Living the Truth: A Theory of Action by Klaus Demmer (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 332 Living the Truth: A Theory of Action. By KLAUS DEMMER. Trans. by BRIAN MCNEIL. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010.Pp.164. $35.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-589-01697-2. To thine own self be true. Such is the overarching theme of this book, although Demmer does not say it so well as does Shakespeare’s Polonius. To the contrary, although Demmer praises precision and the necessary effort to get down to the details of the concrete situation, his book provides little more than generalities that are often open to multifarious interpretations. One can hardly object to the injunction to do good and avoid evil, but one wishes that a book-length treatment might provide more details about what is good and what is evil. Of course, Demmer does get more specific than “Do good and avoid evil.” Still, in a book on morality, he considers only four specific cases—a doctor providing information to a patient, the seal of confession, celibacy, and poverty—and these but briefly. After reading the whole book, one can reach few conclusions about what Demmer might say concerning particular cases. One can gather, at any rate, that he thinks celibacy is usually unhealthy. The whole book seems either to be written in code—requiring constant deciphering—or to be written by an author who simply cannot commit himself to anything. Take the following passage: “It is the task of conscience, and the complex actions that it performs, to take the existing empirical realities in their inalienable referential character and fill them with the meaning that it has grasped in such a way that an anthropologically grounded image of ordo is generated” (120). What does this mean? My deciphering came up with the following: “Don’t expect conscience to tell you what is right and wrong simply by considering the observable characteristics of an action; a difficult act of interpretation—indeed, a creative act of interpretation—is needed before any moral evaluation can be made.” But then I could be wrong. After all, we never get an account of “inalienable referential character” or of “an anthropologically grounded image of ordo.” Nor does it become clear how conscience can fill empirical realities with meaning. Demmer might defend himself by noting that the book does not concern ethical content but moral methodology. True enough. But moral methodology, like anything else, requires concrete details, details not provided by Demmer. As Demmer himself says, “A person who does not submit to the constraint of concreteness is fleeing from the truth” (109). By this standard, the book is a long and torturous escape flight. Demmer praises natural law, which “resists the tendency to a vagueness that withdraws into unassailable niches” (13). Demmer himself, however, is indeed unassailable. He rests safely behind the ironclad defense of obscurity. Many passages are especially obscure. Consider the following: “The person is the proleptic outreach of the act of knowing and willing toward Being as the fullness of all its individual aspects” (27). This definition comes shortly after Demmer has criticized Boethius’s traditional definition as being overly abstract. BOOK REVIEWS 333 Clearly, Demmer does not offer great improvements. He provides only hints as to what a proleptic outreach might be, and he has no analysis of knowing and willing, or any explanation of how to reach all the individual aspects of being with a capital “B.” He does not even acknowledge that defining a person as a kind of activity might be problematic. So much for the style of the book. What of its content? As already mentioned, living the truth means being true to oneself. In this life journey of honesty, however, many pitfalls present themselves, chief among which is a kind of moral rigorism or legalism, which Demmer thinks—so it seems—most of the Catholic intellectual tradition has fallen into, at least since St. Thomas Aquinas. This rigorism is itself a symptom of cowardice. The spiritual coward is unwilling to take risks and attempts to evade the burdens of life, so he seeks refuge in moral norms, from which he hopes to attain certainty. Following rules is comforting to him. He is, however, living a lie...