardless of its subsistence as
pp. 232-41 and Allan B. Wolter, The Transcendentals and Their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus (St. Bonaventure-New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1946), 162-8.
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determined by a particular nature, is better than anything incompatible with it is. In the light of these considerations, Duns Scotus can summarise the results of his research with a new characterisation of the essence of pure perfections. This description, which Scotus considers more appropriate to the thing itself and less equivocal than that proposed by Anselm, reads as follows: “A pure perfection is whatever is absolutely and without qualification better than anything incompatible with it (Perfectio simpliciter est quae est simpliciter et absolute melius quocumque incompossibili).”13 The essence of pure perfections described in this way leads Duns Scotus to make four new discoveries concerning the essentially necessary properties of pure perfections. First: All pure perfections are mutually compatible. 14 The argument advanced by the Subtle Doctor develops as follows. No pure perfection can be incompatible with another pure perfection because, if this were the case, the same perfection would be both better and worse than the other, and vice versa. The impossibility that one and the same thing could be less perfect than it could indirectly proves the fact all pure perfections must be compatible. Second: All pure perfections admit of infinity.15 The proof of Duns Scotus is as follows. If a pure perfection does not admit of infinity, then it would have to exceed or be better than what is infinite, since a pure perfection is better than what is incompatible with it. However, nothing can exceed or be better than what is infinite. Thus, all pure perfections admit of infinity. Third: Pure perfections are irreducible simple (simpliciter simplices),16 that is to say, they cannot be reduced neither to anything simpler nor to each other, and are therefore indefinable. Four: Every pure perfection is “communicable,”17 that is, several subjects can share a pure perfection. Finally, Duns Scotus considers that pure perfections are properly “Transcendentals,” not in the sense of being properties coextensive with being, but rather in the sense of being properties not limited to spheres or categories of
13John Duns Scotus, Tractatus de primo principio, cap. IV, Tertia conclusio. 14See Scotus, Quaestiones Quodlibetales, q. 5, n. 8. 15See Scotus, Quaestiones Quodlibetales, q. 5, n. 9. 16See Scotus, Quaestiones Quodlibetales, q. 1, n. 4. 17See John Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, I, dist. 2, q. 7, n. 39.
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beings and in the sense that they lack essential limitations or restrictions. In this way, Scotus classifies these Transcendentals into three groups: properties which characterise all beings (such as ens, unum, verum or bonum), properties which only some beings possess but which are in themselves formally infinite (such as being a person, knowledge, freedom, etc.) and properties which can only be ascribed to the Infinite Being (such as necessary real existence, absolute infinity, omniscience and omnipotence). Thus, as Seifert says, “all Transcendentals are necessarily also pure perfections, and all pure perfections are eo ipso Transcendentals.”18
II. The “Perfection” of Seifert’s Theory of Pure Perfections
What corrections or clarifications has Josef Seifert introduced to this traditional doctrine of pure perfections and how has he used and applied it? I will discuss the “perfection” of Seifert’s theory of pure perfections by giving a brief account, in order, of his nine major contributions to this theory. 1. The first contribution concerns the need for a more precise and exact determination of the nature or essence of pure perfections. In the first place, Seifert notes that Scotus’ distinction between in quolibet, or suppositum (substance), and cuilibet, or specific nature, is superfluous and misleading in the way it is applied to the description of pure perfections. There are indeed certain limited subjects, not just their specific natures, for which possessing a pure perfection is not necessarily better than not possessing it. For example, it would be absurd for the subject of human nature (in quolibet) to possess rather than not to possess a pure perfection such as eternity. Besides, although it is true, to a certain extent, the same suppositum can be the bearer of different natures, this “plasticity” or “flexibility,” so to speak, is not infinite. No finite subject can bridge the gap between finite and infinite nature. Therefore, in Duns Scotus’ formula, the expression “anything incompatible” (quocumque incompossibile) with a pure perfection must leave open the question of whether it is a subject or a nature, or both.19 In the second place, Seifert notes that the Scotus’ description of a pure perfection as that which is better than anything incompatible with it can only be
18Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap V, 212. 19See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 220-2.
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understood by considering the perfection in question in itself, and not in relation to other possible pure perfections. An intelligent nature, in Seifert’s example, is certainly more perfect than an unintelligent or less intelligent nature, but only with regard to intelligence. The most intelligent but evil nature is less perfect than a less intelligent nature which is nevertheless morally good. Seifert therefore gives the following formula for describing a pure perfection: “A pure perfection is such, that the being which possess it and which is compatible with it is, from the point of view of that perfection, necessarily more perfect than a being which in fact does not possess the given perfection, or by essence cannot possess it.”20 Finally, in the third place, Seifert thinks that it is possible to provide a new description of the pure perfections, which more adequately encapsulates the essential characteristic of their absolute goodness or their absolute “being better,” i.e. the fact that they are better in an absolute way. The proposed formula says, “A pure perfection is such that it is impossible to surpass it without possessing it.”21 2. The second major improvement Seifert made in the theory of pure perfections concerns the ways in which the actual existence of such perfections can be identified. Josef Seifert begins by noting that pure perfections possess an objective, essential necessity. They are indeed Urgegebenheiten, irreducible realities. Thus, their existence can be ascertained, according to Seifert, in two ways: indirectly, by a negative proof, and directly, by a positive insight. The negative proof for the existence of pure perfections is, as Seifert calls it, a sort of objectivist “transcendental deduction.” It is because, since pure perfections are irreducible data, they are also “undeniable truths” in the sense that every negation of them necessarily entails a contradiction, by reintroducing the datum in question. To hold that there are only mixed perfections, or surpassable attributes of being as such, implies defending that it is absolutely better to possess a surpassable perfection than not to possess it, or that it is absolutely better to be limited than to be unlimited. However, this is tantamount to saying that a pure perfection is not really a pure perfection. This contradiction therefore provides indirect proof of the fact that there are indeed pure perfections.22 However, definitive evidence which refutes any denial of the existence of
20Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 222. 21See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 224. 22See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 225-8.
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pure perfections, as Seifert points out, consists of rendering “intuitively evident that the perfectiones simpliciter really do include perfections in an absolute sense higher than any which are possible in natures or beings which lack these pure perfections or which are incompatible with them.”23 In this case, we are not dealing with a simple psychological impossibility of thinking something “higher than…” Rather, we are referred back to the objective material lawfulness, which we encounter in perfections such as being a person, being wisdom or simply being.24 3. The question of the existence of pure perfections leads us to the third major development introduced by Josef Seifert in the metaphysical theory of pure perfections. It concerns the problem of knowledge of these perfections. At this point, Seifert separates drastically from the Scotistic epistemological conception. Duns Scotus maintains that the human spirit first grasps the essential form or ratio formalis of a pure perfection by experience, and then abstracts from the experienced perfection all the limitations it finds. The human mind then ascribes the purified essential form to God in a most perfect manner (perfectissime). Seifert simply considers such a conception impossible. He asks how the human spirit can abstract from the limitations he finds in experience without in some manner knowing how to distinguish the limited instances in which a pure perfection is realised from the pure perfection itself?25 Far from any idea of grasping essential forms contained in the phantasmata, Seifert, in accordance with his manifold epistemological investigations and inquiries on the methods of realist phenomenology, defends an intuitive knowledge of pure perfections. This intuitive knowledge is certainly not direct, but mediated “in the mirror” of others. This “mediated immediate” knowledge is, in Seifert’s own words, an “indirect knowledge in which other, originally hidden essences, are reflected and co-given in what is more immediately present to us, sometimes as their perfect form, other times as their intelligible ‘opposites’.”26 In fact, in the world, we only experience immediately finite forms of pure perfections, but at the same time, we understand the formal essence of these pure
23Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 229. 24See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 228-30. 25See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 231. 26 Josef Seifert, Discours des Méthodes: The Methods of Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology, (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2009), 34.
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perfections in their purity and infinity. Using a distinction by Bonaventura, in the same way as Seifert, we can say that pure perfections are not ‘intuited’ as such in the immediate objects of our concrete experience, but ‘contuited’ on that intuitive contact with reality. Alternatively, as Seifert himself says, “the perfect form of the pure perfections is only co-given to our human mind with the finite and imperfect forms of them which we experience immediately.” 27 4. This conception of knowledge, both of the existence and the essence of pure perfections, gives Josef Seifert occasion to understand more deeply some of the essential characteristics of the perfectiones simpliciter, especially their admission of the infinite. This is his fourth major advance in the doctrine of the pure perfections. It is not just the case that every pure perfection is not essentially limited and is therefore compatible with the infinite, but above all that a pure perfection is only fully itself when it is infinite. Our co-given insight into a pure perfection allows us to understand that its essential form definitively contradicts all those limitations in which the pure perfection in question is accessible to us. The primary and genuine form of every pure perfection is its infinite form. According to Seifert, by rejecting a certain positive knowledge, albeit indirect, of the archetype of a pure perfection, in the final analysis the Scotistic epistemology of pure perfections is not able to justify this important insight: that the pure essential form of a pure perfection is formally infinite, even if we can only access it in its finite forms.28 In this light, the mutual compatibility of all pure perfections is evidence that the pure perfections are not merely compossible with each other, but rather that there is a profound inner union between them, in such a way that in the Infinite Being all perfections are united.29 Likewise, the irreducible simplicity of pure perfections means they are ultimate and simple data, which cannot be reduced to something else. Pure perfections, as far as they are absolutely infinite, and not merely “infinite within the finite,” are in no way composed of parts or moments.30 5. The fifth major achievement within the theory of pure perfections involves
27Seifert, Discours des Méthodes, 35. 28See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 238-41. 29See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 232-4. 30See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 244-5 and 235-7.
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Seifert’s arguments to prove that properties like life, free will, to be a person and love are in fact pure perfections. Life is a pure perfection where it is seen not as bios, that is, not as organic vegetal, animal or human life which is inseparable from a body, but rather it is understood in the sense of ‘zoee.’ That is, the most universal essence of life, for it is absolutely impossible to surpass any limited form of life in perfection without living. For this reason, according to Seifert, Aristotle himself attributed life to “the unmoved mover.”31 Following the deep insights of Scotus, Seifert demonstrates that free will is also a pure perfection because of both its object and its motivation. The object of free will is not restricted to any particular good, but is extended to good itself. Besides, free will can be motivated not only by the only subjectively satisfactory, but also by the intrinsic value.32 To be a person is certainly absolutely better than not to be it. The perfections of being, in other words actuality, self-possession, autonomy and self-sufficiency, are fulfilled in the person in a higher way than in non-personal beings. Thus, the person is the being in the primary and archetypal sense. Moreover, the perfection of being a person admits infinity in such a way that even God must be a personal being. For, as Seifert asks: How could a non-personal being create us? How could God be a just judge and have mercy on us without knowing and loving, acts which only persons can carry out?33 Finally, love is also, according to Josef Seifert, a pure perfection. Among the various arguments he brings forth in favour of this thesis, I will mention only one direct insight: love in the sense of self-donation of one person to another is a perfection absolutely insurmountable by a being incapable of love.34 6. Seifert’s sixth major contribution to the doctrine of pure perfections is his defence of the thesis, which suggests that knowledge of pure perfections is a necessary condition of any knowledge of God.
31See Josef Seifert, What is Life? On the Originality, Irreducibility and Value of Life (Amsterdam, Rodopi, Value Inquiry Book Series, 51, 1997), 20-4. 32See Seifert, “A vontade como perfeição pura,” 78-80. 33See Seifert, “Essere persona come perfezione pura,” 66-75, and Essere e Persona, cap. 9, 326-408. 34See Seifert, “El amor como perfección pura,” 68-78, and Conocimiento de Dios, 202-213.
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According to Seifert, on the one hand, mixed perfections are primarily and in a certain sense exclusively realised in finite beings, whereas pure perfections, by being formally infinite, can only be properly realised in God himself, the Infinite Being. On the other hand, whereas no pure perfection can be fulfilled in an absolute sense in any finite being, mixed perfections can be attributed to God only via negationis and via supereminentia. In other words, God does not possess them directly, but He does retain every perfection present in them. In this sense, as Seifert notes, mixed perfections are attributed to God via negativa, and to creatures via affirmationis, whereas pure perfections are attributed to God via positiva, and to finite beings via negativa.35 This is the basis upon which Seifert responds to the argument, commonly presented by philosophers today, that all statements about God are anthropomorphic. They cannot preserve God's “absolute transcendence,” either with respect to our knowledge or with respect to His actions in the world. This view can be countered by the argument that pure perfections which are attributed to God via positiva cannot entail anything “human, all too human” because they are, by essence, infinite. Moreover, applying the via negationis to God, far from being an anthropomorphic way of speaking about Him, involves denying that mixed perfections exist in God, because of the imperfection which these perfections carry in themselves. Finally, as Seifert explicitly states, the ultimate consequence of the thesis that all statements about God can only be anthropomorphic is “not only the old deism, but a more radical agnosticism, which, by its abandonment of any claim to objective knowledge about God, can no longer be clearly distinguished from atheism.”36 7. Josef Seifert’s seventh major development within the theory of pure perfections involves proposing a new defence of the famous quarta via of Thomas Aquinas. He bases this on the discovery of the constitutive essence of pure perfections.37 Far from regarding this proof as the weakest of Aquinas’ five ways of proving the existence of God, as is usually the case, Seifert suggests that this
35See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 241. 36Seifert, Erkenntnis dês Vollkommenen, 171. See also “Scotus’ Analyse der ‘reinen Vollkommenheiten’”, 262-282. 37See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 12, 488-503, and Erkenntnis dês Vollkommenen, 147-50.
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proof constitutes the core of any cosmological argument. As is well known, the proof is taken from the gradation of perfections to be found in the worldly beings, and is built on the concept that “’more’ and ‘less’ are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum.”38 Aquinas, in Seifert's opinion, does not clearly distinguish in his formulation of the proof between a relative and an absolute maximum, or between necessarily limited perfections and pure perfections which are potentially infinite, but which appear only to a limited degree in the beings of our experience. However, his proof is completely valid in the sense that not only the essential limitation of mixed perfections but also the limitations of the embodiment of all pure perfections in the world necessarily imply both the contingency of essence and the contingency of existence of worldly beings. Why is this particular being limited in this precise way, rather than in any of an infinite number of other possible ways? Moreover, if this particular being can have more or less of any of the perfections it possesses, why does it exist instead of not existing at all? In this way, Seifert argues, the fact that it is impossible to explain limited degrees of perfection in terms of limited beings proves the existence of an infinitely good God. Only an infinitely perfect Being, “something than which nothing greater can be thought”, can be the ultimate explanation for being. 8. It is precisely this conception of God’s Being as “that greater than which nothing can be thought” which leads us to the eighth major improvement made by Seifert in the theory of pure perfections. I refer to his sound defence of the so-called ontological argument, which he regards as the strongest proof for the existence of God, though also the most difficult to comprehend.39 God ‘s essence, Seifert suggests, contains all pure perfections, all those attributes it is absolutely better to possess than not to possess, and those which it is better to possess than to possess anything incompatible with them. Thus, God’s perfection includes not only the absolute plenitude of reality and of being, but all personal and moral perfections. God is not only “that greater than which nothing can be thought,” but also “that better than which nothing can be thought.” In the defence presented by Seifert, this description of God’s Being is not a mere idea or simple, nominal definition. It is instead true knowledge of God’s
38Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 2, a. 3. 39See Seifert, Gott als Gottesbeweis, especially V. Teil, 527 ff.
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nature, however imperfect and indirectly obtained from our experience of the world this knowledge may be. Moreover, because God is God, and actual existence is inseparable from the highest perfection, God necessarily exists. Anselm’s immortal insight that a pure idea of supreme perfection would not be “that greater and better than which nothing can be thought” if it did not actually exist, is interpreted by Seifert as follows: God’s infinite perfection, which includes full possession of the ratio formalis of all pure perfections in their infinite form, would not be perfection at all if it did not really exist as a perfection. God really exists simply because God is God as proof of God’s existence. 9. Finally, Seifert’s ninth main contribution to the theory of pure perfections is of special significance to Christian philosophy. Based on his understanding of love as a pure perfection, Seifert considers it possible to justify, in a purely philosophical way, the central claim of Christian revelation that God is “love” itself.40 By using better reasons than those proposed by Ariston in the Platonic Symposium to prove that love is something divine, Seifert shows that, because God is a person and pure perfections in the person can only be fully realised through love, God must be love. Besides, God’s absolute and infinite perfection means that the creation of the world cannot be understood in terms of God’s self-realisation, and only one intelligible way of explaining the free act of creation remains: love, which must be identified with the divine essence. Josef Seifert has, in fact, made many other contributions to the development of the theory of pure perfections. He has proposed, for example, a phenomenological and personalistic reading of the Platonic Idea of the Good as the sum-total of pure perfections.41 He has also offered a valuable assessment of Thomas Aquinas’ original contribution to this issue by explaining the Thomistic distinction between the name, which expresses a pure perfection, and our finite mode of expressing it in language.42 However, the nine major contributions are considered sufficient to account for the importance and scope of Seifert’s investigations on pure perfections.
40See Seifert, Conocimiento de Dios, 202-213. 41See Seifert, “The Idea of the Good as the Sum-total of Pure Perfections,” 407-424 42See Seifert, Essere e Persona, cap. 5, 242-3.
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III. The “Imperfection” of Seifert’s Theory of Pure Perfections
What remains to be done in terms of perfecting the doctrine of pure perfections? I particularly consider a more extensive treatment of two issues to be of paramount importance. As far as I know, Josef Seifert has never explicitly addressed the first of these issues, at least not adequately. The other issue, however, arises from distinctions expressly proposed by Seifert himself. 1. The first issue refers to the relationship between pure perfection and value. As is well known, Seifert follows Hildebrand’s axiology, according to which the term value can only be properly applied to “the intrinsically important,” to the positive importance of what is intrinsically good and precious. Hildebrand and Seifert both distinguish four types of the intrinsically important and, therefore, four kinds of specifically distinct values. (1) Qualitative values, which include the family of moral values (characterised by the basic and intrinsic importance of moral goodness), the domain of the so-called intellectual values (such as intellectual acuity, wit, intellectual depth and brilliance), and the realm of aesthetic values (centred on the intrinsic importance of beauty). (2) Ontological values, that is, values “rooted” or “embodied” in the specific nature of beings. (3) The values of perfection or technical values, which are based on the immanent perfection of a capacity. (4) The formal value of “being something.”43 On the one hand, the notion of value or intrinsic importance does not seem to
43See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethics (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1972), Part I (English original edition: Christian Ethics, New York: David McKay Company, 1953. Definitive German edition: Ethik, in D. v. H., Gesammelte Werke, hrsg. von der Dietrich von Hildebrand Gesellschaft, (Regensburg-Stuttgart: Josef Habbel-W. Kohlhammer, 1971-1984, 10 vols., vol. II, 1973) and Ästhetik 1 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. V, 1977). See Josef Seifert, Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit (Salzburg-München: Universitätsverlag Anton Pustet, 19722), 274-290, Was ist und was motiviert eine sittliche Handlung? (Salzburg-München: Universitätsverlag Anton Pustet, 1976), “Being and Value. Thoughts on the Reform of the Metaphysics of Good within Value Philosophy,” Aletheia I, 2 (1977), 328-336, “Dietrich von Hildebrands philosophische Entdeckung der ‘Wertantwort’ und der Grundlegung der Ethik,” Aletheia V (1992), 34-58. See also Rogelio Rovira, “On the Manifold Meaning of Value according to Dietrich von Hildebrand and the Need for a Logic of the Concept of Value,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 89 (2015), 115-132.
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be identical to the notion of pure perfection, to “being better” in such an absolute way that it is impossible to surpass it without possessing it. Although all pure perfection entails a value, not all-pure perfection is properly a value. Love is, according to Josef Seifert, a pure perfection, and it definitely has a value. However, love is not properly a value, but an “affective response” to value. Moreover, it is also clear that not all value is a pure perfection. The qualitative value of the “beauty of the visible and the audible,” for instance, is not a pure perfection, and the same is true of intellectual depth, the energy of the will or the ontological value of the corporeal living being. On the other hand, can there conceivably be a difference between the absolute goodness of the intrinsic importance and the absolute goodness of the “being better” belonging to the pure perfection? How are we to understand a relationship between value and pure perfection, which is different to that of identity? Is there really a difference between the goodness or excellence proper to value and the goodness or excellence in being? In short, we can clearly see that the notion of value and the notion of pure perfection do not seem to be identical, yet we cannot see a difference between the axiological goodness or positiveness of value and the ontological goodness or positiveness of pure perfection. Here we touch on a new aspect of the mystery in the relationship between value and being, which deserves further investigation. 2. The second issue refers to the question of the communicability of pure perfections and the incommunicability of the person. Josef Seifert accepts Duns Scotus’ thesis that every pure perfection is communicable, i.e. shareable by more than one subject. This thesis, however, poses a difficult problem for Seifert’s conception of to be a person as pure perfection.44 Certainly, to be a person always involves incommunicability in terms of the individual being, because only a unique being, incommunicable and profoundly individual, can be a person. How, then, can to be a person be a pure perfection and thus communicable? In his response to this objection, Seifert begins by distinguishing between to be a person and to be this or that person. The former, but not the latter, is a pure perfection, for the essence of the person involves a personal identity and being an inalienable, irreplaceable individual, but not being this person instead of that one. Seifert then makes a further distinction between pure perfections and
44See Seifert, “Essere persona come perfezione pura,” 68-75.
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properties, which are neither pure nor mixed perfections. To be this unique person rather than another one, Seifert asserts, is neither pure perfection, which it would be absolutely better to have than not to have, nor mixed perfection. This haecceitas, or uniqueness, is a type of perfection, which, in Seifert’s own words, “is beyond the difference between pure and mixed perfection.”45 Josef Seifert even grants a theological significance to this philosophical distinction between pure and mixed perfections on the one hand, and perfections, which are beyond this distinction, such as in the above case of specific personal identity, on the other hand. He considers it the “key” to a little better understanding of the Trinitarian mystery, where no divine person lacks any perfection, yet each divine person is distinct from the other.46 Nevertheless, the ontological status of perfections, which are “beyond” the difference between pure and mixed perfections, raises some problems. What does it mean to be “beyond” the above distinction? On a logical plane, we can understand the concept of perfection without taking into account the difference between essentially unrestricted perfection and essentially limited perfection, in the same way as we can represent the notion of animal without regard to the difference of “rational” and “irrational.” However, all animals, which actually exist, are necessarily either rational or irrational. Can there really be an actual perfection, which is neither capable of infinity nor incapable of infinity? Can a perfection, which is by nature “indifferent,” so to speak, to the distinction between the infinite and the finite, be predicated of the divine persons? Moreover, how can the nature or essence of perfection be characterised, such as the individual identity of each specific person, if this perfection is, according to Seifert, “beyond” the distinction between pure and mixed perfections? Is the essence of this perfection communicable to each person? If so, how can this perfection explain the individuality of this particular person? Alternatively, is the essence of this perfection, in fact, radically incommunicable? In this case, how can we understand its nature as a perfection? Why do we call it perfection? The aporia presented by the communicable nature of the pure perfection involved in being a person, and the inherent incommunicability of each individual person therefore requires further thought. Moreover, theologians must explain a further problem: the aporia of the difference between finite persons, who exist in
45Seifert, “Essere persona come perfezione pura,” 71. 46See Seifert, “Essere persona come perfezione pura,” 72-3.
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individually different natures, and the divine persons, who exist in one numerically indivisible nature. Josef Seifert’s analysis on pure perfections is extensive, precise and full of deep insights and sharp distinctions. He has recognised, perhaps more than any other contemporary philosopher, that these ultimate data of reality play as essential a role in metaphysics as the science of being. Moreover, in Seifert’s analysis of pure perfections, his astute assessment of the contributions of earlier philosophers goes hand in hand, in an exemplary way, with careful attention to the things themselves. For all these reasons, Josef Seifert is worthy of the title, I am pleased to bestow upon him: Doctor Perfectionum. Seifert’s doctrine of pure perfections is clearly not perfect, in the sense of it being complete and finished. It is, certainly, perfectibile. As a true philosopher, always attentive to the voice of reality, Josef Seifert has not offered us a closed system of thoughts about pure perfections. He prefers reality to develop in an ongoing dialogue rather than silencing it by trapping it in a system. The example offered by Josef Seifert invites us to continue to perfect the theory of pure perfections by hearing the voice of reality
Journal of East-West Thought
Journal of East-West Thought
A REPLY TO ROVIRA: CAN THE “IMPERFECTION” OF MY PHILOSOPHY OF PURE PERFECTIONS BE OVERCOME?
Josef Seifert
In his excellent paper “Perfection and Imperfection of Josef Seifert’s Theory of Pure Perfections,” Rogelio Rovira has formulated with precision Anselm of Canterbury’s philosophical discovery of the pure perfections and Duns Scotus‘ refinements of this teaching. He has further attributed to me, more than generously, eight improvements of the philosophy of pure perfections. In the last part of his essay, he has asked two excellent questions about my philosophy of pure perfections which to answer, as well as I am able to, is my present task. Rovira thinks that I have never addressed the first of these two questions, at least not adequately.1 The other issue arises from distinctions expressly proposed by me but has not been sufficiently treated yet. He kindly describes what he means by “imperfections,” rather than in terms of faults, as parts of my position that stand in need of further investigations and are perfectible. In spite of these imperfections, he even bestows the title doctor perfectionum on me, an honor I certainly do not deserve as long as I have no answers for him. 1. The relationship between pure perfection and value. Rovira notes that I follow “Hildebrand’s axiology, according to which the term value can only be properly applied to ‘the intrinsically important’, to the positive importance of what is intrinsically good and precious.” He points out that Hildebrand and I both distinguish four types of the intrinsically important and, therefore, four kinds of specifically distinct values. (1) Qualitative values, which include the family of moral values (characterized by the basic and intrinsic importance of moral goodness), the domain of the so-called intellectual values (such as intellectual acuity, wit, intellectual depth and brilliance), and the realm of aesthetic values (centred on the intrinsic importance of beauty). (2) Ontological values, that is, values “rooted” or “embodied” in the specific nature of beings. (3) The values of perfection or technical values, which
1Perhaps I came close to addressing it in my “The Idea of the Good as the Sum-total of Pure Perfections. A New Personalistic Reading of Republic VI and VII”, in: Giovanni Reale and Samuel Scolnikov (Ed.), New Images of Plato. Dialogues on the Idea of the Good, (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2002), S. 407-424.
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are based on the immanent perfection of a capacity. (4) The formal value of “being something.”2 Now Rovira notes: On the one hand, the notion of value or intrinsic importance does not seem to be identical to the notion of pure perfection, to ‘being better’ in such an absolute way that it is impossible to surpass it without possessing it. Although all pure perfection entails a value, not all-pure perfection is properly a value. Love is, according to Josef Seifert, a pure perfection, and it definitely has a value. However, love is not properly a value, but an “affective response” to value. Moreover, it is also clear that not all value is a pure perfection. The qualitative value of the “beauty of the visible and the audible”, for instance, is not a pure perfection, and the same is true of intellectual depth, the energy of the will or the ontological value of the corporeal living being.” I of course agree entirely with both of these assertions (as long as “energy of the will” and “intellectual depth” refer only to finite human or angelic qualities). To the second one, I might add that most certainly none of the ontological values of particular individual finite beings and of their species and genera, values that are inseparably connected with these natures (of roses, lions, elephants, etc.) in their finitude, is pure perfections. Thus, there are indeed countless values, which are not pure perfections. Rovira continues: “On the other hand, however: can there conceivably be a
2See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethics (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1972), Part I (English original edition: Christian Ethics, New York: David McKay Company, 1953. Definitive German edition: Ethik, in D. v. H., Gesammelte Werke, hrsg. von der Dietrich von Hildebrand Gesellschaft, (Regensburg-Stuttgart: Josef Habbel-W. Kohlhammer, 1971-1984, 10 vols., vol. II, 1973) and Ästhetik 1 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. V, 1977). See Josef Seifert, Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit (Salzburg-München: Universitätsverlag Anton Pustet, 19722), 274-290, Was ist und was motiviert eine sittliche Handlung? (Salzburg-München: Universitätsverlag Anton Pustet, 1976), “Being and Value. Thoughts on the Reform of the Metaphysics of Good within Value Philosophy,” Aletheia I, 2 (1977), 328-336, “Dietrich von Hildebrands philosophische Entdeckung der ‘Wertantwort’ und der Grundlegung der Ethik,” Aletheia V (1992), 34-58. See also Rogelio Rovira, “On the Manifold Meaning of Value according to Dietrich von Hildebrand and the Need for a Logic of the Concept of Value,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 89 (2015), 115-132.
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difference between the absolute goodness of the intrinsic importance and the absolute goodness of the “being better” belonging to the pure perfection? How are we to understand a relationship between value and pure perfection, which is different to that of identity? Is there really a difference between the goodness or excellence proper to value and the goodness or excellence in being? In short, we can clearly see that the notion of value and the notion of pure perfection do not seem to be identical, yet we cannot see a difference between the axiological goodness or positiveness of value and the ontological goodness or positiveness of pure perfection. Here we touch on a new aspect of the mystery in the relationship between value and being which deserves further investigation.” In order to answer this question, I would first like to refer to my elaboration of three fundamentally different “directions” in which being distinguishes itself from non-being: reality, intelligibility, and value.3 While there are many relations between them, they still are quite different. For example, the crimes committed in Auschwitz are superior in reality to the kindness of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear. However, the more real they are, the greater is their disvalue.4 But if the overwhelmingly generous and kind love Cordelia shows to her father in a theatre play were to become real, the superior reality of her love and forgiveness would of course also increase and transform the value of her imaginary good actions into real morally good actions. In a similar way, one might encounter a perfectly intelligible curve in mathematics as compared to a much less intelligible but noble human love. Yet, no doubt, the higher intelligibility does not make the curve more valuable than love. Now, I think that pure perfections are found in all of these three dimensions of being: reality, intelligibility and value. However, two comments are needed: i) Intelligibility is a pure perfection but not the intelligibility of a necessarily finite object, such as of the solution of a chess problem or the formula of a curve, just as the ontological value of a giraffe is not a pure perfection. ii) The perfections of reality and intelligibility are only perfections if they are also bearers of value; and they are pure perfections only inasmuch they are open to infinity.
3Josef Seifert, 4See my long critical discussion of the theory that evils are only the conspicuous absence of due good.
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Let us read the very precise formulation Rovira gives to the second problem:
“2. The second issue refers to the question of the communicability of pure perfections and the incommunicability of the person. Josef Seifert accepts Duns Scotus’ thesis that every pure perfection is communicable, i.e. shareable by more than one subject. This thesis, however, poses a difficult problem for Seifert’s conception of to be a person as pure perfection.5 Certainly, to be a person always involves incommunicability in terms of the individual being, because only a unique being, incommunicable and profoundly individual, can be a person. How, then, can to be a person be a pure perfection and thus communicable? In his response to this objection, Seifert begins by distinguishing between to be a person and to be this or that person. The former, but not the latter, is a pure perfection, for the essence of the person involves a personal identity and being an inalienable, irreplaceable individual, but not being this person instead of that one. Seifert then makes a further distinction between pure perfections and properties, which are neither pure nor mixed perfections. To be this unique person rather than another one, Seifert asserts, is neither pure perfection, which it would be absolutely better to have than not to have, nor mixed perfection. This haecceitas, or uniqueness, is a type of perfection, which, in Seifert’s own words, “is beyond the difference between pure and mixed perfection”.6 Josef Seifert even grants a theological significance to this philosophical distinction between pure and mixed perfections on the one hand, and perfections, which are beyond this distinction, such as in the above case of specific personal identity, on the other hand. He considers it the “key” to a little better understanding of the Trinitarian mystery, where no divine person lacks any perfection, yet each divine person is distinct from the other.7 Rovira renders my two replies to this question very precisely: It is indeed a pure perfection to be a person and to have a unique incommunicable identity. Nevertheless, it is not a pure perfection to be this instead of that person. On purely philosophical grounds, this seems evident in relation to human persons: it can never be absolutely better to be me than to be you. On the level of the divine
5See Seifert, “Essere persona come perfezione pura,” 68-75. 6Seifert, “Essere persona come perfezione pura,” 71. 7See Seifert, “Essere persona come perfezione pura,” 72-3.
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person, this does not seem to be evident. Rather, one would have to assume that in the case of the divine person the individual thisness and uniqueness of the divine person is inseparable from the divine necessary existence, where one cannot conceive of the possibility that another person would have become God. Therefore, the unique and unrepeatable personal thisness of a divine person seems to be a pure perfection and differ essentially from finite persons. However, it is evident that for a Christian it is necessary to apply the intuition that to be this person instead of another one cannot be a pure perfection applies also to God. For the negating, this of God would deny Holy Trinity, the three-personhood of God. For if it were a pure perfection to be the Father instead of being the Son, the Son would lack an infinite pure perfection, and vice versa. At the same time, from a point of view of Trinitarian theology, to be “this person” instead of another one cannot be an essentially limited (mixed) perfection either because this would again contradict the infinite divine perfection. Rovira points out that the ontological status of perfections, which are “beyond” the difference between pure and mixed perfections raises some problems. He formulates: What does it mean to be “beyond” the above distinction? On a logical plane, we can understand the concept of perfection without taking into account the difference between essentially unrestricted perfection and essentially limited perfection, in the same way as we can represent the notion of animal without regard to the difference of “rational” and “irrational”. Nevertheless, all animals, which actually exist, are necessarily either rational or irrational. Can there really be an actual perfection, which is neither capable of infinity nor incapable of infinity? Can a perfection, which is by nature “indifferent”, so to speak, to the distinction between the infinite and the finite be predicated of the divine persons? In light of Rovira’s penetrating questions, I wish to propose another solution to this mystery, without invoking the thesis that personal identity of this person (instead of another one) is neither a pure (and in God actually infinite) perfection, nor mixed and necessarily limited perfection. This other solution is not in contradiction to the previous one but adds an important point missing from the one Rovira criticizes. From the perspective of a Trinitarian faith, one could reconcile the impossibility that the haecceitas of the divine persons falls outside the divine essence and outside the identity and purest perfection of the divine being. Thus with the impossibility that it would be a pure perfection to be the Father or the
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Holy Spirit instead of being the Son, etc... We could say that the unique haecceitas of each and of all of the three divine persons is of the divine essence. In this sense their identity as three unique persons who are identical with God is a pure perfection, but not the being one of them instead of the other one. In other words, no other person could be God and have the divine nature except uniquely these three persons and no others. Rovira continues with his excellent critical questions: Moreover, how can the nature or essence of perfection be characterised, such as the individual identity of each specific person, if this perfection is, according to Seifert, “beyond” the distinction between pure and mixed perfections? Is the essence of this perfection communicable to each and every person? If so, how can this perfection explain the individuality of this particular person? Alternatively, is the essence of this perfection, in fact, radically incommunicable? In this case, how can we understand its nature as a perfection? Why do we call it perfection? The aporia presented by the communicable nature of the pure perfection involved in being a person, and the inherent incommunicability of each individual person therefore requires further thought. Moreover, theologians must explain a further problem: the aporia of the difference between finite persons, who exist in individually different natures, and the divine persons, who exist in one numerically indivisible nature. Rovira puts his finger on a great difficulty, which Rodrigo Guerra López also raised in the discussion. But unlike Guerra López, Rovira does not deny that to be a person is a pure perfection but formulates very precisely the apory that appears to us as a contradiction: The aporia presented by the communicable nature of the pure perfection involved in being a person, and the inherent incommunicability of each individual person. To this mysterious question, I wish to reply in the following way: In general, we may say that “communicability” to more than one subject cannot mean that some general nature is communicated in the sense that it would enter the individual as the numerically same and as general essence. Rather, in general, not only in persons, the generic and specific essential characteristics of an individual are in the individual as fully individual essence of this individual, and of its unique essence inasmuch as this essence is in the individual. The aporia
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presented by the communicable nature of the pure perfection involved in being a person, and the inherent incommunicability of each individual person.8 1．Certainly, this applies in a very new sense to persons of whom Spaemann therefore said “Person ist kein sortaler Begriff”.9 “Person” does not mean a “sort of thing”. Rather only, the individual person is a person. Nevertheless, there exists a general “essence” of personhood, which is communicable only in the sense that it is “the intelligible plan realized in each individual person”. Therefore, it is of the essence of the person to have a unique and incommunicable thisness. Moreover, each feature of the general essence of the person: intellect, will, heart, etc. is absolutely unique in each person. Therefore, we must dispel the idea that the communicable essence enters into, and is individualized by, some principle of individuation in the individual. Rather it is a universal “essence” or essential plan of personhood that can solely exist as entirely individual essence in and of each person. 2. If we understand communicability in this sense, there is no more contradiction between being a person being absolutely better than not being a person and than anything incompatible with it, and the absolutely incommunicable individuality of each person. 3. Moreover, when we come to the level of the person, we find an entirely new sense of communicability: not the fact that the universal “essence of personhood” is present in each person and unites him or her in virtue of a universal plan according to which each exists. Rather, the specific personal communicability is entirely grounded in the individual and irreplaceable uniqueness of the person. It is a communicability through knowledge, through love, through community, etc. On this issue and its role in the dialogue between Christian and Jewish religion with Eastern religions in Ismael Quiles.10
8 See Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen. Philosophie und Realistische Phänomenologie/ Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology. Studien der Internationalen Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum Liechtenstein/Studies of the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality Liechtenstein, (Hrsg./Ed.), Rocco Buttiglione and Josef Seifert, Band/Vol. 3 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996), ch. 1, On Essence. 9Personen. Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen ‘etwas’ und ‘jemand’ (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996). 10Ismael Quiles, “La personalidad e impersonalidad del absoluto segun las filosofias de oriente y occidente,” in: Sociedad Católica Mexicana de Filosofía, ed., El Humanismo y la
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Understood in this way, then, the two senses of the “communicability,” and neither one of them, stands in contradiction to the truth that “being a person” is a pure perfection, i.e., that being a person is absolutely better to anything incompatible with being a person. Calling being a person a “pure perfection,” however, does not deny that for accidental reasons, such as the incorrigible evilness of a person, it could be better to be a person but a dog, or not even to be born, than to be a person. This very special modification of the notion of pure perfections in persons could be better clarified by the distinctions between four dimensions and meanings of human dignity.11
Metafisica Cristiana en la Actualitad, Segundo Congreso Mundial de Filosofía Cristiana, IV (Monterrey, N.L., Mexico, 1986), pp. 39-52. See also Josef Seifert, Essere e persona, cit., ch. 9; “Essere Persona Come Perfezione Pura. Il Beato Duns Scoto e una nuova metafisica personalistica, ” De Homine, Dialogo di Filosofia 11 (Rom: Herder/Università Lateranense, 1994), pp. 57-75. 11 Josef Seifert, “Die vierfache Quelle der Menschenwürde als Fundament der Menschenrechte,” in: Burkhardt Ziemske (Hrsg.), Staatsphilosophie und Rechtspolitik. Festschrift für Martin Kriele zum 65. Geburtstag (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1997), S. 165-185; The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure. Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine. Vol. 1: Foundations. Philosophy and Medicine, vol. 82 (New York: Springer, 2004) – Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure. Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine. Vol. 1: Foundations. Philosophy and Medicine, vol. 82, Kluwer online e-book, 2005, ch. 2.
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BOOK REVIEW S
Seifert, Josef. Back to ‘Things in Themselves’: A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism New York: Routledge. 384 pages, ISBN 0-4157-0307-0. Reprinted 2013 & 2015 (orig. published 1989). eBook published Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. 2013.
Josef Seifert’s long out of print treatise on phenomenology as a foundation for Classical Realism has finally been republished by Routledge and is now available as an eBook as well. An abstract written by the publisher describes the work as “…an enlightening dialogue with Descartes, Kant, Husserl and Gadamer…” where “Seifert argues that the original inspiration of phenomenology was nothing other than the primordial insight of philosophy itself, the foundation of philosophia perennis.” His purpose is to show how rethinking its methodology reveals a “objectivist” philosophy in complete continuity with the classical philosophers of Plato, Aristotle and Augustine. In doing so he demonstrates Husserl’s approach to the principle back to ‘Things themselves’ among idealist and empiricist critics. To supplement his argument/proof he counters Kant, whose assertions attempted to discredit “the knowability of things in themselves.” Over the critical discourse of the book the Augustinian cogito is revealed as embodying not only the truth and the essence, but the very existence of ‘personal being.’ The book is divided into three parts. Particularly insightful is his extensive “Analytical Table of Contents” which immediately precedes his Preface and expands the two page Table of Contents into an eight page meticulous and exhaustive outline. Here he details each component of his view that Phenomenology is “the method which leads us to see essences in what they themselves are.” I have reproduced the two page Contents below for a quick overview:
Part I: The classical principle of phenomenology: ‘Back to things themselves’ 1. ‘Back to things themselves:’ Rethinking Husserl’s maxim and the nature of philosophy 2. Critique of epoché Part II: The cogito and indubitable knowledge Introduction to Part II 3. Do Kant’s reasons for transcendental philosophy deserve for it the title ‘critical
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philosophy?’ 4. Does Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology prove phenomenological realism to be uncritical? 5. Indubitable knowledge of real being and of necessary essences in the cogito Part III: Objective knowledge of ‘things in themselves’ Introduction to Part III 6. What are ‘things in themselves?’ 7. Can human knowledge of ‘things in themselves’ be ‘objective?’ 8. Beings which claim to ‘be in themselves’ 9. Indubitable and infallible knowledge of ‘things in themselves:’ phenomenology as noumenology
Part I: The classical principle of phenomenology: ‘Back to things themselves.’ Seifert begins by defining the classical basis of phenomenology. He points out oppositional aspects of constructions, reductionism, premature systematization or causal explanations along with similar forms of obliteration or “doing violence to the given.” He immediately brings Husserl’s maxim into consideration by relating how beginning with philosophical analyses with causal explanations prevents ones true understanding of ‘things themselves.’ He contends that adequate causal explanations are impossible unless one can return to things in themselves. Then he proceeds to explore how phenomenology as realism may affect these concepts. Next – he discusses considering phenomenology in light of atheistic, or ‘mystical’ and alogical aspects. He then addresses metaphysics, proof, and speculation. He also asks: “…is ‘phenomenological realism’ naïve?” in light of society and history and language. Finally in he critiques epoche as the foundational moment for methodology by defining the various meanings of epoche, ideation, and phenomenological reduction. This is followed by discussions of individual (autonomous) existence, the unique existential question of ‘God,’ and then comparing a critique of epoche methodology for analyzing ‘essences’ as well as exploring ‘necessary’ essences. He then offers a “radical critique”of ‘transcendental reduction’ as the proper method for any knowledge of the necessary essences. Part II: The cogito and indubitable knowledge: critique of the motives which led to transcendental philosophy and transcendental phenomenology, and a defense of the transcendence of man in knowledge. In the middle section of his work, Seifert asks if “Kant’s reasons for
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transcendental philosophy would be more appropriately be called ‘critical philosophy.” In exploring Kant’s motives for the ‘Copernican Turn,’ he outlines criticisms of various causes for Kant ultimately turning to transcendental idealism. He then brings into view a detailed in-depth critique of Husserl’s transition through various transcendental-ontological views of the world and self, culminating in relating philosophy to other disciplines and sciences. He continues by discussing ‘transcendental’ and ‘pure’ ego and critiques universal constitution as inseparable from transcendental idealism. He finishes the middle section surveying the “Indubitable knowledge of truth in the cogito” and defining the characteristics of absolute and essential necessary facts. In this discussion he considers: the strict and general rules of the universal over the particular, timelessness and eternity, indestructibility, immutability, incomparable intelligibility, injudicabilitas in the foundation of rational knowledge and apodictic certainty and cognitive infallibility. Part III: Objective knowledge of ‘things in themselves;’ constituted, unconstituted, and unconstitutable being. In the final third Seifert brings together phenomenology in light of realism versus the noumenology absurdity. He asks if one can know ‘things in themselves’ and considers if such a claim might be nonsense. He points out contradictions in the concept of man, his insight into his own being, how objective can one view himself, and if this knowledge or awareness is in itself accessible or valid. He juxtaposes the mind of the individual in truth seeking or knowledge as opposed to a societal truth or knowledge of self. A key to understanding this dichotomy is explored in “Important senses in which we can know ‘things in themselves’ with a critique of Kant and Husserl.” This ranges from considerations of the ‘true being (or essence and existence) of things opposed to the objects of error and deception. He covers the various sources of the claim to ‘ontic’ autonomy and heteronomy and that ‘Being in itself’ can be the authentic essence of a things versus merely the exterior, superficial aspect of an entity. He then methodically defines and explores: the many meanings of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective;’ relating these aspects to ontological categories; epistemological categories; purely ‘functional concepts;’ as "predicates of attitudes, judgements, or methods; and as logical categories. He finishes with a fascinating discussion of “Beings which claim to ‘be in themselves’ as opposed to “mind constituted” beings. He proposes that the indubitable and infallible knowledge of ‘things in themselves’ reveals phenomenology as noumenology.
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Though the main audience for Seifert’s expansive work is scholars and philosophers – it can be an invaluable encyclopedic resource for students of philosophy and academics in other disciplines. This reissue is a welcome necessary reference for those seeking a complete reading, insights and assessment of Josef Seifert’s seminal life work.
Nancy Anna Daugherty, California State Polytechnic University at Pomona. Email: [email protected].
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A Review of Cognitive Phenomenology by Elijah Chudnoff (New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015, Pp. 182, ISBN: 978-0-415-66025-9)
Cognitive Phenomenology is a volume in the Routledge’s New Problems of Philosophy series edited by Jose Luis Bermudez, Texas A&M University, USA. Its author is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, USA, who has previously published Intuition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013). Cognitive phenomenology is a contemporary variant of phenomenology. The debate about the legitimacy of cognitive phenomenology has lasted for two decades. This volume is brimmed with innovative, challenging, and insightful ideas involving in issues concerning both contemporary phenomenology and foundation of cognitive science. Those scholars who are actively doing research in the domain of phenomenology will see this volume as a significant contribution to the literature because it elaborates and rigorously defends a position about the experience of thinking, which has been a highly controversial topic. For those scholars who are intrigued by the problems of cognitive phenomenology, this volume provides a comprehensive, lucid, and stimulating introduction. This volume may also be used as a textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate students as it provides a highly informative guide and overview together with helpful chapter summaries. The addition of further readings and a glossary allows one to increase their understanding of the mind, consciousness, experience, perception, and cognition as it relates to philosophy in general as well as phenomenology in particular. Cognitive Phenomenology would draw a wide range of scholarly interest because it offers a comprehensive, all-inclusive treatment of the frontier issues and current debates concerning the major areas of phenomenology. As well, these issues have wide impact on other areas of philosophy such as epistemology, philosophy of the mind, philosophy of language and ethics. The author’s discussion is developed throughout six chapters following a general introduction, which explains the general nature and present status of the debate about cognitive phenomenology as well as the fundamental concepts involved in the debate. The logical structure of this deployment goes in the sequence of the following topics: introspectability, phenomenal contrast, irreducibility of cognitive phenomena, the streams and temporal structure of conscious experience, phenomenal holism and the interdependence of sensory and cognitive states, and intentionality and mental
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representation. Moreover, this topical sequence exhibits a rigorous logical structure. What makes this volume controversial is the author’s relentless defense of the very notion of cognitive phenomena, which is apparently self-contradictory from the perspective of analytical philosophy. This notion is also radically opposed to the position held by traditional phenomenologist such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. On the classic views of phenomenology, experiential phenomena or phenomenological states, for example, the phenomenon of what it is like to have a headache, are characteristically non-cognitive, non-doxastic, and non-epistemic. Thus, a cognitive phenomenon or experience of cognitive activity, for example, the experience of what is like to believe that so-and-so is the case, would be tantamount to a non-cognitive state of cognitive activity. In other words, the author is defending a position that cognitive states have non-cognitive features. Hence, it is interesting to see how the author dissolve the puzzle and explain how cognitive phenomenology is a philosophically legitimate enterprise and how it is worth exploring. One of the crafty arguments for the legitimacy of cognitive phenomenology that the author makes in this volume is that phenomenal differences made by some cognitive states are irreducible to and independent of those made by sensory states. Thus, cognitive phenomenal states and perceptual phenomenal states are different and each stands in its own right. This line of argument connects to another one, namely, the argument from phenomenal intentionality to the effect that some cognitive phenomenal states feature phenomenal intentionality. Specifically, phenomenal characters of some cognitive states determine their intentional states, namely, their intentional objects and representational contents. Therefore, if you are conscious that you are thinking, then your inspective consciousness of your thinking determines ‘what’ your thinking is directed at and what you are thinking of. This theory singles out phenomenal intentionality as a distinct type of intentionality, though it is not quite clear about how this second line of argument helps distinguish cognitive phenomenal states from perceptual phenomenal states. The author hopes that by individuating cognitive phenomenal states, the above-mentioned puzzle of contraction in phenomenology would be dissolved, and cognitive phenomenology would have a proper object of study. However, individuation of cognitive phenomenal states would entail the distinction between sensory phenomena and cognitive phenomena. As a result, cognitive
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phenomenology would consistently mirror traditional phenomenology, which might be now renamed sensory phenomenology. Though this radical conceptual move is interesting, it goes against the main current in cognitive studies that sees increasingly more connections than differences between perception and cognition. The theory of cognitive phenomenal states might dissolve the logical puzzle; but it may also introduce a puzzle concerning the difference between conscious states and phenomenal states. If conscious states could be made identical with phenomenal states (so that we are conscious of something if and only if we are in a phenomenal state), then it would seem the mind is essentially phenomenal, and everything else which characterizes the mind is secondary. However, consider exactly the role our consciousness plays within our mental life? One can be conscious without being rational; but one cannot be rational without being conscious. Would the following theory be more plausible? I think; therefore, I am conscious that I think. If so, the consciousness of cognitive states does not have to be phenomenal, and it may well be just cognitive.
Dr. ZHAOLU LU, Professor of Philosophy, Tiffin University. Email: [email protected].
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Kida Gen, The History of Anti-philosophy, Tokyo: Kodansha, 2000. 272 pp. ISBN: 978-4061594241. (Japanese)
The author of this book, Kida Gen, who passed away in 2014, was a leading philosopher in Japan. He was well versed in phenomenology and published numerous translations and books on Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In this book, Kida attempts to relativize the history of Western philosophy, relying on an anti-philosophical view developed by leading authorities on phenomenology such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who took over the philosophical work of Friedrich Schelling, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In the first chapter, the derivation of the word “philosophy” is summarized. The word philosophia in ancient Greek originally was used as an adjective derived from philosophos (having a strong intellectual curiosity), and then as a verb of philosophein (“to love knowledge”). Socrates defined philosophia as “being aware of self-ignorance and love and seeking for knowledge” and established a method called irony to uncover the ignorance of the Sophists. Kida also discusses the introduction of “philosophy” to Japan. It was first translated as “希賢学（希＝seek for, 賢＝knowledge, 学＝study）” by 西周 （NISHI Amane）. However, NIHSI later changed “賢” to “哲”, which represents the same meaning as “賢”, and “希” was omitted. Thus, “philosophy” was translated by the Japanese word “哲学” as it is used today, but Kida points out that “哲学” sounds more like the Sophists use of the word, which creates a very strange situation. In the second chapter, the structure of irony is discussed. Kida says that to Socrates, irony is not only “a style of expression,” but “a fundamental way of living,” or “a unique style of existence” such as “infinite negativity” which does not allow people to stop even for a moment and forces people into an unstable life style without being mindful of peace. Kida finds an example of such a way of life in Osamu Dazai, who was one of the best Ironists in Japanese literature, and who eventually committed suicide. The third chapter describes in detail the process by which Socrates was tried and sentenced to death, referring to the Peloponnesian War, the War of the Thirty Tyrants, and the disciples of Socrates who were involved in the two wars: Alcibiades, Kritias and Charmides. Kida shows how Socrates himself presented “infinite negativity” as a way of life. In the famous trials, Socrates tried to deny
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both the oligarchy system and the democratic system which were a fundamental cause of the two wars. Kida argues that Socrates’ way of thinking was an attempt to eliminate the world view of the Athenian people at the time and was a trigger for the birth of Plato’s new philosophy. In Chapter 4, Kida returns to the view of nature of the pre-Socratic philosophers (Vorsokratiker) in order to more concretely show the role of Socrates in clearing away the old world view and setting the stage for the appearance of Plato. According to Kida, the pre-Socratic philosophers shared a certain view of physis (nature), which is very different from that of thinkers and philosophers after Socrates. Physis is a Greek word, from which the English word nature and the Latin word natura are derived and was originally used in the meaning of “states which things should be.” The Sophists contemporary with Socrates partly maintained such a view of nature, isolating “nomos” such as ceremonies, customs, institutions, and laws from the domain of physis, and then gave up on pursuing physis (states which things should be) of things around them. From the viewpoint of orthodox Western philosophical history, the natural view of the pre-Socratic philosophers seems to be heterogeneous, but it can be seen universally, Kida says, as in the thought of Lao Zi (老子), Kūkai (空海), Shinran (親鸞), the Cheng–Zhu school (朱子学), and Japan’s oldest literary work Kojiki (『古事記』). In Chapter 5, Plato’s life and the outline of his theory of ideas are discussed. While the pre-Socratic philosophers believe the existential structure of things can be described by the verb “grow” as in Chinese and Japanese thought, Plato sees the existential structure of things from the viewpoint of “making”. Kida, relying on Heidegger, argues that philosophy started when Plato’s theory of ideas was established and the way to understand existence was separated into two: “essentia (it is …)” and “existentia (there is…)”, and that “essential” had been regarded as superior to “existentia” since the birth of philosophy. In Chapter 6, Kida focuses on how Aristotle, while replacing Plato’s concept of “Eidos” or “Hyle” with the notion of “potentiality” and “actuality,” criticized Plato’s theory of ideas and tried to return to the traditional theory of physis. However, Aristotle wrote about the “Unmoved Mover", which is incompatible with the view of nature of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and he failed to completely escape from Plato’s thought. The supernatural principles such as Plato’s “Idea” and Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” were to be handed down in the form of “reason” or “spirit” as a metaphysical mode of thinking in the traditional
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Western culture. However, Kida concludes that such a mode of thinking is distinctly unnatural, referring to criticism of traditional Western philosophy by Nietzsche and Marx. In the seventh chapter, Kida leaps from Aristotle to Descartes, following the keywords of the Roman Catholic church, Holy Roman Empire, scholastic philosophy, the Renaissance, and mechanistic naturalism. Kida presents as an ingenious story the trajectory Descartes took through his attempt to establish universal mathematics, the conversion from an interest in mathematics to metaphysics, method skepticism, and then the proof of the existence of God, while he is describing how human rationality replaced Plato’s “Idea”, Aristotle’s “Pure form”, and the personality of God in Christian theology and became a metaphysical principle in the Western world. The emergence of Descartes had a great impact on the history of Western philosophy, for his rationalism made “existentia (there is…)” subjected to “essentia (it is …)”, which means that the view of nature of the pre-Socratic philosophers was buried deeper than ever. Compared to other chapters, chapters 8 and 9 do not seem well to succeed in relativizing the history of philosophy. In these two chapters, Kida discusses two philosophers, Kant and Hegel, who represent German idealism, though his commentary on them can be said to be textbook-like. Kida describes how Kant overcame dogmatic rationalistic metaphysics and British empiricism, and how Hegel arrived at the concept of “absolute spirit” based on Kant’s study of reason and completed a metaphysical mode of thinking which Heidegger thought would have a great influence on the modern world as a kind of technology. In chapter 10, Kida explains that “positive philosophy” presented by Friedrich Schelling, “consistent naturalism” presented by Karl Marx, and “the will to power” and “eternal return” presented by Friedrich Nietzsche can be regarded as variations on an attempt to restore the view of nature shared by the pre-Socratic philosophers. it was Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, whose names are almost synonymous with phenomenology, who rediscovered and reevaluated the three philosophers (Shelling, Marx, and Nietzsche) who had convincingly criticized the metaphysical thinking style originating from Plato, and took from them the anti-philosophical attitude. In the final chapter, the nineteenth century views related to the philosophical problems this book has treated, such as the social influence of the industrial revolution, the development of natural science, the establishment of humanities, and criticism of positivism in the philosophical world, are discussed.
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In this book Kida has made a magnificent attempt to relativize traditional Western philosophy from an anti-philosophical perspective. Kida’s argument that the thoughts of the protagonists in general philosophy textbooks: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, are “unnatural” is clear and impressive, and, by introducing the concept of “essentia (it is …)” and “existentia (there is…)” throughout the book, he succeeds in making his point consistent and persuasive. Moreover, his ability to tie a wide range of knowledge into a convincing story is brilliant. However, if Kida had more daringly relativized traditional metaphysics introducing oriental thought not only in chapter 4 and 5 but throughout the book, this book would be more interesting to those who engage in East-West studies. In fact, Kida confesses in the introduction that he “felt uncomfortable with studying philosophy in Japan that has contributed to Western culture”. Considering this confession, he may well have had a strong interest in understanding the history of the relationship between Western philosophy and Oriental thought. However, given the purpose of this book is to give an overview of the history of philosophy from the anti-philosophical point of view which was born in the West, readers should probably be satisfied with Kida’s approach.
SENOUE KAZUNORI, Lecturer at Tokyo Institute of Technology Foreign Language Research and Teaching Center, Japan. Email: [email protected].
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