Viktor Frankl and Meaning

 

     The phenomenon of meaning, its social roots, its relation to human nature and the "who we are" (plurality) that has its roots in human nature yet transcends it (Arendt). Its relation to happiness. Meaning is at the very intersection of human nature and personhood. I got started thinking about this today by thinking about Viktor Frankl. I feel the modern social system, which is largely a function of the global economy, de-means human life daily. The focus on happiness - therapeutical and otherwise – functions among other things as an ideology to mask this. I want to try to unpack some of these intuitions.

 

All thinkers I admire resist the reduction of human beings to functions. Frankl's insight is that meaning is not simply a psychological state. One does not create meaning by deciding to feel meaningful. Meaning is discovered in responding to something real: a task, a person, a truth, a responsibility. Happiness may follow from this response but cannot be directly pursued. The more directly one seeks happiness, the more it recedes. I completely agree.

    Arendt adds another piece of the puzzle. Human beings are not merely members of a species; we are not (hopefully) an exemplar of an Ur-model, though I think that is a chilling possibility (Brave New World). We are born into a world of plurality. We become persons through speech, action, promise, remembrance, forgiveness, friendship, citizenship. We disclose who we are as well as what we are. Human nature provides the conditions for this but the actual "who" emerges only in a shared world among others. That is why meaning is never merely private. Even when I am alone, the things that matter to me have been shaped by language, traditions, communities, loves, loyalties, and forms of life. Meaning is social all the way down. The very language in which I ask "What is the meaning of my life?" was given to me by others.

     Many modern institutions are efficient at organizing production and consumption (if not just distribution and fulfillment of needs) but they weaken the very things through which meaning appears. Local communities disappear. Work becomes fragmented. Traditions lose authority. Places become interchangeable. Relationships become mobile and temporary. Economic value increasingly displaces other forms of value. This is not simply a conservative complaint. It appears in Marx's notion of alienation, in Arendt's analysis of mass society, in Josef Pieper's critique of total work, in Wendell Berry's defense of local communities, and in Christopher Lasch's critique of narcissism. What all these people share is the suspicion that a society can become highly productive while simultaneously eroding the conditions under which life appears meaningful.

     The therapeutic culture is part of this. If the social world itself is producing alienation, loneliness, rootlessness, and insignificance, it is tempting to reinterpret these as primarily psychological problems. The question becomes: "How can I feel better?" rather than "What kind of world are we creating?" Therapy undoubtedly has a legitimate role. Frankl himself was a psychiatrist. But some forms of therapeutic discourse function ideologically when they individualize what may be social, cultural, or spiritual wounds. A lonely person may not simply need coping strategies. He may need friends. A person who feels useless may not simply need self-esteem. He may need work that genuinely contributes something. A person who experiences life as meaningless may not simply need cognitive reframing. He may need participation in realities larger than himself.

 

. . .

Meaning lies at the intersection of human nature and personhood. Human nature provides certain fundamental capacities and needs: language, friendship, work, love, truth, beauty, belonging, transcendence. Yet meaning is never merely the satisfaction of common needs. It emerges through the unique ways persons respond to these possibilities and through the worlds they build together. Arendt would perhaps say that meaning appears wherever human beings disclose themselves to one another in a common world. Frankl would say that meaning appears wherever a person answers the demands of reality. Pieper would add that meaning appears most fully when we encounter reality not merely as users or producers but as contemplative beings capable of wonder. Much of contemporary life systematically pushes us away from all three: away from genuine plurality, away from genuine responsibility, and away from genuine contemplation.    The result is not merely unhappiness. It is something deeper: a weakening of the experience that one's life genuinely matters, belongs somewhere, and participates in a meaningful whole.

 

   Thus the problem of meaning cannot be solved entirely by psychology. It is simultaneously anthropological, social, political, moral, and ultimately metaphysical. The question "What gives life meaning?" inevitably becomes the question "What kind of beings are we, and what kind of world allows us to flourish as those beings?" For thinkers like Frankl, Arendt, Berry, Gaita, and Pieper, those two questions cannot ultimately be separated.

 

. . .

 

Another go at it. I feel I need to concretize the intuition. If we speak only of human nature, we are speaking of what human beings generally are. We are rational, linguistic, social, dependent creatures. We need friendship, meaningful activity, truthfulness, beauty, belonging, and love. These are universal features of human flourishing.

     But meaning is never found in these general needs alone. Take friendship. Human nature may explain why human beings need friendship. But the meaning of friendship is not found in "friendship in general." It is found in this friend, with this history, these shared memories, this act of loyalty. Meaning enters when the universal human need becomes embodied in a concrete personal relationship.

    Or teaching, my vocation. Human nature may explain why human beings need education and why knowledge is a human good. But what gives meaning to my teaching is not the general fact that education exists. It is this particular student struggling with an idea, a student discovering a new possibility, a conversation that changes someone. Meaning appears in the encounter between universal human goods and particular persons. Perhaps that is what I mean by the intersection. Human nature provides the field of significance. Personhood provides the concrete realization. Without human nature, meaning would become completely subjective. Whatever anyone chooses would count as meaningful. Without personhood, meaning would become abstract. Friendship, justice, truth, beauty, and love would remain mere concepts.

    Meaning arises when universal human goods become concretely embodied in a personal life. This is why Frankl's examples are almost always particular. Not "love" but a particular wife. Not "work" but a particular task. Not "courage" but a particular response to suffering. Human nature tells us what kinds of things can be meaningful. Personhood determines how those meanings become actual in a unique life. Or, borrowing from Arendt, human nature explains what we are, while meaning emerges through the disclosure of who we are. A bee can flourish according to its nature. It builds a hive, gathers pollen, reproduces. But we do not speak of a bee finding meaning. A human being must do more than function according to nature. He must answer the question: "Who shall I become?" Meaning seems to arise in that space between nature and freedom, between the goods that call to us and the unique response we give to them.

 

. . .

 

This explains my unease with some modern therapeutic language. It often treats meaning as a subjective feeling located entirely within the individual. But my understanding is closer to Frankl, Arendt, Gaita, and even Aristotle:

meaning is neither merely "out there" in objective human nature nor merely "in here" as a psychological state. It is found in the lived relation between a person and the real goods that human nature makes possible.

     A father reading to his child is a good example. The meaning is not reducible to biology. Nor is it a private feeling. It arises in the concrete realization of a human good – love, care, transmission, belonging – through this particular father and this particular child. The universal and the personal meet in a single act. That may be the intersection I am trying to name. It is the place where human nature becomes biography. Where the universal becomes a story. Where "what we are" becomes "who I am." And meaning seems to live precisely there.

 

. . .

 

   I have emphasized - with Berry, MacIntyre, and others - that to realize the potential in human nature, i.e. virtue and a chance to flourish, we are by nature communal animals. Yet, and surely Berry would not disagree based on his Sabbath poems, we also need solitude, contemplation, a life apart from this community. This reminds me that human nature is a Spannungsfeld (field of tensions) of seeming opposites, which I first learned from a section of Weil's The Need for Roots. Weil argues that human beings possess multiple, sometimes competing needs of the soul. We need liberty, but also obedience. Equality, but also hierarchy. Security, but also risk. Personal initiative, but also social cooperation. Truth, but also rootedness in tradition. She does not try to dissolve the tensions. She thinks they belong to the structure of human existence itself, and I agree.

    Human beings are naturally communal animals. We need friendship, family, conversation, common projects, shared memories, traditions, and places. Without these we become diminished. This is one of the themes of Wendell Berry and Alasdair MacIntyre. Yet we are also creatures capable of contemplation. A person who never leaves the community cannot truly see it. He merely conforms to it. Genuine membership requires some distance. The poet, philosopher, monk, artist, and even the farmer walking alone through his fields all exemplify this need.

     Berry understands this. His Sabbath poems are records of solitude. He enters the woods alone. He becomes silent. The social world recedes. Yet this solitude is not individualism. He returns from it more deeply connected to the land, the creatures, and the community. This may point to something deeper about human nature itself. We are simultaneously beings of belonging and beings of transcendence. We belong somewhere but we also possess the capacity to step back from every particular belonging and contemplate it. We need community, yet we also need solitude. We need tradition but we need enough distance to judge traditions. We need action, yet we need contemplation. We need rootedness, yet we are drawn beyond every particular place toward truth as such.

     Meaning seems to arise not from one side of these polarities but from their fruitful tension. A life of pure community risks conformity and absorption into the collective;a life of pure solitude risks isolation and sterility. A life of pure work risks becoming what Pieper called "total work."

A life of pure contemplation risks detachment from responsibility. Human flourishing seems to require movement between the poles.

 

 Many of the thinkers I return to, such as Aristotle, Weil, Berry, Pieper, Gaita, Arendt, Murdoch – share a suspicion of systems that attempt to resolve these tensions once and for all. Modern economic life privileges productivity over contemplation. Certain romantic movements go in the opposite direction (in rebellion), prvileging self-expression over communal obligations. Some forms of collectivism subordinate the person to the community. Some forms of liberal individualism dissolve the community into autonomous choices. But we areconstituted by these tensions. We are not one thing but a dynamic unity of apparently contrary needs. Human nature is not a fixed blueprint but a field of ordered tensions – a Spannungsfeld. And perhaps wisdom consists less in choosing one side than in learning how to inhabit those tensions well.

     Thus Weil's account feels so true my experience. We do not merely need freedom. We need freedom and belonging. We do not merely need individuality. We need individuality and participation. We do not merely need community. We need community and solitude. A healthy human life is not the victory of one pole over the other. It is a kind of rhythm between them. Berry walking alone on a Sabbath morning and then returning to his family, neighbors, and farm may be as good an image of that rhythm as any philosopher has given us. It is not an escape from community but a return to it through contemplation. And perhaps contemplation itself is possible only because there is a world of people and things worth returning to.

 

. . .

 

    Frankl's insights about suffering, one's attitude toward it, as a source of meaning, as opposed to the thought that we are all supposed to be happy ala Brave New World is important. But without a certain range of metaphysical horizons, would that thought make sense? What does Frankl say about that if anything?

   I think that this is one of the deepest questions in Frankl, and I think he is deliberately ambiguous about it. Frankl certainly rejects the idea that happiness is the goal of life. Happiness, he says, is a by-product. Human beings seek meaning, not pleasure. In that respect he stands against the world portrayed in Brave New World, where suffering is eliminated, desires are managed, and happiness becomes the supreme social objective.

    For Frankl, suffering can become meaningful when it cannot be avoided and when a person responds to it with dignity, courage, fidelity, or love. His famous examples from the death camps/concentration camps involve people who retained their humanity despite conditions that stripped them of almost everything else. But why should suffering borne nobly matter? Why is dignity preferable to despair? Why is courage better than surrender? Why should fidelity to a dead spouse remain meaningful if death is simply annihilation? I just thing they are, period. In this case, there is no answer to the question why. There is the absolute.

  But at this point Frankl becomes somewhat elusive. As a psychiatrist, he wanted logotherapy to be available to religious and non-religious people alike. He therefore refused to make belief in God or immortality a formal requirement of meaning. Meaning, he thought, could be discovered within ordinary life, work, love, and responsibility.

   But he repeatedly implies that meaning points beyond itself. One of his favorite ideas is that conscience is not merely a subjective feeling but a kind of organ for perceiving objective meaning. That already implies a reality larger than the self. He also writes at times as if ultimate meaning transcends human understanding altogether. We may not know why suffering occurs, but we can still trust that life has meaning under all conditions. That sounds quite religious. Frankl once wrote: "It is not we who are permitted to question the meaning of life – it is life that questions us." I like that. It implies that reality itself addresses us with demands. Meaning is not something we invent. We answer to it. Absolutely right.

    The question then becomes: who or what is doing the questioning? Frankl does not give a definitive answer as far as I know. As I understand him, he wanted to leave open a space where the religious person could say "God" and the secular person could say "the objective demands of reality." I would press here.  Suppose there is no God, no immortality, no ultimate justice, no transcendent order, no enduring significance beyond death. Then what exactly makes suffering meaningful? One could still say that courage is admirable. One could still say that loyalty is noble. One could still say that love is beautiful. But it is difficult to explain why these things ultimately matter rather than merely being preferences we happen to admire. Again,I think that confuses the kind of thing for which we need reasons to justify it from an absolute command or reality that we are called to submit to, unconditionally.

   This is where Frankl's position differs from many existentialists. For Sartre, meaning is fundamentally created by human choice. For Frankl, meaning is discovered. If meaning is discovered, then there must be something there to discover. And if there is something there to discover, one naturally begins asking metaphysical questions about the structure of reality itself. I think this is why so many readers eventually move beyond Frankl toward religious or metaphysical reflection. For me, influenced by Gaita, the absolute of loving your children, say, regardless of any other benefit or reason why, points to some reality that makes demands on us, or issues invitations, but which we can only experience as an absolute ‘love your children’, no reason for this possible. It is good. It is right. Etc. just saying the say thing with different worlds. Frankl’s account of meaning also seems to presuppose that reality is somehow hospitable to meaning.

    The alternative is difficult to sustain. If the universe is ultimately indifferent, if suffering is simply pointless pain, if love ends in absolute annihilation, if justice is finally defeated by death, then Frankl's language of responsibility, dignity, and meaning begins to sound strangely unsupported. One can, indeed must, still affirm it, but one wants to know what holds it up.

     Thus I think Frankl stands at a threshold. He shows that human beings need meaning more deeply than happiness. He shows that suffering can be transformed by meaning. But he leaves largely unanswered the further question that concerns me: What sort of reality must exist for meaning itself to be ultimately real? That question leads beyond psychotherapy into metaphysics, theology, and philosophy.

 

 

P. S.

 

  What is the difference between thinking "the phenomenon of meaning" and "the concept of meaning"? The concept of meaning is an intellectual object. It is what we arrive at when we ask things like ‘What do we mean by meaning’? or ‘How should it be defined?’ or ‘How does it differ from happiness, purpose, value, significance, or truth?’ This is the philosopher's conceptual work.

   The phenomenon of meaning is something prior to the concept. It is the lived reality that gives rise to the concept in the first place. A child experiences meaning long before possessing the concept of meaning. A farmer caring for a field. A mother sitting beside a sick child. A student discovering a vocation. A mourner keeping faith with the dead. A prisoner enduring suffering for something he loves. All of these involve meaning as a lived phenomenon before anyone formulates a theory about it.

 

For example, for Heidegger, there is a difference between a theory of truth and the phenomenon of truth as unconcealment. For Gadamer, there is a difference between a theory of understanding and the lived phenomenon of understanding. For Wittgenstein, there is a difference between a definition of a word and the actual forms of life in which the word has its home.For Gaita, there is a difference between defining love and seeing what love looks like in the life of a saint, a mother, or a friend. The phenomenon always comes first. The concept is a reflective attempt to articulate what is already there.

  One danger of modern thought is that it often mistakes the concept for the phenomenon. For example, a psychologist might define meaning in terms of subjective well-being. A sociologist might define it in terms of social integration. An economist might define it in terms of preference satisfaction.

Yet before all these theories stands the phenomenon itself: the lived experience that some things matter, that some acts are noble, that some sufferings are worth enduring, that some loves are irreplaceable.

    Frankl begins from the phenomenon rather than the concept. He does not start by defining meaning. He begins with the fact that some prisoners lost the will to live while others retained it because they experienced a task, a love, a responsibility, or a hope that gave their suffering significance. Only afterward does he theorize.

    If you approach meaning as a concept, you may ask what meaning is. If you approach meaning as a phenomenon, you ask what is happening when a human being experiences life as meaningful. That second question immediately opens onto friendship, work, love, memory, suffering, contemplation, community, transcendence, mortality, and hope. It becomes anthropological rather than merely conceptual.

    My question here involved the phenomenon of meaning, and what its existence revealed about human beings and the world we inhabit. Trying to understand a dimension of human reality.

 

 

Reflection on a scene from Annie Hall (Woody Allen)

I want to reflect on a hilarious and unsettling scene from Annie Hall (Woody Allen). Alvy is ostensibly neurotic. Given the knowledge that humanity's life is limited, that the existence of the earth is limited, that, absent the Divine, everything we do, everything and everyone we love, all we care about, anything at all intrinsically good will perish and it will be again as though it never was, given all that, the young Alvy doesn’t see the point of doing his homework. The mother and the therapist are ostensibly rooted in common sense reality and find Alvy’s attitude neurotic, even ridiculous. Who is the neurotic party in this exchange?  Here is the transcript of the scene, the young Alvy being brought before a therapist by his mother:

 

Mother: He’s been depressed. All of a sudden he can’t do anything. 

Dr. Flicker: Why are you depressed, Alvy? 

Mother: Tell Dr Flicker. It’s something he read. 

Dr. Flicker: Something he read, uh? 

Alvy: The universe is expanding. 

Dr. Flicker: The universe is expanding? 

Alvy: The universe is everything. If it’s expanding, someday it will break apart… and that will be the end of everything. 

Mother: What is that your business? He stopped doing his homework. 

Alvy: What’s the point? 

Mother: What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding! 

Dr. Flicker: It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we’re here, uh? Uh? Uh? (laughs)

 

I want to say that Alvy's thought is not irrational. It is, in a sense, perfectly rational. If the universe is destined for extinction, if every human achievement will disappear, if every civilization will vanish, if every beloved person will die, and if there is no reality beyond this process, then Alvy has stumbled upon what many philosophers have regarded as the deepest problem of human existence. There are echoes of Pascal, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Camus. Tolstoy describes almost exactly Alvy's question: if death annihilates everything, why continue with the ordinary business of life? There are perhaps two kinds of people: those who are deeply struck by Tolstoy’s question (Alvy) and those who think he went crazy (Alvy’s mother).

     The mother is not entirely foolish either. "You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" is funny because it expresses a genuine truth. Human beings cannot live constantly at the level of cosmic abstraction. There is breakfast to make, children to raise, books to read, students to teach, gardens to tend. Much of life would become impossible if we continually held before our minds the eventual heat death of the universe. The mother embodies the finite horizon of life. Meaning is found within life. Alvy is looking beyond life to the ultimate horizon. The problem is that the ultimate horizon threatens to swallow the nearer meanings. Both perspectives seem true.

    I always thought that the therapist's response was inadequate. "We've gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we're here" is not really an answer to Alvy's question. It is more a recommendation for coping. It resembles the response of Epicureanism or perhaps Camus: the universe may be indifferent, but we must nevertheless live. But Alvy was asking whether enjoyment itself is stupid, pointless. If everything perishes, why should enjoyment matter? Why should love matter? Why should truth matter?

   Many religious thinkers have argued that the problem is not merely psychological but metaphysical. Without some participation in an eternal reality, the destruction of all finite goods seems to undermine their ultimate significance. One hears this in Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and in modern figures such as Hans Küng. The longing that love not perish forever points toward a question about the nature of reality itself. 

    I guess one could say that Alvy's neurosis lies not in asking the question but in being unable to live with it. Many philosophers have distinguished between confronting mortality and becoming obsessed by it. A person may fully acknowledge death and finitude while still being able to love particular things. One thinks here of Martin Heidegger, for whom authentic life requires facing death rather than fleeing from it. 

    What strikes me most about the scene is that the adults are treating Alvy as though he has made a childish mistake, when in fact he has encountered one of the oldest and most profound human questions. The comedy comes from the mismatch between the depth of the question and the banality of the answers. The therapist laughs. The mother talks about Brooklyn. Yet Alvy has stumbled into the same abyss that troubled Pascal, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and countless others. Perhaps the neurotic person is not the one who sees the problem, but the one who thinks the problem has been solved simply because there is homework to finish and dinner to eat. But the converse danger is also real: perhaps the neurotic person is the one who cannot return from the stars to Brooklyn. The film never quite decides between those possibilities. That is part of why the scene remains memorable. It is funny because both sides are right, and because neither side seems fully satisfying.

 

. . .

 

What's the point?  I think of Nietzsche's definition of nihilism: 

"Was bedeutet Nihilismus? – Daß die obersten Werte sich entwerten. Es fehlt das Ziel; es fehlt die Antwort auf das 'Warum?'." 

"What does nihilism mean? – That the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; the answer to the 'Why?' is lacking."

 And this:

 "Wer ein Warum hat, erträgt fast jedes Wie"

 “Whoever has a Why to live can bear almost any How.”

 For Nietzsche, Christianity had supplied Europe with a cosmic answer to the Why. Human life had a purpose. History had a direction. Suffering had meaning. Human beings had an ultimate destiny. Once faith in that framework collapsed, people often continued to use its moral vocabulary while no longer believing its foundations. The result was nihilism: we still want meaning but no longer know where meaning comes from. Thus Nietzsche feared nihilism more than atheism. Atheism is a belief. Nihilism is a condition.

      Nietzsche’s thought was developed by the great psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. His central tenet is that human beings do not live merely by pleasure, comfort, or survival. They need meaning. Meaning comes ultimately from a metaphysical root. To live practically we must have metaphysical roots, or completely "forget the question of Being" altogether (Heidegger). We cannot live without at least an implicit answer to the Why? Without being hopelessly, almost inhumanly shallow. This is the anthropological truth (or not) that I am interested in. Nihilism is the collapse of the answer to "Why?" It is the discovery that the traditional sources of meaning no longer command belief – the metaphysical roots of life have died – leaving us naked before the cold, cruel indifferent, meaningless universe and our impending annihilation.

     Nietzsche's point is that human beings cannot simply dispense with the Why. We may suppress the question, distract ourselves from it, or inherit an answer without reflecting upon it. Yet when the answer collapses, nihilism emerges. And similarly, Heidegger argues that ordinary life is possible largely because we do not continually confront the question of Being. We are absorbed in projects, routines, concerns, and practical affairs. The world is already meaningful enough for us to get on with things. This is what Alvy’s mother embodies. But occasionally, as with the young Alvy, that practical horizon collapses. In anxiety, for example, beings as a whole lose their obvious significance. One asks, "What is the point of any of this?" Young Alvy is experiencing something like a child's version of Heideggerian anxiety. The mother's answer is essentially the answer of everydayness: "Brooklyn is not expanding." "Stop asking ultimate questions and return to the practical world." This need not imply shallowness. I assume she takes the metaphysical roots of her Jewish culture for granted. The difference between her and Alvy turns out to be that for Alvy “God is dead” i.e. the traditional sources of meaning no longer command belief.

 

. . .

 

    Can human beings ultimately live without some answer to the Why? Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre would say that humanity must learn to live without metaphysical comfort. Meaning must be created, affirmed, or disclosed within finitude itself. But thinkers as different as Leo Tolstoy, William James, Josef Pieper, Raimond Gaita, and many religious thinkers would question whether this is psychologically or even conceptually possible. I find this second answer more plausible.

    I was very impressed with Tolstoy’s Confession as a student. His crisis was almost exactly Alvy's crisis and can almost be read as a commentary on Nietzsche's definition. He repeatedly asks: Why should I live? Why should I do anything? What will come of what I do today or tomorrow? When every answer ended with death, he felt he had reached a dead end. He discovered that all the ordinary purposes of life – success, family, achievement, pleasure – were undermined if death ultimately erased everything. His famous question was essentially: Why should I do anything today if tomorrow death destroys it all? The practical projects of life depended upon a horizon of meaning larger than mortality. Nietzsche and Tolstoy are strangely close. Both agree that human beings cannot live without an answer to the Why. Their disagreement concerns whether that answer can be created by human beings or must ultimately be discovered in God.

    Even many secular people seem to live as though certain things possess an enduring significance that exceeds their empirical lifespan. We treat love, truth, justice, friendship, and beauty as though they matter absolutely, not merely temporarily. The mother who grieves her child is not simply regretting the loss of a useful object. She experiences the child's existence as something that ought not be annihilated. That "ought not" is already pointing beyond a purely naturalistic description of the world. So I think the anthropological question is exactly this: Can a human being genuinely live without an answer to the Why, or can he only live by forgetting the question?    In the Annie Hall scene, the young Alvy is asking whether Brooklyn itself still makes sense once the universe has become a question mark. The adults have an answer to how to live. What they never provide is an answer to why.

      Perhaps most people do not possess an explicit metaphysics. But they possess a hinge belief or Einstellung (fundamental attitude toward life). They unreflectively trust that life is worth living, that love matters, that truth matters, that their actions matter. These convictions function as practical answers to the Why even when they are never formulated philosophically. Nihilism asks whether these roots have any foundation at all.

 

. . .

   I also think of Chesterton's discussion of the madman in Orthodoxy as an aid to understanding the scene. He argues that the madman is not the man who has lost his reason. Rather: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." Chesterton's point is that many forms of madness are characterized by a terrible logical consistency. The paranoid person often has an explanation for everything. Nothing is left unexplained. The system is airtight. The problem is not that there is too little reason but that there is too little reality, too little openness to the richness and mystery of existence. He writes that the madman's mind "moves in a perfect but narrow circle." Everything fits. The circle is complete. But it is small.

   Now consider young Alvy. In one sense, no, Alvy is not Chesterton's madman. He has stumbled upon a real philosophical problem. The mortality of the universe is not a delusion. The question "What is the point?" is not irrational. Chesterton himself took that question with great seriousness. Much of Orthodoxy is an attempt to answer it.

     But there is another sense in which Chesterton might criticize Alvy. The child takes one fact about reality – the eventual destruction of the universe – and allows it to eclipse every other fact. The logic looks something like this:

 

Everything eventually ends.

Therefore nothing matters now.

Therefore there is no point in doing homework.

 

Chesterton would say that the conclusion does not necessarily follow. The beauty of a flower is not disproved by its mortality. The goodness of friendship is not refuted by death. The value of a mathematical proof is not erased because the sun will one day burn out. For Chesterton, the mistake is allowing one abstract truth to swallow all the concrete truths. Thus he often contrasts the philosopher with the child. The child can delight in particular things before possessing a complete theory of the universe. The madman, by contrast, demands a theory that explains everything before he can delight in anything.

   Chesterton would probably be even more critical of the therapist than of Alvy. The therapist's answer – "We've gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we're here." – is not really a rational answer at all. Chesterton would likely ask: Why enjoy ourselves? Why value happiness? Why value life? In other words, the therapist does not answer Alvy's question. He merely changes the subject. Alvy is right that the question cannot simply be ignored.

But he is wrong if he concludes that finitude automatically destroys meaning. The therapist is right that life must be lived. But he is wrong if he thinks living removes the need for an answer to the Why. In a way, the conflict between Alvy and the adults resembles the tension Chesterton saw at the heart of modernity. Alvy asks a metaphysical question. The adults offer practical answers. Chesterton's complaint is that practical answers alone cannot satisfy a creature who naturally asks, "Why?" What Chesterton ultimately proposes is not less reason but a larger reason, one that includes wonder, gratitude, love, mystery, and what he regarded as the gift-character of existence itself.

    And that brings me back to Nietzsche's definition of nihilism. The deepest problem is not that the universe expands. The deepest problem is that the answer to the "Warum?" seems to have disappeared. Chesterton, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and in different ways Heidegger all agree that this question is unavoidable. Their disagreement concerns whether there is, in fact, an answer.

 

. . .

 

And Chesterton’s lightness here points to a metaphysical root. Chesterton does not usually begin with a cosmological proof or a chain of syllogisms. He begins with a certain experience of reality. The beautiful flower is not first a neutral object to which he later adds theological meaning. Rather, he experiences the flower as wondrous, gratuitous, unexpected, gift-like. The experience itself already contains a kind of religious intimation.

    Chesterton's thought moves something like this - there is no necessity that there should be a flower at all. Yet there is a flower. And not merely a functional object, but something beautiful. The appropriate response is wonder and gratitude. Gratitude naturally seeks a giver. That last step is the big move. Gratitude is unlike admiration. Admiration can stop at the object. Gratitude seems directed beyond the object. Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy that the hardest thing is not to be grateful when things are pleasant but to be grateful simply because things exist at all.

    Chesterton points to God because of how he experiences the flower. Not because the flower logically proves God, but because the flower is experienced as disclosing a world that looks more like a gift than an accident. This is why Chesterton is often a poor fit for both modern apologetics and modern atheism. The apologist sometimes wants an argument. The atheist wants evidence. Chesterton keeps returning to a transformed perception of ordinary things. I think he is close to Wittgenstein in this: "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." Or Simone Weil's attention to the sheer reality of another person. Or Murdoch's account of beauty drawing us out of ourselves. Or Gaita's descriptions of seeing a human being as precious beyond all calculation. None of these are deductive proofs. They are attempts to describe a way of seeing.

    The disagreement comes afterward. One person says that this experience reveals something real about the nature of reality; another says that the experience is psychologically powerful but tells us nothing about ultimate reality. All the thinker I treasure belong firmly to the first camp. My own hesitation and doubt have never been about the experience itself. I am certain that beauty, love, goodness, fidelity, and wonder disclose something deep. My hesitation comes at the next step: Does this disclose God?

Or does it merely feel as though it does? Chesterton answers that question with a confident yes. But his yes emerges from the experience of the flower, not merely from a prior doctrine about flowers. Chesterton begins from a phenomenon many people recognize. The debate concerns what that phenomenon means. I am like that. Meaning is real. My love of my children, my family and friends, of all the beautiful and good things of the world: I cannot question the reality of that love or the intrinsic love-ableness of what I love. Which implies it is “good, very good” that they exist. That is the root. I am not sure what that implies metaphysically, but I know it is incompatible with nihilism.

. . .

The scene (for me) is very funny. Which affects how I think about the problem it raises somehow. The scene juxtaposes two radically different horizons of human existence. On one side, there is Brooklyn. Homework. Parents. School. Daily life. The world of practical concerns. On the other side, there is the question that haunted Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Pascal, Heidegger, and countless others: Why live at all if everything ends? The comedy arises because these two horizons collide in the same room.

    A little boy has inadvertently stumbled into a question that belongs in a seminar on metaphysics or in the pages of A Confession. His mother responds as though he were worried about a pothole on the street. "What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn!" It is funny because she is both completely right and completely wrong. She is right because human life actually takes place somewhere. We do not live in "the universe." We live in Brooklyn, Potsdam, Jena, Bowling Green. We have children to raise, classes to teach, meals to prepare. But she is wrong because Brooklyn exists within the universe. The local cannot finally escape the cosmic.

    What gives the scene its depth is that the provincial answer is not simply mocked. In a sense, Woody Allen understands that most human beings survive by inhabiting the provincial horizon. If every morning we fully inhabited the thought of cosmic extinction, many of us would struggle to get out of bed. The scene therefore dramatizes a permanent tension in human existence. We are finite creatures who ask infinite questions. The child is already asking a question far larger than he can bear. The adults are living answers they cannot adequately articulate. The therapist says: "We've gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we're here." That is not a philosophical answer. Yet it is how millions of people actually live.

  This is where the scene becomes almost Tolstoyan. Tolstoy's crisis began when the practical routines of life stopped shielding him from ultimate questions. Suddenly farming, writing, family, and success all appeared against the backdrop of death. The therapist and the mother are still protected by the practical horizon. Young Alvy is not. But there is another layer. The scene is funny because philosophy often appears ridiculous when translated into ordinary life. Imagine Socrates refusing to pay his taxes because he is contemplating the immortality of the soul. Imagine Heidegger being unable to finish the shopping because he is preoccupied with the question of Being. Imagine Tolstoy refusing to mow the lawn because death renders all achievements finite. There is something absurd about allowing cosmic questions to interfere with ordinary tasks. Yet there is something equally absurd about believing that ordinary tasks somehow answer cosmic questions. The scene captures both absurdities at once.

   I like the scene because it exposes a genuine feature of the human condition. Animals seem capable of living entirely in Brooklyn. Human beings cannot. But human beings cannot live entirely in the universe either (would a Buddhist agree?). We are suspended between the two. We must somehow finish our homework while wondering why there is anything at all. And perhaps the funniest irony is that the mother may be wiser than she knows. "Brooklyn is not expanding" is philosophically ridiculous. Yet there is an ancient wisdom hidden in it. Aristotle, Aquinas, and even Wittgenstein in very different ways would remind us that meaning is encountered first in concrete forms of life: this family, this friendship, this classroom, this flower, this city. We do not begin with the universe as a whole. We begin with particular things. The danger is forgetting the universe. The opposite danger is forgetting Brooklyn. The genius of the scene is that it shows both dangers in less than a minute and makes us laugh while doing so. Great art.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Thinking about Death and the Afterlife (again)

 

Thinking about death. First, I belong to the lucky ones. Even if I died tomorrow, I have had a full life. Just read of two twelve year-olds killed by a car while riding their bikes. Of course, countless others, victims of accident, disease, natural catastrophe, and war. Is the destruction of the state of Ukraine or Iran worth the death of one child? The blood those leaders have on their hands, whatever the logic of power, too terrible to contemplate. They must hope death is the end. Not because of the possibility of Hell only, but I believe we must all suffer the pain we have caused others in the next life, if there is one (Purgatory). I have a hard enough time trying to face my own Purgatory and I have have not caused the violent death of innocent children, among other people. As for the young who have had their lives cut short, one can only hope for a God who has made a place for them by his side.

  I love life. Not every part of life in this world, to be sure, but life itself. Intensely. So many things make life worth living for me, even sick as I now am. That up front. 

  I agree with people like Hans Küng and indeed the Church, east and west, that there are powerful anthropomorphic reasons why there should be an afterlife: the deep longings that nothing in this world can satisfy (C. S. Lewis’ joy), the horrible injustices needing to be reconciled, the need to face the pure truth of our lives, most importantly the belief that the loved one oughtn't perish, the inability to believe in the final annihilation of the loved one. I have written of my inability to believe in the annihilation of my grandmother many years ago at her funeral despite being an atheist-materialist at the time. I still cannot believe in the annihilation of my beloved father and other beloved relatives that are no longer among us. The point is not simply that I want this, therefore it must be true. Rather, it is that certain human responses seem woven so deeply into love itself that complete annihilation appears almost morally unintelligible to us. When one truly loves another person, one does not merely desire their continued biological functioning. One experiences them as irreplaceable, as having a reality and value that seem to demand more than disappearance into nothingness. And then the thought of the end of the earth itself, the thought that everything good and worthy of love will perish. Unbearable. Proves nothing, I guess, but why is this implanted in us and indeed goes with what it means to love someone at all if the hope thereby engendered is an illusion?

      And I try to cultivate an openness for dimensions of reality beyond our science. I am not completely without hope. That being said, I confess to finding it difficult to have complete faith in that hope. Despite my wishes, I have a hard time actually believing my embodied soul will survive the death of my body. Which I suppose means weak faith, if not a complete lack of faith. This faith presupposes a certain picture of God, an absolute, omniscient, and in some sense all-powerful God who knows us absolutely and has the idea of you and me in his mind, which is, I suppose, the basis of a possible resurrection. This idea is found in both Christian Platonism and thinkers influenced by it. If the deepest reality is not blind mechanism but mind, love, or logos, then perhaps the continued reality of the person would not depend upon the frail persistence of biological processes or even upon some naturally immortal “substance,” but upon being held in being by that ultimate source. In that picture, resurrection is less like magic and more like the refusal of ultimate reality to abandon what has truly existed and been loved. Still, I fear giving in to wishful thinking and sentimentality. And there is just too much in all this that seems like a fairy tale. Perhaps a limit in me.

    And I know death is terrible. It is more than hard to die, physically and spiritually. Few die peacefully in their sleep. Dying is  humiliating, frightening, bodily, fragmented. Simone Weil wrote that affliction reduces a person almost to a thing. There is no glamour in it. The modern image of dignity often depends on autonomy, control, competence, self-possession. This dying annihilates. But there may be another kind of dignity in remaining human even in weakness: in loving others while afraid, in telling the truth about suffering without bitterness, in enduring dependence without surrendering one's humanity. Some of the most dignified moments I have heard described occur precisely where worldly forms of dignity collapse: for example, in Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. I think of my mother caring for my father in his last years. 

    And I fear the last sparks of consciousness after the heart stops pumping, a Muhlholland-Drive-like nightmare. Here I have been close to death recently with a massive pulmonary embolism. While it was still touch and go and worrying about the fate of my children should I die, I remember having a strong feeling “whatever happens, things will be alright.” I was strangely not afraid. Another response I have had to a medical crisis: the desire to break out laughing in the midst of pain and physical crisis. The whole bodily thing seemed at that moment absurd to me. Still, when I have lost all conscious control, what will the last sparks of my dream-state do to me? 

    But of this much I am sure. I am required to accept my death so that others will have the chance of life, so that my children and grandchildren and their children whom I will never know and who will not know me will have a chance of life. We all have to make way for those that come after us. I first heard that thought from my favorite professor of German literature, Dr. Thomas Baldwin. That thought is what will have to give me the courage to die with some measure of acceptance. Should be think of our deaths as necessary sacrifices to make for those we love and the love of the world? We all have our cross? Indeed, to me the deepest part of the Christian story is the part many find the most absurd: idea that God shared our bodily life even unto the most terrible death on the cross.

Another Postscript to Last Entry: Heidegger

 

I listened to a presentation on Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis and his alleged attempt to redo his image without really renouncing his involvement. The suggestion often is that there is a connection between his actual philosophy and this involvement worries me since I take seriously his 1) affirmation of the transcendence of Being relative to the human horizon and 2) our capacity to receive authentic disclosures, though never absolutely. 3) language as the house of being. I can see how some could see this as irrational. My feeling is that what is missing in Heidegger, besides more clarity in his writing,  is an orientation to goodness. Love plays little role. I don’t think you need to reduce Heidegger’s philosophy to Nazism in order to recognize that something in the philosophy may have lacked moral substance. How to preserve what is illuminating in his thought while confronting both his political involvement and certain dangerous ambiguities internal to the philosophy itself. 

     What I importantly owe to Heidegger. Being transcends our conceptual grasp; reality is not exhausted by technological manipulation or representational thinking. Truth is essentially disclosure (aletheia), an event in which beings can show themselves authentically, though never absolutely or from nowhere. Human beings are receivers before they are sovereign; we dwell within language rather than master it completely. We are conditioned by all the elements of our finitude. Language as “the house of Being” points toward the depth, historical situatedness, and revelatory power of speech, poetry, and tradition. None of this is irrational in itself. It functions as a corrective to reductionism, positivism, technological domination, and modern forgetfulness of mystery.

. . .

    What does Heidegger mean by disclosure or truth as uncovering or unconcealedness? I am not a Heidegger scholar but as a student taking a test for my Heidegger professors, Ronald Bruzina and Ted Schatzki. I would explain it this way, focusing not on Being and Time but Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Of the Essence of Truth). 

    The standard correspondence theory of truth understands truth primarily as a relation between a statement and a fact. A proposition is true if it correctly represents reality. “Snow is white” is true if snow actually is white. Truth here is mainly correctness, accuracy, correspondence between thought and object. Heidegger does not deny this but he thinks it rests upon a deeper, more primordial phenomenon that philosophy since Plato and especially modern philosophy forgot. Before a statement can correspond to reality, reality must first already be "disclosed" or "unconcealed" to us. Beings already show themselves within a meaningful world. Heidegger calls this more original truth Aletheia, which he paraphrases as unconcealment. For example, before a scientist can make correct statements about a tree, the tree must already appear within a world of significance: as something encountered, usable, visible, meaningful, situated within practices, language, and forms of life. That is how it is real to us, before we even try to theorize about it. Truth is therefore originally an event of disclosure in which beings become accessible at all, I would say more in the sense of a x being a real tree, a real friend, real gold - and you could substitute a true tree, friend, gold, etc. True and real are given in experience prior to any theorizing. But Heidegger wouldn't go that far. Because Heidegger feared that the entire metaphysical tradition from Plato onward increasingly interpreted Being in terms of stable presence, essence, fixed intelligibility, or permanent structure. He thought this ultimately culminated in modern technological metaphysics, where beings become objects fully graspable by conceptual thought. So Heidegger tries to avoid saying: truth = correspondence to essence. Instead he emphasizes truth = the event in which beings come into unconcealment at all. This means he rejects claims that beings have fully determinable “true natures” accessible through metaphysical adequation.

   This shifts philosophy. Correspondence theory asks: “Does the statement match the object?” Heidegger asks first: “How does the object come into openness or intelligibility in the first place?” In other words, how do we come to have ideas about trees in the first place? Or not quite that, that is still too superficial. Before we ever form explicit “ideas” about trees, we are already living in a world where trees matter and appear meaningfully and as real. We encounter them as shade, obstacles, beauty, lumber, living things, part of landscapes, symbols, homes for birds, and so on. The tree is already disclosed (real, existing) within a practical and meaningful world before it becomes an object of detached cognition. So Heidegger’s deeper question is something like: How is it possible for beings such as trees to appear meaningfully to us at all?  What is the openness in which anything can show itself as something? What makes it possible for anything to appear meaningfully to us at all? What must already be in place for us to encounter something as something? What allows beings to become intelligible in the first place? What is the underlying condition that lets reality disclose itself to us? How is it possible for the world to show up as meaningful rather than as mere chaos? What allows us not merely to see things, but to recognize and understand them? What makes possible the experience of encountering something as a tree, a person, a tool, a danger, or a work of art? What allows reality to come into presence for us at all? – These are Heidegger-like questions that go beyond the logical version of truth.

     The “openness” (the world?) is what he connects with Being and aletheia. This is why he emphasizes everyday involvement over detached theorizing. A carpenter does not first perceive meaningless sense-data and then infer a “tree” or “hammer.” He is already immersed in a meaningful world of use, practice, language, and concern. Only later do we abstract and form explicit conceptual or scientific representations. So Heidegger is trying to uncover the pre-theoretical conditions that make ordinary and scientific knowledge possible in the first place. And this is also why “language is the house of Being.” Language is not merely labels pasted onto pre-given objects. It partly opens a world in which things can appear under meaningful aspects at all. Thus truth becomes historical, world-related, and tied to human existence (Dasein) rather than merely logical correctness.

     Being (Sein) for Heidegger is not a highest object or thing. It is the “clearing” or openness within which beings can appear as meaningful at all. Being is not another entity alongside entities; it is the condition for entities becoming intelligible. This is why Heidegger says Western philosophy forgot the “question of Being.” It focused on beings (objects, substances, causes) while overlooking the more fundamental mystery that beings appear at all within intelligibility.

     This view goes beyond the  flat picture of knowledge as a detached subject mechanically representing external objects. Human beings are always already involved in a meaningful world prior to abstract theorizing. This primordial level of openness or disclosure is where Being (Sein) reveals itself to us, i.e. reality has its roots, though never completely or finally. Not Being as a thing or object, but Being as the meaningful presencing of beings. A tree is not first encountered as a neutral object to which we later add meaning. It already appears within a world: as shelter, beauty, wood, life, sacred grove, ecological being, scientific specimen, and so forth. The deeper question is: what is the openness that allows anything to appear meaningfully at all? That openness is what Heidegger associates with the disclosure of Being. And because this disclosure is historical, linguistic, and finite, no disclosure exhausts reality completely. Every revealing also conceals. A scientific worldview reveals certain truths about the tree while concealing others. A poetic experience reveals dimensions hidden from technical analysis. A commercial attitude reveals economic value while perhaps concealing beauty or sacredness.

  Compare to Kant. “What are the transcendental conditions that make experience and knowledge possible for a rational subject?” Kant’s related question. For Kant the center remains the knowing subject, even if he complicates naive subjectivism. Heidegger thinks this still remains too trapped within modern subject-object metaphysics. He shifts the question radically: not “What structures does the subject impose?” but “How is there already an open world in which subject and object can appear at all?” For Heidegger, openness is not primarily a structure inside consciousness. It is the reality of a world in which we already dwell. Thus he replaces the isolated epistemological subject with Dasein –  human existence as always already “being-in-the-world.”  Kant begins from cognition; Heidegger, like a good Thomist, begins from existence. Kant asks about the conditions for possible experience. Heidegger asks metaphorically about the clearing in which beings can show themselves meaningfully before theoretical cognition even begins. i.e. about about the lived world in which beings already matter to us and are real for us before we treat them as objects of study. And while Kant’s transcendental structures are universal and relatively stable (space, time, causality, substance, etc.), Heidegger historicizes openness itself. Different epochs disclose reality differently. Greek physis, medieval creation, modern technological enframing – these are not merely different theories imposed upon the same neutral reality or different world versions in Goodman's sense ("constructions"), but different ways Being becomes intelligible. Thus Being is not possessed once and for all through concepts. Human existence is a continual participation in partial disclosures of reality. This is what many readers find so powerful in Heidegger: he tries to recover wonder before intelligibility itself. Not merely “What exists?” but “How does anything come into meaningful presence at all?”

  . . .

But it gets intense when we move from beings like trees or human beings to Being as a limited whole. Heidegger doesn’t begin with “Being as a whole,” but with concrete encounters with beings: trees, tools, people, death, work, language, anxiety, beauty, boredom, home, technology. Heidegger’s thought starts phenomenologically, with the way beings show themselves within lived experience. But he thinks that in these encounters there is always already an implicit understanding of reality as a whole operating in the background. Every meaningful encounter presupposes a world. For example, a tree can appear as raw material, as sacred, as ecosystem, as commodity, as divine creation, as biological organism, as object of scientific analysis, or as poetic presence. These are not merely different “opinions” about one neutral object. They reflect different ways in which reality as a whole is unconcealed. A technological age tends to reveal everything from rivers, forests, animals, and even people primarily as resources to be optimized and controlled. A religious world discloses beings differently. A Homeric Greek world differently again.

      So Heidegger moves from beings to Being by asking what kind of world must already be open for beings to appear in these characteristic ways? What understanding of reality as a whole is silently governing what counts as meaningful, real, important, usable, sacred, or true? This background horizon is never usually thematic. We live within it before we think about it. It is more like an atmosphere or clearing.

    And this is where “pictures of the world” arise. Not first as explicit theories, but as comprehensive ways reality becomes intelligible: for example, modern technological enframing, Christian creation, Greek physis (nature), nihilistic absurdity, fascist destiny, liberal individualism, Platonic participation in the Good, and so on. Each is a disclosure of Being as a whole.

      Now is where my anxiety begins. If all comprehensive worldviews are disclosures of Being, then what distinguishes profound truth from catastrophic distortion, such as Heidegger’s own life exemplified? Heidegger often resists returning to stable metaphysical standards outside disclosure itself. That is why his critics fear relativization or historical fatalism. I think our understanding of beings depends upon deeper disclosures of Being as a whole. But some disclosures are spiritually truer because they disclose reality under the light of the Good. The issue is not whether all worldviews disclose something but whether they disclose reality adequately or deformingly.  And thus my appeal to the sublime. Certain experiences seem to break open egoistic or reductive horizons and reveal dimensions of reality that feel not merely perspectival but intrinsically higher: love, beauty, goodness, sacrifice, reverence, the dignity of persons these are sublime (privileged) openings. My idea is to preserve Heidegger’s insight into disclosure while recovering a Platonic hierarchy of disclosure. Some unveilings deepen participation in reality; others narrow, flatten, or corrupt it.

. . .

     So there is something missing. In Heidegger, disclosure itself almost has a quasi-sacred authority without a sufficiently developed criterion of moral orientation. If Being “sends” historical disclosures, how does one distinguish genuine disclosure from destructive intoxication, collective frenzy, or idolatrous destiny? Heidegger lacks a sufficiently robust account of the Good by which disclosures are judged. 

    That is where Plato, Christianity, Murdoch, Gaita, and Weil think differently. For Plato, truth is ultimately illuminated by the Good. Disclosure without orientation toward the Good is dangerous because intelligence can serve tyranny as easily as wisdom. The soul must be morally ordered to apprehend reality rightly. For Iris Murdoch, attention must be purified through unselfing and love. Mere openness to “disclosure” is insufficient because the ego can mythologize itself collectively and historically. For Raimond Gaita, our deepest disclosures occur through love, reverence, and acknowledgment of persons as absolutely significant. And for Christianity, disclosure divorced from love becomes spiritually perilous. “The spirits” themselves must be tested. Heidegger could write profoundly about dwelling, mystery, rootedness, poetry, and destiny while remaining morally obtuse regarding Nazism. Historical destiny and ontological disclosure sometimes carried greater weight for him than the concrete suffering of persons. That absence of love is what strike me most about his writings, at least the ones I know. There is care (Sorge), anxiety, authenticity, historical destiny, openness, listening, Gelassenheit. But no compassion, mercy, goodness, forgiveness, or the moral transformation of vision through love. I have read that Emmanuel Levinas criticized Heidegger for giving priority to Being over the ethical relation to the Other. That hits the nail on the head.  Levinas from what I have read about him feared that ontology without ethics could become spiritually dangerous because the concrete person risks being subordinated to historical or ontological abstractions.

       This connects to my earlier entry on the sublime. Heidegger recognizes disclosure, but not fully the moral conditions for trustworthy disclosure. The sublime without the Good can become ambiguous, even intoxicating. One may become receptive to destiny, power, rootedness, or historical grandeur without orientation toward love and human dignity. I do want to affirm aspects of Heidegger rather rejecting his thought wholesale: preserving his critique of reductionism and his recovery of mystery, while re-situating disclosure within a Platonic or moral horizon shaped by goodness, love, and reverence for persons. This is the corrective Murdoch sought: transcendence, yes, but transcendence identified with the Good rather than merely with ontological disclosure as such. Love, morality, is a real apprehension of reality. I won’t budge on that as long as I live.

 . . .

 This is the crux for me, with the Wesen der Wahrheit (Essence of Truth) as aletheia, as covering and uncovering, never final. The worldviews of House and Vincent do reveal something real, or a possible take on reality, however incomplete. With something like God or the Good or the Absolute character of morality, it is one perspective among others. And it becomes difficult to distinguish between possible world versions and evil ones, like Nazism. There was a lot of pseudo-science in Nazism, but its rejection of pity and its Umwertung der Werte (revaluation of values) is a possible take on Being, in this understanding. This is where the Heideggerian conception of truth can seem frightening.

       If truth as Heidegger understands it is fundamentally Aletheia, disclosure, unconcealment, the partial revealing and concealing of Being, then even distorted or destructive worldviews may appear to possess a certain truth. They disclose something. They are not simply arbitrary fantasies. Vincent in Collateral sees something real about anonymity, death, indifference, urban isolation. House sees something real about self-deception, fragility, suffering, hypocrisy. Even true nihilism derives its force from genuine disclosures of abandonment, absurdity, mortality, or alienation. This is why they can be authoritative for some people. Pure falsehood rarely grips intelligent people deeply. The danger lies in partial truths absolutized. Once disclosure itself becomes primary, a terrible ambiguity emerges: by what criterion do we distinguish profound disclosure from spiritually catastrophic disclosure? If God or the Good become merely “one perspective among others,” then metaphysics risks collapsing into competing world disclosures or “world versions,” each revealing some aspect of reality, none possessing decisive authority.  

    This is where Nazism becomes philosophically terrifying, not merely politically evil. Because Nazism was not experienced by many of its adherents simply as a set of empirical claims. It functioned as an ontological disclosure, an entire interpretation of Being: struggle, rootedness, destiny, blood, sacrifice, hardness, heroic authenticity, contempt for weakness, overcoming bourgeois pity, fusion into historical peoplehood. It carried quasi-religious and quasi-sublime dimensions. The rejection of pity – the Nietzschean On the Genealogy of Morality-style inversion of values – can appear within this framework not as moral evil but as an alternative disclosure of existence. This is the abyss many critics fear in Heidegger. Because if there is no transcendent Good by which disclosures themselves are judged, then one risks becoming unable to distinguish between authentic transcendence from collective intoxication, reverence from mythic fanaticism, greatness from domination, destiny from idolatry, sublimity from brutality. Everything becomes potentially a “sending of Being.” Heidegger himself fell into that trap, proving the point.      

. . .

    I want to keep returning to the Good, love, pity, reverence, uncondescending attention, the sublime purification of ego-consciousness. I do not experience all disclosures as equal. I want to appeal to a moral phenomenology deeper than what happens to be take as authentic disclosure at any particular time in history. Can evil disclose reality truly if it simultaneously diminishes or blinds the soul’s capacity to perceive what is most real? This is where Plato, Thomas, Murdoch, Gaita, Weil, and even Wittgenstein part company from Heidegger. For them, moral corruption is not simply one disclosure among others. It is also a deformation of vision. I would add even if the deformed vision is of some aspect of Being. Evil may reveal partial truths: mortality, conflict, weakness, hypocrisy, cruelty, tragedy, finitude, fallibility, etc. But it also obscures intrinsic dignity, love, goodness, mercy, the sacredness of persons, genuine transcendence. Thus Nazism may contain disclosures of modern alienation, technological uprootedness, spiritual emptiness, or civilizational crisis while being fundamentally false because it falsifies the meaning of human being itself. Not every disclosure is equally truthful because the condition of the soul affects what can be seen. 

      This is why I keep emphasizing the sublime linked to goodness rather than merely intensity or ontological shock. The sublime alone is ambiguous. Fascism can produce counterfeit sublimity: mass unity, sacrifice, destiny, ecstatic transcendence of individuality. The decisive issue is whether transcendence is ordered toward love and truthful acknowledgment of reality, or toward domination, ego-mythology, and sacrificial violence. Indeed, pity is philosophically decisive. Not sentimental pity, but the capacity to perceive another person as absolutely real and morally irreducible. That capacity is a condition for genuine disclosure of Being rather than ideological possession. Which is to say that truth cannot be separated from morals or at bottom love. Not because truth is subjective, but because selfishness and cruelty darken apprehension, reason itself. 

. . . 

    Many liberal, Enlightenment, or socialist critics fear Heidegger because they see him as undermining the universal rational subject that grounds liberal democracy, objective norms, procedural reason, scientific discourse, and emancipation from myth or authority. From that perspective, Heidegger’s emphasis on historical situatedness, disclosure, destiny, language, and pre-conceptual belonging can appear dangerously irrational, tribal, or politically volatile. If reason is historically conditioned and there is no neutral standpoint, then what protects us from fascism, nationalism, mythic politics, or authoritarianism?

   That critique has force. But it often misses what draws people like me to Heidegger in the first place. I am certainly not attracted to irrationalism. I am attracted to Heidegger’s critique of reductionism: the insight that reality exceeds calculative reason, that human beings are not detached Cartesian spectators, that truth involves disclosure and participation, that language shapes worlds of meaning, that modern technological consciousness flattens being into manipulable objects. But my criticism comes from an older metaphysical and moral tradition rather than from procedural rationalism. Heidegger rightly criticizes modern reductionism and the illusion of purely detached rationality. But because he severs disclosure from the transcendent Good, he lacks an adequate criterion for judging disclosures themselves. That is a Platonic/Thomist criticism.

    For Plato, participation in truth is inseparable from orientation toward the Good. Not every unveiling is equally revelatory. The condition of the soul matters. Moral and intellectual virtue are intertwined. For Aristotle, practical wisdom (phronesis) requires rightly ordered desire. Reason alone does not guarantee goodness because corrupted desire distorts judgment itself. For Thomas Aquinas, intellect is naturally oriented toward being and truth, but the will and moral character profoundly affect one’s capacity to perceive and love the good rightly. Evil darkens understanding. So for me the problem with Heidegger is not that he rejects “objective rationality” in the Enlightenment sense. It is that he lacks a sufficiently developed account of the Good, moral virtue, love, the purification of attention, the normative hierarchy of disclosures, the moral conditions for truthful perception – all the things I find in Weil, Pieper, Murdoch, and Gaita. This is why Heidegger’s thought can express ambiguity about destiny, rootedness, historical revelation, and collective identity. Heidegger recovers transcendence without adequately recovering moral transcendence. He recovers the mystery of Being without sufficiently distinguishing between higher and lower participations in reality. That is different from the liberal criticism that simply wants to restore neutral rational procedures.

   And thus my emphasis on the sublime linked to goodness. I want neither a flattened procedural rationality nor sheer historical disclosure untethered from moral reality. I, like the thinkers I just mentioned, want a conception of transcendence in which reality genuinely exceeds us, while also preserving a hierarchy grounded in goodness and love rather than merely in intensity, destiny, or power.

 . . . 

    It was Alan Bloom’s critique of Heidegger in The Closing of the American Mind that first got me thinking of these things in the late 1980’s. Bloom recognizes Heidegger as perhaps the deepest critic of modernity and also regards him as dangerous. Bloom’s claim is that Heidegger exposed genuine weaknesses in Enlightenment rationalism, liberalism, positivism, and technological civilization but did so in a way that ultimately undermined confidence in rational truth itself. For Bloom, modern liberal education had already collapsed into relativism: students no longer believed in truth, only in “perspectives,” cultures, values, or historical conditioning. Bloom thinks Heidegger radicalized this tendency philosophically by historicizing reason itself. The danger, as Bloom sees it, is that if all thought is historically situated disclosure, if philosophy is inseparable from epochs of Being, if there is no stable human nature accessible to rational inquiry independent of historical horizons, then philosophy loses its classical orientation toward permanent truth. This is where Heidegger becomes, together with Nietzsche, Bloom’s philosophical enemy.  

    Bloom always starts with Plato. For Plato, despite human finitude, there remains an intelligible order of reality toward which reason can genuinely ascend. Philosophy aims at truth about nature, justice, the soul, and the good. The philosopher may never possess exhaustive certainty, but the distinction between truth and historical interpretation remains fundamental. Bloom claims Heidegger dissolves this distinction. Instead of asking “What is justice?” one now asks “How has justice historically disclosed itself within a horizon of Being?” Instead of asking “What is human nature?” one asks “How does humanity understand itself within a historical epoch?” For Bloom, this shifts philosophy from rational inquiry into contemplative historicism.

    And politically, Bloom fears that once rational universality collapses, people become vulnerable to historical destiny, collective identity, mythic belonging, and charismatic movements. In his reading, Heidegger’s Nazism was not an accidental biographical error but connected to this deeper anti-rational tendency. If he were alive today, he would see himself confirmed in this diagnosis.

     Importantly, Bloom does not think Heidegger was a vulgar irrationalist. Quite the contrary. Heidegger was too profound for that. The danger is deeper: namely, reason itself becomes subordinated to pre-rational historical disclosure. Thus philosophy ceases to judge history from the standpoint of truth and instead listens for “sendings of Being.” Bloom believes this leaves human beings spiritually defenseless against powerful historical moods. He thinks philosophy requires eros toward stable truth, not merely receptivity to historical disclosure. The Platonic ascent toward the Good becomes replaced by ontological listening. In my terms, Heidegger recovers mystery but loses moral and rational hierarchy.

    And I suspect Bloom would agree with much of my own criticism. Without orientation toward the Good, disclosure itself becomes ambiguous. One may become receptive not only to truth but also to seductive distortions of reality. Bloom understood why Heidegger attracted intelligent people. Heidegger responds to genuine spiritual hunger produced by modern reductionism and technological flattening. Bloom knew modern liberal rationalism is spiritually thin. But he believed Heidegger’s cure endangered philosophy itself by dissolving confidence in rational access to permanent truths. So the disagreement is not merely “reason vs irrationalism.” It is really more like classical rational transcendence versus historical ontological disclosure (Heidegger). I accept Heidegger’s critique of reductionist rationalism and the depth of disclosure, but I want disclosure subordinated to the Good in a Platonic or Thomistic sense rather than left ontologically open-ended. 

. . . 

  I still don't know what to think of Heidegger as a human being, not wanting to be judgmental, but I guess what I think about him is not that important. I would like to believe the Hannah Arendt picture and not the picture of an unregenerate nazi who hurt people without remorse and doctored his texts later.

   There is strong evidence, so far as I can judge, that Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism was morally serious and not merely a brief accidental political mistake. His rectoral address, some administrative actions, later silences, and especially portions of the Black Notebooks make it impossible simply to dismiss the issue. He clearly hoped, at least for a time, that the movement represented some kind of spiritual-historical renewal for Germany. And his later refusal to offer the kind of explicit repentance many expected understandably troubles people deeply.

    At the same time, the caricature of Heidegger as simply a lifelong monster or secretly unchanged Nazi also feels inadequate to many who knew him personally or studied the complexity of his life and work. Hannah Arendt is important because she knew both his greatness and his blindness intimately. She did not excuse him, but neither did she reduce him to his political failure. She saw a man capable of extraordinary philosophical insight combined with astonishing moral obtuseness and susceptibility to historical illusion. Profound ontological insight does not guarantee moral clarity. A person may perceive dimensions of Being, language, finitude, and transcendence while remaining morally compromised, self-deceived, vain, ambitious, frightened, or historically blinded. In fact, one danger in Heidegger is that his philosophy does not sufficiently humble disclosure before goodness, which is evidence of this moral obtuseness. If one becomes fascinated by destiny, hiddenness, historical revelation, rootedness, or “greatness,” one may become vulnerable to confusing intensity with truth. Philosophers often see some things with extraordinary depth while remaining blind to other aspects of reality. Plato would likely say that intellect severed from moral purification becomes unstable. One can ascend very high intellectually while remaining spiritually disordered. The danger is not merely theoretical error but distorted eros.

   One can acknowledge Heidegger’s philosophical gifts, the lasting importance of many of his insights, the darkness of aspects of his political involvement, the insufficiency of some of his later responses, and the possibility that these things are connected in partial and complicated ways. Indeed, I constantly try to understand how truth, blindness, disclosure, ego, history, love, and moral failure intertwine within finite human beings, like myself.