Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

by D.C. Schindler

The computer has increasingly become the principal model for the mind, which means our most basic experience of "reality" is as mediated through a screen, or stored in a cloud. As a result, we are losing a sense of the concrete and imposing presence of the real, and the fundamental claim it makes on us, a claim that Iris Murdoch once described as the essence of love. In response to this postmodern predicament, the present book aims to draw on the classical philosophical tradition in order to articulate a robust philosophical anthropology, and a new appreciation of the importance of the "transcendental properties" of beauty, goodness, and truth.
The book begins with a reflection on the importance of metaphysics in our contemporary setting, and then presents the human person's relation to the world under the signs of the beauty is the gracious invitation into reality, goodness is the self-gift of freedom in response to this invitation, and truth is the consummation of our relation to the real in knowledge. The book culminates in an argument for why love is ultimately a matter of being, and why metaphysical reason in indispensable in faith.

"Philosopher D. C. Schindler defies the dragon of modernity, whose dominant thought patterns induce a life- and culture-threatening loss of reality and self. He offers life-giving proposals regarding love, being, and the transcendentals to restore us profoundly to the world and to ourselves as humans. Buy the book--you may divest yourself of others. Digest it, and revel in your already-involvement with a responsive reality--an involvement of intimate encounter and communion; a reality that is love, fraught with beauty, goodness, and truth."
--Esther Lightcap Meek, Geneva College

"Love and the Postmodern Predicament is a treasure trove of philosophical riches. Schindler does not merely indicate the need to return to metaphysics to wrestle successfully with what he carefully and accurately describes as our postmodern predicament, but in fact leads us out of that predicament. His profound and original reflections on love, grounded in the transcendental properties of being, are a radical refashioning of traditional metaphysical principles."
--Jonathan J. Sanford, University of Dallas

"In this rewarding little text, Schindler accomplishes something too rare among works of  he accommodates a wide audience and yet deftly draws the reader into deep metaphysical waters, into a consideration of some of the most profound and perennial philosophical concerns. Throughout, the timeliness of his reflections on love, beauty, God, and the good remains in clear view. This is a highly recommended work by an author of capacious intellect and generous spirit."  
--Lee M. Cole, Hillsdale College

D. C. Schindler is Associate Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology at The John Paul II Institute at The Catholic University of America. He is the author of The Perfection of Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns (2013).

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Catholic, Cultural, Christian, Love, Christianity

194 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Professor David Christopher Schindler is Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America in 2001, with a dissertation on the philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He taught at Villanova University from 2001-2013, first as a teaching fellow in the Philosophy Department, and then in the Department of Humanities, where he received tenure in 2007. He received an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to do research in Munich from 2007-2008. Professor Schindler is a translator of French and German and has served as an editor of Communio: International Catholic Review since 2002.

Reviews

[David Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a crying need for new contemplative celebrants who can leaven the world through their witness to the order of being through the order of their lives and thought. Like a metaphysical ophthalmologist, D.C. Schindler works to strengthen the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings of our sight so that we can see anew the transcendentals of beauty, goodness and truth. Our milieu betrays an aversion to philosophy and metaphysics which pits us against our very natures because man as "an animal with logos" cannot be such an animal without holding a metaphysical system. The malaise of modernity is characterized by a "loss of respect for the true inwardness of things" and an attendant "lightness of being." A recovery of a rich, ontological understanding of beauty, by which we behold the whole, can help us restore our rootedness in the reality of the real. Modernity is characterizable by its habit of "lonely-mindedness," in which the self is conceived of as an isolated subjectivity that is the exclusive originator of the will, with no intrinsic relation to things outside. Against this distortion, a recovery of apprehension of goodness as a property of being, a transcendental, is needed, for then we will once again understand freedom as an involvement in reality and the will, not as a power to noncommittally like from a "safe" distance, but instead as love. Modernity sees knowledge as mere information and this results in a loss of human depth and a brittleness of identity. When we come to see truth as a transcendental again, then we realize true knowing is to make genuine contact with things, to take into ourselves in intimate encounter and personal presence the reality in which we have always already been involved through beauty and goodness.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shindler understands our postmodern predicament as a deep misology, a hatred and skepticism of reason’s claim to know reality. Under the appearance of modesty, some try to limit the reach of reason, which ultimately separates it from reality. Even well-meaning individuals who are philosophically rigorous are in a sense "guilty" of this.

This book helps us regain a proper relationship with reason, reality, being, and God through what is mainly an exposition of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (to which Love plays a crucial role)

Beauty is an open invitation to intimacy with reality. Beauty sets the horizon for a genuine human existence and enables a real encounter between man and the world.

Goodness is the free response in giving ourselves to what is other.

Truth is the reception of reality into ourselves [which transforms us into true and fruitful human persons] (an addition with which I believe the author would agree with).

Schindler's strength is his interpretation of the classical tradition. This is no mere vain repetition of a dead and bygone thing. He accomplishes, I believe, a reinvigoration of that whole tradition simply by giving us a renewed perspective on it. The way he explains it does not feel forced at all, it is very natural and illuminating. I would like to say that this lens he proposes is what true phenomenology should be, a loving and truthful account of our experience of reality. It could be used as a magnificent introduction to some essential ideas of classical philosophy & metaphysics.

Part II is a more difficult read than Part I & III, It is mostly a rigorous interpretation of love in Aquinas which is, as he shows, a fairly ambiguous subject. The main idea (love as coaptatio), however, was not that complicated to understand, so most people should be able to get through it.

Reading this makes me feel sane again despite these crazy times. D.C. Shindler is genuinely becoming one of my favorite writers/philosophers.

[Simona Sanduleac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. The author gives back what Postmodernism took away from you. He unveils what lies beneath our pathetic excuses for running away from discovering the world which God has freely given to us. And at the end, just like God did after He created the world and all its fantastic creatures, we come to the ultimate conclusion - "It is good."

[Esther Meek · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much life and world healing philosophizing here!

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

D. C. Schindler’s Love and the Postmodern Predicament is an ambitious work of metaphysics, philosophy of culture, and Christian thought. Its central concern is the relationship between human beings and reality: what it means to know something, to love something, to encounter beauty, and ultimately to participate in being itself.

Schindler’s diagnosis of the postmodern predicament is that modernity has progressively weakened our confidence that reality possesses an intelligible structure independent of us. The world is increasingly approached as something to be observed, measured, represented, categorized, and manipulated. Knowledge becomes information, freedom becomes autonomy, and truth becomes something we construct or possess rather than something to which we must become receptive.

Against this, Schindler attempts to recover a classical metaphysical vision in which reality is intrinsically intelligible, good, beautiful, and therefore capable of being genuinely known and loved.

The book’s central philosophical framework is built around the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty.

The transcendentals are not three properties that happen to belong to certain things. They are different ways of understanding being itself. Anything that exists insofar as it exists is capable of being understood in terms of truth, goodness, and beauty. These three dimensions are therefore not merely subjective categories imposed upon reality. They disclose something about reality and, at the same time, something about the way the human person relates to reality.

Schindler develops these three transcendentals as different dimensions of a single movement.

Beauty is the invitation of reality.
Goodness is our participation in reality.
Truth is our reception of reality.

And these culminate in love, which is the union of the knower and the known, the lover and the beloved.

This is one of the most compelling aspects of the book because Schindler is trying to overcome the modern tendency to separate things that, in classical metaphysics, belong together.

We tend to think of truth as belonging to the intellect, goodness as belonging to morality or the will, and beauty as belonging to aesthetics. Schindler’s argument is that these divisions are ultimately artificial. Truth, goodness, and beauty are different dimensions of the same reality, and the human person encounters reality through all three.

Being

The foundation of the entire argument is being.

For Schindler, being does not simply mean that something happens to exist. He is working within the classical metaphysical tradition in which being refers to the actuality and intelligibility of a thing: what it is, that it is, and the reality it possesses.

This distinction is crucial to Schindler’s criticism of modernity. If we encounter things merely as objects, then their reality is reduced to what can be observed, measured, or used. But if we encounter them as beings, we recognize that they possess an intelligibility and goodness that precede our own purposes.

The difference is between asking:

“What can I do with this?”

and asking:

“What is this?”

The first question treats reality as an object of manipulation. The second allows reality to disclose itself.

This is ultimately an epistemological question, but Schindler believes it is also an ontological and moral one. How we understand reality determines how we relate to it. If reality is fundamentally raw material for human purposes, then domination and manipulation become natural responses. If reality possesses an intrinsic intelligibility and goodness, then knowledge requires receptivity and our freedom becomes a response to something that exists independently of us.

This is why the phrase from the book that stood out to me so much is:

“If beauty represents an invitation to the real, and goodness our involvement in it in freedom, truth is above all our reception of reality, on its terms. It is for this reason a living relationship, one with the capacity to transform.”

I think this passage captures much of Schindler’s entire project.

The phrase “on its terms” is especially significant. Schindler’s conception of truth requires the knower to submit, in a sense, to the thing known. Reality has a priority over our interpretation of it. Genuine knowledge is therefore not simply the successful production of propositions or the accumulation of information. It is the intellect being conformed to what is.

Truth as reception

This is where Schindler’s understanding of knowledge becomes particularly interesting.

The modern conception of knowledge often tends toward a subject-object model: there is a knowing subject over here and an external object over there, and knowledge consists in obtaining accurate information about that object.

Schindler thinks this misses something essential.

To know something is not merely to have information about it. Knowledge involves a kind of participation. The form or intelligibility of the thing becomes present within the knower. The knower is changed by what he knows.

This is especially evident in personal knowledge.

I can possess a tremendous amount of information about another human being without actually knowing that person. I can know their age, occupation, political views, psychological profile, history, and habits. Yet none of this necessarily constitutes genuine personal knowledge.

To know someone requires encounter.

It requires presence.

It requires allowing the other person to disclose themselves rather than reducing them to an object of analysis.

Schindler extends this insight beyond interpersonal relationships. He thinks something similar is true of our relationship with reality itself. The world is not merely an object from which we extract information. Reality discloses itself to the person who is receptive to it.

Truth is therefore fundamentally relational.

This is why Schindler can describe truth as a “living relationship” capable of transforming us. If knowing reality leaves the knower entirely unchanged, then something about the nature of knowing has been misunderstood.

Beauty as revelation

Schindler’s account of beauty follows naturally from this.

Beauty is not primarily a matter of subjective preference. It is not simply the pleasurable response that occurs when an individual happens to like the appearance of something.

Beauty has an objective dimension because it belongs to the way reality presents itself.

A beautiful thing arrests our attention.

It calls us outside ourselves.

It produces wonder.

And wonder is philosophically important because it interrupts our normal relationship with things. We stop using them and begin contemplating them.

This is why Schindler describes beauty as an “invitation to the real.”

Beauty doesn’t merely tell us that something is pleasant. It suggests that there is something worth knowing.

The beautiful thing presents itself as worthy of contemplation before we have fully understood it. In that sense, beauty precedes knowledge while simultaneously drawing us toward knowledge.

There is a subtle philosophical movement here:

Beauty makes reality attractive.
Its attractiveness awakens desire.
Desire leads us toward participation.
Participation leads us toward knowledge.

This is also why Schindler’s account of beauty is inseparable from love.

Goodness, freedom, and participation

If beauty is the invitation, goodness is the response.

This is where Schindler’s account of freedom becomes important.

Modernity often conceives freedom negatively: I am free insofar as I am not constrained by anything outside myself. The ideal of freedom becomes autonomy—the ability to determine myself independently of external authority or objective standards.

Schindler’s conception is almost the inverse.

For him, freedom reaches its fulfillment not when it is completely independent of reality but when it is capable of responding appropriately to reality.

If something is genuinely good, then freedom can give itself to it.

This means that freedom is not fundamentally the ability to choose arbitrarily. It is the ability to participate in what is good.

That is why Schindler’s conception of goodness has such an intimate relationship with love. Love is not simply an emotion that happens to accompany our choices. It is the movement by which the self gives itself toward another.

There is therefore an important relationship between freedom and receptivity.

The modern autonomous subject wants to begin with itself: I determine what is valuable.

Schindler instead asks us to begin with reality: What is valuable independently of my preferences, and how should I respond to it?

This is a very classical conception of freedom. Freedom is perfected by truth rather than opposed to it.

Love as an ontological reality

This leads to the central concept of the book: love.

Schindler’s account of love is much more metaphysical than the ordinary use of the word suggests.

Love is not merely an emotion, and it is not reducible to subjective desire. Love involves a union between lover and beloved. The lover allows the beloved to affect and transform him while still preserving the distinction between the two.

This is why love is connected to being.

To love something is, in some sense, to allow its reality to matter to one’s own existence.

Love therefore involves:

* receptivity,
* knowledge,
* desire,
* freedom,
* participation,
* self-gift,
* and union.

This is also why Schindler’s critique of modernity is ultimately more radical than a critique of technology or secularization. He thinks the modern loss of metaphysical realism eventually becomes a loss of the conditions necessary for love.

If reality is merely an arrangement of subjective interpretations, then there is nothing genuinely other than ourselves to receive.

If truth is merely something we construct, then there is no reality to which we must conform.

If goodness is merely preference, then there is nothing objectively worthy of our self-gift.

If beauty is merely subjective taste, then beauty can no longer call us beyond ourselves.

Schindler’s metaphysical project is therefore simultaneously a recovery of the possibility of love.

Aquinas

The book is deeply indebted to Thomas Aquinas, particularly his understanding of being, truth, goodness, intellect, will, and participation.

Aquinas provides much of the metaphysical structure within which Schindler’s argument operates.

For Aquinas, being is fundamental. Truth and goodness are understood relationally: truth concerns being in relation to intellect, while goodness concerns being in relation to appetite or desire. A thing is true insofar as it is intelligible, and good insofar as it possesses the perfection appropriate to its nature and can therefore be desired.

Schindler takes this Thomistic framework and places much greater emphasis on beauty as the mode through which reality becomes attractive and therefore draws the person toward knowledge and love.

This is one of the most interesting aspects of his project. Beauty isn’t simply an additional transcendental alongside truth and goodness. It becomes a kind of bridge between them.

Beauty attracts us toward what is good.

The good draws us into participation.

Truth allows us to receive what reality is.

And love unites these dimensions.

In that sense, Schindler’s project can be understood as an attempt to recover the unity of the transcendentals rather than treating truth, goodness, and beauty as separate philosophical categories.

Plotinus

The comparison with Plotinus is particularly illuminating.

There is a strong Neoplatonic character to Schindler’s understanding of beauty and participation.

For Plotinus, beauty is fundamentally connected to form and unity. A beautiful thing is beautiful because intelligible form shines through it. Sensible beauty can therefore awaken the soul to the realization that beauty does not originate at the level of the particular physical object.

The beautiful object points beyond itself.

This gives Plotinus’s philosophy of beauty an inherently transcendent character. We encounter a beautiful body, but the experience can lead us toward the recognition of beauty itself, then toward intelligible reality, and ultimately toward the Good and the One.

Schindler’s account of beauty as an “invitation to the real” has a very similar structure.

Beauty does not terminate our attention in itself. It draws us beyond itself toward a deeper apprehension of reality.

This is also where Plotinus’s conception of love becomes relevant. Beauty awakens desire, and this desire can become the beginning of the soul’s ascent toward its source.

Schindler’s account has a similar movement:

beauty → desire → love → participation → deeper knowledge of reality.

The difference, however, is fundamental.

Plotinus ultimately describes reality through the One, Intellect, and Soul, with the soul’s movement involving a return toward its transcendent source. Schindler’s Christian metaphysics shares the language of participation and transcendence but places it within the doctrine of creation.

For Plotinus, the relation between the One and everything else is fundamentally one of procession and return.

For Schindler, the relation between God and creation is fundamentally one of gift and participation.

Being is given.

The world does not exist because God needed to produce something. Creation is gratuitous. This gives Schindler’s metaphysics a profoundly personal dimension that is absent from Plotinus’s ultimate principle.

The goal is therefore not simply absorption into the One. It is communion with God, in which distinction is not annihilated but fulfilled.

This distinction also makes Schindler’s understanding of love more explicitly personal. The beloved remains genuinely other while nevertheless becoming united with the lover.

Schindler’s synthesis

What makes the book particularly interesting is the way these traditions converge.

From Plato and Plotinus comes the idea that sensible reality can disclose a higher intelligible order, that beauty can awaken the soul, and that our desire for the beautiful can lead us toward the Good.

From Aquinas comes the metaphysical account of being, truth, goodness, intellect, will, causality, and participation.

From Christianity comes the decisive idea that being itself is gift, that the source of being is a personal God, and that the ultimate form of union is communion rather than absorption.

Schindler then uses this classical framework to diagnose the postmodern condition.

The result is essentially a philosophy of participatory realism: reality exists independently of us, it possesses an intelligible and good structure, and we fulfill ourselves not through absolute autonomy from reality but through participation in it.

That is perhaps the most important philosophical lesson I took from the book.

We often assume that freedom means being able to stand apart from everything and determine ourselves independently. Schindler suggests that this actually produces alienation. The self becomes most fully itself not by withdrawing from reality but by entering into a meaningful relationship with it.

In this sense, his conception of freedom is inseparable from love.

To be free is to be capable of giving oneself.
To give oneself requires something genuinely worth giving oneself to.
To recognize that something as worthy requires truth.
To be drawn toward it requires beauty.
And the resulting participation is love.

This also gives a much richer account of what philosophy itself is supposed to be. Philosophy isn’t merely the construction of theories about reality. It begins with wonder and involves learning how to see. The philosopher must become receptive to being rather than attempting to impose a conceptual system upon it.

The book therefore ultimately asks a question that is much more existential than technical:

What kind of person do I become depending on how I understand reality?

If I understand reality primarily as a collection of objects, I will tend to approach it in terms of utility and control.

If I understand reality as intrinsically intelligible and good, I can approach it through contemplation, receptivity, participation, and love.

This makes Love and the Postmodern Predicament much more than a critique of postmodern philosophy. It is an attempt to recover an entire way of seeing.

Its deepest claim might be summarized as follows:

Reality is not merely something we stand over against. Reality is something we can participate in.

Beauty invites us into that participation. Goodness gives our freedom a direction. Truth allows us to receive reality as it actually is. Love unites us with what we have come to know and value.

And beneath all of this is being itself: not a collection of inert objects, but the actuality and intelligibility of reality, ultimately grounded in the fullness of being that Schindler identifies with God.

There are certainly parts of Schindler’s argument that I found difficult, particularly as the book progresses into its more explicitly Thomistic and Christian metaphysical discussions. Some of the later arguments depend on distinctions within Aquinas that I don’t yet have a sufficiently strong grasp of to fully evaluate.

But the central vision of the book is one I found deeply compelling. In particular, Schindler’s account of knowledge as receptivity—and his insistence that truth requires us to receive reality “on its terms”—gave me a different way of thinking about what it means to know something. His treatment of beauty as an invitation rather than merely an aesthetic judgment was equally compelling, especially when considered alongside Plotinus and the broader Platonic tradition.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book, but the second half was quite challenging as I’m not as familiar with the work of Aquinas and the Christian tradition.

[Paul Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful call for our era to return to a healthy respect of metaphysics, by which we might find a strong foundation for thought and action and a renewed love for reality and God. Common sense, if somewhat complicated. Some passages were so insanely beautiful that I must highly recommend the book.

Overall pretty accessible, but the philosophy expounded is deep enough that you've got to read closely to track the thread. As such, it can be a little disengaging, so only 4 stars.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

Profound and accessible. I found this really stimulating and helpful. Schindler is a leading thinker at this time.

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Schindler offers a primer in metaphysics from what can only be called a Balthasarian Thomist perspective. Accordingly, he reinterprets the (traditional Thomist) transcendentals through the lens of love and beauty, which, for Schindler, are something like Ur-transcendentals that explain and are implicated by all of the others.

Especially interesting is his claim that beauty provides the paradigm for all instances of perception. In doing this, he links Aquinas with a central theme in the Romantic movement, where art represents something like a paradigm of human agency.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important work about the poverty of modern metaphysics and the need to recover ancient ways of looking at and understanding the world. I gave it only 4 stars because parts of it are every dense and difficult to follow. But there is a lot of "gold among the weeds" even in those less well-drafted sections.

[David deBruyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the first three chapters accessible enough, but the picture become much fuzzier as the chapters went on. Still, rare and helpful to hear a modern philosopher speak on beauty, goodness and truth.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in a while!

Incredible work showing how love and beauty are at the foundation of everything.

[Daniel Massett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great, short book with clear and deep explanations of the transcendentals (beauty, goodness, and truth) and how philosophy abandoned these ideas and the consequences that necessarily follow.

While it is an introduction to these transcendentals, it is also very deep and often complex--definitely written on the slightly more academic side of the pop to academic spectrum, but this is merely a function of the topic itself. The transcendentals are part of being itself, and developing a friendship with knowledge of being is at the heart of philosophy, as Schindler argues well at the end. Ultimately, the study of philosophy leads to a genuine poorness of spirit, the startling claim of Socrates that "All I know is that I know nothing." Read a little and you'll think you know it all; read and live a lot and you'll realize how little you know and how wonderful being truly is.

A great book.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read about half of the book. Very great, detailed look into the neo-Platonic, Christological view of goodness, beauty and truth. I will definitely have to revisit this one.

[Aimee Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely one to reread.