judgment which puts the abstractions together with the experienced objects. And judgment allows for inference when we put judgments together in reasoning processes following the principle of noncontradiction.
That same reference to the Whole is what makes will possible as the freedom to choose. Referred by our nature to the Whole, we are free in the face of anything less than the Whole and are thus able to determine ourselves. But that can only happen insofar as we understand the possibilities for our choice given by intellectual operations. Thus intellect and will are like two sides of the same coin: each presupposes the other. We cannot understand unless we choose, and we cannot choose unless we understand the options.
The building up of our view of the Whole is linked to the limitation of our experience and the inadequacy of the frameworks for understanding that experience. That is why science has a history of uncovering nature. And our choices are limited by our understanding of possibilities. At first they were extremely limited. Over time each of us attains to habitual ways of understanding and choosing. Passed on to others, these ways sediment into institutions, that is, loci of practices that focus and hone our possibilities for acting. Because of the differing ways of understanding and the differing character of institutions, cultures are necessarily plural. And because understanding and choice develop over time, cultures have a history—much of it brought about by interaction between cultures.
Each of us is born and raised in a determinate culture as mediated by the more or less limited understanding possessed by those who raised us. That process focuses the possibilities given by each of our individual genetic makeups. So when reflective awareness begins to emerge in each of us, we are already determined by two structures we did not choose: our genetic makeup and our cultural shaping. These give us the initial motivational structure for choosing. When we begin to make our own choices, we further determine our own habit-structure within the frameworks of the genetic and cultural stamps given to us. At any given moment then we have three already determined levels that constitute any given Me: a genetic level, a cultural level, and a personal-historical level. We cannot erase the fact that Here-and-Now we are each determined by these three levels, in the peculiar forms they have taken in each of us. But any given person has the bipolar structure sketched above. Reference to the Whole grounds the I as the ability to understand and choose from among the possibilities afforded by the I’s own Me. The Me is the artist’s material for the I, the already determinate stuff for the I’s choosing. What am I going to do with Me? is the question each one of us always faces. And what we do depends upon how we understand the possibilities afforded by that tri-level structure.
The interplay of these levels sediments into a dynamic center that a long tradition has called “the heart.” It is the ground of our spontaneous tendency to move in certain directions, to be attracted by certain possibilities and repelled by others. It is our more or less automatic pilot, the default position for everyday action. But being directed toward the Whole, I am always placed in conscious life at a reflective distance from Me, on account of which I have to ask myself: Where is my heart? Is it where it ought to be? Where ought it to be?
Reflective distance makes the individual responsible for its own actions. It becomes the cutting edge of the culture which it can sustain, develop, or subvert. Its full development lies in the cultivation of its spontaneous proclivities for action when thought reaches the heart. Religiously, that means when God moves from object of thought to a living Presence.
Now the function of philosophy is to make the invariable structures explicit, those that are present phenomenologically and those that underlie foundationally. That is why John Paul points to a move from phenomenon to foundation. We will follow that move in the treatment of the various philosophers we have selected.
The practice of philosophy stands at a distance from our own hearts in order to arrive at an understanding of what and why our hearts desire what they do and in order to arrive at criteria for judging the movements of our hearts within a responsibly developed view of the Whole. Philosophy holds open the space for the fullest development of the heart and clarifies the heart to itself. But philosophy itself is not directly a matter of the heart; it is a matter of the intellect and its pure, unrestricted desire to understand, apart from how we might feel about things.
* * * *
Armed with the basic concepts we have highlighted in our dealing with everyday things, we turn to focus upon select highlights in the history of thought, beginning with Plato, passing through Aristotle, on to Augustine and Aquinas, who took up Plato and Aristotle respectively, and then to Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger. The aim is not to present how they used to think and thus satisfy historical curiosity, but to learn how to think by attending to the things with which the classic texts deal. The lives of the thinkers are to that extent irrelevant. It is the things themselves that we learn to focus in various ways by studying the great philosophers.1
QUESTIONS
1. What are the essential features of each of the sensory fields?
2. What is the difference between the “lived body” and body object? You know of bodies by sensing them in various ways as objects appearing within your sensory fields. But you know your own body in a different way. Describe that difference as exactly as you can.
3. What is different about touch than is the case with the other senses?
4. How is intellection different from sensation?
5. How is a natural capacity different than a sensory object? How is it like the intellect? How is it different?
6. Heraclitus once said: All things flow and nothing remains the same. You can’t step into the same river twice. Is that true of all of experience and its objects?
7. Red thing, redness, color, sensory feature, quality, property: these terms are arranged from more concrete to more abstract. Each more abstract term covers more items in experience than the more concrete terms that precede it. This is an instance of a logical hierarchy—parallel to the Church hierarchy in which you find broader and broader spheres of authority. How do the notions of sameness and difference function in this logical hierarchy?
8. Universal notions function like glasses. How so?
9. How are humans related to space and time?
10. The pope says that what we need is a renewal of the philosophy of being (FR 97/119). How does the notion of Being enter into the discussion of the mailbox? What features of human experience does it make possible?
11. What are the essential features of the way in which different kinds of things present themselves: the nonliving, the living, the animal, the human?
12. What are the essential features involved in speech? How does writing modify those features?
13. How does aesthetic experience move us from essence to existence?
14. How are the big questions made possible by the structure of human awareness?
15. Describe the bipolar structure of human existence. How does that make the human being the culture-creating animal?
16. Describe the distinction between I and Me. How does the heart fit into the picture?
FURTHER READINGS
1. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. This is one of the founder of phenomenology’s most readable works, set against the background of modern thought from Galileo and Descartes through the British Empiricists and Kant in relation to the development of Western thought generally.
2.
