Objective Values

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.