Morning of Holy Thursday
Lots of people, especially in conservative circles, don’t like phenomenology, which is the philosophical movement that John Paul II drew upon in formulating his Theology of the Body. Here is a brief explanation of phenomenology as the late Holy Father understood it:
Phenomenology is a subjective, inductive, and experiential philosophical method. [Edmund] Husserl[, its founder,] was interested in discovering how things are in the world (the being of things—what philosophy always investigates) through the interior perception of the world by individual people. …. Through his studies, which focused on ethics, [Karol] Wojtyla saw that phenomenology was able to provide a link to reality, a way to ground ethical norms in reality, and not only in interior ideas. … Wojtyla saw that phenomenology provided a way to re-link ethical norms to reality… [and] a powerful tool for the study of Christian ethics. If the Christian norms taught by Revelation could be understood as interior norms, i.e., if these norms could be perceived through experience, they would cease to have the character of external laws imposed on one from the outside. Further, one could speak about these values in a subjective way appropriate to the modern world.
Phenomenology studies human experiences from the interior point of view. … It is precisely because the person is vital to revealed truth that there can be a synthesis of phenomenology and the faith. Phenomenology … begins with our conscious experience of ourselves as acting agents. Phenomenology then leads to the mystery of human personhood. Phenomenology, subjective as it is, “opens the door” to the full truth about man revealed in the objective order by God. John Paul II makes this link between phenomenology and the objective order of the faith through the text in Genesis: “Let us make man in our image.”
Conservative critics of phenomenology construct a dichotomy between "experience" and "truth." They argue that St. Thomas Aquinas’s scholastic philosophy, dependent as it is on reason with its postulates, proofs, and corollaries, is far superior; or indeed, that Aquinas’s approach
Morning of Holy Thursday
Lots of people, especially in conservative circles, don’t like phenomenology, which is the philosophical movement that John Paul II drew upon in formulating his Theology of the Body. Here is a brief explanation of phenomenology as the late Holy Father understood it:
Phenomenology is a subjective, inductive, and experiential philosophical method. [Edmund] Husserl[, its founder,] was interested in discovering how things are in the world (the being of things—what philosophy always investigates) through the interior perception of the world by individual people. …. Through his studies, which focused on ethics, [Karol] Wojtyla saw that phenomenology was able to provide a link to reality, a way to ground ethical norms in reality, and not only in interior ideas. … Wojtyla saw that phenomenology provided a way to re-link ethical norms to reality… [and] a powerful tool for the study of Christian ethics. If the Christian norms taught by Revelation could be understood as interior norms, i.e., if these norms could be perceived through experience, they would cease to have the character of external laws imposed on one from the outside. Further, one could speak about these values in a subjective way appropriate to the modern world.
Phenomenology studies human experiences from the interior point of view. … It is precisely because the person is vital to revealed truth that there can be a synthesis of phenomenology and the faith. Phenomenology … begins with our conscious experience of ourselves as acting agents. Phenomenology then leads to the mystery of human personhood. Phenomenology, subjective as it is, “opens the door” to the full truth about man revealed in the objective order by God. John Paul II makes this link between phenomenology and the objective order of the faith through the text in Genesis: “Let us make man in our image.”
Conservative critics of phenomenology argue that St. Thomas Aquinas’s scholastic philosophy, dependent as it is on reason with its postulates, proofs, and corollaries, is far superior; or indeed, that Aquinas’s approach is the only legitimate thinking about God and man. They are suspicious of phenomenology’s "subjective" nature, arguing that human experience leads us to error and that excessive reliance on experience tempts us to moral relativism. In doing so, they construct a dichotomy between "experience" and "truth." Here’s an extreme example, taken from a sedevacantist (i.e., schismatic) website:
Phenomenology attempts to base human knowledge on the "phenomena," that is, what appears to the human mind, rather than on an exploration of external existing things. Whether a thing truly exists or not is unimportant to a phenomenologist; only what he cogitates exists for him.
Moreover, phenomenology describes "meaning" as the combined observations of a multitude of observers, past, present, and future. Thus, meaning can never be isolated. The true meaning of a symphony may never be known, because it resides alternatively in the written score, what was in the mind of the composer, the variety of performances different orchestras and different conductors, and also involves future performances.
One can easily see how this philosophy is one of the modernist "subjectivist" philosophies, basing itself not on an external reality or standard, but upon one’s own personal conceptions. Thus, it easily leads to moral relativism and dependence upon personal or subjective opinion ("what feels good") as opposed to external or objective reality (e.g., the Ten Commandments).
Of course, John Paul II viewed experience not as an alternative to objective reality, but as a means of grappling with objective reality. The dichotomy is false: Thomist rationality, and (???) Johannine-Pauline (???) experience, both help us find the truth. (Anyway, human reason isn’t exactly infallible — and leads to sins of pride and presumption as easily as human experience leads to relativism.) And even Aquinas recognized that we come to knowledge of the truth first through our senses. Human experience, fallible though it is, is a necessary means of encountering objective reality.
More important than these arguments is one single fact, which silently and incontrovertibly and eternally proves that human experience can be, and must be, united with Truth: God Himself chose to experience life on earth through the senses of a human being; indeed, chose to experience death.
We do not know how the Atonement works, but we agree that it was accomplished through
God’s experiencing of human life, human suffering, and human death.
God is omniscient. Even were there no Incarnation, he would understand human bodily being, its sensations, pains, and joys, completely. Even were there no Passion, He would have perfect knowledge of suffering and of death.
Yet God did not deem His perfect intellectual comprehension of human life, suffering,
and death sufficient to accomplish the Atonement. In His Wisdom, He deemed it necessary also
to experience these things, in flesh taken up of His own free will.
If God can accomplish something through His experience, then man can accomplish something through man’s experience.
Have a blessed Triduum!
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