Further Development of the Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand

I. Appropriating Hildebrand's Insights

The first way in which we can make Hildebrand's thought fruitful is to see for ourselves what he has discovered. Anyone who gains the same insights into reality that Hildebrand has gained contributes to the fruitful embodiment of the Hildebrandian philosophy in his own mind and possibly in the minds of his students. In the words of Saint Augustine, the teacher of philosophy should help students read in "the book of that light which is called truth" (in libro lucis illius quae veritas dicitur; Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV, xv, 21).

Any real appropriation of a philosophical insight requires delving into the nature of things themselves. Anyone who draws from the same fountain of truth from which Hildebrand drank will be led to discover some new aspects of being, however small they may be in comparison with Hildebrand's significant discoveries.

For a presentation of Hildebrand's momentous philosophical insights, I refer to Hildebrand's self-presentation.¹

II. Systematic Presentations of Hildebrand's Thought

A second form of adding to the thought of Hildebrand lies in providing systematic presentations of it. Such presentations can take chiefly three forms:

1. 1. Presentations of his thought in general, perhaps in a work analogous to the ones of Roger Troisfontaines on Gabriel Marcel (Trois-fontaines 1953–68) or of Rocco Buttiglione on Karol Wojtyła and Augusto del Noce (Buttiglione 1997, 1991).

2. 2. Presentations on different topics on which systematic accounts are missing from his work but in which many dispersed insights can be found. An example of this is his philosophy of history, to which Hildebrand makes many contributions. Among such contributions are his sharp distinction between the intersubjective historical life of ideas and their truth and his penetrating critiques of historical relativism, the ideology of progress, and the arrogance of imagining one's own era to be vastly superior to all previous eras, which he compares to the silly pride underlying racism.² Hildebrand elaborates our real task when confronted with dominant ideas and ideologies: namely, not becoming mouthpieces of the spirits of our epoch but, in the light of the eternal truths about things, providing a sharp and sober critical analysis of the respective zeitgeist and sorting out the elements of truth from possibly fatal errors contained in it. Hildebrand executed this task both in his heroic fight against National Socialism and its antipersonalistic errors and in his devastating criticism of the errors pervading society and many theological trends within the Catholic Church in the 1960s and thereafter (Hildebrand 1994; Seifert 1998). One should also here mention his splendid analyses of classical and romantic elements in the works of different classical composers.³

3. 3. Synthetic presentations of his thought referring to those fields and areas of philosophy where coherent and large systematic works of Hildebrand exist—such as on aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of community, and love—but where at least a general and broader public could very much profit from abbreviated summary presentations of his thought.⁴

III. Presentations of the Philosophical and Historical Development of His Thought

Hildebrand's philosophy forms a coherent whole from his earliest writings to his latest posthumous works. There is nothing like a Heideggerian Kehre or other pseudo-dramatic turns in his thought nor truly dramatic revolutionary changes such as Scheler's during the last four or five years of his life.⁵

Nonetheless, there are also certain important developments in Hildebrand's thought, such as the later addition of the third category of importance—the objective good for the person—to his earlier crucial distinction between the merely subjectively important (satisfying) and the objective (intrinsic) value.⁶ Another development involved his more fundamental change of position on the nature of the free value-response that we will discuss later, and an elaboration on the fundamental newness of being motivated by the objective good of another person in the intentio benevolentiae of love deserves special emphasis as well (Hildebrand 1971, 1980). Moreover, in an absolutely brilliant chapter, Hildebrand shows that the loving person desires the good for the other person not only...