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“INSIGHT” by: Roque J. Ferriols, S.J. We shall not begin with a definition of philosophy. The purpose of this course is not to teach you what philosophy is but to try to give you a chance to philosophize. Like all activities, philosophizing is something which is easier to do than a define. After you have begun to engage in this activity, you might want to try to define it yourself. Even at this early stage it is probably safe to say that most of you associate philosophy with thinking. A crucial element in thinking is insight. Insight is a kind of seeing with the mind. A good example is seeing the point of a joke. A friend gives a joke. You see the point and you laugh. Somebody also does not see the point and is bewildered. He might accuse you of pretending to see point that is not there. But you know quite definitely that there was a point, that you saw it, that you did not feel yourself into thinking it was there. You are glad to be alive and able too see the point. At the same time you realize how hard it is to convey all this to one who has missed the point. Two things should be considered with regard to an insight. 1. The insight itself. 2. What I do with the insight. Item number two is vague. It will become clear as we go along. What can I do with my insight into a joke? I can analyze it. If I am merely enjoying the joke, analysis can kill my enjoyment. But if I aim to deliver the joke to 1
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Page 1: Philosophy of Man_2

“INSIGHT”

by: Roque J. Ferriols, S.J.

We shall not begin with a definition of philosophy. The purpose of this course is not to teach you what philosophy is but to try to give you a chance to philosophize. Like all activities, philosophizing is something which is easier to do than a define. After you have begun to engage in this activity, you might want to try to define it yourself.

Even at this early stage it is probably safe to say that most of you associate philosophy with thinking. A crucial element in thinking is insight. Insight is a kind of seeing with the mind. A good example is seeing the point of a joke. A friend gives a joke. You see the point and you laugh. Somebody also does not see the point and is bewildered. He might accuse you of pretending to see point that is not there. But you know quite definitely that there was a point, that you saw it, that you did not feel yourself into thinking it was there. You are glad to be alive and able too see the point. At the same time you realize how hard it is to convey all this to one who has missed the point.

Two things should be considered with regard to an insight.

1. The insight itself.2. What I do with the insight.

Item number two is vague. It will become clear as we go along.

What can I do with my insight into a joke? I can analyze it. If I am merely enjoying the joke, analysis can kill my enjoyment. But if I aim to deliver the joke to others, analysis can deepen and clarify my original insight and so help towards a more effective delivery.

Take this example:

Knock. Knock.

Who’s there?

Mary Rose.

Mary Rose who?

Me relos ka ba? Anong oras?

Upon analysis I discover that the point of the joke is this: “Mary Rose” and “me relos” sound very different, yet they are made to sound alike. To bring this non-existing alikeness into existence, I must mispronounce “me relos” and say “me reros”. But this introduces a new difficulty. Will the listener know that “me reros” stands for “me relos”? To make sure he does, I follow it up with “Anong oras?” Finally, to make the point of the

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joke stand out more sharply, I try to surround the delivery with an atmosphere of atrocious nonchalance.

Take another example. Juan is standing beside the coffin of his grandfather who has just died at the age of ninety-five. As far as Juan can remember, the old man was always weak and shriveled. For Juan is only eighteen and his grandfather was already seventy-seven when Juan was born. Juan comes home from the funeral and his mother hands him his grandfather’s memoirs. There Juan sees his grandfather as he was during the revolution: young and full of vigor and high spirits. Then he hears from old maiden aunts who heard from their old maiden aunts that in his youth his grandfather used to be dashing and quite popular with the ladies. Juan gradually begins to realize: My grandfather as a young man was exactly like me! For Juan likes to think of himself as full of high spirits, dashing, and quite popular with the ladies. Then Juan begins to think more deeply. He is full of high spirits now, but high spirits re not inexhaustible. It may take a long, long time, but sooner or later his high spirits will be exhausted. It will be his turn to become old and shriveled and to be contemplated in the coffin by his grandson. Juan thinks to himself: This is the way it is with the generations of men. They start life full of vigor and high spirits then wither away and die. But not before they have left behind sons who also begin full of vigor and high spirits then wither away and die after they have given life to their own sons. Juan has an insight into the rhythm of rise and fall in the life of the generations of men.

What can Juan do with this insight? He can crystallize it in a metaphor. Homer had the same insight centuries ago and crystallized it in the image of leaves. Here are two versions of the passage from the sixth book of the Iliad.

High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation?As in the generations of leaves, so is that of humanity.The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timberBurgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.So one generation of men will

grow while another dies.

As the generations of leaves, so the generations of men.

For the wind pours leaves out on the ground,

But the wood blooms and grows and begets in the season of spring.

So too the generations of men: now they bloom,

Now they pass away.

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The metaphor sharpens the insight and fixes it in the mind. Also, one portion of reality casts light on another. By contemplating the fall and the return of leaves, we are able to understand not only the nature of trees but also the rising and falling rhythm of the generations of men.

Take a third example: the insight into the meaning of the number four. The insight is so clear that it seems nothing can be done with it. However, just to push a point, one can say that the meaning of four can be analyzed into two and two or into one and one and one. And we can see that these analyses do make somewhat clearer the already clear insight into the meaning of four. But let us try another approach: let us ask: how did we gain this insight into the meaning of the number four? The usual answer is: by counting. You can count four cars, for instance. Say you have here a Toyopet, a Mercedes Benz, an Impala, a Volkswagen. Note that you have to look at them in a special way if you want to count until four. You must look on them as cars. If you look on them from the Toyopet viewpoint, you can only count one. Abstraction is involved here. We abstract when we concentrate on one aspect of a thing while prescinding from its other aspects. We prescind when we neither affirm nor deny, we merely, disregard. Thus, if I have two carabaos and two dogs. I can count until four only if I consider them as animals and prescind from the fact that two are carabaos and two dogs. But what is the content of the insight into the number four? It is not four cars nor four animals but simply four. Here we come across a second abstraction; we must not only abstract from certain aspects of the things we count, but in the end we have to abstract from the things themselves. The simple insight into the meaning of our is seen to involve a rather complicated preparation involving at least two abstractions.

Abstraction is one of the tools often used in the analysis of insights. An abstract thought is called a concept and a analysis by abstraction is called conceptual analysis.

We can return to Juan’s insight into the rise and fall of generations and analyze it conceptually. The moment we begin the analysis we see that there are many ways of doing it. One-way could be: The generations of men begin in life with a fund of energy and high spirits, which seems inexhaustible. But sooner or later the fund exhaust itself. Yet in the very process of self-exhuastion it begets another generation equipped with the same kind of seemingly inexhaustible energy and high spirits.

This last example shows one of the dangers of conceptual analysis it can desiccate an insight. The throbbing, tumultuous generations of men become an abstract fund of energy and high spirits. That is why it is necessary after conceptual analysis, to return to the concrete fullness of the original insight. When this return to the concrete is made, conceptual analysis can deepen and vitalize insight. When this return is not made, conceptual analysis fossilizes insight.

From this brief survey of insight, we have gained some insight into the nature of insight. It is a kind of seeing, not without eyes (though our eyes often play a very important role in it) but wit our powers of thinking. When we want to clarify and deepen an insight or to fix in our minds, we “do something” with it. We have seen two

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techniques for doing something with an insight: conceptual analysis and, metaphor. But other techniques can be used. There is for instance the important technique of weaving a myth to embody our insight.

There is a second point to note in our survey of insight. The fact that there are many ways of doing something with an insight shows that certain insights are so rich that they cannot be exhausted by our efforts to clarify them. We may explore them in many ways and along different levels, but some superabundance of the original insight always remains beyond the reach of our techniques. In fact one of the effects of “doing something” with this kind o insight is to make us more keenly aware of its superabundance. Hence this kind puts us into a state of tension between a sense of knowledge and light and a sense of ignorance and darkness.

A third point. Note that insight permeates the process of doing something with an insight. We need insight to see that the contemplation of the fall and return of leaves does lead to deeper understanding of the death and birth of generations. We need insight to see whether a given conceptual analysis of a given insight does probe deeply into it instead of merely classifying its superficial aspects.

Fourth and final point. Why do certain insights resist all efforts to explore them completely? Because these insights bring us into the very heart of reality and reality is superabundantly rich. The richness of these insights then is the richness of reality itself. And the stance of human being facing reality has always to be a tension between a sense of knowledge and sense of ignorance.

THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY*

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By Robert O. Johann, S.J.

In his article on the starting-point of philosophical reflection, Maurice Blondel calls attention to the difficulty of combining the universal scope of such reflection with technical and methodological precision.1

There is, as it were, a kind of conflict between the matter and form of philosophy. On the one hand, philosophy has traditionally pretended to exercise a kind of universal jurisdiction and to find its matter in the general movement of mankind’s spiritual life, in those problems and questions whose resolution concerns us all. On the other hand, philosophical reflection seems unable to make headway except at the price of progressive specialization and self-limitation. The various techniques of approach and treatment that have been developed have had the effect of splintering the philosophic enterprise into different camps of specialists who give the impression of being out of touch not only with the common life of humanity but with one another as well. Whereas the special sciences have elaborated a kind of universal method of handling their several distinct an limited areas, a method which make possible not only communication between them but a cumulative and collective progress as well, philosophers seem bent on adapting the universal object of their discipline to a whole range of special methodologies which seem more indicative of individual biases and points of view than of any requirements of subject-matter.

This split between form and matter has been more manifest than it is today. As John Macmurray points out, there is growing consensus that philosophy cannot solve its old problems with its old methods. 2 But here the consensus ends. When it comes to interpreting it, two divergent paths open up. On the one hand, we have those who discard the problems to concentrate on perfecting a method, and on the other, those who relinquish method to be free to wrestle with problems. The first make the problem of philosophy primarily a problem of form and methodology, and end up with a minimum of substance. The second moved by the poignancy of substantive issues and finding “no formal analysis that is adequate to the task…”,3set scientific form aside and in Macmurray’s ords, “Wallow in metaphor and suggestion.”4The net effect is to leave the human enterprise at large without rational guidance. Reason turns in on itself and life muddles along. The only this is, such muddling is today a luxury we can ill afford. We are literally at a crossroads and life itself is at stake.

One cannot probe with any depth into the real nature of philosophical inquiry with out developing along the way a fairly definite view of human life as a whole. Since the nature of philosophical inquiry is itself a philosophical issue, any adequate determination of it will itself imply a whole philosophy. The position elaborated in this paper is no

1 Cf. M. Blondel, “le point de depart de la recherché philosophique,” Annales de Philosophic Chretienne (October 1905-Mars 1906), 337-360, esp. pp. 337-339. The second part of this article appeared in the next issue (Avril-Septembre 1906), 225-249.2 See the chapter on :The Crisis of the Personal” in John Macmurray’s the Self as Agent (New York: Harper, 1957), pp. 17-38.3 Ibid., 27-28.4 Ibid., p.28

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exception. It may be well, therefore, even if it is impossible here to justify it fully, at least to indicate the general position from which I am operating. This position, for want of a better name, can be called ontological pragmatism.5 It is a kind of pragmatism, since it views thematic knowledge as an instrumental function of experience aimed at the latter’s transformation. Ideas must be tested by consequences, by what occurs when they are acted upon. Their validity is measured by their success, when used as directives, in making experience itself more richly meaningful and coherent. On the other hand, we call our position an ontological pragmatism, since we contend that the instrumental conception of knowing, far from implying a veil between us and reality, actually enables us progressively to discern its nature. If this is true in general, it is no less so when applied to answering question: What is philosophy? The validity of a conception of philosophy’s nature must be tested by what it leads to in practice. Any conception that blocks the formal movement of experience, that is less fruitful than some alternative in promoting concrete coherence and reasonableness, can hardly be said to be in greater correspondence with, or more in tune with reality than its rival. The warrant for the particular hypothesis which I shall suggest about the nature of philosophical inquiry can only be its greater potential, when put into practice, for the enrichment of experience.

In order to give some order to what follows, I shall first say something about the nature of inquiry in general. Secondly, I shall take up the matter of context- the cultural, communal context of all our inquiries. Here I shall try to specify the sort of perplexity to which philosophy, as a distinctive kind of inquiry, is a response. Finally, I shall indicate briefly three distinct but inseparable phases of philosophy’s effort to resolve this perplexity. The three phases I shall term logic, phenomenology, and, for want of a better name, meta-pragmatics.

1. The nature of inquiry in general. Inquiry may be provisionally defined as man’s effort to integrate his experience as responsible agent. For this to be understood, a word must first be said about how we are using the term “experience”. “Experience” in this paper will signify the interactive process itself interior to which the human self is in dynamic relation with the whole range of the other. In the sense, experience is not something going on within the self in a kind of totality that is all-inclusive. Nothing can be conceived as outside of or utterly divorced from the process.6

Within this process, man functions as the responder. This notion of “responder” has its roots in that objective awareness, that presence to other as other, that is characteristics of man. Unlike the brute animal which “lives as it were, ecstatically

5 I have taken this name for my position from the title of dissertation, “Peirce’s Ontological Pragmatism,” done at Yale by Rev, Vincent C. Potter, S.J. under the direction of Prof. John Smith. However, although partly inspired by Potter’s insisghts into Pierce’s philosophy (which I find very congenial) I am much more indebted as any discerning reader will not fail to note, to the writings of John Dewey for what follows, especially his Logic,The theory of Inquiry (New YorkHolt, rinehart and Winston, 1983) and to H. Richard Neibuhr’s The Responsible Self (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). I think Neihbur’s personalism (and my own) gives Dewey’s thought a perspective it otherwise lacks-one whose fruitfulness, however, the reader must judge for himself. In any case, the use I put Dewey to is something for which I take full responsibility-which is the reason why, beyond this general acknowledgement of my indebtedness, no specific appeals to his authority are made in this paper.6 I have developed this idea of experience more fully in “The Return to Experience,” Review of Metaphysics, XVII,3 (March 1964),319-339.

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immersed in its environment which it carries along as snail carries it shell,”7 man finds himself standing over against the environment with which he is in interaction. Hence his actions are never simply reactions to stimuli but are, in H. Richard Niebuhr’s phase, “answers to actions upon him,” answers which must fit into the ongoing process like statements in a dialogue and which, as a consequence, not only look backwards to what has been “said” but are made in anticipation of reply, i.e. of “objections”, confirmations and corrections.”8

Human actions, therefore, always presuppose an interpretation of what is going on and what may be expected as its consequence. The human agent is aware that the future hangs on the present, that what he will undergo depends in no small measure on what he does, on the adequacy of his response. By the same token, he is aware of the complex and inclusive situation in which he finds himself as a question being addressed to him. It may, indeed, be a familiar question, one for which he feels he has the answer from having met and coped with it before. On the other hand, it may have novel features, which call into question the adequacy of past habits for dealing with it and give rise to hesitancy and uncertainty.

This uncertainty, it should be noted, is not something private and subjective. It is not something simply in the mind of the agent. Nor is it merely something negative, a sheer absence of knowledge. On the contrary, it is positive and pervasive quality of interactive process itself, of the inclusive situation embracing agent and environment and which may be described as one of tension, discord, discrepancy. There is a positive incoherence between environmental demands and the agent’s habitual equipment to meet them. And it is this incoherence that calls forth inquiry.

From this point of view, inquiry is what the agent does, the operations he performs to remove this tension and incoherence, to transform the objectively unsettled state of affairs into one that is settled, to reintegrate his experience as responsible agent so that the quality of discord that marked it may be replaced by one of harmony. This will the case when the question raised by the environment’s action on him once more becomes familiar question; when he has acquired a new and reliable way (or habit) for dealing with it. Needless to say, the achievement of such a habit presuppose that whatever estimate he forms of what is required of him be put to the test of practice. Prior to such testing, i.e. prior to acting upon the newly formed interpretation of what is called for acting the confirmations or corrections it receives in the process, the interpretation itself remains merely a hunch or hypothesis whose reliability is not assured. In other words, the relationship between man the responder and that which demands his response is still unsettled. A kind of wariness and probing are still in order. The process of inquiry is not yet concluded. Thus we may ay that inquiry in its full and proper sense is not merely a matter of reflection, of taking thought, of forming a preliminary estimate or interpretation, but also includes those operations and dealing with the other by which alone the estimate can be established as warranted. Only when the agent is newly equipped with a habit on which he can count is he once more at home in his surroundings.

7 Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, Hans Meyerhoff, trans. (New York: Noonday, 1962), p.39.8 Cf. H. Richard Niebuhr, op cit., p.64.

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If this is so, then inquiry may be defined as that whole process by which man’s experience of himself as responder to actions on him is transformed from an incoherent state to one whose elements hand together, from a state of tension and discord to one that is resolved and integrated. Inquiry thus mediates between two states of affairs that are immediately and qualitatively distinct and that of themselves respectively provoke and terminate it. One does not have to inquire as to whether inquiry is called for. The objective discrepancy between past habit and novel circumstances presents itself immediately to the wary, responsible agent as calling for it. He may, indeed, decide, to ignore the call, to plunge into action without forethought, without first attempting to resolve discrepancy, hoping the meanwhile not to be too severely chastened by subsequent experience—the very urgency of the demand for action will at times preclude anything else—but the unsatisfactoriness of proceeding in this fashion, even when he has to, imposes itself on anyone who has been around for even a little while.

By the same token, just as the need for inquiry announces itself, so also does its successful close. In so far as the question posed by the situation in which he finds himself is once more a familiar question to the agent, incongruous with tried ways of behaving, there is nothing more to inquire about. The tension and conflict characterizing the inclusive situation of the agent, and bringing from his “Being-at-a-loss” in the face of insistent requirements, have been resolved. Harmony has been restored.

This does not mean, of course, that the solution to one question may not give rise to new conflicts or that there is ever a time when man’s experience a responsible agent is so harmonious, his habits so proportioned to the full range of the demands placed upon him, that there is no room for further inquiry. Indeed, one of the points I shall try to make in this paper is that the very breadth of man’s “environment” precludes his ever wholly taming it. The unlimited character of the other involved in man’s life prevents the question raised by that life from ever becoming wholly familiar.9 The integration and harmony, therefore, of the responding agent’s experience is so far from over being a stable possession that it is actually never more than an ideal. The measures of actual at-home-ness man achieves is never more than relative to some limited range of the other. Even this limited wholeness is possible only by a selective restriction of man’s attention to his more urgent and pressing perplexities—those that must be resolved for life to continue at all, or at least without excessive disruption. But the moment he lifts his eyes beyond those, there are always others. Indeed, being perplexed is so much a part of man’s awareness of himself in the world, that any integration presenting itself as more than partial as not leaving the door open to further and continuing inquiry, is by that very fact grasped as not even partial, as being wholly and radically inadequate.

For all this, however, particular and limited inquiries are successfully concluded, particular tensions and conflicts are, as a matter of fact, resolved; relatively reliable habits are acquired which are then available for inclusion within more comprehensively

9 The realm of the other that confronts the self is not restricted to limited others but opens out to that. Other who is beyond all limitations and whose reality, therefore exceeds our efforts to come to grips with it conceptually. See my The Pragmatic Meaning of God (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1966).

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satisfactory integrations. Were it not for the self-evident character of such limited confusion can be transformed into manifest coherence, neither inquiry nor anything like human reasonableness and intelligence could arise and develop in the first place.

Before concluding this section on the general inquiry, one final word. The insistence I have placed on responsible action as the originating ground and ultimate context of inquiry—that alone terms of which “taking thought” itself becomes a meaningful activity—should not be misconstrued to imply the final servitude of inquiry to immediately and overtly practical ends imposed on man from without, or the one-sided and exclusive domination of thinking by practice. On the contrary, the real significance of referring inquiry to human action for its meaning is to place that action under the illumination and direction of thought, to allow man to take into account in his practice more than what is immediately at hand.10 As well shall see, far from being limited to simply discovering means for pre-established ends, human inquiry includes within its scope the progressive determination of the goals themselves of human endeavor.

2. The Matrix and Scope of Philosophical Inquiry. So far, we have considered inquiry in relation to the active life of man. The point of this section is to view it in relation to man’s communal life. For the responsible self, whose experience as responder inquiry seeks to integrate, exists and functions only in a community of selves. And this, I shall maintain, has important—and too often overlooked—bearings not only on the nature of inquiry in general, but also on the origin and nature of philosophical inquiry specifically.

Human experience is essentially shared experience. The environment with which man interacts is not simply and utterly physical. It is not engaged merely in terms of its immediate impingement on the human organism. It is dealt with primarily as being also for others, as being something in common. Things are imbued with meanings that have arisen in context of cooperative activity, which involves common and shared ways of intending and relating to them. In fact, it is only as ingredient in community action, i.e. as dealt with in common, that elements of the environment acquire objective status vis-à-vis the human self and become things to which the human self can respond and not merely react. In other words, man the responder emerges only as sharing a way of life with other selves, only as participating in a common culture only as member of an ongoing community, an ongoing cooperative enterprise. It is through the acquisition of shared habits of belief and practice, a kind of induction into a common system of interpretations and valuations, which regulate the cooperative relation of members of the group towards the environment and one another, that self-awareness and the capacity to act responsibly arise and mature.

If this is the case, then it is clear that there can be no question of any inquiry that does not presuppose, and proceed against the background of, the more or less coherent world0view of the group in and by which the inquirer has been formed. Before he can

10 Cf. John Macmurray, op. cit., pp. 22-23; also C.I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and valuation (La Salle Open Court, 1946), p.48.

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even experience any kin d of incoherence in his life as responsible agent he has already been accustomed to viewing and relating to his surroundings in the way the community does of which he s a member, and this cultural influence cannot but affect the way he sees his problem and the sort of solution he will find acceptable.

Secondly, it must be remembered that the shared system of regulative meanings and procedures has a double import. Of first important is its role, as shared, in the creation of community. This it has almost regardless of its content, i.e. regardless of what precisely is commonly believed and prized. I say “almost” because it is clear that no way of life can be viable that completely disregards, or is not in some measure adequate to, the actual conditions of human survival. Granting this minimal adequacy, however, the traditions of the group, whatever they happen to be are an essential condition for its very being and life as a human community. Precisely as shared, they are what makes and keeps the community and its members human.

However, beside their adequacy in the role of making a common life possible, there is also the matter of their adequacy to the real possibilities of man in relation to his environment, i.e. of human experience as a whole. Here the question of content, of what is believed and what is prized, comes to the fore. For if the sharing of beliefs is what constitutes human life in the first place, the relative adequacy of their contents to actual conditions and possibilities determines the richness of that life, it’s grater or lesser humanity.

This distinction the role of beliefs and shared and their adequacy in terms of content has significant bearings on an understanding of the nature of inquiry. First of all, it indicates why shared beliefs are already goods—and tend to be held on to—regardless of the amount of evidence that can be brought to support or undermine them. Their initial elaboration and the credence given them is more a function of the requirements of community, of the need for a comprehensive and common way of life, than it is of adequacy to the real natures of things. Quite apart from this latter question, their very service-ability in the creation and maintenance of community already gives them a kind of validity.

On the other hand, the very fact that a common way of intending the elements and make-up of human life arises with only minimal regard for their inherent possibilities is precisely what makes its subsequent criticism and correction by the responsible agent cannot long be satisfied with the mere adaptation and application of common sense, that generally accepted body of regulative meanings and procedures, to particular circumstances. Such application does, of course, entail a kind of inquiry. In this case, however, inquiry’s only function is to bridge the gap between accepted norms and particular cases. It is not a matter of radically extending or revising traditional ways but simply providing them with that final determination which is necessary for their functioning in the her and now.

However, another and critical kind of inquiry, one concerned not merely with the application but with the very adequacy of common sense, cannot in the long run fail to emerge. Common sense inevitably comes under scrutiny because of its built-in

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disproportion to the very self-awareness it makes possible. The responsible agent, as we have seen, cannot but be aware of the general connection between what he does and what he undergoes. He knows that the satisfaction of needs and the securing of goods and enjoyment depend on the way he actively intervenes in his surroundings. The adequacy of his response is condition by the measure in which he has discriminated the factors functioning within the experiential process and determined their connections with one another and with the quality of his life. In other words, the world is grasped as means (i.e. as instrumental) to consummatory experience so that its intelligent use presupposes a knowledge of its workings, of what is connected with what. The greater this knowledge, the greater man’s capacity for intelligent response.

Now common sense gives rise to this awareness, but cannot by itself, i.e. by its own meanings and procedures, do much about it. Its absorption with the qualitative, with direct uses of enjoyments, although it involves a knowledge of objects independent of the agent, precludes a knowledge of them in their independence, i.e. precisely as objects. Such a knowledge which is a pre-requisite for the intelligent exploitation of the world-as-means – i.e, a knowledge in which is a pre-requisite for the intelligent exploitation of the their relationships to one another rather than in terms of direct experience – can arise only by setting aside immediately practical inquiry. From this point of view, scientific inquiry is a necessary development and refinement of the responsible agent’s interpretation of the world-as-means and the agent’s equipment in terms of common sense to deal with it, and its function as inquiry is to resolve this discrepancy.

Common sense, however, is not only inadequate to the possibilities of the world-as-means; it is also inherently inadequate to the possibilities of human life itself as consummatory end. To emerge, through participation in a common way of life, into responsible self-awareness is to reach a point beyond that way of life, a point from which that way of life itself becomes questionable. It is to be in a position not only to judge its quality and coherence, its concrete reasonableness as an aesthetic whole, but insofar as this way of life is regulative of the community’s activities, to be called on to justify it. A critical justification, however, of common sense meanings and procedures cannot be carried on in terms of these meanings and procedures. For this, a new and this time philosophical inquiry is needed, one that looks to all these meanings, both in their relationship to one another and to the overall quality of life. From this point of view, philosophy will be an inquiry into the coherence, quality, “sense” of human life itself as comprehensive reality and final value. It will arise because of the discrepancy in man’s experience as responder between the question posed by human life-as-end and the habitual equipment of common sense to deal with it. And once again, its function will be to resolve discrepancy.

Philosophical inquiry, therefore, no less than other forms of inquiry, emerges in response to tensions and conflict inherent in human life itself. No less than they, it aims at a qualitative transformation of experience. As Blondel once observed, its purpose is not so much to explain life as to constitute it,11 to lift it to a level of integrity and

11 M. Blondel, art. cit., p.241 of the second part in the Annales de Philosophie Chretienne (Avril-Septembre 1906).

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coherence that cannot be reached without it. This being so, we can understand why philosophy cannot divorce or separate itself from the ongoing course of life and actual concerns of men if it is to be true to itself and not self-defeating. Because it bears on the quality of life itself, it must begin there and end there. Not artificial or contrived issues are its starting point, but the actual shape of life as it lived in the world today. Nor is its goal to reach some realm behind or beyond the affairs of everyday, but to order and integrate these same affairs into something coherent and whole.

From this, we can understand why agreement among philosophers is so difficult of attainment. If philosophy is indeed an inquiry into the possible sense and coherence of Human life as end-value, any completely objective test for determining the relative validity of its results is out of the question. For the kind of coherence which life can have for a person are not independent of his desires, expectations, and aspirations—i.e., of his individual bias, both that which is spontaneous and that which is culturally conditioned. All these inevitably enter into a judgment of the adequacy of a view of life purporting to be comprehensive.

It is here that philosophy is in a different position from that occupied by science. The connections prevailing in the world-as-means are independent of our likes and dislikes. Conflicting views as to what they are can be adjudicated by the sort of control they respectively make possible. The very fact that a particular interpretations makes possible a successful use of the world as means which another does not, precludes any argument about their relative merits. In philosophy however, no such experiment is possible. In the presence of conflicting philosophies, a person will incline to that in whose light his own orientation and relationships to the surrounding universe make the most sense. As an inclusive and comprehensive quality, such “sense” is final and ultimate, with nothing inside it to certify its presence. A particular philosophy does not enable its adherent to do anything he otherwise couldn’t do. Rather, it enables him to experience his life differently, viz. as more coherent and meaningful, than would otherwise be possible.

This difference of immediate quality—which is a matter of direct awareness, something a person can feel and testify to but not prove—is the decisive factor in shaping philosophical convictions. A person will hold that view which to him, affords or promises the greatest harmony and integration of life’s complexity. And, let’s face it, different individuals with different backgrounds, biases and preoccupations, are always going to see things differently. This is not to say that all views are equally valid or that an immediate quality for coherence may not have resulted from an oversight of relevant factors which subsequent experience—most notably discussion with other philosophers—may force on the attention of the thinker and so require a modification of his outlook. It is only to say that the only real test of man’s efforts to rationalize life’s possibilities is the ongoing course of life itself. On the purely intellectual level, there is no hypothesis of such universal appeal as to preclude opposition nor any so implausible as not to win some adherents.

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When speaking of integration and coherence, therefore, we have to distinguish between a kind of preliminary and provisional integration of a person’s life which is achieved apart from others in personal reflection, and that ultimate integration of it which is achieved in universal communion. Only as found in the long run—which is longer than any of us will be around—to reliably promote such inclusive harmony can philosophic conceptions be with full warrant asserted as adequate. Short of this long run, we can only grope towards communion through dialogue and discussion in an effort to purify our separate visions and intentions of all those elements which keep them separate and discrepant.

3. The Modes of Philosophical Inquiry. We have defined all inquiry as man’s continuing effort to integrate his experience as responsible agent. We have distinguished philosophy from other forms of inquiry as that which looks to the comprehensive integration of this experience, the integration of human life as end. What we want to do now is briefly indicate three distinct, but the interconnected steps in this effort.

a.)Logic. Man as responsible agent emerges to self-awareness through participation with others in common ways of intending his environment. For any individual these common ways in the form of acquired habits are presupposition of his capacity of self-direction. He has them before he is in any position to judge them critically. The same can be said of the community as a whole. Its common habits were not developed reflectively but in response to various and direct existential needs. They hang together as a kind of vital system, not an immediately logical one. Their critical scrutiny, however, is not something that can be put off indefinitely.

To be aware of variety of regulative meanings which justification to be such is not immediately evident is, for a responsible agent, to be called on to justify them. The first step in such a justification is to seek to relate them to one another as meanings. Unless they can be reflectively grasped as logical hanging together and forming a coherent whole, the agent’s own life as shaped by them cannot be grasped as whole. Whatever kind of sense it may make so long as he does not think about it, it will lack the moment he does. The inherent tension of such a situation, therefore, inevitably gives rise to an effort to think through habitual meanings in order to make sense of them on the level of thought. This is the first condition for an adequate philosophy—theoretical coherence. If philosophy falls short here, then, whatever other virtues it may possess it is inherently inadequate to that unification of experience, which is its raison d’etre.

b) Phenomenology. However, mere theoretical coherence is not enough. For it is a notorious fact that meanings intended as meanings have a kind of life of their own. They can be linked up, spun out, and developed into logical patterns almost as things in themselves without regard for the context in which they arose and functioned. The result is that in the search for an interpretation of life that can be thought through consistently, sheer notional coherence can come to be emphasized at the expense of practical relevance. A philosophy ca be elaborated that has nothing to do with the very life from which it arose and of which it was supposed to be an interpretation, nothing to do with human experience except as a kind of springboard for taking off into the blue

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needless to say, instead of integrating the agent’s experience such efforts only serve to exacerbate its divisions and discords. Indeed, in place of harmony interpretations of this kind actually introduce new and gratuitous splits, which cannot but distract the inquiring mind from what it originally set to do. Thus, for example we find philosophies, which actually dig an unbridgeable chasm between their chosen realm of the “really real” accessible only to thought, and disparaged realm of “mere appearance” which, unfortunately is where we live. What could be more absurd and yet what, unfortunately, is more commonplace than the philosopher whose theoretical convictions are so divorced from his practice that to engage in the latter he must forget the former.

Now the point I am trying to make is that coherence is a snare and in the end, self-defeating when it is complemented and continually tested by what we may call phenomenological adequacy. In other words, just as the agent’s experience lacks coherence so long as he cannot think his life, so also is coherence lacking when he cannot live his thought. In addition to being self-consistent , an adequate philosophic stance must also hang together with what is disclosed in direct experience with all that the agent is and can become aware of from his life together with others in community. It is, after all, this same concrete life that he seeks to integrate.

c) Meta-pragmatics. However, self-consistency and adequacy to what is already disclosed in the very living of life are not enough to constitute an adequate philosophy. If philosophical inquiry is man’s effort to integrate his whole experience as responsible agent, then, since philosophy itself is one of the thing he does it must itself come under its own purview and relate itself to that aspiration for wholeness, which animates it, and which it in turn seeks to implement and fulfill.

In other words, philosophy must self-consciously place itself in the context and service of human life of which it is a function and whose direction it has grasp both to control its own conduct as inquiry and to measure the adequacy of its results. This means, first of all, the formulation of an ideal of human wholeness and determination in reflection of the sort of coherence to which man inherently aspires. Secondly, it means a work of continuous criticism carried on the light of this intent—a criticism not only of common-sense beliefs and practices but also of the shape and results of philosophical efforts as well.12 If all human effort are ultimately for the enhancement of human life itself as comprehensive end-value, then they all-including the philosophical—must be judged in terms of bearing on the pervasive quality of that life, i.e. in terms of the contribution they make, negative or positive, to its wholeness, coherence, concrete reasonableness, ultimate satisfactoriness. Supposing, as I do, that this ultimate coherence and satisfactoriness consists in the achievement of universal personal community, then it will be in terms of their bearing on such an achievement that all our efforts must be judged. The making of such judgments about all that man does—including, therefore, his philosophical efforts and their issue—is I submit, the primary and abiding task of philosophical inquiry.

12 I have spelled out this twofold task of philosophy in greater detail in The Pragmatic Meaning of God, pp.36-40.

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When this is remembered and acted on, then not only is philosophy saved from the kind of irrelevance into which it has too often fallen, but it becomes the most powerful instrument at life’s own rational reconstruction and final achievement.

EXISTENTIALISM AND MAN’SSEARCH FOR MEANING

by Manuel B.Dy, Jr.

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Just as there are many definition of philosophy, so there are as many philosophical approaches to the study of man.

The Western definition of philosophy as the “love(or search) of wisdom” originated from the Greeks. The pre-Socratics were primarily concerned with the basic stuff of the cosmos, with that constituted the universe. The question on man could not be totally divorced from the cosmological, since man was conceived as part of nature. The Socratic motto “Know Thyself” was viewed not in the isolation from the quest for some order in the cosmos, for immutable harmony and stability. Man was seen as a microcosm, and the search for the truth about man was simultaneously the search for the truth about the universe. Truth was the immutable object of theory, the episteme, and man’s ideal was its contemplation. Ethics as a practical philosophy, dealing with man’s action, was synonymous with politics, the art of patterning one’s behavior with the common good centered around the polis, the city. Wisdom was the primary virtue, and in the practical order wad identical with prudence, the habit of maintaining a delicate balance with nature. Thus, the ancient philosophical—philosophical because now they were concerned not with a part of the cosmos but with the totality—approach to the study of man was cosmocentric.

With the coming and predominance of Christianity in Medieval Europe, philosophy became the handmaid of theology. Reason was the companion of faith, its task was to make faith reasonable, if not reconcilable with Aristotelian philosophy. Man was viewed still as part of nature nut nature now was God’s creation, and man, next to the angels, was the noblest of God’s creatures, created in his image and likeness. Philosophy became the search for the ultimate causes of things, eventually leading to the truth about God. Man’s ideal was to contemplate God and his creation, and his action was to conform to the natural moral law implanted in his reason. Thus the Christian Medieval philosophical approach to the study of man was theocentric.

The change of focus began with the philosophizing of Rene Descartes (1956-1650), the father of modern philosophy. Descartes, impressed by the progress of the sciences and the mathematics of his time, wanted to achieve the same advance in philosophy by starting on some one certitude, and indubitable, that which cannot be doubted because if it can be doubted, then all else are dubitable. And so, the Cartesian Meditations, as Descartes’ meditations are called, consisted of a methodic Cartesian doubt. Everything was dubitable, for Descartes, even his own body, all except for one fact—the fact that he was doubting. He could not doubt that he was doubting, being a mode of thinking, brought him to the realization “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am”). I am sure I exist as a thinking being. And from this certitude Descartes proceeded to establish the certitude of their existents, including God, by a criterion borrowed from mathematics: the clear and distinctness of the idea.

With the mergence of Descartes’s Cogit, philosophy became the anthropocentric. The question of man was now on the foreground of other questionings on nature or on God. Reason was now liberated from nature and faith, sufficient to inquire on its own truth. The modern philosophers after Descartes pursued this quest with Immanuel Kant

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(1724-1804) finally introducing a Copernican revolution in philosophy: rather than reason conforming to the object or nature that must be subjected to the a priori conditions of the mind or the subject. With Kant, philosophy became a search for the priori conditions of knowing (and doing), rather than for the object itself for the object as such is unknownable.

This rationalistic kind of anthropocentricism reached its climax in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel built a system of the Mind in the process of evolving itself in a kind of dialectic, of reason putting an other to itself (antithesis) and coming to a resolution (synthesis). And it is against the philosophizing of Hegel that contemporary philosophies are said to have started.

On such reaction is Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the acknowledged father of existentialism. Reacting against the System of Hegel, Kierkegard emphasized the individual man who cannot be placed as a “cog in a machine” or part of a system. Reacting against the rationalism of Hegel, he stressed the infinite passion of man. Truth is what is held on with the passion of the infinite. With Kieregaard, philosophy became the search for the meaning of life. The search for truth was now the search for meaning.

In talking about the existentialist’s search for meaning, one is immediately faced with two difficulties. First existentialism is not so much a philosophical system as a movement, an attitude, a frame of mind. For one thing, the existentialist philosophers are very much against systems. As a reaction against Hegel, they labor philosophical system and philosophize in an systematic though not inconsistent manner. In this regard, it is more appropriate to talk of many existentialist philosophies rather than a single existentialist philosophy. Secondly, the question of what is the meaning of man’s existence is for them more important than the answer, for they do not agree on the answer. It is not that the existentialist thinkers do not have an ethics, a notion of the highest good or value, but their ethics for the most part is intertwined with their ontologies and philosophies of man. And so, the existentialist would rather invite us (not impose) to ask similar question but seek the answer for ourselves.

In spite of the divergency of thought, the existentialist thinkers in general can be divided into two camps, the theistic and the atheistic. Belonging to the theistic group are Soren Kiergaard. Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber. In the atheistic group, the well known existentialist are Jen-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Mausrice Merleau-Ponty. Martin Heidegger refuses to be identified with any of the two camps for the simple reason that the question of god, he claims, is beyond his phenomenological approach.

There have been denials and countyer denials by these thinkers of the label “existentialist” assigned to them, but what merits the title of “existentialist”? if these thinkers have different philosophies, what accounts for the title of “existentialist philosophy”?

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We can cite five common features of existentialist thinkers, keeping in mind, however, that each one has his own interpretation, his own unique way of handling the matter.

1. Existentialists thinkers attempt to philosophize from the standpoint of an actor rather than from the spectator. This is due to the fact that the problems considered by existentialist thinkers arise out of their personal experience. The life of an existentialist thinker can hardly be divorced from philosophy. It is not surprising why many existentialist writers make use of the play, the short story and the novel to dramatize these problems. They are means to universalize the personal and the human. In their philosophical writings, the existentialist use phenomenological description, each in his own way, to explicitate rather than to explain the hidden structure of human experiences.

2. Existentialist philosophies are basically philosophies of man, stressing the subjectivity of man. The existentialist do not deny that man to a certain extent is an object, that he is a thing, given, conceptualizable, manipulable, controllable and determinable by others. But this does not constitute his humanity. In protest against the dehumanization and depersonalization of man, the existentialist thinkers hold on to the subjectivity of man: man as the original center, the source of initiative, who has depth, who transcends determinations, the openness and giver of meaning to the world.

In their ontology, the existentialists do not deny the reality of the object but emphasize the subjective. The object is that which ob-jects (gegestand) to the consciousness of man, and yet the object is meaningless, senseless without man. To be subjective is not necessarily to be subjectivistic; rather, it could be only the only way to be objective, to talk meaningfully of a world. According to Heidegger the worldiness of the world is due to man’s concern. Among theistic existentialists, God is not an object but God-for-me, the God of my prayer, the Thou that I as a person can address to.

3. Existentialist philosophies stress on man’s existence, on man as situated. This situatedness of man takes on different shades of meaning for different existentialists. For Soren Kierkegaard, existence is a religious category: the situation of the single, finite, unique individual who has to make a decision before the One infinite God in fear and trembling like the situation of Abraham. For Martin Heidegger, man is dasein, there-being, thrown into the world to realize himself, doomed to potentialities, the extreme of which is death. For Karl Jaspers, to exist to transcend oneself through limit situations and eventually to find God. (Jaspers admits of a vertical transcendence of man). For Gabriel Marcel, esse est co-esse: to exist is to co-exist, to participate in the fullness of being (God) through love, fidelity and faith. On the other hand, for Jean-Paul Sartre, to exist is to be condemned to freedom. Maurice Merleau-Ponty retorts by saying the man is condemned to meaning. And for Albert Camus, to exist is, like Sisyphus pushing and rolling the stone, to live the absurdity of life.

4. Existentialist thinkers emphasize the freedom of man. Again, each

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existentialist has his own interpretation of freedom. In the case of Kierkegaard, freedom is that which enables man to pass from aesthetic states to the ethical, and ultimately, to make leap of faith, the highest act of man’s liberty. Heidegger equates freedom with self-transcendence in time, the being-ahead-of-itself of dasein while having-been and making-present entities in his worlds. Early Sartrean freedom, however, remains the most popular notion of freedom among existentialists. It proceeds from his dictum that existence precedes essence. Man first exists and then gradually creates his own essence. Nothing determines human freedom from creating its own essence except freedom itself: man cannot help but free. and freedom stems from the negating power of consciousness being no-thing of the world the being-in-itself. Merleau-Ponty criticizes this notion of freedom of Sartre and brings out his own notion of Sartrean freedom, Marcel stresses the affirming power of freedom: freedom is man’s ability to say “yes’ to Being, to pass from the realm of having to that of being, the realm of participation. One becomes free only if he transcends himself and goes out to others in love, participating in something greater than himself.

5. Existentialist philosophers propagate authentic existence versus inauthentic existence. Inauthentic existence is living under the impersonal “on” (they) of Heidegger the crown mentality of Kierkegard, bad faith of Sartre. The inauthentic man is the “l’etranger” of Camus, indifferent, tranquilized, unable to make a personal decision of his own. He is the functionalized man of Marcel living in the mass society, the man living the life of monologue of Buber. On the other hand, authentic existence is personal and the authentic man is one who freely commits himself to the realization of a project an idea, a truth, a value. He is one who does not hide himself in the anonymity of the crowd but signs himself to what he manifests.

From the above common features of existentialist philosophers, what then can we infer with regards to their notion of value?

The question of value for the existentialist cannot be divorced from the more original question of what does it mean to be? What is the meaning of life? Camus in his Myth of Sisyphus says that the truly philosophical question is the question of suicide for in suicide one poses the question of the meaning of life. Value then is intimately related to life (and to death as the corollary of life), and if human life for the existentialist is to be lived freely, authentically, responsibly, personally then, value is that for which a person lives and dies for. Value is that to which the authentic man commits himself. Marcel says in his Mystery of Being that for existence to be truly human it must have a center outside itself. For life to be human, it must answer the question, what am I living for? Value is then that around which all my human activities revolve.

Is value for the existentialist subjective or objective? The answer is that both subjective and objective. Value is subjective because value always presupposes a subject who values; value is always value-for-me. Value is objective because there is truly something I can live and die for. Value is intimately connected with truth, for I cannot live and die for what is false or for what I think is untrue. And yet between the two poles

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of value, the existentialist would prefer to emphasize the subjective side, holding on to it as Kieregaard would put it, “with the passion of the infinite”.

But where do values come from? What is the source of value? Here is where atheistic and theistic existentialists part ways. The atheistic existentialist like Sartre would assert that man is the ultimate source of values; he is responsible for what he commits himself to. Values spring from man’s freedom to realize himself and no outside source can be attributed to them. Values are not absolute. Man alone is responsible for his own being; he cannot depend on any absolute. This assertion may be tantamount to a certain kind of individualism, and indeed existentialism is pictured many times as a man on a solitary island surrounded by the lonely span of the waters of the ocean. Nevertheless we find in the philosophy of Sartre a stress on the responsibility of the person to mankind for his decision(I chose not only for myself but for the whole of humanity), and in Camus, the spirit of rebellion.

The theistic existentialist, on the other hand, would admit of the relativity of values as precisely pointing to an Absolute Value who grounds them. The subjective source of values is human freedom, yes, but human freedom is limited and becomes fulfilled only when it participates in Someone greater than itself. Man’s commitment to a value is finite and needs to be grounded in an absolute. Above and below are linked with each other (Buber). The objective source of value is none other than God, the Absolute Thou who can give final and complete fulfillment to my life.

What then is existentialist’s search for meaning? In spite of the divergency of thought between theistic and atheistic existentialists, we can infer that it is ultimately a search within. Man the subject is the giver or discover of meaning. But the search within is a search that “erupts,” extends to the outside, to the other than the self. How far this will extend depends on how deep man can reach into the recesses of the subjectivity. Dag Hammarskjold once wrote a diary, “The longest journey is the journey inwards.” The search is a life-time task andtime is the essence of this meaning, for as Merleau-Ponty quoting the poet Claudel says,

Le temps est sens de la vie (sens: comme on dit le sens d’um course d’eau,le sens d’une phrase, le sens d’une stoffe,le sens de l’odorat).

Time is the meaning of life (meaning :asOne say of the direction of course ofWater, the meaning of a sentence, the Texture of material, the sense of smell).

Just as man cannot evade time, so he cannot escape from this search for meaning, for upon this hinges the integrity and wholeness of his humanity.

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THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD

By Manuel B. Dy, Jr.

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Traditionally, a formal study of philosophy begins with logic (the study of correct reasoning), then goes through metaphysics(the study of being), followed by cosmology(the study of nature and the universe) and ends up with philosophical psychology or philosophy of man. The philosophical study of man comes last in the curriculum. Moreover, man is defined by traditional scholastic philosophy as rational animal, or as a composite of body and soul. Under the aspect of body, he is like any other animal, a substance, mortal, subject to the limitations of time and space. Under the aspect of soul, he is gifted with the power of reason, free and immortal. From the behavior of man to think and decide, it is concluded that he must be gifted with human soul.

The method we are going to use in our reflection on man will attempt to do something different from the traditional approach. Instead of going first in to logic (after all, reality is not always logical), we shall begin with man himself in his totality. Isn’t it that our understanding of the world, and even of God, is somehow based on what we understand of ourselves? We shall not start too with definitions of man, definitions that may cut man into parts. Instead, let us describe man from within, from what is properly human, not from a point of view that is external, our method is called phenomenological.

Historical ConsiderationsThe man behind the phenomenological movement was mathematician turned

philosopher named Edmund Husser(1859-1938). He had an aim very similar to Descartes: to arrive at “philosophy as a rigorous science”. But, unlike Descartes who was impressed by the progress of the sciences of his time, Husserl came to this goal as a result of dissatisfaction with the sciences of his time. According to him, the natural sciences start out with a lot of presuppositions. In particular, he was reacting against the naturalistic psychology of his time which treats of the mental activity as casually conditioned by events of nature, in terms of stimulus-reaction relationship. This kind of psychology would presuppose therefore that man is a mechanistic animal.

As a result of this dissatisfaction with the sciences, Husserl turned to philosophy in order to make it ”the science of ultimate grounds,” in other words, “ a rigorous science,” he meant a “presuppositionless philosophy,” a philosophy not without any presupposition(for that would be impossible) but a philosophy containing the least number of primary presuppositions, so basic and immediately evident that they need not be clarified any further or reduced to other presuppositions.

How does one arrive at this kind of philosophy? According to Husserl, one has to transcend the so-called “natural attitude”. What is the natural attitude?

The term “natural attitude was used by Husserl to refer to the most predominant attitude of this time, namely the scientific attitude. The scientific attitude when carried to the extreme and used as the only way of looking at things, becomes “scientific”.

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Briefly, the scientific attitude observes things, express their workings in singular judgments, then in universal judgments, and by the process of induction and deduction arrives at concrete results. This is the way science makes progress. But fir Husserl, this attitude contains a number of assumptions:

1.) it consumes that there is no need to ask how we know.2.) It assumes that the world (the object)is out there, existing and explainable in

objective laws, while man the subject is a pure consciousness, transparent to itself and facing the world to know it as it is.

3.) It takes for granted the world-totality.

To put in less technical terms, the natural attitude look at reality as things. Its wayof knowing things is fragmented, partial, fixed, clear, precise and manipulative. There is no room for mystery in the natural attitude. It is, in the words of Husserl, “fact world”.

Thus, Husserl saw that philosophy needed a new starting point and method, different from that of the sciences. He realized that the sciences were getting farther and farther away from the heart of things. And so, he cried for a going “back to things themselves!” By “back to things themselves!’ he meant the entire field of original experience. He came to the point that the ultimate root of philosophy and of all rational assertions was not to be found in a concept, nor in a principle, not in a Cogito but in the whole filed of our lived experience . this new method would attempt to go back to phenomenon, to that which presents itself to man, seeing things as they really are, independent of any prejudice. This method would be a logos of the phenomenon, in short phenomenology.

Some characteristics of the Phenomenological Attitude

Before going into the method itself, it might be worthwhile to mention first some characteristics of the phenomenological attitude in order to see how the phenomenological method fulfills the aim of Husserl of going back to original experience.

1. The phenomenological posits the unity first before analyzing the parts or aspects of this unity. This is being faithful to original experience because in original experience we see no opposition between subject and object. What I perceive in original experience is an integral unified whole. For example, when I see a pretty “chick” walking in the corridor, I see the whole “chick” first before I notice the sharpness of her bust, the smoothness of her legs, etc.

The phenomenologist is also interested in the parts but only insofar as these lies in the context of the totality of human experience. For example, when phenomenologists undertake an analysis of the language, he will look at this phenomenon not just as a body of words, with a grammatical and phonetic structure, but also as embodiment of thought.

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2. The phenomenologist does not reason from particular instances to generalstatement (induction) nor deduces from a general law some particular cases (deduction) but describes. The phenomenologists simply explicitates, unfolds what is already there. Since the totality is already there, what is left to do is reveal structures of this totality. Original experience can only be described, not deduced or induced because it is already there, the ultimate, the origin. Thus, the phenomenologusts describes meticulously, and since reality is rich and inexhaustible, there is no conclusive end to his description. Whatever he describes will only be a “bite” of reality.

3. The phenomenologists is essentially concerned about experienced and about man. His world is not the world of formal typifications and models, of constructs (like the scientist’s) but the worked s lived by man. What concerns him is man’s being-in-the-world-with-others, the problem he encounters in life like death, love, etc., his memories of the past and his anticipation of the future. All these he must bring light to.

4. In his attempt to be faithful to experience, the phenomenologist uses “epoche”. This is a term coined and borrowed by Husserl from mathematics to refer to a stepping from prejudice, a suspension of judgment, a bracketing of the natural attitude. We shall explain this in greater detail in our discussion of the method proper.

Some Important Steps in the Phenomenological Method

Space and lack of time prevent us from giving a complete discussion of Husserl’s phenomenological method. For our own purposes we shall select only three important steps in his method:

1. Epoche. Epoche literally means “bracketing” Husserl borrowed this mathematical term and applied it to the natural attitude. This is the preliminary step in the phenomenological method. Before I can investigate anything, I have to bracket, that is to say , hold in abeyance my natural attitude towards the object I am investigating. My natural attitude consists of my prejudices, biases, clear fixed precise, unquestioned, explicit knowledge of the object. These I have to suspend for a while, not denying it nor affirming it.

Let us say, I am an Atenean and I meet a La Sallite. What is my natural attitude towards him? If I am a typical Atenean, I would say here is a student who is “all form but no substance”. If I am a La Sallite and I meet an Atenean my natural attitude would be, “here is one who is all substance but no form”. All these conceptions may have some truth, may be so clear to my mind, but if I am to use the epoche, I would have to suspend all these and let the other unfold himself before me.

What is my natural attitude towards a priest? That he is one who is holy, pure, a messenger of God. What is my natural attitude towards a teacher? That he is one who

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gives grades, a terror whom I have to coy and please. What is my natural attitude towards a pretty “chick”? That she is one who can probably satisfy my sexual appetites.

It seems that we do have a natural attitude for anything, not realizing how much this hides the manifold richness of the object before us. We remain secure in the conceptual level, and unless we the epoche, we will never perhaps come to see the richness, the beauty; the goodness of a person or thing. We have to use the epoche in order o see the world with “new eyes” and to return to the original experience from where our conceptual natural attitude after all was derived.

2. The Phenomenological Eidetic Reduction. The term “reduction” is another term borrowed by the Husserl from mathematics to refer to the procedure by which we areplaced in the “transcendental sphere”, the sphere in which we can see things as they really are, independent of any prejudice. In Husserl’s philosophy, there are several reductions; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another phenomenologist, may even have more. But for our own purposes, we shall mention only the two most important ones: the eidetic reduction and the transcendental reduction.The eidetic reduction is derived from the Greek word “eidos” which means essence. Under this step, I reduce the experience to its essence. How do I arrive at the essence? I start out with an individual example and investigate what changes can be made in the example without making it cease to be thing it is. That which cannot change without making the object cease to be thing it is the invariant, which is the eidos of the experience.

Let us say I am describing the phenomenon of love. In the epoche, I bracket my biases and judgments on love, like love hurts or that love is a “many splendored thing,” etc. Now, I reduce the object to the love phenomenon of love, to the lived experienced of love. In the eidetic reduction. I reduce the phenomenon of love to its essence, removing the contigent factors. I begin with an example, relationship between two people. Can I change their age? Their sex? Their race? Their family background? Their family background? Their social status? I discover that I can change all these without the relationship ceasing to be love. What is it that I cannot change? Perhaps, it is the activity of giving, the disinterested giving of oneself to the other as he is, I find that if this is missing in a relationship, then the relationship cannot be called love. This therefore becomes the essence of love.

3. Phenomenological Transcendental Reduction. Under this step, I reduce theobject to the very activity of my consciousness. Instead of paying attention simply to loving, seeing hearing, etc. I now pay attention to my loving, my seeing, my hearing, etc. I now become conscious of the subject, the “I” who must decide on the validity of the objects in experience, I now become aware of the subjective aspects of the object when I inquire into the beliefs, feelings, desires which shape the experience. In other words, the object is seen in the relation to the subject, and vice versa, the subject in relation to the object.

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For example, if under the eidetic reduction, I see the essence of love as disinterested giving of oneself to the other as he is, in the transcendental reduction I reduce this meaning of love to my experience of it. I see meaning of love as such perhaps because I have experienced it that way, perhaps because I have been a lover myself. I discover that this meaning of love has a perspective of the lover. If I were to take the perspective of a beloved, then perhaps its meaning would be different—maybe, it would be more of a receiving rather than giving. Of I were to take the perspective of a religious, then maybe love would be seen as the activity of god, the presence of god’s grace in man.

What is rain? Rain can have many meaning. To the romantic, it is a creation of beauty-its patter is music to his ears, its sight recalls memories of the past, its touch cleanses long hidden inner wounds. To the children, it is a chance to play and to bathe at the same time. To the farmer, it is blessing from heaven , a necessity for a good harvest. But for the commuter, it is a curse, a battle for a ride, a struggle to brave through the traffic. To the poor a time of misery, of having to bear up with leaking roofs and walls, with hunger and cold.

The Intentionality of Consciousness

It is in the transcendtal reduction that Husserl came up with the main insight of phenomenology: the intentionality of consciousness. For Husserl, every conscious act intends something. Consciousness is consciousness of something other than itself. If an act is present, the object is also present. Therefore, the character of the object is co-determined by the character of the act. Consciousness does not just adapt itself to the object passively but rather, its very essence is to form meaning to the object.

For the phenomenologists, then, there is no object without a subject, and no subject without an object. The subject-of –the-object is called by phenomenologist as the noesis, and the object-for-the-subject is called the noema.

Put in other words, there is no world without man, and there is no man without a world. The world is a human world, and man is being-in-the-world.

Marcel’s Phenomenological Method

The existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel uses a phenomenological method less technical than Husserl’s. According to Marcel reflection which is rooted in experience, is two levels:

1. Primary Reflection. Primary reflection breaks the unity of unity of experience. It looks at the word or at any object as a problem, detached from the self, and fragmented. Primary reflection is the foundation of scientific knowledge, for the science assumes a

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stand where the world is apart from the subject. The subject does not enter into the object investigated.

2. Secondary reflection. Secondary reflection on the other hand, recaptures the unity of original experience. It does not go against the data of primary reflection but goes beyond it by refusing to accept the data of primary reflection as final. The unity of experience is grasped by placing back the object to the self. For Marcel, the level of secondary reflection is the area of the mysterious because here we enter into the realm of the personal. What is needed in secondary reflection is an ingathering, a recollection a pulling together of the scattered fragments of our experience.

The secondary reflection is strictly speaking, the phenomenological method of Marcel, whereas the primary reflection would seem to correspond to the natural attitude of Husserl.

Some examples:

Who am I? from primary reflection, I can answer the question by mentioning my name, date of birth, height, weight—the items I would normally fill out in a registration card. But all these are contingent, relative to the inner self that I am. In secondary reflection, I would have to penetrate into inner core of my person.

My body. Primary reflection would look at my body as a body like other bodies, detached from the self that would make it unique. My body would be the body examined by a physician, or perhaps the body that I sell in a prostitution house. But is this my sole experience of my body? Secondary reflection tells me that my body is mine. The way I carry my body is very unique. The dentist cannot experience the pain I feel when he pulls my tooth because my tooth is mine. And if I am a prostitute and still have a conscience, I experience (when I sell my body) a terrible feeling that I am selling myself.

Here are two true-to-fact examples of primary and secondary reflection from two students:

Examples I:

Once, during the early years of my adolescence, I had a pet canary. I kept him in a small cage, which I placed on the porch table. I never forget to feed him regularly a task, which I never entrusted to anybody else.

I remember the time when I used to sit there to sit there on the porch, just listening to his beautiful singing. Whenever my friends called on me, I very often showed them my prize canary with pride. I had taught him to sing whenever I whistled a tune that was similar to his song.

Then one day, a terrible thing happened, after I had fed him I did not notice that I had left the cage door open. In a matter he was gone. My favorite pet had flown away,

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leaving behind him the empty cage, which I thought was so beautiful, and was not a mere reminder of the happy days when I used to hear him sing.

My first reaction was to try to get him back, no matter what it cost. I saw him perched on the fence, his wings not used to flying over long distances. I immediately rushed into the house and got my air rifle. I was desperate, and the only thought that was in my mind was capture the creature even if it meant that I had to kill him. Fortunately I was too late, when I returned, he was already gone.

I was angry at everything. I kept on telling myself that it was unjust, after all the trouble I went through taking care of the bird. I could not bear it if I was to see him in the possession of another person. Maybe, that was the reason why I wanted to kill him rather than to let him fly away.

Several days passed. One afternoon, just as the sun was about to set, I was sitting out on the porch. Suddenly, I heard him singing, I was surprised to hear it because canary birds are seldom seen here, and when you hear one singing, you cannot just mistake it for some other bird’s son. And my canary’s singing, I cannot mistake for some other canary’s.

I looked up and saw him, perched on one of the limbs of a tree. That time I felt a longing inside me, a longing to have him back. He was so close, yet it was almost impossible to catch him. But the feeling quickly passed, because I realized that the song I was hearing was just the same as, if not more beautiful than, the song that I heard from the cage. The song was still mine, mine to hear, mine to enjoy for a moment.

As I looked at that yellow bird high up on the branches of the tree, it seemed as if he was happier then, because he was free. He was still my bird, yet he was free. That was the time I began to realize that every bird can, and does, sing a truly beautiful song. Unlike before when I only know how to listen to the song of a bird in a cage, now I have learned how to listen to every bird I hear. As long as I could hear them, they were mine.

From that day on, I never saw my canary again. However, I was glad that he was able to escape from his prison because, through that, I was able to see the real value of possession. My property does not end at the place where the fence surrounding my house stands. A creature, as long as it gives me pleasure whenever I see or hear it, belongs to me.

My neighbor’s dog is rightfully mine if he wags his tail in joy when he sees me coming. Real possession can be mine to a greater degree than the master’s if the bond of friendship between that dog and me is greater.

Beauty can also be the object of possession. When I see a flower blooming though it does not grow in my garden, I own it. Before, I would be tempted to pick that flower and bring it home with me. But now I realize that it is better to let it alone to bloom for me, rather than to have it within my reach only to see it wilt in my hand. Since I put value in it, it is, in a sense, my own.

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Even spider’s web is a thing of beauty. Very often, I would watch spiders spinning their webs. I would be tempted to destroy the web. I think that it is in man’s nature to have a sadistic tendencies. However, I would hold back my hand for I know that the fulfillment of my savage tendency is nothing when compared to the pleasure of appreciating the beauty of nature. Only then can I say that I am the richest man on earth.

Example II:

I really did not know that I was like this. Its Christmas eve, in the morning. We have just eaten breakfast (the first time I eat breakfast in a girl’s house). Marilyn and I have just been to Misa de Gallo. I don’t know how it happened, but it all started at the Expo ’67 fairgrounds. Then she thought of the Old-English tradition of twelve days of Christmas, the exchange of gifts somehow bound us closer. Yet, I really do not know whether I love her or whether I should start planning and remolding my life for her. It’s only been less than a month.

Today is the twelfth day of Christmas. I plan to give my gift tonight. She just gave me a brightly wrapped thin rectangular box—her gift to me.

It is the evening of Christmas Eve. I have just opened my gift. It is a bit of a let-down for me. He has given me only a set of pastel coloring sticks. I don’t think I should feel this way. I don’t want to feel as though I am belittling her gift, but I still do feel this way.

Why is it she gave me only a set of pastel coloring sticks? I was expecting more. Am I not becoming somebody special in her life? So, why just a set of “adult crayons”? it is not than I do not value her gift, or reject it, or even ridicule the emotion behind it, but I am bothered because I expected something more, a gift with more emotional and sentimental impact than a set of coloring sticks. I am happy about her giving but I am a little sad about the gift. Not sad, maybe, but puzzled. I think I have shown I like her, maybe even love her (I don’t know) and I think she has shown her own receptive feelings towards me. But still I feel a let-down.

It has only been a month. What really do I know of her? Do I really know her quirks, her likes, dislikes, inside out? Do I know what touches her and what does not? Do I know her now beyond the surface of her smiles, deeper than the joy of talking and being with her?

And in my choice of a gift for her ( I bought her a book of French poems that pun on English nursery rhymes), was I really sure it was theI gift for her? I know I was looking for something meaningful, a gift that would be close to her. Yet, I realize I am only hitting that humorous side of her person (which is primarily evident in these first encounters) with this choice of gift. My choice of gift shows I really don’t know her yet.

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I realize it must be the same for her. She doesn’t know me beyond my smiles, the kooky-colored shirts I wear, or the jackets I’m so fond of and the posters I love to make.She doesn’t know the lazy labyrinth that is me. She hasn’t traveled through it yet. It has only been less than one month, and she knows for sure I like to make posters.

Now I know I should not feel this way. There should be no letdown about her gift. It is a gift of beginning, a gift that symbolizes the state and the depth of our incipient relationship. It is, in fact, most significant now, more significant than a tie, a wallet, or a set of hankies can be. I know there is a lot of time to learn about each other a lot of time to explore and discover, a lot of time to learn to love the best way we can. But as of now, this gift speaks for us.

I can say that this experiences is a real one and that what I underwent was what has been compartmentally designated “primary and secondary reflection”. I underwent both steps, tough I did not see them as two steps, then, or that I was using a philosophical method.

My primary reflection came when I was “jolted” at the kind of gift I received. It was a break from the flow of my existence, or to be more exact, a break in the way I thought of Marilyn. I had to stop and think—why “only” this? I think I expected more, now that we are growing closer to each other. Isn’t there something wrong somewhere? I feel a let-down.

Together with this first reflection is the “wrenching” feeling of anguish. A part of me is threatened. That part of me is the way I think of Marilyn. I may have to review things and change my feelings, and the anguish that comes with change is beginning to overwhelm me. My “self” is threatened.

In this reflection, too, I have cut myself off to an extent; I become a sort of a judge above my receipt of a gift. I seem to sit back and view this gift and ask “by this only?” I am indifferent to a certain extent in posing such a question. I have cut myself off in this indifference. I seem to be above the question I pose.

Yet, I reflect further. I think of how I regard Marilyn at this stage. I realize I really do not know her myself. I only know I like her through a mere presence, which I have not fathomed. Even my choice of a Christmas gifts shows this.

From this realization I make another one—that she herself does not know me inside out, that we have known each other as deeply as a few weeks can afford, and ultimately her gift is the best symbol of this knowledge she has. Thus, I should not feel this way.

From my secondary reflection, I experience a sense of liberation. I am not apart from and above the question. I have seen it in greater totality. I have confronted the question, seen the question with my own self-involved, consequently enlarging my view. I am at one with the phenomenon of this gift. I can grasp it and have united myself into

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this phenomenon, and furthermore I feel at one with the giver, Marilyn. I am no longer part from and above it.

I feel free now because I have removed the anguish I had before. I see the phenomenon in a greater totality and my anguish is gone. I can now go on in my discovering Marilyn. The obstruction has been surmounted.

Lastly, the result of these two steps, primary and secondary reflection is that I can now give a greater significance to the gift. I seem to have transcended the phenomenon of this gift, and have enriched it with this greater significance:

It is a gift of beginning. It is a symbol of what we both are to each other at this stage. We shall have time to learn and to discover and to give gifts that do not come in brightly-wrapped boxes but still pierce our hearts more deeply.

HUSSERL’S TRANSCENDENTAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION*

By Richard Schmitt

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Philosophers before, as well as since, Husserl have spoken of a philosophic discipline called “phenomenology” which describes its objects instead of constructing explanations. Husserl’s phenomenology differs from all the others in the conditions which any inquiry must fulfill in order to deserve being called “phenomenological”. Phenomenology, according to him, can begin only after the “transcendental-phenomenological reduction” has been performed by the beginning phenomenologist. Descriptions not preceded by this “reduction” are not phenomenological. Anyone who wants to understand the claims made by Husserl for his “Transcendental Phenomenology” and, even more, any one who wants to employ the phenomenological method must first understand and practice the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. But such understanding is difficult to achieve; Husserl’s own descriptions are quite perplexing and the commentators deeper widely in their interpretations of these descriptions. I shall try to clarify this initial phase of phenomenology by showing that Husserl’s characterizations of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction are, in fact, suggestions for a phenomenological description of reflection as opposed to straightforward, nonreflective thinking. This will provide only a partial explication of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. How phenomenological reflections from other kinds, as (for instance) scientific reflection, must be treated in a separate paper.

We must begin by rehearsing, once again, Husserl’s descriptions of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. There are a number of different ways of approaching the reduction. One may follow Descartes on his road of total doubt. Alternatively one may examine one of the traditional philosophic disciplines; e.g., logic, in an attempt to uncover the aims implicit in its development.1 By either way one is led to question what previously seemed self-evident. On the Cartesian road we are led to question all presuppositions of human experience; in logic the presupposition of judging, of validity, and truth become questionable. We begin, then, by questioning what we had previously taken for granted, or by wondering what seems most familiar.2 This involves a change of attitude (Einstellung);3 we must look at the world with “new eyes”. What exactly is this new attitude which I adopt as I perform the transcendental-phenomenological reduction? Here Husserl provides a variety of phrases designed to ex-

*From Richard Schmitt, “Husserl’s Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 20 (1959-1960), pp. 289-245. Reprinted with permission of the editors. 11Formale and transcendentale Logik, Halle, 1929, p. 6 ff. This work will be referred to as Formale.22Die Krisis der Europaischen Wissenschaften und die Transcendentale Phanomenologic, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana Vol. VI, The Hague, 1954, p. 80. This work will be referred to as Krisis.33Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischien Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana Vol. III, The Hague, 1950, p. 61. This work will be referred to as Ideen I. hibit this new attitude to the reader: I no longer attach any validity to the “natural belief in the existence of what I experienced”,4 I “invalidate,” “inhibit,” “disqualify,” all commitments (Stellungnahmen) with reference to experienced objects; I “bracket the objective wolrd.”5 This last is one of the best well-known phrases used in this connection. Husserl draws his metaphor from mathematics where we place an

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expression in brackets and put a + or – sign in front of it. By thus bracketing the objective world we “give it a different value.”6 In performing the reduction, the phenomenologist establishes himself as “disinterested spectator”7 and changes his practical aims.8 The result of this change of attitude is a change in my experience. Previously experienced reality now becomes “mere phenomenon.” This Kantian term is here used in a new sense; any object of experienced becomes “phenomenon” for the observer who recognizes the object’s claim to reality, but reserves decision on the validity of that claim. In the “natural,” preanalytic and prephenomenological attitude—sometimes Husserl also calls it the “naïve,” attitude, but not in any perojative sense—we generally believe that objects perceived are real; we believe that we live in a real world. This belief is “put out of action”, suspended, we make no used of it.9 We are left with a world-as-phenomenon, a world which claims to be; but we refuse, for the time being, to pass on the validity of this claims.10

A further result of this movement is the discovery of the transcendental ego. I suddenly recognize that it is I who must decide whether the claims to reality of the objects of experience in a particular, and of the world as a whole of general, are valid claims. I discover that whatever has sense and validity, has sense and validity for me.11 I thus discover the “absolute being of the transcendental ego.”12 “Absolute being (Seiendes) is in the form of international life which, whatever else it may be aware of in itself, is at the same time awareness of itself.”13 The “I” which transforms the world into mere phenomenon is, in so doing, aware of it self as transforming the world and cannot be subjected to the same transformation. But apart from its “modes of relatedness” and its “modes of behavior,” this “I” is completely devoid of any content which could be studied or explicated. It is completely indescribable, being no more than a pure ego.14

4 4 Cartisianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser, Hisserliana Vol. I, The Hague, 1950, p. 59. This work will be referred to as Cart.5 Op. cit., p. 60.6 Ideen I, p. 174. 7 Cart., p. 73. 8 8 Krisis, p. 399.99 Ideen I, p. 65.1010 Cart., pp. 58-61.1111 Op. cit., p. 65. 1212 Ideen I, p. 72.13 13 Formale, p. 241.14 14 Ideen I, p. 195, and Cart., p. 99.

Husserl insists that the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in no way limit experience. The phenomenologist does not turn away either from the whole of experienced reality and actuality or from certain areas of it; he only suspends judgment concerning the reality or validity of what is experienced. The world before the transcendental-phenomenological reduction and the world which I have transformed into “mere phenomenon” do not differ in content, but in the way in which I am related to each of them.15

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We are now in a position to understand Husserl’s choice of terminology better. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is called “transcendental” because it uncovers the ego for which everything has meaning and existence. It is called “phenomenological” because it transforms the world into mere phenomenon. It is called “reduction” because it leads us back (Lat. reducere) to the source of the meaning and existence of the experienced world, in so far as it is experienced,16 by uncovering intentionally. Husserl also uses the term “epoche.” At first it appears as a synonym for “reduction.” In his last writings he differentiates between the two terms; the change of attitude, i.e., the suspension of all natural belief in the objects of experience is called the “epoche”; it, in turn, is the pre-condition for reducing the natural world to a world of phenomena.17 The term “transcendental-phenomenological reduction” covers both the epoche and the reduction in the narrower sense of Husserl’s last writings.

Throughout his writings of the middle and late period Husserl insisted that phenomenology is a reflected enterprise.18 It seems reasonable therefore to the transcendental-phenomenological reduction as a phenomenological description of the transition from a nonreflective to a reflective attitude, albeit a reflective attitude of a particular kind. If a phenomenology is a reflective enterprise, it does not follow that all reflection is, therefore, phenomenological. But, before we can distinguish phenomenological from other kinds of reflection, we must first turn to the more general question: what distinguishes reflection from nonreflective thinking? (henceforth to be referred to merely “thinking”).

Traditionally the distinction between thinking and reflection rested on the distinction between what was inside the mind and what was outside of it. According to John Locke, “….the mind….when it turns view inward upon itself and observes its own actions about the ideas it has, takes from hence other ideas….”19 and these ideas are ideas of reflection. Hume draws the distinction in a very similar way.20 The traditional distinction is intimately tied up with the doctrine that the mine has an “inside” and since this view is no longer popular, the difference between thinking and reflection bears re-examination.

1515 Cart., pp. 59-60. 16 Cart., p. 65.17 17 Krisis, p. 155.18 18 Cf. Ideen I, p. 177; Cart., p. 59; Krisis, 457.1919 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. II, ch. vi, par. 1.

A more serious objection against this concept of reflection as “the mind thinking about itself” is, that there is much thinking about oneself which is anything but reflective, but is, on the contrary, often only a means to escape the necessity for reflection. This kind of nonreflective and evasive thinking about oneself is found in brooding about one’s own feelings and emotions, self-pity, nursing feelings of resentment or a sense of injury and, in extreme cases, a hysterical exaggeration of emotions.21 take a child who has been punished for disobedience. He will retreat to his room in anger, turning over and over in his mind how he has been wronged, and how unjustly he has been dealt with. This child

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thinks, and he thinks about his own “mind” and the ideas therein,” about his own loneliness and unhappiness, and how no one loves him. But, so far, he does not reflect. He does not ask himself whether his punishment may not, perhaps, be partially justified, whether it is really true that he is being punished merely out of sheer malice and ill will on his parents’ part. Caught up in his own anger and misery the child has not been able to “stand back” and survey the situation calmly and with some detachment. In his anger he loses his “sense of proportion” and his “proper perspective.” Reflection, on the other hand, involves just this critical detachment. Once the child begins to reflect, after the first violent emotion is spent, he will, to be sure, still think about himself but not merely about himself, his own suffering, and the sins of others against him. He will, instead, think about himself in relation to the other person involved. He will review the events, try to see them from his parents’ point of view, how his behavior may embarrassed or hurt them. Thus taking “the others’ point of view” will, at the same time, lead the child to think about himself in a different light. He will no longer merely interest himself in his own happiness—that is put aside from the moment—but think about what he actually did do. Thus the scope of reflection about oneself is considerably wider than that of thinking about oneself, since it includes facts about one’s relations to others and about oneself which had before remained unnoticed or had appeared irrelevant.

This difference between thinking and reflection does not only hold where once person is the object; it also applies “outside” the mind. A political reformer (for instance) is firmly committed to his view of the world: he sees and experiences society rent by a class dissensions. Yet he is not content to mouth tired political catch phrases. He thinks about this world in which he finds himself, and everywhere he discovers new evidence for his diagnoses of society’s ill. Much thought also goes into the application of his proposed remedies. To be a successful revolutionary a man must think but he need not, and perhaps should not, reflect. If the reformer were to reflect he would have to temper his revolutionary zeal, detach himself from his aims and his habitual attitude toward the world, and question what had seemed self-evident before. He would have to raise the question whether the world which he had taken to be immediately experience is not at least in part the embodiment of his own wishes and the product of his imagination. Here again reflection requires detachment and widens the scope of inquiry.

2020 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Part I, Bk. I, Sec. II.21 21 Cf. Max Scheler, “Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis” in Vom Umsturz der Werte, Vol. II, Leipzig, 1923, p.

These examples show that the difference between thinking and reflection does not lie in the respective objects of these activities since any object can be the object of thinking as well as of reflection. The examples have also provided us with material for showing where the difference between thought and reflection does not lie. Beside, we must find that Husserl’s description of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction provides us with all the terms and distinctions needed for the analysis of these two examples.

a) The person who thinks is “interested” in the objects of his thought; they attract

him.22 We saw this very clearly in our two examples: the child was overwhelmed by his

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anger and sense of injury; the reformer was “caught up” in his world which is waiting to be reformed.

b) To be interested or to be attracted by an object brings with it that the object which is attracting me is accepted as it presents itself; it “imposes” itself on the observer.23 for the child in his anger and hurt are indubitably real. He would reject emphatically any suggestion that things are not really so bad.” The man who is, in this sense, attracted by or interested in the world or in himself accepts the world and himself “at face value”. This attitude Husserl calls “natuerlicher Seinsglaube”24 the unquestioning acceptance of the existence of what is experienced.

c) In order to begin to reflect one must perform the epoche, i.e., one must suspend this interest, become disinterested.25 Thus, the child begins to reflect only after his commitment to the existing experience is weakened, if he stands back and takes up a “neutral attitude”26 This involves canceling or suspending the earlier acceptance of experience, placing oneself, as Husserl puts it sometimes, “above” the natural world, where by “natural” he means “prereflective”.27

d) The epoche thus renders questionable what previously has been taken as certain

and self-evident. This does not mean that experience as a whole is rejected. To question something is not to deny it. The child does not suddenly say, “oh, I’m not really angry”; the reformer does not deny that the world is riddled with injustices, but experience ceases to be unambiguous and the door is opened to questions. The certainty once possessed by experience now becomes a mere claim. World as well as psychological self become, in Husserl’s language, “mere phenomenon.” We are beginning to take up a properly reflective attitude, one of detachment and questioning. Here the epoche ends and we are entering the phase which Husserl calls the reduction.

2222 Erfahrung und Urteil, ed, by Ludwig Landgrebe, Hamburg, 1949, p. 80. This work will be reffered to as Erfahrung.23 23 Ibid.23 23 Cart., p. 59.25 25 Op. cit., p. 73.2626 Ideen I, p. 264 ff.2727 Krisis, p. 395.

For this new attitude, what was once a clear datum becomes a complex experience in need of clarification; what seemed actual becomes mere possibility,28 and this transformation has several important implications:

e) What had, at one time, seemed to be a fact of immediate experience now looks as if it might have been merely an interpretation and, possibly, a false one. Maybe his father’s severity was not a manifestation of ill will or arbitrariness. Perhaps the perhaps the poverty of the workers is not merely a result of exploitation and the greed of employers. Only in the reflective attitude do we begin to separate what is really given in experience, what close and attentive scrutiny reveals to be “really there” from what was merely added to this experience by the observer, as interpretation or anticipation. We distinguish here, Husserl says, between what is “self-given” (selbstgegeben),29 what is

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given “in the flesh” (leibhaft),30 and what is merely associated opinion (Mitmeinung).31 It is here, in reflection, that the distinction between true belief and knowledge is first drawn.

f) On the other hand, interested thought is selective. As long as I accept the world of natural experience unquestioningly, certain facts of the situation are either not noticed at all or are put aside as important. But now, in reflection, the facts which had previously seemed self-evident have become questionable, and thus facts which they had overshadowed before or which, in relation to them, had seemed insignificant now come to light and must be examined carefully. The scope of relevant subject matter is widened considerably as soon as we make the transition from thinking to reflection. The angry child goes beyond his own anger and reflects about this anger in relation to his own conduct and that of his parents. The reformer considers facts previously ignored or unnoticed; he must, among other things, face up to his own preconceptions. These new facts had previously been “anonymous”; now they lost this anonymity.32 Concepts or feelings which had been merely “at the back of my mind,” as well as objects which I had seen or heard without noticing them are now brought out into the open.

g) Reflection must describe these new facts rather than explain them.33

explanation are in order where we know what the world or my present condition is like, and we want to find out why they are in this state. But as we turn from thinking to reflection we relinquish former certainties. Accordingly, there is nothing definite that would require or even be capable of explanation. Instead there are facts, only casually observed before or perhaps not observed at all, which need to be examined in order to separate what is evidently given in our experience from what is merely associated or outright fiction. Once the revolutionary questions his former world-view the facts lose the ready-made significance which his previous theories had given them. The once intelligible world is replaced by disjointed experiences which refuse to fit into any kind

28 28 Cart., p. 66.29 29 Formale, p. 251.30 30 Ideen I, p. 52.31 31 Cart., p. 82.32 32 Cart., p. 84.33 33 Ideen I, pp. 171-174.of pattern, and his first task is to pay close attention to actual observation to find what his society is really like, what in his former experience was genuine fact, and what was merely supposition and interpretation.

h) Throughout the unfolding of these two transformations, the epoche and the reduction, repeated reference was made to the reflecting self. These must be now rendered more explicit. As the subject takes up a more detached attitude, his experience takes on a different complexion, and this is true whether the object is myself or the world. Thus, it appears, that the content of experience is dependent on myself as a subject; experience presents to me its claim to validity: I must certify this claim. I can withdraw my confidence or belief from the object, thereby transforming it from a valid experience into a mere phenomenon. In this sense, as a subject, am the source of the validity of

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experience,34 but this, at the same time, transforms the meaning of the experience. Once the validity of the present experience is put in question, one looks at the world with “new eyes” and the world looks different to one. In this sense the subject is not only the source of the validity of experience, but also of its significance (Sinn).35

i) As the scope of awareness widens, the self as subject falls under notice: the reformer begins to ask how much his own wishes, desires, needs, prejudices shaped his experience of the world. The child wonders whether his actions have merited the punishment inflicted. Reflection, thus, is always expanding in two directions: The world is examined in relation to myself when I try to distinguish those aspects of experience which are genuinely evident from those which I merely assume or suppose to be the case. The subject is examined in relation to the world when I inquire into the beliefs, feelings, desires, etc., which shaped the experiences about which I am not reflecting. Husserl distinguishes these two directions of reflection as the “noetic” and the “noematic” aspects of the intentional relation; the former refers to the subject-in-relation-to-the-object, the latter to the object-in-relation-to-the-subject.36 These two aspects of the intentional relation are strictly correlative;37 they determine each other and each can only be understood in the light of the other. There is no object unless it is object for some subjet,38

and no subject unless it has a world as its object.39

j) Noetic analysis only reveals the ego in so far as it has become the object of the reflective act; the ego which reflects here, as in all reflection, remains irrevocably anonymous. We are aware of its presence but it has no content, it cannot be describe.40

Reflection, then, takes a subjective turn in three different ways: the object of thinking is revealed as object-for-a-subject, as object whose validity and significance flows from this subject. The subject is seen as being the subject-of-this-object, the subject which, in

34 34 Cart., p. 65.35 35 Ibid.36 36 Ideen I, p. 218, ff., and Cart., p. 74.37 37 Formale, p. 231.3838 Ideen I, p. 110 ff.39 39 Cart., p. 99.40 40 Ideen I, p. 195. Husserl’s language, “constitutes” the object. At the same time the ego which reflects but eludes all descriptive grasp makes itself felt.

We have now shown that the transcendental-phenomenological reduction shows all the common features of the transition from thinking to reflection. It remains for another paper to show the distinguishing marks of phenomenological reflection which sets it apart from reflection in everyday life or in the sciences.

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THE SUBJECTIVITY OF OBJECTIVITY*

by Quentin Lauer

By a sort of paradox not at all uncommon in the history of philosophy, Husserl, the ardent champion of “scientific” philosophy, has opened up a new and rich dimension of philosophical investigation precisely for those who would “de-scientize” philosophy. For Husserl transcendental subjectivity, the “source of all objectivity,” was the key to a “strictly scientific” philosophy. For many of those who draw their inspiration from

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Husserl, subjectivity is more significantly the means of transcending science in a genuinely philosophical investigation.

That this has been one of the results of Husserl’s life long efforts is by no means sheer accident. This ideal of the philosophers as “disinterested spectator” is precisely which the ideal of he himself (fortunately) never attained. His accomplishment was rather to reveal in a most striking way to contemporary thinkers that to investigate subjectivity is not necessary to be a subjectivist, but rather, and much more importantly, it is to study a necessary condition of objectivity, a subjectivity which, though not “ conceptualizable,” is still “graspable” in all the richness of its objective reference.

In doing this, Husserl has revealed the legitimacy of a this-worldly investigation, which, though it does not deny the possibility (or even the need) of an extrapolation, still does not institute this extrapolation, convinced as it is that things themselves have a discoverable intelligibility. The fact that such a purely descriptive investigation is inadequate to the whole of reality and must be complemented by an extension—whether causal or dialectical—does not destroy the legitimacy of investigation; nor is the character of the investigation altered when it is so complemented. The phenomenological procedures of Husserl have served well those who seek to go beyond him in their penetration of reality—above all, his exploitation of subjectivity has provided contemporary thinkers with a vantage point from which to view objectivity, while avoiding the Kantian dilemma of essentialism.

That a philosophy of phenomenal being need not be a phenomenalism Husserl has abundantly manifested. To be convince that the determination to circumscribe one’s philosophical investigations within the limits of what a subjective inquiry may reveal need not be prejudicial to a contact with transcendence, may be somewhat foreign to Husserl’s own intentions; it is not excluded by his own method. The question here is, what can a this-worldly inquiry reveal concerning being, not, what steps must be taken in order to go beyond what this being reveals of itself.

There seems little question that Kant was talking both quite intelligently (as he always did) and quite intelligibly (as he did not always do) when he insisted that being, in

* Source: Phaenomenologica 4: Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), pp. 167-174.the sense in which he understood being, is not a predicate, in the sense which he understood predicate; that is, to say something that it is, is not to differentiate it conceptually from the same thing as merely possible. The story of the hundred real thalers and the hundred possible thalers, which has since become legend, unquestionably contains an important truth. A hundred real thalers is no more than a hundred possible thalers; certainly the number is no more in either case. It is also correct to say that the intelligibility of the thalers as the thalers of the hundred is no greater in either case. At the same time, it does seem necessary to say that there is a significant difference between the hundred real and the hundred possible; intelligibility and the conceptualization are not co-terminous. Not only is there a difference for the one who possesses the real as opposed to the one who thinks of the possible; there is another difference, the kind of difference that

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anyone introduces into the discourse when he says of something that it is, as opposed to saying of something that it is merely understandable; a difference for everyone in that universe of discourse—not a “purely objective” difference, but a difference in a reciprocal relation of subject and object.

I recall during my student days hearing a professor illustrate the nature of genuinely metaphysical question by asking over and over again, “What does a thing do when it is?” It should be noted, by the way, that he did not ask: “What do we say of a thing when we say that it is?” This would be to ask for the “meaning” of being, which, because it cannot be conceptualized, is indefinable and has no meaning. After he had asked the question often enough it was to be expected that one of the students would ask him, “Well, what does a thing do when it is?” It might also be expected that the only answer the professor could give was to shrug his shoulders and say, “It is.” I have since wondered whether his answer would equally vague if the question which had been asked was not—“What does a thing do when it is?”, but “What does a man do when he is?” Quite obviously the second question has no more significance than the first, if a man is looked upon simply as a thing. If, however, a man is looked upon as a man, with all that which goes to make up this complex being which a man is, then the question takes a genuine significance, in fact a unique significance. Nor should this question be confused with equally significant but distinct question: “What is man?” It does not ask for a definition of man; rather it inquires the way a man is, when he is. The way a man is cannot be the way a thing is. A man is, we might say, speaking existentially, when and only when he exists. And to say this is clearly to give an entirely different sort of answer from the kind which could be given to any other question about man. If one asks, for example: “What does a man do when he runs?”, we can either describe what he does or liken it to what other beings do in the same circumstances. No other being, however, is the way man is—not merely because man is essentially different from any other being, but because in existing, man does what only man can do. To say that a man is and that a stone is, for example, is not merely to enumerate two “things” that are; it is man who, by existing, gives significant being to things. This giving of being we can call, for lack of a better word, a “creation”.

In thus giving being to the things which are, man is also providing an answer to the question: “What do things do when they are?” It is possible to ask what it is for something to be—even though the answer cannot be enunciated in a preposition—because being is accessible through the one being which stands out—ex-ists—as the center reference for all being, the one whose being is to be center of reference, to exist. When things are, to put in somewhat crudely, they are related; related to each other, I suppose but primarily related to man, who is the center of temporal being, in the sense that he is first among beings which are temporal, but, more important, in the sense that man is the source of the temporal being of those things which are. Man, we might say, is the only being who temporalizes, not merely because he is in time and is conscious of it, but because, by being, he constitute vital time, which is history. If one may be permitted to pun, this is precisely a creatio ex nihilo, because it is a creation coming from the very nothingness which man himself is. Things are, of course; but integral to their being is the determination supplied by man, to whom they are related and who, by negating, puts

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them into a context of limitation and determination. Without man, there is only the chaos of brute fact: it is for man to negate this chaos, thus stripping mere fact of its “massivity,” giving it “a local habitation and a name.” Man is, so to speak, the point at which subjectivity is introduced into the mass of brute fact. And is it through this insertion that there is a world, a realm of “sense”; and sense is the contribution of subjectivity. The world makes sense because man is in it.

We might illustrate this in the world of values. The question has always been asked and probably will always be asked whether values are objective, which is to say inherent in objects which are valued, or subjective, which is to say contributed by subjects who evaluate. As a matter of fact, it seems that an adequate answer can be given only if we recognize not only that values are both subjective and objective, but that they would be neither if they were not both. There is no contradiction in saying that a value is both subjective and objective; rather it is the only way in which values can be at all. Values are “created,” because without subjects to whom they are values there would be no values, and because the very being of values is a doing of the subjects for whom they are values. To say that values are subjective is not to say that they are not objective; it is to affirm the only kind of objectivity that makes sense. Without subjectivity there can be no objectivity; there can be no objects; there can be only chaos without significance. It can be said with truth that things are beautiful in themselves, provided we understand that “in themselves” does not mean that their beauty is entirely independent of the response which they elicit or are calculated to elicit. Things are beautiful or ugly, because there is in them that which can elicit from a subject the response which we have agreed to call aesthetic. They would not be beautiful, if there were no such response to be elicited, were there not subjects who can responds. This should not be interpreted as meaning that beauty is nothing but the response itself. Rather, beauty is the meaning of the response and what is calculated to elicit the response. The fact that there can be a response is necessary in order that there be beauty in any understandable sense of that term. Buy the same token, then, being is neither objective nor subjective, precisely because it is both. An object is in eliciting a response from a subject; the subject is in responding to objects. The Cartesian cogito, ergo sum, has recently been amended to read respondeo, ergo sum. To that we might add atque res sunt; the being of both subjects and objects is contained in the response of subjects to objects—or, better, in the reciprocal response of subjects and objects.

Thus, it is not, no more than in a case of beauty, the subjects which creates the being of its object; rather, the subject in being (or, if one prefers, in existing) actualizes itself as subjects and at the same time actualizes objects as objects—and, incidentally as “things”. To return to Kant, he was quite right in saying that things-in-themselves are unknowable, but it was not for the right reason. They are unknowable, not because the intellect is incapable of grasping them, but because there is no such thing-in-itself. In itself, we might say, there is no-thing. To be thing is to be related to subject, not to be independent. Nor is there room, on the other hand, for Fichte’s equally illusory “subject-in-itself”; to be subject is to be related to objects, not to stand in a splendid isolation. It is for this reason that the world of objectivity is not deformed by the contact with subjectivity. On the contrary, it is by its very contact with subjectivity that it becomes a

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world. It is the presence of subjects in the world which makes it to be a world; the subject-object relationship is a dialogue.

Obviously what has been said up to this point should not be understood merely in terms of a cognitional response to objects. That would be precisely the too-intellectualist approach. The world of being is a world capable of eliciting a variety of responses from subjects; and being which subjects exercise is precisely a variegated being of their response to the universe in which they are, including their response to other subjects. Just as it would be nonsense to speak of a subject for whom there are no objects, so it would be nonsense to speak of objects for which there are no subjects. Nor is this merely a question of subjects and objects being somehow related to each other, some sort of static mutual affinity; rather it is a mutual communication of being on the part of subjects and objects. The subject is subject not merely because it is related to objects, but because this relation is constitutive to the very objectivity of objects. Conversely, objects are not merely related to subjects; their relatedness constitutes the very subjectivity of subjects. We do not say of an object that, in addition to being, they are related to a subject; nor do we say of subjects that, in addition to being, they are related to objects. Neither is fully except by being related to its counterpart; each “creates” the other—and itself.

An investigation of this sort cannot, of course, say that this is what anyone who sets out to investigate being must find. There is no question here of claiming a privileged position, outside of which lies only error; rather it is a question of setting up a universe of discourse wherein one can intelligibly discuss what it is to be within the limits of that universe of discourse. The point is, however, that this is not merely an arbitrary universe, a universe of postulates; the claim is, rather, that such an inquiry provides viable insights into the universe of being in which we live—even though it does not pretend to say the last word on this universe.

Such a view is not a merely arbitrary, because it goes beneath the surface of what one individual means by saying of something that it is or of someone that he is. It is an attempt at a genuinely ontological inquiry, wherein the mystery of the being is, so to speak, given an opportunity to unravel itself. At various times in the history of philosophy, this inquiry has been pursued either from the point of view of the subject encompassing a universe or from the point of view of a universe encompassing all subjects. The present inquiry is an attempt to synthesize the two points of view. A universe which simply encompasses individual subjects cannot be other than opaque to these individuals. An individual subject which simply encompasses the universe cannot be other than arbitrary in its view of things. What is required, it would seem, is a universe which is a universe, only because there are subjects which make it so, and individual subjects who are subjects, only because they are in a universe which conditions there very being as subjects. Nor is this a return to the subjects-object dichotomy, which has long since proved itself to be the outstanding philosophical dead-end street. Rather it is an attempt to see all being as neither subjective nor objective, precisely because it is both.

There is a strong tendency, even among those who reject any psychology of faculties, to see consciousness as a sort of faculty whereby the human subject is

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conscious of that which is not subject, i.e. object. Might it not be better to describe consciousness as a way of being—of being conscious? From this view it would not be inaccurate to see the world as a whole of many parts, with conscious man at its center. But, it would, perhaps, be more accurate to look upon the world as a whole which is somehow conscious, precisely because one of its parts is conscious man, without whom it simply would not be a world. The world is a world because its way of being is a conscious way of being. If we can say that the whole man is conscious, even though that whereby it is conscious is but a part? To return to the question: “What does a thing do when it is?”, we might reply: “When a thing is, it is conscious,” If this statements needs softening we might amend it to read: “To be is to share in being conscious of itself, because, as a world, it necessarily includes subjects who are conscious, and who, by their consciousness, contribute to the being of objects which are, merely as objects not conscious. The being of a non-conscious, on the other hand, enriches the being of the consciousness. To be, we might say, is to act, and the being of the whole is interaction—the kind of interaction which belongs to an integrated organism.

From a personalist point of view I can say: I exist because others exist; my being as subject is to be related, not only to objects but also to other subjects—to be with. But, from other point of view I can say: I am because the world is, and the world is because I am. I am not swallowed up in the world; I am not de-individualized. Rather, I am the more individualized, because I am in the world—my dignity as a man, as an individual, is not distinct from my being in the world, whereby the world is precisely this world, and I am precisely this man.

Nor does derogate from the dignity of the creator, who stands above both the world and man in it. Rather it enhances that dignity, since it make Him not the Creator of puppets, but of creators. To be is to act, and to act is to create. It is, of course, not to create the way God creates; but it is to share in the creative act whereby the universe realizes the potentialities inherent in it. Through his encounter with the world man creates himself; and it is in this encounter that the world becomes a world for him—which is ultimately to say that only through man can the world have a significance.

New York

READING MARCEL: 3 EASY PIECES FOR BEGINNERS

by: Ramon Vicente Sunico

I. TO BEGIN

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This essay sets out to do two things: a) to give the beginning students a few insights—tricks of the trade, so to speak—into how a philosophical essay may be read and b) to explain in a few broad strokes what the French thinker, Gabriel Marcel, is trying to say in the excerpted article, Primary and Secondary Reflection: The Existential Fulcrum.” I should emphasize the words “broad strokes” because, while this essay sets out to do the two things mentioned above, it does not set out to do your reading—nor your thinking—for you.

By now, you should have had a few introductory classes about philosophy and how it is essentially a commitment to truth. Many things we do, of course, hinge on this dedication to truth. And, if we were to use the term “philosophy” in as wide a sense as possible, we would see that a scientist can be as much a philosopher as those people who live and breathe within the walls of our Philosophy Department. Indeed, ages ago, there were no scientists, only natural philosophers. At any rate, philosophy and your philosophy classes will demand a certain honesty from you and about your self. “Yourself” here pertains not only to who you are but how you are: what you do as well as who you are with.

On a finer, more precise level, however, “Philosophy” implies a historical tradition. Go to the library and you will see a section, a set of shelves forming a category “Philosophy.” On these shelves are what librarians and publishers,—at least, classify to be a philosophy books. There represents a group of individuals whose commitment—to truth—is carried out and articulated in a certain way. Here, scientists, statesmen, educators—whatever—may be out of place. This is so tradition defines. Just as a physicist uses a peculiar language with which only other physicists are comfortable, the philosopher has inherited from the many other philosophers before and around him (or her) a way of talking about things, if not a way of doing things. Even his or her problems have been inherited.

This brings us now to you. You are actually on the edge of the jungle where both old and new things await you. On one hand, you share with all human beings the desire to know and the desire to know the truth. On the other hand, you now face a discipline which you are, as yet unfamiliar with but which you have to undergo.

The first thing to realize then is that Philosophy is a highly verbal discipline. You use words here more than you use equations or graphs. You deal with thoughts and feelings more than you deal with quantities and measurements. So, as you begin, be honest and ask yourself: How good am I with words?

Already, an honest answer may indicate the smoothness or the rockiness of the path ahead.

Secondly, the first state of philosophy which you will get could be a deceptive one. This is so because many of the words you encounter will seem to be the same ones you use in everyday life—outside the classroom, in the cafeteria and so on. But as I have just said, this can be misleading. For, while philosophy might not use graphs or formulae,

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it does have its own jargon, its own argot. Once again, let us use the example of the sciences. In physics, the word Force has a very specific meaning. It is a technical term denoting the product of a relationship between Mass and acceleration (other technical terms). Yet, outside the lab, we also use the word force in a variety of ways: “Don’t force me to kiss you!” (force as a verb); “Forcing through ka!” (force as a technical term in another discipline, basketball); “Join the Air Force and discover God.” (force as collective noun).

You can think of similar cases in economics, sociology, literature and so on. Notice also that the farther you get from disciplines which use “Science,” the harder it is to tell the technical term (or jargon) from ordinary language. (It’s as if the numbers, formulae and graphs also serves as cues to our understanding, telling us to be careful.) The same applies to philosophy only there are less cues which allows us to distinguish technical term from ordinary word. Usually it will take a quiz to teach you the difference. At any rate, as you begin to read Marcel, try to be sensitive to the crucial words which he emphasizes or repeats. In a highly verbal field such as this, it is important to develop your vocabulary. Just it is advisable to know your definitions in science, it is also advisable to look up the meanings of Marcel’s words in the dictionary. In many cases, the convenient technique of guessing at the meaning of a word from context won’t be enough. Remember that learning a new discipline always entails learning a new language.

Let us take the title of Marcel’s article for example: “Primary and Secondary reflection: The Existential Fulcrum.” Which word or words do you think need explanation? Which are the crucial terms? The colon (:) indicates a relationship while cutting the title in half. It could tell us that the first half is explained by the other. It could also be that “The Existential Fulcrum” is an example or illustration of what “Primary and Secondary Reflection” mean. Now, the work before you begins to unfold. At the very least, as you enter into the text, it would not be unreasonable to expect a discussion of “Reflection.” “Reflection,” of course, is a common enough word specially when sets against “Existential Fulcrum.” It is one of those words which may have both an “ordinary” and a “technical” meaning. As you go on then, the word “reflection” should serve to orient you from losing your bearings.

II. SKIMMING AND ORIENTATION

In the last sentence of the previous paragraph, I used words drawn from navigation (e.g. orient, bearings) and compared this to the act of reading. Indeed, one can, with some advantage, imagine the text to be a sea stretching out before us. If we were to set out sail on this sea, we would first scan the horizon and survey the expanse before us. Watching waves, we study the surface. Or if we were to swim instead, we first test the water. Before the decision to immerse ourselves in the sea is made, we dip part of ourselves and hold the rest of us in reserve. This study of the surface, this testing of the

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water may be likened to skimming. We do this in order not to get lost or in order not to drawn.

As you get to know the writing style of Marcel, you may discover how easy it is to drawn. Of course, his style is part of the reason. Perhaps the way Marcel thinks is confusing. On the other hand, it is also possible that what he thinks about—the objects of his thought—is deep and complex. Philosophers, being individuals, all have their own manifest ways of philosophizing. Some are more systematic than others. Some are more exciting than others. Some proceed slowly building conclusions upon premisses. Others carry you with along colors, ideas and inspiration all reasoning with examples and figures of speech.

With Marcel, there is no attempt to package, schematize and streamline the process of thought. Rather, he seems intent in showing how a thinking subjects oscillates between receiving data from the world outside us—things people and events—and world inside us—our own thoughts and feelings. Thus, he seems to avoid a clear but static statement of preposition in favor of an active stream of examples and insights which, at their best, strike resonant chords inside the reader. You will notice this when you skim. With skimming, one utilizes a certain distance from the text in order to form a general map reflecting evident trends and even breaks in the over-all surface of the text. With skimming, you can arrive at an outline which shows quickly how you are to go on and how to approach the text more easily.

Reflection

To outline a philosophical essay usually means to highlight the ideas and propositions in the work as well as in the relationships among these same ideas and propositions. You will also find relationships between these ideas and propositions in the text and your own ideas and opinions about life. Some ideas serve to support more general ideas. Others qualify instead of amplify. Still others define, exemplify, analogize, defend, attack, etc. with Marcel, there are lots of example which, while serving to clarify an abstract concept by presenting a concrete example familiar to you, become objects for further discussion later on. Also in Marcel one discovers a number of digressions. Yet, a few of these digressions—as you continue reading—turn out not to be digressions after all. Rather, they prepare you for a deepening of the discussion at hand. At any rate, skimming allows you to foresee how the current of the text will move on. It will help you anticipate eddies (i.e. whirlpools) of meaning which are more attractive than others.

Notice, for example, how Marcel begins his discussion of reflection. He cites three examples with each offering a deeper view than previous one of how a person reflects. Never mind then that the very first sentences of the article are long, boring and confusing: with skimming, you can see that what comes later is what can explain what you’ve read before. To quote the poet Roethke: “You learn by going where you have to go.” You can see Marcel developing the meaning of reflection as remembering, then as paying attention to one’s own thoughts and then as studying the very value of one’s existence (notice how the word existence creeps into remind us of “The Existential Fulcrum). Moreover, Marcel, with his examples, manages to highlight other important

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ideas pertinent to reflection: why it comes about, what its objects are and even how it stands in relation to other things we do (such as living).

Reflection is shown to be intimate relationship with experience. Indeed, Marcel tries to show that experience implies reflection, that experience is more than the simple meeting of itself (inside) and sense data of world (outside). This two do not just touch; they meet. Experience thus implies not just a juxtaposition of perceiver and perceive but a meaningful and creative relationship between the two, a dialectic.

Can we say now that reflecting completes experience? This it achieves through acquiring and/ or endowing meaning from and upon the event which is the meeting of self and world. See then how Marcel manage the apparently ordinary word “reflection.” He shows the many different meanings possible in the word and in the act itself.

What does Marcel do when he does this? He reflects upon reflection. In the process, he describe two modes or types of reflection: the primary where one recounts, remembers, studies, analyzes or dissects experience and the secondary where one recovers, reconciles, relates or synthesizes a previously isolated and analyzed experience. This secondary is redeemed secondarily mainly because it completes and finishes the action of primary reflection: anyone can take a watch apart but only the one who can put it back together again, makes it run and uses it truly understands watches.

Marcel shows the processes of reflection. One can begin thinking of what one owns (by noticing it is lost), proceed to what owning means, go to an ask who one is and thence consider the very meaning and value of an existence where one is and owns at the same time. Thus does Marcel begins by asking, “Where is my watch?” (p.1) And end by wondering, “Really, who am I?” (p.6).

The Existential Fulcrum

As we shall see, this last question begins Marcel’s next discussion. In discussing “Primary and Secondary Reflection,” Marcel, for all his digressions and convolutions, subtly and surely leads us into the second half of the title: “The Existential Fulcrum.”

Previously, Marcel proceeded from discussing “What did I lose” how did I lose it? What did I say? How could I have lied?” into focusing upon the “I” who loses or owns, who lies or searches for the truth. Similarly, his analysis of reflection has proceeded from what one reflects upon to WHO reflects. (Incidentally, the surprise answers to both these questions is the same: it is the “I” who remains in question.)

In trying to answer this question about one’s identity, Marcel once again falls back on an example on which to begin his analysis. He asks to remember times when we were asked by others or ourselves who we are. As in his reflection on reflection, Marcel first draws on the common experiences of our daily lives. He cites the common enough practice of filling out forms which supposedly identify us. He encourages us to recall, to evoke our experience of completing a bio-data sheet or a resume or even a school

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registration form. Having recalled the experience, Marcel then concentrates on a peculiar feeling, namely, that whenever we read what we have written down, no matter how completely we have filled out the form, to us, the date seems both accurate and inaccurate. Yes, everything we have written down about ourselves (name, date of birth, sex, weight, height, address, educational attainment, etc., plus the required ID photo) is true, yet none of these, either singly or ensemble, quite captures the true “I”, the vital self who lives. Thus, I am both identified and alienated by my own fact sheet.

Clearly, Marcel sees this as indicative of the complexity of asking who we are. Clearly, in the question “Really, who am I?” the terms “I” and “am” have to be reflected upon. The definition of “I” depends on what we understand by “am,” a form of the verb “to be,” a verb of existence. Marcel has led us into a reflection on our way of be-ing, on our personal existence.

With this, Marcel now refers you to previous discussion on “how I am” within the historical tradition which is philosophy. He cites the great modern posers of this question: Descartes and Kant. As he does so, the sensitive reader (you?) is expected to become more and more aware of the history contained in such technical terms as “subject,” “cogito” and so on. This essay, however, has gone on too long already so, concerning the history of philosophy, it leaves you now to your own and your teacher’s devices.

What is more to the point is that, having asked his question, Marcel again tries to reflect on our experience of existence or, rather, our experience which is existence. He begins simply enough by observing that 1) we are bodies 2) among other bodies. When we speak of existence, we also mean the sensual nature of our existence. You see your body. You see other bodies. Because of your body, you can be seen. But also, with and through your bodies, you see (and feel, taste, touch, hear, smell, etc.).

This description of life as sensed and sensing seems simple enough. Yet, as in the example of filling out a form, something paradoxical emerges. While we are easily of our bodily presence, our existence is not exhausted by being or having a body. We are bodies but we, each of us, are immediately and spontaneously aware that we are not mere bodies. Just as your bio-data is inadequate so too is your body’s data inadequate to comprehend what each of us means by “I am.”

Marcel has brought us to the point where we can more accurately see ourselves be! He has shown us that profound experience of body which both articulates or manifests our existence and points beyond a merely material existence.

Indeed, in reflecting upon “how we be,” Marcel has tried to evoke that indescribable, irreducible self-awareness of our own existence. On this everything hinges. On this everything is poised in dynamic balance: the existential fulcrum. Having primarily analyzed and dissected the concepts of “I” and “am,” he now, subsequently (and secondarily) recuperates the many propositions and qualifications and points finally

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to that indescribable, exhilarating and indubitable moment when we are stuck with wonder by the vivid consciousness that we are.

III. ON DOGS AND BODIES

In the second half of this article, Marcel is brought by his reflection on a reflection to a further reflection on the body. He has been brought to this pass by having to ask, “Really, who am I?” or what may be rephrased in a less dramatic fashion as “Really, what does it mean: I exist?”

From here, it is relatively easy to see why Marcel now centers on our personal experience of body. The body is the most obvious part of us. Through it and with it, we relate to and with the world. At the same time, because of it, the world manages to relate to, and with us. Because we have a physical, material body, the physical and material world becomes present and available to us (via our bodily senses). Even more than this, because of our bodies, we become present (read palpable) to other bodies in this world (human or not).

In concentrating on this phenomenon called body, however, we have for the moment regarded the body as an object—an object of our interest, an object of our intention, an object of our reflection. In asking who we are, we have, so to speak, isolated one aspect of our being: the body. And where it was once just another part of the asker (the one who reflects), it now has to take the stage as that distinct one about which we are asking questions (that which is reflected upon).

In asking about the body, we refer to our experience. The body is some thing which the person who owns it uses. It is an instrument and a possession. I get a brilliant thought; I use my lungs to vibrate air through my voice box past the echo chambers which are my throat and mouth to express this thought (so that other bodies may hear). Or, I can tell my hand to pick a pen up, to move this way and that until viola! My thought is not only expressed but preserved. The same is true of passionate feelings: my body, my lips, my tongue, my arms, my fists—all may become a medium, a means through which I present my self to the world.

My body then is something I own. It is something I use. It is something I have.

Enter the dog. One way through which Marcel probes more deeply into an idea is by comparing this idea against other ideas. In this case, he compares owning a body with owning other things: inanimate objects as well as animate ones, watches as well as dogs.

Inasmuch as the body is an instrument in our dealing with the world, it is like a watch or a dog. It extends our self. The watch allows us a way of structuring our activities, regulating the way we do things, stretching our attention throughout the day. The dog serves another as another set of sharper eyes, sharper teeth, shaper ears and so forth.

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Yet, unlike our body, the watch cannot feel. It ticks but it does not talk. Here, the dog is less like the watch and more like our body: it breathes, it moves on its own, it lives. Moreover, in fortunate cases, the remarkable dog can reciprocate our feelings for it. It can love us back; it can hate us back.

Now, however, the similarities among these objects cease. This is so because no matter how dear a watch becomes for us (sentimental value included), no matter how much we love it; we are physically distinct from it. I love my watch but when I lose it, it is not I who disappears. I love my dog but when my dog dies, I do not die as well.

We are now arrive at a most peculiar and, I daresay, a most wonderful relationship between my body and me: I not only HAVE a body; I AM this body. I can tell my finger to scratch my nose but when my nose itches, I itch. When tears slip from my eyes down my cheeks, it is not just my eyes which cry: I weep.

Exclamatory Awareness

In his reflection, upon our experience of existence, Marcel, in the motion of primary reflection has sought to dissect our experience. He has separated our bio-data from ourselves. He has bisected the body from the “I”. yet towards the end of his article, Marcel confronts (but cannot discuss further) one core experience of existence which, for its simplicity and vividness, for its vivacity and depth, defies further analysis and schematization. Here perhaps the usefulness of philosophy ends and the wonder of poetry begins. Here one cannot explain; one only evokes.

The experience of exclamatory awareness is one which involves, one which seizes (as in bulaga!) the total person. It is not merely a pure intellectual event. It is not just an emotional moment nor is it mere physical sensation. Indeed, it involves the whole person and all this talking and writing about it may only serve to complicate and befuddle what is a simple, though not a shallow, issue.

Marcel asks us to recall those moments when, as in flash, we become aware that we are alive, that we are here now! We do not arrive at this awareness as one arrives at a conclusion from premisses or extrapolated data. It arrives at us. It just happens that we are so alive that this being alive overflows into awareness. These moments appear to be the special possessions of childhood but only because, as we age, the sophistications of our thoughts, the complexities of our emotions and, indeed the very complications of our body all serve to bury the indubitable, immediate discovery that we are.

The child awakes and upon waking smiles. One day, some time after you were born, how did your being alive express itself?

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MY BODY*

by Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz

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Any philosophy of man is a systematic and holistic attempt to answer the question of “who am I?” In our day-to-day life, we may be so engrossed in our activities that we do not bother anymore to question what seems clear and obvious to us. The question of “Who am I?” is such a case. It is surprising to ask this to ourselves. At first glance, isn’t this question so simple? What could be clearer and obvious to us than the reality of our “I”? But this is only at first glance, from a superficial and uncritical natural attitude. Certain events in our life (like sickness, failures, death) can awaken us and bring us to the limits of our ordinary experience. And then, the once-so-simple question deepens, begins to complicate, and beckons on us: who am I?

An important aspect in answering this question is the experience of my body. If I were asked about myself, my answers inescapably have reference to my body. What are you? Man, because I have a form, activities and a body of man. Who are you? I am Juan Santos, tall, mestizo-looking long haired, with small ears and a big belly due to beer drinking (isa-pa-nga!). Where am I? Here, where my body is; look at me, look at my body. In these ways, I seem to say I am my body.

But there are times too that know I am not just my body. I am a man also because I have an understanding and mind of man. When I say to my parents, “I love you,” this one loving them is not just this tall-mestizo-looking-long-haired-with-small-ears-fat-belly-etc.” body of mine but my whole spirit and will. And it can happen that while my body is in room B-109, listening to a boring lecture on the theories of Lobachevski or the poems of Chairil Anwar, I am taking a walk at the beach, along with my sweetheart, watching the sunset.

On one hand, I recognize an intimate relation of myself with my body, and thus truly say: I am my body. Yet, on the other hand, I also know that I cannot reduce my whole humanity to my body. I am also spirit and will: my body is only something I have: I have my body. What is the meaning of this paradox?

Some Answers from the History of Philosophy

Classical Views. Already in early times, the ancient philosophers of Greece tackled question of the human body. What is the body of man? Is it truly a part of his being man? Or it is just a contingent “addition” to his self? It is a bestial imprisonment of the human spirit or its perfection?

According to Plato (ca. 430-350 B.C.), man is his soul. This is the essence of his humanity and the source of all his activities. In the Phaedrus, Plato uses the following metaphor.1 The soul is a charioteer of two winged-horses. One is sensible and flies high to the heavens to reach the light of truth and goodness. The other comes from a bad breed and because of neglect and sinfulness, had lost his wings and fallen to earth to assume human form. No wonder heavenly and earthly tendencies are in conflict in the spirit of man. The taking of a human body is an unfortunate accident and a cruel imprisonment of the free and pure soul. Consequently, Plato states in the Phaedo, that the true philosopher strives to evade body because

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Surely the soul can best reflect when it is free of all distractions such as hearingor sight or pain or pleasure for any kind—that is, when it ignores the body andbecomes as far as possible independent, avoiding all physical contacts and association as much as it can, in it search for reality.2

In death the true man is freed from his imprisonment to see perfectly the pure light of absolute truth.

In the view of Aristotle (304-322 B.C.), man is the whole of his body and soul. There is no sense in asking if body and soul are one. They are one like the oneness of the ugly and his figure. The relation of the body to the soul is the relation of matter to form.3

there is no matter that is not informed by form, and no form that is not the form in matter. Likewise, the body and soul of man are only two aspects of the whole man. In De Anima, we read the following observation:

A further problem presented by the affections of soul is this: are they all affect-tions of the complex of body and soul, or is there any one among them peculiarto the soul by itself? To determine this is indispensable but difficult. If we consider the majority of them, there seems to be in no case in which the soul canact or be acted upon without involving the body; e.g. anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. Thinking seems the most probable exception; but ifthis too proves to be a form of imagination or to be impossible without imagination it too requires a body as a condition of its existence.4

The Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages also dealt on the question of man’s body. In the City of God, St. Augustine (354-430) mentions that man can be divided into body and soul, and no doubt the soul is more real and important. But is it only the soul that is man, and its relation to the body similar to the relation of the charioteer to his horse? This is not possible, because the charioteer is not a charioteer without the horse; similarly a soul is not a soul if it is not the soul of a body. It is possible

* Reprinted with the permission of the author and translated from the original Pilipino by Manuel B. Dy, Jr.

11 Phaedrus, 246-47. 2 2 Phaedo, 65.3 3 De Anima II, I. 4 4 Ibid., 1, 2.

that only the body is man, and its relation to the soul is similar to the relation of the jar with the water? Neither is this possible, because the end of the jar is to be filled with water and the end likewise of the body is to be filled with the soul. Man is the unity of the body and soul, and he can exist only as this unity.5

The great St. Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274) in the Summa Theologiae also said that the soul is not a man: “For just as it belongs to the nature of man to be composed of soul, flesh, and bones.”6 And in another place, he further states that although the body is not part of the essence of the body, nevertheless the very essence of the soul inherently needs to be one with the body.7

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It is Rene Descartes (1596-1650) who sets the kind of questioning regarding the human body in the present history of the philosophy. A prominent French philosopher and mathematician, he is considered the father of modern philosophy and analytic geometry. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes explains the profound and real difference between the body and soul of man. In the first meditation, he states the methodic doubt: we should doubt all that we know because, first, they come from our senses which can be mistaken or can deceive us, and second, this can be just the result of a dream. Even the certain and universal truths of religion and mathematics I can think of as only imaginary, the work of a bad spirit.8

In the second meditation, Descartes shows that even if I use the methodic doubt, there is one truth that I can not deny or doubt: I think, therefore, I am (Cogito, ergo sum). Even if I fully deny or doubt this, I only prove by my denial and doubting that I am thinking and existing. Descartes continue to ask, But what is this I which I have proven to exist? And his answer: “A thinking being (res cogitans). What is a thinking being? It is a being which doubts, which understands, which affirms, which denies, which wills, which rejects, which imagines also, and which perceives.”9

In the last meditation, Descartes adds that even we can prove the reality of the world and material things, the real essence of man is still different from his body. He stresses,

55 De Civitate Dei, XIX, 3.6 6 Summa Theologiae, 1a, 75, 4.7 7 Ibid., 1a, 75, 7.8 8 Meditationes de prima philosophia, I.9 9 Ibid., II.

And although perhaps, or rather certainly, as I will soon show, I have a bodywith which I am very closely united, nevertheless, since on the one hand Ihave a clear and distinct idea of myself in so far as I am only a thinking andnot an extended being, and since on the other hand I have a distinct idea of abody in so far as it is only an extended being which does not think, it is certain that this “I” (-that is to say, my soul, my virtue of which I am-) is entirely (and truly) distinct from my body and that it can (be or) exist without it.10

At first glance, for Descartes, man’s body is just a material thing, extended, and as such does not seem to differ from a complex machine like a computerized robot. Yet Descartes himself also admits that the answer is not as simple as that. He mentions, again in the Meditations, that we cannot say, for instance, that the relationship of the body and soul is like of that captain and his ship, another metaphor of Plato.11 If the ship meet a

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collision, it is only the ship that damaged or “hurt” but not the captain who observes the damage. But when my body is hurt, I do not just observe the incident; I am involved. When I am slapped, for instance, by a storekeeper in the market with whom I have quarreled, I do not say only my cheeks but I am hurt.

If we read Descartes himself, we can see that his inquiry is rather complicated, and he does not really say that man is “a ghost inside a machine.”12 In several writings, he admits that the body and soul of man is real unity.13 However, this unity itself of the body and soul cannot be known and discussed by philosophy due to its inherent ambiguity. In Descartes view, the aim of philosophy is to reach clear and distinct ideas regarding reality. Mathematical truth is for him the model of philosophical truth. But the truth regarding the unity of man’s body and soul cannot fit into this frame of thinking. Thus, even if Descartes recognizes the unity of man’s body and soul as a truth based on experience, he emphasizes that this is not a philosophical truth. In a letter to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, he summarizes his opinion regarding this matter:

The soul can be apprehended only by the pure understanding; body, i.e. extension, shapes and movements, can also be known by understanding alone, butit is known much better by the understanding aided by the imagination; andfinally, the things which pertain to the union of the soul and the body can be

known only obscurely by the understanding alone, and even by the understanding aided by the imagination, but they are known very clearly by the senses. Hence, those who never philosophize, and who make use only of their senses,do not doubt that the soul moves the body and that the body acts on the soul….it is in dealing only with life and everyday affairs, and in refraining from studying and meditating on things which exercises the imagination, that we learn toapprehend the union of the soul and the body.14

10 10 Ibid., VI.11 11 Ibid., Laws, XII, 961.12 12 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 13-25.13 13 Letters to Regius, Arnauld and Princess Elizabeth; and replies to the fourth, fifth, and six

objections.14 14 Letter to Princess Elizabeth, 28 June 1643.Gabriel Marcel. In present times, a number of philosophers, notably the

phenomenologists, have criticized the philosophy of Descartes. One of them is Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). Like Descartes, Marcel is a Frenchman, but unlike Descartes, he is a playwright and musician. His propensity is not the clear and skeletal order of mathematics but life itself and the clear-vague world of drama and music.

In Marcel’s philosophy, man’s embodiment is not simply a datum alongside other data but the primary datum that is the starting point and basis of any philosophical reflection.15 Descartes failure, according to Marcel, lies in the imprisonment of his methodic doubt which aspires for mathematics-like truths. This way of thinking is on the level of primary reflection. In this kind of reflection, I place myself outside of the thing that I am inquiring on. An ob-jectum (“thrown in front”). It has nothing to do with myself

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nor do I have anything to do with it. I take each of the parts (analysis), study their ordering (systematize) and arrive at some clear and fixed ideas regarding the thing itself (conceptualize). But in this manner, the body studied in primary reflection is no longer my body but a body. “A body” is an objective idea apart from me; I have nothing to do with it nor does it have anything to do with my life. This is the body talked about in anatomy, physiology, and the other sciences. Because this is an objective and universal idea, this can be the body of anybody else, and consequently, of nobody.

There is a particular value in primary reflection on the body (Medicine, for example, would not progress without the sciences that study the human body), but this is not the whole truth. In order to come closer to an understanding of the totality of all that exists (and isn’t this the primary aim of philosophy?), we have to go back and root our reflection on the concrete experience of my body. We have to enter in a level of secondary reflection. In this kind of reflection, I recognize that I am part of the thing I am investigating, and therefore, my discussion is sub-jective (“thrown beneath”). I have something to do with it and it has something to do with me. Because I participate in the thing, I cannot tear it apart into clear and fixed ideas; I have to describe and bring to light its unique wholeness in my concrete experience. In using secondary reflection, we discover that what exists is not “a body” but “my body”—a body full of life, eating, sleeping, happy, afflicted, etc., my body that is uniquely mine alone.

Marcel’s philosophy of the body is an inquiry on the meaning of the experience of my body.

If we used secondary reflection and recognize the experience of my body as the starting point and the foundation of our inquiry, we can see that it does not make sense to separate the I and the body and to ask, “What is the relation of the I to the body?” The reason is because the body referred to here is no longer “my body” but the abstract “a body”.

15 15 Marcel summarizes his discussions on the body in Chapters 5 and 6 of The Mystery of Being, I, Reflection and Mystery, translated by G.S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960).

But what is mean by my in “my body?” Is it the my of possession (avoir) that I refer to when I talk of “my ballpen” or “my dog”? Is the logic of “I have a body” the same as “I have a dog”?

Marcel shows that in order for me to possess a dog, we must have an inter-relationship with each other. I must have a claim, for instance, on the dog: I decide when it will stay and I take care of it or have it taken care of. Likewise, the dog must recognize my claim over it: it follows me, it loves or fears me, etc. In short, I must have responsibility and control over what I possess.

At first glance, it seems that this is also the relationship I have with my body. First, like having my dog, my body is mine and mine alone. Even in societies where

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slavery exists and the masters own the body of their slaves, the slaves experience that this is unjust and violates their rights as human beings. If they do not realize this, then we can say their humanity is destroyed. Secondly, I have a responsibility over my body and I take care of it; I nourish it and let it sleep, bathe it, give it pleasure, etc. The limit of these examples is the ascetic who evades whatever pleasures of the body; it is difficult to say if he is still included in the experience of “my body.” Thirdly, I have control over my body. It can do whatever I want it to do if it can—sit, walk, go out of the room, drink Un-cola, talk, etc.—if I so desire.

There is validity in liking “I have my body” to “I have my dog,” but there is also a limitation. Even if I intimate with my dog, I cannot deny that our lives are still separate. It can be in the house while I am in the movie house; it was born while I was in my teens, it may die earlier than I. This is not the case with my body: our location and history are inseparable. Wherever I am, there also is my body, and wherever my body is, there I am too.

Upon reconsideration of secondary reflection, it does not make sense too to consider the relation with my body as only an instrument. If I say I own my body, I treat it like an instrument that I possess and use in order to possess and use other things in the world. Only by means of my body, for instance, can I possess and use this ballpen, this table, this car, this building and others. Is my body then an instrument?

An instrument is an extension or reinforcing of a power or part of my body. The eyeglasses reinforce my sense of sight; the car extends the “ability” of my feet to travel; the clothes and building extend our skin; and the hammer further reinforces my hand, the computer our brain, and so on. If my body were an instrument, it would need some other body that extends and reinforces, and this body would also need another body, and thus we would arrive at an unending series of bodies ad infinitum. Clearly this is an absurdity that is contrary to our experience.

For Marcel, the body that I can say I have is a body-object, “a body” that I or any body can use. This is the body studied by primary reflection of the sciences. But if I treat my body as only a possession, its been mine loses its meaning. The experience of my body is the experience of I-body (body-subject). Here secondary reflection recuperates and states that there is no gap between me and my body. In short, I am my body.

If I say I am my body, this does not imply that I am the body that is the object for others, the body seen, touched, felt by others. Like the dualism of Descartes, this materialistic view is imprisoned in the Procrustean bed of primary reflection and reduces the experience of my body to the idea of “a body”. “I am my body” has only a negative meaning. It simply states that I cannot separate my self from my body. My being-in-the-world is not the bodily life alone nor the spiritual life alone but the life of an embodied spirit (‘etre incarnee’).

Marcel admits that it is difficult to conceive of this experience of “my body” in a clear and distinct manner. Thinking involves making use of ideas that mediates the

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experience or thing itself investigated. But the experience of “my body” is what Marcel calls “non-instrumental communion.” My body cannot be framed in an instrumentalist idea, and if I only think of it. I have not really reached the essences of the experience. My body is a unity sui generis and this unity is inconceptualizable. I do not think of my body; I feel it. This feeling that makes known my body is termed by Marcel as “sympathetic mediation.” If we want our thinking to be faithful to experience, we need to use concepts that point to this feeling (directional concepts). And this can be fulfilled only if we enter into secondary reflection and humbly return to the experienced reality of ordinary life.

The life of Embodied Spirit

We begin our reflection on the experience of my body by recognizing its paradoxical character. On one hand, I cannot detach my body from my self; they are not two things that happen by chance to be together. Rather, myself is absolutely embodied. Likewise, on the other hand, I cannot reduce my self to my body: I also experience my self as an I—spirit and will that can never be imprisoned in my flesh and bones. That is why we can say there are two faces shown in the experience of my body: “I have my body” and “I am my body”.

It is very tempting for any erudite person, philosopher or scientist, to forget this paradox and fix his attention to only one side of the experience. This precisely is the danger of any primary reflection: our inquiry becomes clear and distinct but we get farther away from real experience. The paradox is the experience itself, and this should be the one described by the philosophy by means of secondary reflection.

The body as intermediary. I experience myself as being-in-the-world through my body. My body acts as the intermediary between the self or subject and the world.16

1616 In this part, I am indebted to some ideas of William Luijpen in his Existential Phenomenology (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 274-82.

When we use the term intermediary, we refer to one of two conflicting meanings. If I say, “X is the intermediary of Y and Z,” I may mean that because X, Y, and Z encounter or become closer to each other or come to an agreement. Let us take this example from the story of Macario Pineda titled, “Kung Baga sa Pamumulaklak.” A young farmer named Desto wants to win the hand of the illustrious young lady named Tesang. However, he cannot just present himself directly to the lady of his affection to tell her of his feelings. He first approaches his uncle Mang Tibo who is the kumpare of Tesang’s parents so he can act as intermediary between him and Tesang’s parents. Only then do Tesang’s parents allow Desto to court her. In this situation the intermediary serves as the “bridge” for the union of the young man and the lady.

On the other hand, I can also mean the opposite. I can say that because X, Y, and Z are separated. Still with the example of courting, the parents of the girl may stand between our affection and prevent our being sweethearts. In the old film of Virgo Production, often Lolita Rodriguez plays the role of the “other woman” who stands between the beautiful relationship of the couple Eddie Rodriguez and Marlene Dauden. Here the intermediary is not a bridge but an obstacle.

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Now, when I say my body is the intermediary between my self and the world, I refer to the two meanings of intermediary. On one hand, because of my body, an encounter and agreement occurs between my self and the world. In reality, the encounter of the experience of my self and the experience of the world can only take place in the experience of my body. Because of my body, I experience the world as my body and we are familiar to each other. Because of my body, the chair I am sitting on is hard, the sunset is as red as a rose, the effect of the lambanog on my empty stomach is strong., the smell of Pacwood factory in San Pedro, Laguna, is like hell. Because of my body, I have an experience of “near” and “far,” “up” and “below” and many other relations in space. The world of man is different from the “world” of the fly because their bodies have different frameworks. My body is by nature intentional (directed to the world), and it creates and discovers meaning that I am conscious of in my existence. Thus, because of my body, the whole universe has and reveals a meaning for-me-and-for-man. Through my body, my subjectivity is openness to the world and the world is opened to me: the world fills me, and I fill the world.

On the other hand, also because of my body, I experience the world as separate from me. I am “not-world”, and the world is “not-I”. in the giving-meaning-to-the-world of my body, I also experience the self as “outside” of the world, I am the one who sees, and who gives-name to this or that. My body shows that I am not simply a thing among other things in nature. The oneness and wholeness of my body is different from the wholeness of the world. If I did not have this kind of distance from the world, I would become only a thing without an interiority; and clearly this view is not true to our experience of life. My body participates in the world but cannot be reduced to it.

The body is intersubjectivity. My body is not only an intermediary between me and the world but also between me and others. I show my self to the other and the other also shows himself to me through my body.

Because of my body, we interrelate with each other in many different ways—in our vision, actions, attitude, in our rituals, signs, and speech. We face each other in anger, tenderness, sadness, etc., because we have a body to present. If the other shows wrinkles on his forehead, he is indicating dissatisfaction, confusion or disapproval of what I am saying. The wry and red appearance of my face is an anger; my fixed-to-the-ground look and my sigh are my loneliness.17 The child does not have to disobey his parent, a look from the parent is enough to prevent him. Every part and action of my body says something of myself and my world. As what a poet says of an alluring young woman:

There’s a language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look outAt every joint and motive of her body.18

The language of my body has its own grammar and rhetoric in expressing my interiority. If I love Maria, I show this through my kisses, embrace, holding tenderly to her hand, etc., and also through exchanges of rings, daily telephone conversations, weekly visits. I respect my parents in kissing their hands; I accept a new acquaintance in

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shaking his hand. Embodiment is not just an additional or an external appearance; it is a gesture and appearance of what I truly feel inside. I cannot say I love my brothers and sisters if I do not show this love to them. I cannot say I respect my parents if my speech to them is not respectful. My faith is meaningless if I do not realize it in my daily actions and life. In social life too, the great aspirations of the citizenry need to be embodied in political, economic, cultural, (etc.) framework for this two have an enduring realization. A the apostle James says, “Whoever listens to the word but does not put it into practice is like a man who looks in a mirror and sees himself as he is. He takes a good look at himself and then goes away and at once forgets what he looks like.” (James 1, 22-23). The spirit and the word is fulfilled in the actions and deeds of the body.

However, as we have seen, there are two facts to the body as an intermediary. I cannot separate my intersubjectivity from its embodiment, but I cannot also reduce it to its embodiment. The spirit needs to be expressed and realize in the body but my body cannot fully state all of my subjectivity. I may truly love my family even if my body is far away from them. The fullness of my love for the beloved cannot be said in exchange in rings or in daily telephone conversations. My subjectivity transcends in expanse and depth its embodiment. Indeed my body shows myself, but it can also be a mask that hides what I truly think or feel. I can smile in the company of my friends while suffer inside of frustration (as they say, “laughing in the outside but crying in the inside”). The paradox of “I have my body” and “I am my body” also applies to my inter-relationship with others.

17 17 This is discussed in the chapters on the body in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) and Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (New York; Washington square Press, Inc., 1966).

18 18 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act 4, scene 5.

The value of the body. As the appearance and expression of my subjectivity, my body has a unique value and dignity. It directs me not only to the world and to others but also to God. St. Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians: “You know that your bodies are parts of the body of Christ. Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and who was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourselves but to God, he bought you for a price. So use your bodies for God’s glory.” (1 Corinthians 6, 15-18).

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HUMAN FREEDOM

by John F. Kavanaugh

“Well, right now,” said Castle. He picked up a book of matches. “I’m free to hold or drop these matches.”

“You will, of course, do one or the other,” said Frazier. “Linguistically or logically there seem to be two possibilities, but I submit that there’s only one in fact. The determining forces may be subtle but they are inexorable. I suggest that as an orderly person you will probably hold-ah! you drop them! Well, you see, that’s all part of your behavior with respect to me. You couldn’t resist the temptation to prove me wrong. It was all lawful. You had no choice. The deciding factor entered rather late, and naturally

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you couldn’t foresee the result when you first held them up. There was no strong likehood that you would act in either direction, and so you said you were free.”1

B. F. Skinner

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism…If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.2

Jean Paul Sartre

Life is a continual series of choices for the individual which a main determinant of choice is the person as he already is (including his goal for himself, his courage or fear, his feeling or responsibility, his ego-strength or “will power,” etc.). We can no longer think of the person as “fully determined” where this phase implies “determined only by forces external to the person.” The person, insofar as he is a real person, is his own main determinant. Every person is, in part, “his own project” and makes himself.3

Abraham Maslow

Source: John F. Kavanaugh, Introduction Towards a Philosophy of Man (New York: Corpus Books, 1970) pp. 65-92.

1 1 B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 258. Paperback. Hardback edition published in 1948.

2 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” from Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 290-291. The lecture of Sartre’s, translated by Mairet, has also been published in a small hardbound edition.

3 3 Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton: Insight Van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 151-152.

All men seem to be at least experientially aware of freedom in choice. The experience is so primary, in fact, that it is so difficult to conceive oneself operating as if there were no freedom at all. Data from literature, history, and personal communication present manifold testimony not only to freedom, but to the ambiguity, the deliberation, the irrevocability, and even the terror of it. It has often been maintained that this universal experience of freedom provides the greatest proof for its own existence.

Before I place an act, I am aware that I can or cannot do it, that I have various alternatives before me which represent various limited aspects of what might be good for me here and now or in the long run.

Even during the placement of the act itself, I can make myself aware of its dependence upon my continuing the act. And after the action is completed, I am aware that I did it, that it is mine—part of me, an extension of myself, a self-project, a creation. This final awareness often brings with it either a feeling of well being, accomplishment or guilt and failure.

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It is precisely this primary, universal experience, however, which has been called into question by Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and even historians. The three quotations introducing this chapter represent at least some of the positions taken.

B. F. Skinner, an extremely influential behavioral psychologist from Harvard, seems to affirm that man is not free because: a) all present behavior is controlled by previous behavior, including the entire network of environmental, psychological, and educational stimuli which have shaped our present characters and personalities, and b) all behavior (even the dropping of a book of matches) has motivational causes which are necessitating causes. We might summarize this basically by saying: man is determined by his historicity.

Quite to the contrary of Skinner, Jean-Paul Sartre’s position seems to be one of absolute indeterminism or total freedom. In Sartre’s view man actually has no history. The individual has only his future project which he make entirely of himself or for which he alone is responsible. Man is so free, so indeterminate, that he cannot even be defined.

Abraham Maslow offers something of a compromise position. Man cannot be reduced to his historicity, to his environment, to determinism: nor can man be totally divorced from them. To be a human person means: a) to have potentialities which liberate him from blind necessity—to be able to know, question and mould himself, and b) to be inserted into an environment and history which help him actualize these potentialities.

All three of these men will merit our further consideration, but before we begin to enter debate or controversy, we should first look reflectively at our own experience to see what important personal data should be accounted for within any theory that might be proposed.

Phenomenological Analysis of Reflection and Questioning

Involved in the very act of reflection which we are right now making in communicating and understanding, in Skinner’s act of offering the hypothesis of determinism, in Sartre’s formulation of absolute freedom, an din Maslow’s middle course, is an important phenomenon of human behavior that is worthy of our consideration. In philosophical and scientific reflection we experience a distance from objects and demands which are presently before us. We are able to “hesitate” cognitionally by questioning the status quo. Skinner is at least not enslaved by his environment or by blind necessity to the extent that he cannot question that environment and formulate hypotheses about it and invite others to share his attitudes. He shares, with Sartre, Maslow, you, and me, the ability to question, to hesitate, to achieve a distance from immediate necessity.

Therefore at least the immediate objects before us and the immediate tasks at hand do not compel or force us. We have by our questioning achieved a distance from

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and a certain control over the immediate environment. Moreover, all of us share in the ability to question our historicity and our past: Skinner does this with the American values of competition and properly accumulation; Sartre does it with traditional values of “natural law” and religious belief; we do it with the values of our country, our church, or our family. To this extent, we certainly are not slaved by our past—or hopeless determined by it.

All of this is to say that none of the objects, tasks, or values which I confront can exhaust the complexity of my desires and aspirations. None of them, on their own, can constrain me definitively or hinder me from making further considerations about the advisability of responding to them. Since—as we have already seen—I have the potentialities of knowing and wanting in ways that transcend the immediacy of any particular need, object, or satisfaction, by these very potentialities I achieve a distance from the demanding stimuli of things and I am able consequently to say something about my response to stimuli, to environment, to values is the first point worth noting with respect to the distance involved in questioning and cognitive hesitation.

A second important point is that I can reflect upon myself. To this extent, I acquire a distance from myself-as-one-immediately-concerned-with-the-present-stimulus. I can look at myself in relation to my present needs, my past experiences, my environmental heritage. Then reflecting upon myself, and seeing myself in relation to all these things, I can act upon this knowledge. I can take myself in hand, you might say, and consider the horizons of who I am, what my potentialities are, and what I might want to make of myself. The second point, then, is that with the distance I achieve from myself in self-reflection, I am able to achieve at least to some extent—self-position and self-determination.

Distance from the immediate demands before me, distance in seeing my self as related to my own state-of-affairs: this is why questioning is possible for me in the first place, because in the distance of self-reflection am able to take myself, my environment, my needs, and my values and say, “Wait a second—I do not have to do that.” By the very act of calling something into question I am liberating myself from the chains of necessity. Questioning then—which we saw as the starting point of philosophy—implies some minimal self-possession. Seen in this way, questioning implies that the questioner is free. In the act of freedom which questioning is, I am able to ask who, what, and why I am.

And only when I can possess myself can I give myself to the life-projects which I, in my philosophizing, have formulated. Thus questioning is not only the beginning of philosophy. It is also the initiation into the formulation of my own creative project which is my life—lived in fidelity to what I understand as my true identity.

To theses factors in my experience which I have been talking about I will assign the name freedom. It entails:

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a. achieving a distance in reflection from blind necessity with respect to external stimuli, environment, values, immediate objects, and present needs;

b. achieving a distance from myself in self-reflection whereby I am able to see myself in relation to present needs, past experiences, and future rewards; and whereby I am able to question this relationships;

c. achieving a possession of myself in reflecting who I am and what my potentialities might be—self-possession:

d. being able to say something about myself—self-determination.

All of this is not claim that I am absolutely free. it is merely to say that I do this, that Sartre does this, that Skinner does this, that anyone who can question and reflect upon himself can do it.

Free Choice: A Metaphysical Analysis of the Will

One might well ask what the notions of distance, questioning, and self-reflection have to do with the more common notions of free choice. And although the concept of self-possession is most fundamental to our understanding of freedom, a discussion from an analytic point of view concerning the freedom of the will might be valuable here. Here we will try to understand more fully the meaning of the will. We will try to investigate the nature of the dynamism involved when an act of the will is placed or when we choose something.

The will is an intellectual tendency, or a tendency toward an intellectually known good. It is different from sense appetite in that it is not “chained down” by the immediacy of the sensed object. (Note that the idea of distance is again operative here.) I know not only this object as good, but I know all objects, all subjects, all that is, as good in some respect—at least insofar as it exists. Anything then, because it can be seen as good, might be the object of my will—whether it is a good steak, a good person, a good feeling, or a good action. It is precisely because a thing or action can be seen as having good aspects that my will goes out to it or tends toward it. The very reason that I find myself having a tendency toward an object in the first place is because I sense it or know it as having good things about it. It is the “good” quality of the thing by which the will is drawn or moved.

We might say, then, that the will is naturally determined to seek to good; and if I were ever presented with an unmitigated, simple, unqualified good, my will would be certainly toward it. With this in mind—that all things are good in some way and that my will tends spontaneously toward them because they are somehow good—I recognize nevertheless that my “tending” is always concerned with an existential, real world which goods are precisely limited, finite, condition, interrelated, and ordered to other goods. If I am about to undertake a course of action, it is often evident that a number of possibilities—all of which have good and bad points to recommend and discredit them—are presented to me as alternatives. Since none of these alternative “goods” can be called unconditional or simple goods, and since none of them can exhaust the total meaning of

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good in which they all participate, none of them can force my will to a necessary choice. This is our reasoning:

a. the will is tendency toward an intellectually known good; thus it is precisely the “good” aspect of the object which attract my will;

b. the only object which could necessitate my will would be a good that is unconditionally good in an unqualified sense;

c. in many of my choices, however, the goods from which I select as “the good for me in this decision” are all conditioned, limited and qualified;

d. therefore freedom of choice can be operative in my behavior.

We might note that if there should be a case in which a particular good appeared to be absolute—due to the lack of knowledge or an excess of fear and emotion—then freedom of choice would be inoperable. Similarly we might ask ourselves: if the will tends toward the known good all the time, does that mean we never choose evil? If we reflect upon moments of deliberation and choice, it becomes rather clear that this is not the case. It is precisely in deliberation upon and selection of a particular good among many—in relation to our knowledge of who are we and what our potentialities may be—that moral failure occurs. I can freely choose a particular good-for-me-now which I consciously know it is not continuity with my identity and potentialities.4

Amid these reflections, however, we must not forget that we also experience our freedom as being severely limited and modified at times. As we have seen, knowledge is of primary importance. We cannot have self possession if we never arrive at an understanding of the self and its meaning. We cannot choose if we are not aware of its options, of different possibilities, of various alternatives. We can neither choose nor love that which we do not in some way know. We might even have experienced people who seemingly never have known goodness, nobility, kindness, or sympathy, and consequently were never able to exercise their freedom with respect to these values. Moreover, there are ample data that point to the importance of environment, conditioning, deprivation, habit, emotion, natural preferences, and one’s own history in the formation of projects and choices. All of these factors are undeniable, and they must be weighed with the factors that point to man’s freedom.

4 Some philosophers have questioned how the intellect and the will work together in the act of free choice. By my intellect, I know what I know—and I am not “free” in this respect. Inasmuch as I know various options, various goods are presented to the will by intellect. The intellect here is operating as a basis for the will’s final causality. Since these eligible goods are not seen as unconditional goods, the will is not necessitated to any particular good and can determine the intellect to what is called the “last practical judgment,” the will doing this by efficient causality. As Royce points out in this text, “The Will directs the intellect, so to speak, to focus upon this aspect of goodness.” This seems to be a reasonable explanation of the causality involved.

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Consequently, reflection upon my experience leads me to conclude at least initially that there are forces which can shape and influence my present and future behavior. Nonetheless, there are also data that cannot be ignored which point to the conclusion that determining “forces” do not totally destroy my ability to take possession of myself. As long as I can question, as long as I can achieve a distance from my environment and from immediate needs, and as long as I can know various values and goods as limited and conditional, I can take hold of my life and my situation and I can say something about it.

In conclusion I might say, first that I feel free. This is an important consideration. But feeling free does not necessarily make it so. The feeling of freedom does indicate, however, that such an experience is quite primary and fundamental to our behavior. Second and more important is that there are levels of human behavior which, upon reflective analysis, indicate freedom as self-possession and freedom of choice. These levels of behavior moreover, are not just feelings. They are the incontrovertible evidence of questioning, self-reflection, distance, and the awareness of goods-precisely-as-conditional. If theses actions did not exist, I could not be doing what I am doing right now.

THE POSITION OF TOTAL DETERMINISM

Our previous discussion, however does not absolve us of the task of investigating a consistent and scholarly deterministic view of man and of reflecting upon its meaning and significance. Many areas might be considered—sociology, genetics, anthropology; but for our purposes here, we will look at a total stimulus-response theory of human behavior. We will not try to imply that all behaviorists are determinists; nor can we even state for sure that B. F. Skinner, the man in particular whom we will treat, is a total philosophical determinist—although he may sound like one.

In his book, Science and Human Behavior, Skinner rather clearly states his case: “The hypothesis that man is not free is essential to the application of the scientific method to the study of human behavior. The free inner man who is held responsible for his behavior is only a pre-scientific substitute for the kinds of causes which are discovered in the course of the scientific analysis. All these alternative causes lie outside the individual.”5 Note the following things about this statement. (a) Skinner is speaking in the context of the scientific method. In Walden Two he points out that the notion of freedom is too sloppy a concept for a man who is interested in prediction and environmental control. As a scientific hypothesis, then, total determinism might be much more fruitful for collecting and interpreting data than the hypothesis of freedom. (b) The second point occurs when Skinner extends the position of determinism to the extent that other interpretations of human behavior (e.g., human freedom) are pre-scientific. There

5 B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 447. This citation, as well as my own previous comments should be balanced by Skinner’s contention that man can in ways modify his future environment. The point remains difficult to see, however, if the “self” is adequately defined as a “functionally unified system of responses” (page 285; my emphasis). The critical autonomous and initiating- self.

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seems to be a question as to the whether other levels of human explanation—besides the scientific—have any validity. (c) Third, Skinner seems to be maintaining that the causes of human action all lie outside the man and that these causes are necessitating. They would have to be necessary determined.

Skinner’s position seems to be, then, that man’s behavior is shaped and determined by external forces and stimuli whether they be familial or cultural sanction, verbal or non-verbal reinforcement, or complex systems of reward and punishment. I have nothing to say about the course of action which I will take. I apparently cannot question this outside forces which mold my behavior. The implications of this are practically developed in the society of Walden Two, where Frazier, apparently Skinner’s hero, says, “Well, what do you say to the design of personalities? Would that interest you? The control of temperaments? Give me the specifications and I’ll give you the man! What do you say to the control of motivation building the interests which will make men most productive and most successful? Does that seem to you fantastic? Yet some of the techniques are available and more can be worked out experimentally. Think of the possibilities…Let us control the lives of our children and see what we can make of them.”6

These are not merely claim to Skinner’s part. The power of conditioning has been frequently substantiated by research in both human and infra-human levels. Reinforcement can mold a group’s reactions. It can turn self-conscious speakers into group leaders. Human reactions and behavior seem to be extremely manipulable. In many cases it appears that i9ndividuals can be programmed like a machine whose behavior is not only predicted, but controlled. As a matter of fact, Skinner suggests that this phenomenon is occurring right now in our society—in a rather inefficient way—by means of governmental, educational, and propagandistic control techniques.

When I as a subject reflect upon what Skinner’s say in Walden Two and Science and Human behavior, I see many levels of my own experience which correspond to his position.

a. I have genetic, biological, and physical structures which influence my behavior. They are part of the total me which is involved in choosing.

b. I have environmental structures which are part of me—my early life and psychological development, the culture, national, and ecclesiastical frameworks that I find myself situated in.

c. I am keenly aware of external forces and demands which impinge upon me, sometimes creating needs and even values.

All of these levels experience mentioned above I can call historicity; and all of them can be explained by and understood in terms of behavioral control and environmental conditioning. But it is just as evident to me that there are other levels of experience which cannot be explained by or reduced to my historicity.

6 B. F. Skinner Walden Two, p. 292.

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a. I (and it seems that any being called “man”) can make myself aware of my biological and physical limitations compensating for them, channeling them, improving them.

b. I can question my own environmental structures. I can revolt against them or validate them. I can undergo psychological experiences in order to restructure them. I can challenge them—even has Skinner has challenged them.

c. I can achieve a distance from external demands and forces. I can hesitate, reflect and deliberate, challenge. I can talk about them.

These levels of experience are on the level of free inquiry, or intelligence. They are found in human environment or culture. The level of free inquiry enables me to communicate with other people with quite diverse histories. They enable me to change and challenge my own history. The spheres of historicity and free inquiry cannot be reduced to each other, nor can they be explained away by the other. It seems that absolute determinism attempts to do just that. And it runs into enumerable difficulties.

1. The action of questioning and self-reflection must be either explained away or ignored. If they are explained away, it would have to be done by self questioning and self-reflection. Ignoring their existence is admitting that one’s theory cannot account for them.

2. It cannot be assumed that all causal motives are necessitating causes. Experientially the goods that we confront and the motives that we use are precisely conditional, limited, and mixed.

3. If we are all absolutely determined, then we must be all deluded at the very heart of our primary experience, for it seems that almost all normal men experience some degree of freedom in choosing or being able to say something about their own actions. In fact, it would be difficult to conceive how men could operate at all in this world without at least the “feeling” of being free. Society at every level—the interpersonal, the legal, the political, the scientific—is based upon the primordial “feeling” or experience of freedom and responsibility. If such a radically basic experience is a delusion, how could we tell whether any basic experience is trustworthy. Philosophy and scientific enterprise itself could hardly get out of the net of total skepticism and inaction.

4. If all our judgment and choices are “conditioned” and necessitated by prior reinforcement or external stimuli, this case would have to hold true for the determinist himself. He has not freely responded to the “truth value” of his position; rather he has been forced to accept determinism because of his own past, his own environment and seen actions that have been put upon him from the outside. It is not a position adhered to because of its logic, feasibility, or coherence. It is a position that he has unwittingly been pushed into. Not only does the total determinist discredit his own position, but he also admits that the very criteria for scientific experimentation which he holds to are merely value judgments which have been assumed because they have been previously accepted by others now in power and who in turn reward or reinforce him for accepting them.

These last two problems (3 and 4) with absolute determinism are not actually refutations. They are rather reflections about a total determined world and the conclusions that flow from it. What is more important, however, is that a total determinist

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would have a difficult time explaining all levels of human behavior—even his own behavior. If B. F. Skinner is a total determinist (in a philosophical sense), I would like to say about his behavior at least the following things. First, I think he is more than just a product of “forces” external to him, that he offers his theory not only because it is positively reinforcing. Second, I think that he has not been forced or blindly necessitated to hold his own position. Rather it is only because he has questioned and challenged his past that he is able to offer his theory to other men. Finally, I do not believe that he would communicate at all unless he had an implicit faith in the free questioning intellects of the men to whom he is offering his system. Unless men can freely respond to the value of what he says, the only alternative would be to seize power in order to control their values and mind.7

In conclusion, it would seem that determinism as a scientific method has a great deal to offer us in helping us understand how one’s historicity influences one’s behavior. It is an important level of explanation. However, as a total explanation of all human behavior, it fails to account for the data of questioning, self-reflection, and intelligent inquiry; and it cannot succeed in validating its own position nor the value of scientific investigation.

If the attempt to reduce man to his historicity and external structures fails, there nonetheless remain the problems of whether man can be reduced to pure structureless freedom without any nature or any history. Consequently, we should make some attempt to understand the position of absolute indeterminism.

THE CASE FOR ABSOLUTE FREEDOM

For Jean-Paul Sartre, the fullest realization of one’s manhood is found in the recognition that one’s very identity is freedom itself. “I am my freedom,” Orestes shouts tom Zeus in The Files.8 The insight, Orestes, says, crashed down upon him out of the blue and swept him out of his feet. Zeus performed his greatest blunder when he made man free. Man now became his own king and his own lawgiver.

But as we have seen in the quotation from Sartre at the beginning of this chapter, man is actually free and indeterminate because there is no God to conceive man as a definable essence—God being an absolute metaphysical contradiction. Rather than being an essence, man is the structureless phenomenon of consciousness in the world. Man as

7 Many other criticisms have been offered. Two of them, centered around the notion of scientific objectivity, maintain that all knowledge is committed knowledge (even scientific criteria are based on value judgments) and that next cause-effect universe of the behavior its is based upon an outdated Cartesian and Newtonian view of knowledge and scientific investigation. See Carl R. Rogers, “Freedom and Commitment,” a reprint from Western Behavioral Institute, pp. 14-15. The entire article, in fact, is helpful. See also the books of May, Maslow, and Matson listed in the following bibliography.8 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1946), p. 121. The entire play is about the problem of freedom and man’s relation to God.

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consciousness, as a For-itself, is purely a transparent, volatile self-projection continually negating the staticity, structure, and heaviness of the In-itself. And since man in his very identity is an act of negating the In-itself and an act of self-projection, his very meaning and existence is freedom, and his nature is posterior, flowing from his own free defining of himself.

Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essenceof the human being is suspended in his freedom. What we call freedomis impossible to distinguish from the being of “human reality.” Man does notexist first in order to be free subsequently; there is no difference between thebeing of man and his being free.9

Man’s freedom is overwhelming evident to Sartre because man is able to detach himself from the world by his acts of questioning and doubt. This is so evident, in fact that the problem of determinism, with its arguments about motivation and causality, is at best tedious. The free will advocates, he maintains, are killing their efforts in trying to find actions which have no cause. They assume, with the determinists, that a free act must have no cause—a meaningless assumption, having nothing to do with the question of freedom. “Indeed, the case could not be otherwise, since every action must be intentional, each action must in fact have an end, and the end in turn is referred to a cause.”10

The result is that it is in fact impossible to find an act without a motive butthis does not mean that we must conclude that the motive causes the act;the motive is an integral part of the act. For as the resolute project towarda change is not distinct from the act, the motive, the act, and the end areconstituted in a single upsurge…It is the act which decides its ends and itsmotives, and the act is the expression of freedom.11

Certainly, then, there are causes for my actions; but these causes are only part of the total life-project which is me-reaching-outside-of-myself in the act of self-transcending freedom. And since my identity and life-project are indefinable before I actually take a course of action, I am the only source which decides ends, motives, and causes—and I point this only when I am exercising my freedom.12

Although Sartre seems to maintain that there is always a situation (our historicity and facticity) from which we choose, its influence upon our freedom is inconsequential. Within any context, by the very fact that I continually over reach myself in choices and formation of projects—as my very identity—there is only the future which I set up for myself. The past has no effect upon my choices because there is no deliberation in

9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. Translated with an introduction by Hazel Barnes. (New York: Citadel Press, Second Paperback edition, 1965), p. 25. All emphasis are in this text.10 Ibid., pp. 412.11 Ibid., pp. 413-414.

12 Ibid., pp. 412-418, passim. The entire section would have to be quoted to give justice to the development of his thought. An oversimplification, it seems surely tends to distort his total position.

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making them. I do not choose in the light of past choices and reflection upon them. By the very fact that I am conscious, I choose.13

The position of Sartre, consequently, is diametrically opposed to that of Skinner.

a. Since man’s very identity as a For-itself involves consciousness and freedom as immediate givens, and since both involve negation of the structures of the In-itself (definition staticity, heaviness) man is not tied down by his facticity and the world in which he finds himself. Rather, his existence is resistance—to and transcendence—from them, because he can negate them. Freedom’s very meaning is a struggle with and negation of what is given.

b. Since freedom is involved with the future and freedom is man’s identity, man is not tied down by his past or by the choices of the past. Thus, one’s history, one’s environment, and one’s past motivation in no way hinder his freedom.

c. There is no definable limitation to my identity, since I choose my own identity and I make my own essence. Freedom and structure are reciprocally contradictory.

As opposed to Skinner’s total emphasis upon the past, upon one’s historicity, and upon one’s environment, Sartre places total emphasis on the future, the ability to question and revolt, the phenomenon of distance and transcendence. Oddly enough, many of our own initial concepts of freedom tend to one or other of these polarities. We can be overwhelmed by the notion of determinism and historicity—as we have seen in our discussion of Skinner; and we can be equally captivated by the opposite solution of total freedom.

Any notion of freedom which denies the importance of structure is similar to that of Sartre. Moreover, when one affirms that freedom is opposed to structure, one will eventually have to choose between absolute freedom (structurelessness) or absolute determinism (total structure). I myself will fall to this dilemma if I think that freedom involves a negation of external imposition, of binding commitments, of my past, and an affirmation of pure, spontaneous, unreflective, and unencumbered action.

Sartre is certainly incisive in his analysis of man ‘s ability to question, to negate, and to form a life-project. But how can he account for the data that Skinner presents about man’s historicity, and how can he deal with the facts of our own experience which indicate that external and internal structures enter into our choices?

The facts of experimental psychology, biology, and sociology stand strongly in the face of the conjecture that we might be totally free of external influence, hereditary 13 “We must insist on the fact that the question here is not of a deliberate choice. This is not because the choice is less explicit than a deliberation and because as we have seen, a deliberation requires an interpretation in terms of an original choice…One must be conscious in order to choose, and one must choose in order to be conscious. Choice and consciousness are one and the same thing.” Ibid., pp. 437-438.

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factors, environmental tugs, and normal psychophysical development. I am inextricably bound to who I am, and “who I am” includes my history, my growth, and the total formation of the life which I have led to this moment—as well as my ability to question, to negate, and to achieve a distance from necessity. To be me involves the structure of what being me is; and wherever I may go or flee, I will carry myself with me. Whether I have parents in the Communist Party or whether I have been a member of the resistance with a pious bourgeois family (as is the case with Sartre), or whether I have dropped out from a middle-class-split-level-suburban-society, I cannot annihilate my past, my identity, nor my potentialities. And having a past, a history, and an identity as a self-transcending animal, I of necessity embrace the very structure of my identity, my drives and my meaning. I cannot hide from the rules of my physical being or my historicity, nor can I escape the structure of my demand to know, love, and possess myself. If I am to be related to anyone, I must take on structure; if I am to make any project for myself, I must take on a structure; if I am, like Sartre, to forswear “bad faith,” I am taking on structure in that very commitment. To deny structure is to assume one. The very concept of fidelity itself entails structure. If to be without structure is to be free, it is a strange type of freedom. It is like the freedom of a rock—feeling no misery, no pain, as the song goes—hardly a claim to grandeur.

STURCTURED FREEDOM: HUMAN REALITY

Sartre and Skinner, as we he seen, concentrate on level of human reality to the exclusion of other levels. One realm covers man’s historicity and given structure; the other realm covers man’s transcendence in free questioning. Skinner focuses on the first. Consequently he stresses man’s physical, genetic, biological facticity, the internal structures of environmental, psychological and historical “givens”, and the way in which man’s present has been condition by the history of his past. Sartre, on the other hand, concentrates on the second. Thus he emphasizes man’s release from immediate, blind demands and his ability to shape and confront his facticity. In addition, he dwells on man’s ability to question, to negate or validate external “givens,” and on his openness to knowledge and love. But the point is that integral human existence includes both of these realms or levels. Consequently, if man is free, his freedom will involve both realms of his experience, and any interpretation of man must be able to integrate both realms. Absolute determinism either omits the data of transcendence and questioning or tries to reduce it to external “forces.” Absolute indeterminism ignores man’s history and structure or tries to wish it out of existence.

The problem is that neither area can be reduced to the other, and yet both exist quite obviously in our experience. As Maslow said (in the citation given at the beginning of this chapter), environment is important in the development of my potentialities as a man, but environment does not give them to me. He agrees with Sartre in that man can forms his own life project, and yet he nods to Skinner in admitting the importance of the environment in helping this potentialities become actualized.

Our own experience and the experience of other men testify to the mutual importance of both realms. When I am most fully functioning, I find that my own self-

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possession is not at odds with the structures in my life. Actually I find that freedom and structure are complementaries rather than contradictories. The free man does not necessarily fight structure. Internal structures of his very manhood emerge with his maturation. In the process of his growth he either internalizes external structures or rejects them as inauthentic with respect to his manhood. Much like an animal we suffer a growing process in which demands, needs, and responses are largely determined by the external world in which we find ourselves immersed. But with the emergence of questioning (due to the given structure of being-a-human) and the philosophical freedom it entails, we are able to confronts the externals of the environment, country, history, and evaluate them, reject them, or validate them by making them our own.

Even if a man were try to reject all structure, he would in the very act of rejection tie himself to the structure of rejection; the self, in order to be a self, must have some structure to operate at all. At least the self, willy-nilly, has the structure of being a self with various demands and potentialities. And since we are questioning selves, structure will flow from our actual identity—the structure of the demands and drives to know and to do something about what we know. The fact of being human will give rise to structures, values, and demands which will not militate against my freedom, but which will actually make freedom possible and enhance it. As Carl Roger has said, “Instead of universal values ‘out there’ or a universal value system imposed by some group—philosophers, priests, or psychologists—we have the possibility of universal human value directions emerging from the experiencing of the human organism.”14

Often the values which “emerge” from one’s own humanness will be quite close to the values and structured systems “imposed” by the status quo of other human beings who are already here before us. There are the values and structures which we will freely internalize. Often again, these emergent values will be opposed to the present order has been unfaithful to its potentialities and identity. These “surpressed” potentialities will, as Maslow says, “clamor to be realized.” In this case, freedom and free philosophical questioning become the prosecutors of the present and the prophets of the future. This is perhaps what the history of the philosophy is all about—the criticism of human failure and the affirmation of forgotten human possibilities.

Structure, then, is not only compatible with freedom; it is fundamental to all human growth, evolution, and process. Freedom is exercised only within the structure of one’s humanity and one’s historicity; and it is the vehicle by which one can remain faithful to one’s humanity and history. In conclusion we might say:

a. Structures are the offerings of the human world to which I come. Structures embrace historicity, environment, the community of thought, cultural and moral heritage.

b. Structure is also the internal constitution of being a man with human potentialities. It is the reason why values and demands emerge from my own identity as a questioning self, a knower, a lover.

14 Carl Rogers, “Toward a Modern Approach to Values,” from the Journal of Abnormal abd Social Psychology, Vol. 68, No. 2, 1964, p. 167. Most of Roger’s essay and lectures can be ordered from the Western Behavioral Institute, 1121 Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, California, 92037.

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c. My own freely created life project is also a structure. The structure of being a man is the basis of eternally self-constituted values which I shared with the world of other selves who have the same internal dynamisms.

Freedom is operative on all levels, if I want to make it so; and it is operative not as forces against structure, but as a force emerging from structure and emerging with structure in order to further actualize individual and species—wide human potentialities. Man is neither absolutely free nor absolutely determined. Man is freedom within structure.

A NOTE ON FREEDOM AND ANXIETY

The controversy between freedom and determinism sometimes seems to pale before the problem of whether a freedom is a good thing to have in the first place. For many, the problem is not in providing the freedom of the will; rather it is in accepting its true meaning and consequences. More explicitly, freedom can be a lonely and terrifying thing.

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne…Oh, no! It’s a choice, on the contrary and a long distance race, quite solitaryand very exhausting. No champagne, no friends raising their glasses as theylook to you affectionately. Alone in a forbidden room, alone in the prisoner’sbox, before judges and alone in the face of oneself or in the face of other’sjudgement. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that’s why freedomis too heavy to bear especially when you’re down with a fever, or distressed,or love nobody.15

Unlike Camus writing The Fall, many of us try to conceive freedom as if it were something like the effortless fight of a bird. Unfortunately, it often turns out not to be the easy thing that we might have expected. Since it is a part of our very identity, when freedom starts to hurt, we often try to shed it like an extra hat—or at least forget about it. When this fails, the only thing left for us to do is to try to change it into something other than it is—a decoration, a badge, a formula. But it is no decoration, and there are no hurrahs from cheering crowds. There are no toasts to it. There is no escape from it. As Sartre says, in a way we are condemned to be free.

Moreover, in the exercise of freedom, we are definitely and ultimately alone. Only we can possess ourselves. No one else can do it for us. And most terrifying of all, our choices are irrevocable, since the present moment is never to be repeated. We cannot undo what we have chosen. We can only summon ourselves to manage making a new choice. I must be my own man; this is said to be my glory. No one can take my place or receive my blame; this is my suffering as a man. I must freely create a life-project which is myself, extending myself into further realm of existence. And I alone am accountable.

As soon as we lend our minds to the essence of human responsibility, we cannot forbear to shudder; there is something fearful about man’s responsibility.But at the same time something glorious! Every moment holds thousands of

15 Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Vintage, 1956), pp.132-133.

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possibilities but we can choose only a single one of these; all the others wehave condemned, damned to non-being and that too, for all eternity. But it isglorious to know that the future of the things and the people around us, is de-pendent—even only a tiny extent—upon our decision at any given moment.What we actualize by that decision, what we thereby bring into the world, isSaved; we have conferred reality upon it and preserved it from passing.16

Viktor Frankl places the problem well in this passage. Freedom, which is the basis of man’s dignity and glory, which is the synthesis of his knowing and loving powers, is also the source of human ambiguity. Hence it is terrible and it is beautiful. Sartre is quite honest, then, not only in placing freedom on such a high pedestal, but also in seeing it as something of a condemnation and judgment.

I can create the project that is my self and seek out all the possible horizons of my potentialities. And I can ruin myself. In my free choices, I damn the alternatives to non-being, and I bring into existence a creative action, which—but for me—would never have been brought to existence. Hence freedom is not at all an easy thing; rather, it is a two-edged sword of ambiguous possibilities.

The major ambiguity about human freedom is that man is able to know that he is free, what his identity is, what his potentialities are, and he is able to say something about it. Here, we should remember what we discovered about the nature of man’s identity as a knower and a wanter. Radically, knowledge and love have internal dynamisms which are outward and self-transcending rather than appropriative and grasping. By my very identity as a questioner I am trust out of my encapsulated self. I am carried into the world of the other, into the entire cosmos. Very simply, they are open rather than closed dynamisms.

What is more important, however, is that human knowledge and love are open by nature, but not by necessity. Openness is a difficult, delicate thing—as we have seen and will see—and I can choose to remain closed. I can opt for being the center and horizon of my own world, to collect rather than to break out. And here is the rub; I can freely, irrevocably choose to be closed, to be an event which is in its very dynamism open, but which—in freedom—has opted from self-enclosure.

Here again, we can understand why man would at times want to avoid the terror of the choice, why he would sometimes opt to be secure and tensionless in a necessitated nature, rather than insecure and anxious in the freedom of making himself. We can see why he might not want to choose at all, rather than face the task of self-condemnation, why he might try to hand over his freedom either by ignorance or by wanting someone else to choose for him. Dostoevsky sees this when his Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov indicts Christ for bringing man the terrible gift of freedom which has caused

16 Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul (New York: Bantam 1967), p. 28. There is also a hard-bound edition available from libraries.

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man such suffering.17 But the Inquisitor, in saving man from choice, has reduced man to the status of a flock of sheep, contented with food, authority and force.

This is the greatest problem with freedom; it is terrible, but if you take it away, you take away my meaning, my dignity, and my creativity. Such is the case as it is posed in Huxley’s Brave New World, when John, the savage, challenges the Controller by saying, “But I don’t want comfort. I want god, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want to sin.”18 Human dignity and human ambiguity are of the same cloth. If you take away the ambiguities of life, if you tale away the tensions, if you take away the difficulties of choice and the suffering of doubt, you take away my freedom, emasculating me and preventing me from significantly creative action. Freedom and guilt, anxiety, tension, responsibility is not mutually exclusive; in the human condition they help comprise the total meaning of man.

But all is not bleak with freedom. It is also the basis of the most important and fulfilling action a man can place. A man can know himself. Consequently he can possess himself and his destiny. However his destiny and meaning is other-directed, open to his potentialities to know and love. As a result, man’s meaning is not only to possess himself freely. Since he is other-directed, his identity is not fully achieved until, having possessed himself, he gives himself to the other.

MARCEL ON FREEDOM*

by a student

It seems to me that there can be no appreciation of Marcel’s idea of freedom without understanding his view of reality or of his philosophy, if philosophy can be said to belong to someone. Marcel is said to be ‘relentlessly unsystematic’ in his thought, perhaps because of his fidelity to his insights. His thinking starts from and continually 17 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brothers Kamarazov. Special edition of the Grand Inquisitor. Introduction by Anne Frementle. (New York: Unger Publishing Company, 1956), pp. 1-21.18 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Bantam Books, 19587, 163).

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refers back to the concrete experience. He is aware that concepts are an attempt that explicitating an encounter with reality, and since reality is so rich, it cannot be fully explicitated. Concepts draw their strength from the insight and is often an inadequate expression of that insight into reality. This is the reason why concrete examples are not merely demonstrative or accidental or accessory to Marcel’s thought. The examples are part of the insight, the expression is part of the insight, it shows how the insight was born and how it could grow. There is often a sense of mystery, of ambiguity in reality from the way Marcel looks at it. And so Marcel appears disorganized, always after some rewarding but illusive insight. But we can try to find a hold to grapple with Marcel’s thought. His notion of having and being seems to offer a central insight around which the other may revolve or at least be seen coherently. Even Marcel’s celebrated distinction between problem and mystery may be viewed in terms of this central insight. And as we shall see this insight into being and having will be the key to our understanding of authentic freedom which Marcel insists cannot be in the realm of having but in that of being.

When can we speak of having? If we carefully analyze the meaning of to have we find that we can have only things that are outside of ourselves, or at least conceived of as outside of, distinct from and independent of ourselves; thus, I have a pen, a house, an acre of land, an opinion. This independence from me passes on to a certain impenetrable quality of the object I posses. It does not commune with me; its being is not capable of participation or subjectivity. It is autonomous. Marcel remembers having played with a quija board. He would pose questions to it and wait for an unpredictable response from the board. In the midst of the game it just dawned on him that although the quija board always produced an answer, it never in the process “took his person in account”. It had not intersubjective communion. It is opaque, a closed system. But though impenetrable, what I can have is at the same time accessible to all. It can be, or at least considered to be capable of being grasped, circumscribed, and made a common possession of all, so to speak.

*Reprinted with permission by the professor, Fr. Roque Feriols, SJ.What I can have is also quantifiable, as when a man considers his life a

possession. “My life” is conceived as a sum of money which is spent slowly but irretrievably. Finitude or exhaustibility is one of the main characteristics of those we can have.

We have spoken only of what we can have, but when we are said to have them? Again if we look closely at the question we see that we have only those things which we can handle, make use of or dispose of; only those things which have an instrumental relationship with us. And it is through my body that I have them. My instruments are in a way extensions of my body.

The body is a limit case of having. First of all, my body cannot be rightly conceived as distinct from me, for I am an embodied spirit. The condition for the

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existence of the non-body aspect of me is my body. Indeed my point of contact with other existents is through my body. And there are times as in pain, when I am in my body. After a blistering walk I may well say, “I am an aching toe!” Marcel does not hesitate to say, “I am my body,” in a qualified sense of course.

In asserting ‘I am my body’ one is actually making a negative judg-ment; ‘It is neither true nor meaningful to assert that I am other than my bo-dy,’ more precisely, ‘It is meaningless to assert that I am a certain thingbound in some manner to a certain other thing which is or would be my bo-dy.’ We cannot assert any truth about relation R between an unknown Xand my body, which means that the relation cannot be thought. (Creative Fi-delity, p. 9.)

Again I cannot rightly speak of my body as an instrument and therefore a possession. The refusal to put my body in the category of having is precisely the denial of an instrumental relationship, of an objective relationship between my soul and my body. I possess things only in relation to my body. But how can my body which makes possible the category of having be said to be inside or belonging to that same category? Besides the instruments I have are an extension of my body; they share in some way to the nature of my body which makes possible my being able to handle and manipulate them. Now if my body is simply an instrument, by whom is it disposed of? By something bodily. And we have an infinite regress. My body then is a limit case of having.

There is however a dimension of reality where we cannot speak of having but only of being. This is the realm of participation, permeability, openness to others, non-autonomy, creativity, experience with a plenitude. This is the category of the non-conceptualizable, for here the essence of a thing is to be more than its essence, since its reality is found only in participation with another reality. A person for example, is inextricably linked with his freedom and the duality is irreducible to any objective relation, so that when he investigates his freedom, he runs not into a concept but a mystery where he can only be more deeply aware of his freedom and strive to live it more intensely.

…As soon as we are in Being, we are beyond autonomy…The more I am, the more I assert my being, the less I think myselfautonomous. (Being and Having, p. 132)

Freedom is beyond the category of having, it is in the realm of being. For freedom is simply irreducible to an object or an attribute. We cannot speak of freedom as distinct from us, for what are we without freedom? It is precisely because “we are identified with freedom, that our freedom seems sometimes unrealizable.” Nor is freedom a possession. For a thing possesses may be used or neglected by its owner without losing its character, without deteriorating. But with freedom, its very denial is a betrayal of it. Freedom breaks out of the confines of having; it is an affirmation of my being, which is essentially openness, a participation, a creative belonging with other beings and with the fullness of Being itself. With my freedom I create and betray myself.

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(Man is) a being to whom the strange power has been imparted of assertingor denying himself. He asserts himself in so far as he asserts Being and openshimself to it: or he denies himself by denying Being and thereby closing him-self to it. In this dilemma lies the very essence of his freedom. (Being and Ha-ving, pp. 120-121.)

Man is essentially a being in a situation, whose concrete existence is to be in every way involved with other beings. Marcel says that “If we thoroughly examine being in a situation, we should find not so much a syntheses as a juncture of externality and internality.” Participation constitutes man’s being. Incarnation, the first given of metaphysical reflection on man is a form of participation. He is an embodied spirit. Through his body he is inserted into the world of existents, made part of it and in ways immersed in it. Sensation is one level of participation. Marcel makes a good analysis of sensation, denying the explanation that sensation is a message interpreted by a receiver, i.e. the sense faculty, but finding that sensation is created both by the pre-sensible event and the sense faculty of a man. It is not an objective relation between the event and the sense faculty that makes sensation; it is the presence of both that makes the sensation. On the level of persons, the “I” is authentic only with the communion with a thou. A person’s identity is determined by his relation to other “thous”. This relation is not a simple juxtaposition of an autonomous I and an autonomous thou, for there is reality no I apart from a thou. And between them exists not an objective relation, but a presence—the being of one co-present with the being of the other. The I and the thou remain distinct yet are, only in communion with each other. Marcel gives the example of a player in an orchestra. He plays his own score but his music is in and part of the music of an orchestra. In a way the essence of his music is to be more than itself. Or again the individual notes of a music piece, they find their identity only in relation to the other notes; each note cannot be autonomous. Going back to persons this is the reason why we cannot conceptualize a thou, it is only by destroying the relation, the presence, by turning the thou into a he that we can conceptualize him. The relation between the I and the thou is that of an appeal, “be present to me” and a response to it. And it is only when we are capable of such a response that we are truly ourselves.

Before a thou, I put no barriers on walls. I am completely open, able to go beyond myself, trusting, defenseless if you wish; I am totally present both to the thou and to myself. This ability to respond to a thou, to be present to another is the quality of a disponible man. At the core of this quality is openness, a welcoming of the other, as when we invite our guest “to feel at home” with us. It is really the ability to break out of an isolation, to place the center of our life in another, outside of us. And here is where freedom becomes a decisive factor. For each personal encounter is rooted in our free consent to it. I could withdraw from other men or refuse to broaden my experience of reality, or I could open myself to others.

On the ontological plane where we encounter Being, as the Absolute thou. It is again in the openness, a participation with a certain inexhaustibility. It is the experience of Being, that we have, when we admire a beautiful face, a sunset, or a work of art; when

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we pray, when we experience a freshness in reality (as contrasted with that staleness we feel with routine and worn—out ways), a sense of creation, an wariness of something perennial, indissoluble, a certain plenitude. Marcel does not define being. He relates it with our need for it. There is that inward lack in man he calls an exigence of Being, a certain craving for fullness which though we have not yet experience, yet we have a prenotion of. The despairing man denies that there is anything at all out there in reality to satisfy his inner craving. The believer on the other hand, affirms that there is a fullness that can fill this void in him.

This lack in man can be interpreted as an appeal to transcendence, and it is in answer to this appeal that man fulfills or betrays his freedom.

This openness to transcendence is in reality a participation again. But the quality of being creative is strongly felt in the experience of Being. It is a certain newness, an exhilaration, a sense of being alive as when an artist is given an inspiration, or when we encounter a truly generous person, or when we read a simple but inspiring line from a friend, e.g. “Rejoice with me for I shall be ordained a priest.” It is a feeling of expansiveness, an affirmation of reality as indissoluble, perennial. This creative feeling is really the touchstone of communion with being. And when freedom consents to commune with being, it becomes creative participation.

Behind this appeal to transcendence, of this sense of the real, of this denial of a death, is an Absolute thou. For it is only to a thou that an appeal can come, and it is only to a thou that a creative response is possible.

When we analyze the different aspects of man’s being in which he is essentially a participator, the whole purpose is to show the permeability of man, the denial of any autonomous existence for him. He is only a person when he is open to others. Marcel says that when he is most himself, he is least autonomous. The whole meaning of man’s freedom is to affirm, to engage in communion with other persons, with Being. Man’s freedom viewed this way becomes truly creative of the self, for every encounter with a response to another is ultimately rooted in man’s freedom.

FUNDAMENTAL OPTION AND LIBERTY OF CHOICE*

By Pierre Fransen

Unity of Man

Man is not a soul lost as though by accident in a vile and weighty body, a spirit imprisoned in foreign matter, hostile to his highest aspirations. Those are Gnostic, platonic and manichaean errors which have not yet been entirely exorcized. Man is intrinsically one: a spiritualized body, or, more correctly, a corporeal person.

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On the other hand, the soul is not the body. Soul and body are like two poles in a unique magnetic field, in which the lines of force across each other and continually interpenetrate one another. In no way can the actions, states, even the most subtle or the most material, which belongs uniquely and exclusively to the soul or body be disassociated. The psychology of man and child lead to this conclusion and it is therefore unnecessary to dwell upon it.

Primacy of the Spirit

It would, however, be an error to imagine that we look upon body and soul as two opposing forces, practically equivalent, different, but purely complementary. It is still more important for our viewpoint to perceive that in this profound unity the spirit still keeps an inalienable initiative. The meaning of God which He in His creative action as implanted in my whole being, is most deeply imprinted in this spiritual centre of my being, that centre of personal density in which I am most myself, and by reason of that, most in God. It is from this centre of existential density that these features of the divine image are diffused through all the levels of my existence, always further penetrating into my intellect and my will, my imagination and my sensibility, all my psychism of heredity and behavior, my habits and my daily actions, to bestow even on my body an aura of nobility and beauty.

Here a Christian theology of the creation and the divine image and a sane personalist philosophy should complete, correct and develop what there is of imprecision and indistinctness in the conclusions of a psychology, however just they may be.

A double Liberty

God is love. The image of God in us will therefore also be love, the force of love of God, of others and of myself in God. This fundamental power of love constitutes my person. I am in fact a person because I am a spirit. Because I am spirit, I am liberty and

* Reprint from “Towards a Psychology of Divine Grace” Cross Currents 8(1958), with the permission of the editor.therefore love. For liberty is above all a power of spontaneous gift from one person to another, before being choice, election, judgment and free will.

In fact, there is in us as it were a double liberty, precisely because we are corporeal spirits, bodies with a depth of life which fare exceeds the requirements of our material and even our earthly life. There is naturally the liberty which we all know from experience, what is commonly known as free will. There is further down in us a fundamental liberty of existential and totalizing option.

This distinction is of capital importance in order to understand human behavior in general, and specially to detect the incidence of divine grace in us.

Fundamental Liberty

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We know by experience what I have called free will, that liberty by means of which man can to a certain degree order his life. He gets up, he eats, he reads a book rather than to go for a walk, he refuses an invitation, he is obstinate, persistent, or accept an excuse. Even children very early possess this possibility of choice. It is freedom in the usual sense of the word. All the same, it may be asked whether as such as it merits the name of liberty.

If it is to become truly human, this early form of liberty must be directed by something deeper, more stable, supported and directed by a profound and total commitment, by a fundamental option in which I express myself wholly with all that I wish to be in this world and before God. The fragmentary variety of daily options is therefore unthinkable—I might say, inhuman and therefore animal—without a totalizing, profound, stable and spontaneous orientation of my life, of the whole of myself before the totality of the reality which I either accept or refuse.

Unity of These Two Forms of Liberty

Note well: these two forms of liberty have no separate existence. We have often noticed that we are not understood on this point. The fundamental option is not one particular action, more important than others, following or preceding the more specialized choice of some concrete action. It is not a matter of determining in the first instant a “fundamental option,” and then freely developing all the concrete implications as does an architect who first designs the sketch of the house to be built in order finally to carry out the plan in at least details in the course of several months’ work.

For this fundamental option, this existential and total engagement is also impossible if it is not at the same time actualized in a series of particular actions, forming the visible woof of life. It is not therefore a concrete action; it is an orientation freely imposed on our whole life. It is implied in every truly human and free action. Insofar as it is truly free, it is caught in the free and spontaneous movement towards the final goal of my life.

There is therefore continual interaction between the particular, perceptible and conscious actions of every moment and the fundamental option, obscurely conscious, exercised and present in every particular act. In this fundamental option, subjacent, my humble human actions rediscover their interiority and profound unity, their human meaning and nobility. But also in this daily and almost exterior activity, this option becomes real and veracious, and even simply human. The essential option is therefore like the soul of our daily actions and without those acts it does not exist; there are only dreams, vague aspirations. In short, it is in and by through daily actions that my fundamental option, my essential liberty of person, is expressed, that I realize it in myself, that becomes clarified, takes form, becomes incarnate.

The study of the vocation provides us with an excellent illustration ofthis truth. Whether I feel conscious of a vocation to be a politician, or artist,depends at bottom on a fundamental option which has slowly matured during

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my youth. This maturation has been expressed in concrete actions, in thechoice of my reading, in the disposition of my studies, in the friends, modelswhich I have imitated. By these very concrete actions, this option has deve-loped, deepened, has finally arrived at the edge of maturation and evidencewhich has transformed it for me into an imperious and determining vocation.Once accepted and expressed in my clear consciousness, I shall find that Ibeen thinking of it for a long time.

Psychological Applications

These remarks are remarks for every form of education. We can teach children and young people a series of attitudes and concrete actions, we can “train” them with consummate art; as long as they have not been offered what is commonly called an ideal, a basic orientation, our education will remain unfinished, threatened by formalism, deceit, because it is empty of sense and humanity.

On the other hand, it is absolutely useless to fill the heats and heads of young people with magnificent ideas, noble and sublime aspirations. If they have not learned to patiently and perseveringly translate these ideas, noble and sublime aspirations. If they have not learned to patiently and perseveringly translate these ethereal aspirations into humble acts of devotion, service, daily work, our education will only have left them with a vague and ephemeral and even very dangerous enthusiasm. It is the tragic story of certain movements of Catholic Action, which either exhaust their strength in technical and exterior occupations, or else quickly let a quasi-mystical enthusiasm, empty of any concrete responsibility, evaporate at adult age or even at the crisis of puberty. A good Christian is not so much he who faithfully accomplishes all his duties, nor he who is elevated by a wave of mysticism but he who manages to unite in his life a great love to daily fidelity in the most normal actions.

It is here that we find the profound reason for the discouragement, the bitterness full of resentment, the disillusioned melancholy, of certain Christ ‘activists,’ priests or laity, who in the multitude of their occupations have lost the profound sense of their life. Others, the ‘quietists’, find themselves in the same sentiment of solitude and anguish because their vague aspirations remain deprived of life and human and Christian tonality.

This truth provides a solution for many modern problems. For ins-tance, the success of marriage does not depend so much on a certain tech-nique, exterior and dehumanized, of sexual life as on that supreme art withwhich in one life is united a real mutual love and respect, an ideal of life incommon with the multiple and monotonous obligations of living togetherin a certain house, with certain social obligations, in a certain state of health.The English ritual expresses it with singular nobility. “I take thee to be mywedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse,for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, tilldeath do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance; the thereto I plight theemy troth.” The soul of this matrimonial union will always be that “troth,”

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that supreme fidelity of one to the other. But this fidelity has no meaning ifit does not incarnate itself in the concrete situation of each life. Is it not be-cause fidelity is precisely the assurance and foundation of that real love thatGod Himself in Holy Scripture as not disdained to make of it His most beau-tiful appanage?

It is in this union of a real basic aspiration and multiple occupationsinherent in our human life that the secrets of a life resides. Man is thus madeand he can only make a success of his life by accepting himself as he is, spiritand matter, living spirit acting in and through the body, the transparent matterof the sprit in the most humble actions in our life.

The Exercise of this Liberty

In order clearly to establish the essential, we have had to simplify the problem a little. The human situation is rather more delicate and it is here that the psychologist comes in. man is spirit and person in this temporal and material world. That is to say that my fundamental option cannot emerge to the surface of my daily activity except by a long process of maturation in time. Neither can it incarnate itself in a series of precise and concrete actions except by traversing a thick layer of humanity, in which spirit and body intimately interpenetrate and in which man is no longer alone in bearing the responsibility of his life.

1. The Fundamental Option is only expressed in Time. Liberty is not bestowed upon us like a beautiful Minerva, rising whole out of the head of Jupiter. We have to conquer it freely, to deserve to be free. We are not yet speaking of grace, which according to the ancient councils restores us to our lost of liberty. We are speaking of that human condition, situated in time, borne by the flux of history. Every action which is truly free, every good action, fully responding to the truth of what we are and should be, frees us further. Every bad action, that is to say, false and deceitful, freely degrades that same liberty. In a certain sense, we are not free; we freely become so. That is our vocation as men, which has to be fulfilled in the totality of each life.

To be a person, to be free, is the task of the whole life. It is true creation—in the artistic sense—irksome, arduous, prolonged. It is a long process of maturation, appertaining to all living things. It is true that man can distort this process of growth, can interrupt it, turn away from its true end, and empty it of meaning by a kind of spiritual atrophy, freely accepted under the disillusions of life.

2. Our Fundamental Option is Psychologically Conditioned by the Influence of others. It would here be the opportune to glance at a communal philosophy of the person, but it would take us too far and some psychological considerations will suffice for the moment.

By the very fact that the spirit plunges and sends its roots into this psychosomatic humus of humanity, it can no longer be sovereignly alone. Man is linked to the other by his body and his whole psychism; he receives as much as he gives. In his youth, he does

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almost nothing but receive. He receives his body, and with his body many other things which are largely determinant for him: his heredity, his temperament and character to a great extent performed in his race, his people, his family and national culture, the atmosphere of his native land.

In order to act he has to reason, which implies a certain intelligence, receive at birth, later formed in a family, school and cultural milieu. He has to will. It is therefore important that he should possess a certain force of character, stability in his intentions, an amount of endurance in difficulties. A spoiled child inherits, from his sentimental and imprudent parents, a softness which will not affect the child in a numerous family whom his parents have educated with a virile and strong love. All this therefore does not depend only on his liberty.

Man also needs an atmosphere of optimism, confidence, a nervous and affective equilibrium. To express himself in a fundamental option which is rich and integral he must have control of several faculties (intellect, memory, will) a certain spiritual organs with a psychic basis, such as the sense of the beautiful, the real, others, the sense of values, and even the moral sense. He also must be able to count on a sane and stable equilibrium of his instincts. Finally, even the health of his body is of importance in this total exercise of his liberty.

This total liberty is therefore expressed through a dense network of determinisms, influences foreign to my own will. The success of my life will depend on the art with which I learn to use to the fullest extent everything at my disposal, everything which has been given to me. That is the meaning of the parable of the talents, what is nowadays called the situation in which I find myself, from the beginning of my life. The object of all education is to render this situation of departure as favourable as possible.

Conclusion

Man is therefore placed by God in a determined situation of which the multiple incidences are far beyond his personal initiative. But these determinisms, these foreign influences, good or bad, cannot raise him to the level of a truly human life unless he possesses in the depths of himself a divine source of life, a force of activity, a creative and a dynamic reflection of the word of God. Man created in the image of God is love above all, the reflection of the first love, as Dante said in the last verses of his work: “L’amor che mouve il sole el’altre stelle!”

In this depth of himself, man reposes in the hands of God and God sustains him in existence. In these depths reposes what the Bible calls the ‘heart’ of man, the centre of all his activity. The mystics have called it the ‘interior flame’ or with St. Francis de Sales, “the fine point of the soul.” This metaphysic of depth owes nothing to the researches of psychoanalysis. It is part of the Christian philosophy, especially experienced by the greatest mystics. In writing these pages we desire nothing more than to express in modern language one of the most profound thoughts of the anthropology of Blessed John Ruusbroec.

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A PHENOMENOLOGY OF LOVE

by Manuel B. Dy, Jr.

What is love? The question has been asked since the time of Plato, not only by the professional philosophers but by people from all walks of life. Much has already been written on this subject, answers to the question have been given and many more questions posed; and yet the reality of love has not been exhausted. The very fact that this question of what love is still being asked seems to show that love is part and parcel of man’s life, and a philosophy of man is incomplete without a philosophy of love, of man as loving.

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Many of us have the tendency to equate love with romance. The world “love” rings a sweet melody to the ears, brings to the imagination the image of two lovers whispering sweet nothings to each other in the park or on the telephone, unmindful of the rest of the world as if only they matter and exist at all. “Love is a many splendored thing,” so the song goes.

On the other hand, love is pictured many times as an act of possessing or being possessed by another person. People fight and struggle in the name of love. “I love you” has come to mean, “You are mine” and “I want you to do the things I want, I want you to be of what I you want to be.” Or else, it has come to mean, “I am yours, and you can do whatever you want to me.”

For many young people, love has become synonymous with sex. To love another means to be passionately attracted to her and to bring her to bed with me. This equation of love with sex has led to the idea that friendship is not love, that when two lovers break up, they may settle down for friendship as if friendship were inferior to love.

People say, “love is blind and lovers do not see”. This has come to mean that to love is to be attracted to the good qualities of the other. Sometimes this is earned to the extreme of attributing attractive qualities to the other even if they are not there. Love has come to be equated with admiration.

Erich Fromm in his famous book The Art of Loving1 mentions the fact that the popular notion of love at present is “falling in love”. People have the misconception that there is nothing to be learned about love, that love hits a man like lightning. Either you are struck by the arrow of Cupid or you are not. He attributes this popular notion of love to three reasons:

1) the emphasis on being-loved rather than on loving. This is evident in the many books written and sold on “how to win friends and influence people,” “how to be attractive,” “how to have a sex appeal,” etc.

2) the emphasis on the object loved rather than on the faculty of loving. People talk of the “ideal girl,” “the idea boy,” “the ideal husband,” “the ideal wife.” And it seems the right object to love follows the same trend as the fad in the market.

3) the confusion between the initial state of falling in love and the permanent standing-in love. People mistake the initial feeling of infatuation as love. Two people finding themselves as strangers in a country and feeling lonely easily fall for each other. If they simply based their love on this feeling of loneliness their love will not last.

Our phenomenology of love must first set aside all the above preconceptions of love. Now, let us go back to the original experience of love.

Loneliness and Love

1 Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 1-4.

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The experience of love begins from the experience of loneliness. The experience of loneliness is basically a human experience. Because man as man is gifted with self-consciousness, there comes a point in the stage of man’s life that he comes to an awareness of his unique self and the possibilities open to him. He becomes aware that he is different from others, that he is not what others (like his parents) think him to be. As a child, he gaze was turned towards things; toys and candies made up his world. As a child, people were mere extensions of his ego, mere satisfaction of his desires. But as he grows up to becomes more an adolescent, his gaze is gradually turned inwards; he questions the things that were taught to him by his parents and teacher; he reaches for his own identity. “Who am I?” becomes more important than the toys and candies that once were objects of his desires. Too old to be identified with the child and too young to be considered an adult, he feels misunderstood, unwanted, alone.

His natural tendency is to seek out his fellow adolescents from understanding and acceptance. Together they invent their own language, their own music. It is in the barkada that he finds equality. But then what has equality come to mean? It has come to mean uniformity, sameness in actuality. The adolescent groups himself with his barkada because they happen to have the same likes and dislikes as he. Very often, he has a different barkada for movies, another barkada for work and study. Very seldom does he find himself in a group who will take him for that all he is, different from the group.

Until this equality will mean oneness in difference, the person will remain lonely amidst a crowd. Loneliness is possible even if one is immersed in the crowd. In an attempt to conform to the group and hide one’s individuality, his loneliness eventually expresses itself as an experience of boredom.

To overcome this boredom and loneliness, the person many times resorts to drinks and drugs or any form of heightened sensation. The effect of this artificially created sensation is to involve one’s total being in some kind of a trance reminiscent of the primitive man’s ritual and dance. It provides to the lonely and bored person a temporary escape from reality, temporary because the trance, the “happening” is transitory and periodical.

Another resort to overcome the experience of loneliness is to keep oneself busy with creative activity. Keeping oneself occupied with all sorts of activity diverts one’s attention from oneself—but only for sometime. One eventually will tire himself out. Moreover, it is not any activity that can be fulfilling one’s emptiness—the activity has to be creative, something that the person himself has started, developed and finished to end. This kind of activity is rare nowadays. And even if one discovers himself in this creative activity, in the end he still has to come to face with the anguish of being alone.

The answer to the problem of loneliness is the reaching out to the other person as an other. Love is the answer to the problem of loneliness because it is only in love that I find at-onement and still remain myself.

Love is the union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man, a power which breaks through

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the walls which separate man from his fellowmen, which unites him fromothers, love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet,it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occursthat two beings become one and yet remain two. (Fromm, p.21)

The Loving Encounter 2

Loneliness ends when one finds or is found by another in what we will call a loving encounter.

The loving encounter is a meeting of persons. The meeting of persons is not simply bumping into each other, nor is it simply an exchange of pleasant remarks, though these could be embodiments of a deeper meeting. The deeper meeting here in love happens when two persons or more who are free to be themselves choose to share themselves. It presupposes an I-thou communication, a communication of selves. (This is possible even in groups of common commitments although the meeting of persons may be harder due to the expectation of roles.)

First of all, the loving encounter necessitates an appeal, an appeal of the other addressing my subjectivity. The appeal may be embodied in a word, a gesture or a glance—all these can be signs of an invitation for me to transcend myself, to break away from my pre-occupation with myself.

Very often in the daily run of life, I ignore this signs. I am too absorbed or too conscious of the roles I am accustomed to play in daily life as a teacher, a student, an employer, a priest, that I fail to see the appeal of the other. To be able to see the appeal of the other, I need more than eyes; more than mind—I need an attitude, a heart that has broken away from self-preoccupation.

What is the appeal of the other?

The appeal of the other is not his corporeal or spiritual attractive qualities. I can conceptualize the other into a list of beautiful qualities (which I myself may lack) but they can only at best give rise to enamoredness, a desire to be with the other. But once the qualities cease to be attractive, love also ceases. Love is more than mere infatuation, more than mere liking such and such qualities of the other. The other person is more than his qualities, more than what I can conceptualize of him. And love is the experience of this depth and mystery of the other and the firm will to be for him.

Nor is the appeal of the other an explicit request coming from the other. The explicit request of the other may just be a sign of a deeper appeal, yet if I base my reaching out to the other simply on this need, it may well be because of a certain pity, and not really out of love. Or, it may be possible that I can satisfy his request because I just

2 I am indebted in this and the succeeding sections to William Luijpen’s “Phenomenology of Love,” Existentialism Phenomenology (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 311-326, and to John Cowburn, SJ., Love and the Person (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967), pp. 95-162.

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want to get over with it and not be bothered anymore. In such a case, even if I have satisfied the request of the other, he may go away dissatisfied because my heart was not in it.

The appeal of the other is himself. The other in his otherness is himself the request. The appeal of the other is the cal to participate in his subjectivity, to be with and for him.

While it is true that I need an attitude that has broken away from self-preoccupation to see the appeal of the other, the converse also holds: the appeal of the other which is himself enables me to liberate myself from my narrow self. It reveals to me an entirely new dimension of my existence, that perhaps myself-realization may be a destiny-for-you. Because of you, I understand the meaningless of my egoism. Perhaps, I am not meant to be alone, perhaps I can only be truly myself with you.

If the appeal of the other is himself, what then is my reply?

Since the appeal of the other is not his quality or an explicit request, it follows that my response cannot be outpouring of my qualities to the other or the satisfaction of his request. Compatibility is not necessary love. Neither is submission necessary love. Sometimes, refusing the request of the other may be the only way of loving the person in a situation, if satisfying it would bring harm to the person.

If the appeal of the other is himself, then the appropriate response to the appeal is Myself.

As a subjectivity, the other person is free to give meaning to his life. His appeal then to me means an invitation to will his subjectivity, to consent, accept, support and share his freedom. Love means willing the others free self-realization, his destiny, his happiness. At times it may mean refusing whatever could impede or destroy the other’s possibility for self-realization. When I love the other, I am saying, “I want you to become what you want to be. I want you to realize your happiness freely.”

Love, however, is not only saying it, it is doing it. Love is effective, it takes actions. (“Action speaks louder than words.”) Since the other person is not a disembodied subjectivity, to love him therefore implies that I will his bodily being, and consequently his world. Love is inseparable from care, from labor. To love the other is to labor for that love, to care for his body, his world, his total well-being.

Willing the happiness of the other, however, also implies that I have an awareness, though implicit and at times vague, of the other’s destiny. I have a searching for and a partial finding of his way in the world. And whatever opinion I have of the happiness of the other will influence and give direction to my affection for him. It will open certain worldly roads for him and also close others, those that would not bring him closer to his destiny. Love then necessitates a certain personal knowledge of the other.

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Of course, the possibility exists that I could be mistaken as to what will make the other happy. The temptation is also very great that I may impose my own concept of happiness on the other. I can go on laboring for the happiness of the other, where in reality I am simply fulfilling my own needs. The other has become an extension of myself and has become absorbed by my own person. If love is not to become domination, it must be balance by a certain respect, respect for the uniqueness and otherness of the other. Respect does not mean idolizing a person; it simply means accepting the person as he is, different from myself.

Accepting the other as other, as he is, is not to be taken in a static sense. The other is also himself in his potentialities, in his becoming. But his becoming may have a different rhythm from my own. His pace of growing may be faster or slower than my own. In such a case, respect also means being patient. Patience is also harmonizing my rhythm with his. Like a melody or an orchestra, my music of life must follow his own tempo. Patience requires a lot of waiting and catching-up, a waiting that is active, ever-ready to answer to the needs of the other, and catching up that is spontaneous and natural.

Reciprocity of Love

From our description above of loving encounter, it seems that love is wholly concerned with the other. What happens to myself? Am I not at all concerned with myself in love? Am I not at all interested in being loved in return? Here we touch upon two important questions on love: First, what is the relationship of love of the other and love of myself? Secondly, what happens with unreciprocated love?

In the loving encounter, my response to the appeal of the other which is his subjectivity is myself. I will the other’s free self-realization. In other words, I offer myself to him by placing a limitless trust in the other. This opening of myself to the other is defenselessness. It becomes a call upon the love of the beloved, an appeal to him to accept the offer of myself. This appeal of the lover to the beloved is not the will to draw advantage from the affection for the other (upang magkaroon siya ng utang-na-loob). It is not compelling, dominating or possessing the other. Love wants the other’s freedom: that the other himself choose this safe way and avoid that dangerous path.

There is indeed an element of sacrifice in loving the other which is often understood by many as a loss of self. In love, I renounce the motive of promoting myself. I have to break the provisional structure I have given to my own life, and this is painful. Entering into a friendship is acceding to my friend’s wishes which may not be the same as mine. The pain lies in abandoning my egoism, my self-centeredness.

But this does not mean the loss of myself. On the contrary, in loving the other I need to love myself, and in loving the other I come to fulfill and love myself.

In loving the other, I have to be concerned with myself if my love is to be authentic. Since in the loving encounter I am offering myself to the other, the gift of myself must first of all be valuable to myself. If I despise myself and give myself to the

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other, my giving is a throwing away of myself. I have made the other a garbage can of my despicable myself. In the development of man, this love of self takes the form of being-loved. I am first loved by my parents, teachers and friends before I learn to give back that love to others. The joy I first experience in life is the joy of being loved.

And yet this value of myself remains unconfirmed, the joy of being myself a hidden joy. I need to go out to others, to accept and value them as they are to discover the value of myself. In giving myself to the other, I discover my available self. In willing the happiness of the other, I experience the joy of the giving. I giving I also receive. Just as the teacher is taught by his students and the actor is stimulated by the appreciation of his audience, so in loving the other I cannot help but also fulfilled. In love, giving is also receiving, and receiving is giving.

Consequently, there exist in loving the other the desire to be loved in return. I cannot love the other if I am one hundred percent sure my offer will not be accepted. One does not give something he knows the other will not receive. The desire is essential but should never become the motive for loving, otherwise I am “loving” the other not for what he is but for what I can get in return, for myself.

The primary motive for loving the other is thus the other himself, the “You”. The “you” is not a “he” or “she” l talk about. The “you” is not just another self (just a rose among other roses, a fox among other foxes3), but the you-for-whom-I-care. The “you” in love is discovered by the lover himself. It is not that the lover is blind to the objective qualities of the other but that he is clear that the other is over and above his qualities. The motive of love is the “you” that is seen not only by the eyes or the mind but more by the heart. “I love you because you are beautiful and lovable, and you are beautiful and lovable because you are you.”

Since the “you” is another subjectivity, he is free to accept to reject my offer. This is the risk of loving, that the other may reject or betrayed the self I have offered to him. What happens to unreciprocated love?

One cannot of course erase the possibility that the rejection of the beloved could be a test of the authenticity of love. If the other rejects my offer and I persist in loving the other inspite of the pain, then perhaps my love is truly selfless, unmotivated by the desire to be loved in return. But granted that the rejection is final, what can one say of the experience? No doubt the experience is painful, and it will take time fort the lover to recover himself from the experience. Nevertheless the experience can provide him with an opportunity to examine himself. It can be an opportunity for self-reparation. The experience of being rejected can be an emptying of oneself which would allow room in oneself for development. In this sense, an unreciprocated love can still be an enriching experience.

Indeed, the risk and reality of love being reciprocated proves that there is no shop in the world that sells love.

3 Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince ((Penguin Books, 1971), Chapter 21.

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Creativity of Love

When love is reciprocated, love becomes fruitful, love becomes creative.

Granted that knowing the other person as he is necessitates loving him, still there is a distinction between knowing the other as other and loving him as he is. In knowing, I actively let reality be by opening myself to it, but this letting be of reality demands a certain respect and acceptance of reality which is somewhat passive. Loving the other, however, is willing the other’s free self-realization, and willing demands a “making” of the other. In fact, in every encounter, there is making of each other: the teacher makes the student a student, the student makes the teacher a teacher. In the loving encounter, we also make each other be. What then is created in love?

To understand more clearly the creativity of love, let us try a brief phenomenological sketch of the experience of being-loved: what does the other make of me when he loves me?

When I am loved, I experience a feeling of joy coupled with a sense of security. The feeling of joy is the sense of being valuable, of being accepted and consented to. I no longer feel the fear of being myself and anxiety of trying to be someone else. I experience an exhilarating sense of freedom. At the same time I feel secure, secure because the lover participates in my subjectivity such that I no longer walk alone in the world but that I walk together with him. The other by his love has made me fully myself, not just being what I am but also by being what I can become when I am with him. What is thus created in love is a being-togetherness, a “we”. I can no longer say, “I did this or he did that” but “we did this and that.”

Concomitant with the creation of the “we” is the creation of a new world—our world. No longer do we live in two different worlds, but our worlds have become one.

Such a feeling coming over meThere is wonder in everything I see…Everything I want the world to beIs now coming true especially for me…And the reason is clearIt’s because you are hereI’m on top of the world lookingDown on creation and only the explanation I can findIs the love that’s found ever since you’ve been aroundYou almost put me at the top of the world.4

‘My life is very monotonous,’ he said. ‘I hunt chickens; men hunt me.All the chickens are just alike and all men are just alike. And, in consequent,I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine

4 Song by the Carpenters.

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on my life. I shall know the sound of the step that will be different from allthe others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yourswill call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down younder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheatfields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is thecolor of the gold. Think how wonderful that will be back the thought of you.And I shall love to listen to wind in the wheat…5

Union of Love

The “we” that is created in love is the union of persons and their worlds. The union of persons is not an objective union: when two things are united what results is a composition or assimilation: the two elements are no longer distinguishable from each other—they have each lost their identities. The union in love, however, does not involve the loss of identities. The “I” does not assimilate the “you” or vise versa. On the contrary, the “I”, the “you” an other. We become more of ourselves by loving each other. This is the paradox in love, the many in one, one in many. Says the poet E.E. Cummings,

“one’s not half twoit’s two that are halves of one.”

The Gift of Self

It is not our intent here to explain this paradox of love, the paradox of one in many and many in one. That would call for a metaphysics of love. What we can do on a phenomenological level is attempt to clarify and deepen this paradox by means of description of love as essentially a gift of self.

What is the nature of a gift? A gift is causing another to possess something which hitherto you possess yourself but which the other has no strict right to own. If the other has paid for that which I have given him, this is not gift-giving but an exchange or selling. It is of the very essence of gift-giving that it be disinterested, that is to say, I give not in order to get something in return.

Love is essentially a disinterested giving of myself to the other as other. The giving in love is not a giving up: I am not being deprived of something when I give in love because the self is not a thing that when given no longer belongs to the giver but to the given. Nor is the giving in love the giving of the marketing character because as we have said, in love I do not give in order to get something in return. Furthermore, the giving in love is not of the virtuous character: I do not give in order to feel good. I do not give with reporter and photographer surrounding me. Why then do I give myself in love?

The answer can be seen in what is essentially given in love and to whom it is given—the Self. To give myself in love is not so much to give of what I have as of what I am and can become. And this self that I am and can become is given to the other as other, not so much of what you have but of what you are and can become. I can of course

5 Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, pp. 80-81.

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express this giving of self in the giving of what I have, in the giving of sex or material things, but when I do so the thing has become unique since it has become a concrete but limited embodiment of myself. When I pick up a rose from a garden of a hundred roses,

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