Review
Bite-Sized Philosophy
The Art of Living by Dietrich von Hildebrand
with Alice von Hildebrand
Hildebrand Project, 2016 (1965, 1994)
(132 pages, $17.99, paperback)
The Art of Living, available in this new edition, contains in miniature the whole of Dietrich von Hildebrand's ethical philosophy—a blessing, since his larger works, such as Ethics and Aesthetics, may be a daunting mountain to climb for the student uninitiated into the methods of realist phenomenology. To such, Hildebrand may seem to speak in extremes. In nearly every paragraph we meet statements modified by such words as "completely," "absolutely," "every," "never" or "altogether."
Hildebrand, however, is not being dramatic or making unguarded, sweeping statements. Consistent with his usual phenomenological method, he simply tries to discern and classify the ethical archetypes that appear to us in experience, and in order to grasp such archetypes properly, one needs to isolate a character trait or a kind of action in its conceptual purity. He claims, for example, that the irreverent man is "incapable of any abandonment or subordination of self." We may rightly wonder whether this "any" is literally true of anyone besides the Devil. With a touch of honesty, however, I hope we can all recognize within ourselves the dynamic by which our irreverence cuts us off from abandonment where reverence would have opened us up to wonder. None of us is fully the archetypal "irreverent man," but we all have the irreverent man within us.
Following his friend Max -Scheler, Hildebrand puts the notion of responding to values at the center of his ethics. According to this basic structure, the world is full of real, objective values, some of them moral, such as the special value contained in an act of forgiveness, while some are extra-moral, such as the special value contained in the beauty of a sunset. When we encounter these values, we are confronted by an obligation to respond in an appropriate way. Part of this response depends on the inner "yes" or "no" of our will, but part of it also depends on the more stable orientation of our whole character, our virtues and vices.
Virtue & Personality
In this volume, Hildebrand meditates on some underdiscussed virtues in a series of essays. Instead of being given a systematic treatment of the cardinal and theological virtues (for this, see his Ethics and Transformation in Christ), we here learn about reverence, fidelity, responsibility, veracity, and goodness. In each essay, Hildebrand details these virtues, distinguishes them from their opposites, and describes how the response to value involved in each contributes to a flourishing, full personality. Reading the descriptions of these ideal states makes one feel as though he were peeking into what it must be like to be a saint.
As a Christian personalist, Hildebrand frequently returns to the idea that becoming a saint means becoming a fully developed personality. He distinguishes between being a "person"—which all of us are in virtue of being made in the image of God—and developing into a mature "personality." A personality, he says in Liturgy and Personality, is "the man who rises above the average only because he fully realizes the classical human attitudes." Each of the virtues that he analyzes in The Art of Living, then, involves some aspect of a person's development into a full-fledged personality, and the opposite of each virtue involves not merely a moral fault but a "cramp" (one of his favorite words) in one's proper development.
For example, Hildebrand contrasts true fidelity to "pure clinging to habit." The latter fails to be a real virtue because it restricts rather than frees "an inwardly unified spiritual life," whereas true fidelity consists in a "free, meaningful response to the world of truth and values." According to Hildebrand, fidelity enables a person to retain his free, committed response after the first moment he apprehends a particular value. For example, a man may one day come to a profound realization of the goodness and mercy of God and in response to this apprehension entrust his life to Providence. In time, however, the clarity of this realization may wane or difficult events may challenge his initial conviction. Fidelity is the virtue that enables such a man to remain firm in his commitment to God, maintaining both the initial apprehension of value and the initial response.
Hildebrand claims that without this virtue, a person cannot develop a personality, because he will be forever starting over, whereas the growth of one's personality requires the building up of layers of decisive action upon a solid foundation. The person who forgets the values he apprehends or who fizzles out in his response will live like a little bird flitting from one thing to another.
Something from Alice
Von Hildebrand's wife, Alice, translated the original German of these essays into English, and two of her own -essays are included in the volume, one on communion and one on hope. As Peter Kreeft says in the forward, Alice writes more like an existentialist while Hildebrand writes more like a phenomenologist. Indeed, Alice writes with a charm all her own even though one can easily discern a deep continuity between the philosophical outlooks of husband and wife. In both her essays, Alice draws especially on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel and the importance of the encounter between I and Thou. In her essay on communion, for example, she details the deep need within each person to find communion with other persons and, above all, with God; to overcome the "rupture" between persons caused by sin and re-establish the "triumph of communion."
Her essay on hope is perhaps the best in the collection. This essay begins with an analysis of man's capacity for despair, wherein she refers to the work of both Marcel and Kierkegaard. Any adequate philosophy, she contends, must take account of the deep hopelessness behind large portions of human life, especially man's capacity for the utterly irrational despair whereby he prefers to remain in his despair rather than avail himself of a cure offered by another.
Dan Sheffler (Ph.D., University of Kentucky) teaches philosophy at Georgetown College in Kentucky. With his wife and three children, he is a member of Lexington Christian Fellowship.
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