Daniel Dal Monte

The heart is the moral and affective center of the person, and plays a crucial role in spirituality. I examine the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand on the heart, in particular his call to restore the heart after its millennia-long neglect by Western philosophy. Von Hildebrand accounts for the neglect of the heart in terms of a Stoicism that views it as non-intentional, i.e. as disclosing nothing about reality. Instead of responding to objective values, the heart delivers an internal turbulence that distracts from the intellectual task of cognizing what is truly good. Stoicism reduces affective states to a preliminary sensation (propatheia) and a propositional belief that the intellect must evaluate. There is no disclosive capacity intrinsic to affective states that is untranslatable to intellectual propositions. Stoics stress conformity to an objective teleology of the person rather than feeling, through the cultivation of logic. The Epicurean embraces the opposite extreme, giving internal sensations of pleasure and pain pre-eminence over logic. Feeling pleasure supersedes any conformity to an objective standard. The binary of Stoicism and Epicureanism is a lens to understand the neglect of the heart, and to restore the heart. The heart both generates internal sensations, but also provides an evaluative disclosure of reality that is not translatable to intellectual propositions, and so the heart can unite both the objective and subjective domains emphasized by Stoicism and Epicureanism.  

Contemporary Hegel scholarship either defends a theological metaphysics in which history is a teleological unfolding of cosmic Geist; or, the evolution of Geist represents the absolutization of human subjectivity, which undergoes a Bildung that prescinds from any reliance on metaphysical givens. The dilemma is between presenting Hegel as an absolute monist that is outmoded in light of modernity’s skepticism towards a teleology of history; or, of reducing Hegel to the terms of modernity, as defending the absolute self-grounding of the human subject, in history without ontology. I argue that co-opting Hegel for modernity is a mistake. The post-Kantian interpretation of Hegel, that rejects any metaphysics of the absolute, leaves the human subject in a state of alienation that the dialectic process in Hegel is supposed to resolve. I argue that PKI’s account of the self-grounding subject is too similar to absolute freedom that Hegel views as a dangerous fruit of the Enlightenment. Absolute freedom, having relegated God to deistic irrelevance, and stripped nature of any telos, seeks to make its own categories sovereign over those of reality.

I consider the principle of sufficient reason (henceforth, PSR) as it functions in both Leibniz and Kant. The issue separating these thinkers is a modal status of absolute contingency, which is exempt from PSR insofar as it is neither logically necessary, nor does it necessarily follow from the given causal series. Leibniz’s ambitious metaphysics applies PSR even to God’s choices, which, since they must rest on a reason that makes sense of them, necessarily tend to the creation of the best of all possible worlds. Through PSR, the exercise of human freedom represents the unfolding of a concept God already has chosen, with an eye to the best possible world aligned with the universal intelligibility enjoined by PSR. PSR, in Kant’s critical period, is not a principle of being, but one of mere experience, since any extension of thought beyond possible experience can yield no knowledge. Human agency, for Kant, has an intelligible aspect that is beyond possible experience. Since PSR is only a principle of experience for Kant, the agent in its intelligible aspect is not subject to it. Human free will introduces a special modal category of absolute contingency. Kant provides impetus for a humanism that makes the absolute freedom of the human will a competitor with the sovereignty of God, and also liberates the human will from contemporary ideologies that would subordinate it to natural determinism or group dynamics.