Editor's Introduction

This volume brings together a number of scholars working on topics ranging from contemporary ethics to the history of philosophy. This wide scope reflects the comprehensive nature of Dietrich von Hildebrand's philosophic vision, including foundational works on ethics, philosophical method, aesthetics, and the nature of love. Hildebrand managed to fit his extensive scholarly writing into a heroic life of anti-Nazi political activism during World War II. Within his corpus of works are a number of important philosophical problems that beg for further development, such as his conception of personal existence, his rich and pluralistic conception of beauty, and his distinction between person and personality. In several places, however, the development of Hildebrand's thought must involve a correction or even an outright challenge to his reasoning. Each of these papers does just this, applying the insights of Hildebrand to a number of diverse philosophical problems while also advancing and challenging his thought in various ways. Despite the wide diversity of problems, three central areas appear in this volume, which represent some of Hildebrand's most important contributions to philosophy: (1) his method of phenomenological realism, (2) his conception of value and value-response, and (3) his personalism. In the following sections, I provide a brief sketch of these three areas in order to provide a background for the papers in this volume.

Phenomenological Realism

Hildebrand remained committed to two strands of philosophical method that are sometimes seen to be in tension: metaphysical realism and phenomenology. Like his teacher Husserl, Hildebrand sought to ground philosophical argument in that which is given to us in experience rather than rely at the outset on abstractions or theories that distance us from what is given. Unlike Husserl (at least as he is frequently interpreted), however, Hildebrand remained committed to a metaphysically realist version of this phenomenological approach. According to Hildebrand, the reality that we investigate when we do philosophy is a reality beyond us, transcending our subjective experience of it. This reality is revealed in our subjective experience, but it is not constituted by it. Hence the aim of philosophy must be a faithfulness to that which is real. This means that we must strive to grasp reality as it discloses itself and to find suitable terms to accurately express what we have grasped while minimizing any distortion in our understanding or misleading characterizations in our language. Hildebrand typically proceeds by describing in detail an ideal type or essence, attempting to isolate this datum in its purity. He often attempts to preserve this purity by enumerating a set of perversions, distortions, or alternatives to the datum so that our minds can understand the ideal by contrast with what it is not.

At times, this procedure may at first appear similar to the process of conceptual analysis in the analytic tradition. Admittedly, one finds a great deal of variety and development within the analytic tradition on the methods and aims of conceptual analysis. Nevertheless, the primary object of analysis tends to be our own concepts or words. Hildebrand, however, understands his own method to run directly contrary to this because he takes the object of analysis to be the objective, intelligible structure of reality rather than a subjective structure selected from among our own concepts. Hildebrand's goal is the conformity of our concepts to what is given rather than an analysis of our concepts themselves as we happen to find them. I hasten to add, however, an ecumenical qualification. Analytic philosophy begins as a revolt against British idealism and subjectivisms of all sorts by its return to rigorous logical analysis, just as Husserl himself begins with a return to logical analysis. Frege's mathematical Platonism stands as a precursor to both traditions, and it is logic that is hailed as the harbinger of a new objectivism in both phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Ironically, both traditions soon fall back into various forms of the very subjectivism and idealism from which they originally tried to escape. Nevertheless, in both traditions, realism has survived and is alive and well.

This theme of realism runs, in some way, through all the papers in this collection, but...