What is philosophy?

by Dietrich von Hildebrand

Philosophical dissertation

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Religion

242 pages, Hardcover

First published March 20, 1960

About the author

Dietrich von Hildebrand was a German Catholic philosopher and theologian who was called (informally) by Pope Pius XII "the 20th Century Doctor of the Church."

Pope John Paul II greatly admired the work of von Hildebrand, remarking once to von Hildebrand's widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicists of the twentieth century." Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has a particular admiration and regard for Dietrich von Hildebrand, whom he already knew as a young priest in Munich. In fact, as young Fr. Ratzinger, he even served as an assistant pastor in the church of St. Georg in Munich, which von Hildebrand frequented in the 1950s and 1960s. It was also in St. Georg that Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand were married.

The degree of Pope Benedict's esteem is expressed in one of his statements about von Hildebrand, "When the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time." Von Hildebrand was a vocal critic of the changes in the church brought by the Second Vatican Council. He especially resented the new liturgy. Of it he said "Truly, if one of the devils in C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters had been entrusted with the ruin of the liturgy, he could not have done it better."

Von Hildebrand died in New Rochelle, New York, in 1977.

Reviews

[Peter Blair]

Review (reportedly) forthcoming

[Rory Fox]

Published originally in 1960 this is a surprisingly medieval perspective, with a strong strand of Platonist mysticism informing the author’s view of philosophy. He recognises the contributions of Aquinas, Descartes and (latterly) phenomenology, but (arguably) he finds his inspiration more in the thought world of Augustine and Plotinus, and in the contemplation of eternal essences.

The history of philosophy since the Enlightenment is (broadly speaking) a disagreement between explaining knowledge in terms of empiricism, where it is derived totally from the senses; or in terms of rationalism/Idealism, where it is derived to some extent innately/a priori. Kant thought he had solved the problem and bridged the difference. The author considers Kant to concede too much to idealism, so he presents what he thinks is a more plausible objective realist idealism.

One of his serious rebukes of the Kantian style approach is that it fails to properly explain the necessity of logic and mathematics. They cannot be just human psychological creations, which only retain their validity in human thought worlds. They (obviously) have a more objective reality with a necessary existence that makes it inconceivable that they could ever fail to apply in any corner or aspect of reality.

His solution is to claim that there is a world of ‘essences’ and that humans have an intuition of those essences, somewhat akin to how they perceive physical objects. Thus empiricism is right to stress that humans acquire information, but it is wrong to limit it to physical objects. And idealism is right to stress the role of the mind, but it is wrong to think that all its objects are mental entities or mental projections, as the essences are independent of human minds.

The introduction to the book tells us that this approach is a ‘major contribution towards expanding a limited concept of empiricism.’ But is it really. Isn’t the book more at risk of turning philosophy into a quasi-Plotinian mysticism, where it consists of asserting the existence of myriads of un-dedectable entities and then building up a thought world based on their characteristics?

The author is of course entitled to his opinions and his preferred methodology. But he was less willing to admit that of his opponents, accusing them of being ‘very poorly gifted as philosophers’ (p6) and of having a ‘blindness to reality’ (p.10). Those criticisms can of course be turned straight back upon him by his opponents as his philosophy is essentially (excuse the pun) just a set of assertions.

Textually the (digital version of the) book was well laid out and easy to follow, with a modest use of footnotes which thankfully did not involve a lot of turning back and forth. Of its era was a tendency to occasionally quote Latin without translating it, such as a citation of Ovid (p.51) and a verse of the Adoro te Devote (p.183). It would be helpful if modern reprints could provide a translation.

Overall, the book is clearly written and relatively easy to read and follow. This means that it is accessible to readers of any background, although the philosophical terminology means that it will be easier to those with some prior exposure to that thought world. How useful the book is, as an explanation of philosophy, is another matter. Readers who already agree with the author’s thought world may well find the book an excellent source of wisdom. But readers who are less enamored of ‘essences’ and semi-mystical intuitions of the essences, will be less impressed, perhaps to the point of not considering the book to even be offering anything that is genuinely philosophical at all. As a result I’m inclined to pitch a judgment somewhere in the middle, but with an additional acknowledgment that the author could have better acknowledged the assertive nature of his views by adopting a less hubristic tone towards those who disagree with him.

[Gonzalo Joaquín Sánchez Garrido]

Failure —an absolute one— in the attempt to preserve the paradigm of classical (and naïve) realism. The phenomenological pretensions are nothing more than a recoding, in categories of little worth, of what has already been said. The aporia of attaining access to the “thingness” of things is supposedly resolved through a vague and hollow dissolution into basic intuition—one that borders on mysticism. Likewise, it presupposes instances of ontic hierarchies that are nothing but the Christian and deifying residue of epistemological absolutism. Crude and utterly insufficient: a requalified vomit of archaic ramblings from cassocked simpletons.

[Walt]

This is the second book on philosophy I’ve read. As such, I don’t feel comfortable rating this book as much of it was over my head. The parts I understood were brilliant, and I hope to reread it in the future.

[Jed Ojeda]

A very strong account of how we can use the method of phenomenology to know things as they are. In particular, I find it very interesting that Hildebrand says that his brand of phenomenology can be found in Plato's Meno, Aristotle's Organon, and St. Augustine's "Si fallor, sum".