By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Gubser, Michael. The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics and Social Renewal in Central Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii +335.
Professor Gubser opens his narrative with the statement: “The history of phenomenology is partly the history of friendships among the early disciples of Husserl in Munich and Göttingen, among East European dissidents who joined together against their regimes, and among scholars who study philosophy today.”
Given Gubser’s extensive tracking, it seems clear that over the course of a century Husserl’s school not only gave birth to an extensive body of academic phenomenological research, but has produced a valuable body of social and ethical thought that proved useful to Eastern Europeans as they defended their personal and communal rights against hostile regimes and what they perceived as the technological leveling of a materialist culture.
Avoiding politics, Husserl’s Eastern European disciples found hope that a renewal of ancient European culture, defined by its sources, Hellenic in origin and Christian in its evolution, might turn the tide. Religious experience and moral considerations became an important focus of phenomenological investigation, so much so that Husserl feared that religious commitment could compromise the philosophical rigor of his method of inquiry.
Gubser distinguishes between German/Austrian phenomenology and that of Eastern Europe. Brentano, Max Scheler, and Dietrich von Hildebrand are taken as representative of the former; Jan Patocka, Josef Tishner, and Karl Wojtyla as representative of Eastern Europe, where their promotion of a personalist and communitarian social vision contrasted with both liberal and totalitarian modernity.
In common, those Eastern Europeans who took their lead from Brentano and Husserl found in the phenomenology the language and methodology they needed to celebrate human dignity by acknowledging the transcendent nature of man, a human being, possessed of a spiritual soul with an eternal destiny. The crisis of modernity it was thought “lay in the tendency to reduce the world to elemental clay for human molding.” Scheler’s phenomenology gave his followers the means not only to recognize a hierarchy of goods but to speak of a hierarchy of values subjectively experienced.
Gubser devotes separate chapters to Max Scheler, Jan Patocka, and Karl Wojtyla, but he also provides an extended treatment of the person and insight of Dietrich von Hildebrand whom he credits for his early understanding that modern anti-personalism, embodied in what von Hildebrand called “the rise of mass man and the state leviathan,” directly leads to fascist nihilism.
Without diminishing the importance of Scheler, von Hildebrand, and others in the phenomenological movement, Gubser is fascinated with the career of Karol Wojtyla, who as John Paul II became the most renowned figure in the movement’s Eastern drift.
“John Paul II,” Gubser writes, “was not the first pope to link personalism with an overt political and social agenda. The anti-communist platform of his early papacy, along with his persistent critique of liberal individualism referred back to Leo XIII’s denunciation of capitalist excess and Pius XI’s introduction of personalism as anti-totalitarian.”
Before his election to the Chair of Peter, Wojtyla served as both Krakow’s archbishop and as a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin. Gubser believes that of the numerous books that have been written about John Paul II’s career, few have examined the philosophy that was to influence his papal teaching.
Wojtyla’s philosophy had many sources. Prominent among them was the scholastic tradition represented by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, whose major work, God, His Existence and His Nature, remains a viable source of Thomistic teaching on the subject. Under the direction of Garrigou-Lagrange, Wojtyla wrote the first of his two doctoral dissertations on the mysticism of St. John of the Cross. His Habilitationsschrift, the second dissertation, critically examined the thought of Max Scheler. Wojtyla agreed with Scheler that feelings are a crucial element in the domain of human moral experience, something too often neglected by rationalistic philosophers. He sympathized with Scheler’s moral philosophy as contrasted with John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism and the emphasis on sentiment that was characteristic of the Scottish school of moral philosophy.
But Wojtyla objected to what he called Scheler’s emotional reductionism for naively reducing the ethical encounter to feelings alone, for as such it lacked any rational entailment. Scheler’s values, Wojtyla claimed, could not be rationally defended or even classified. Wojtyla was forceful in his criticism of Scheler’s notion of God. Scheler’s phenomenology, he maintained, granted access to the idea of God, the God-like in man, but not to God Himself.
After severely criticizing Scheler in his Habilitationsschrift, Wojtyla over time and on a second reading, as it were, came to appreciate and utilize many of Scheler’s insights. In the light of his Thomistic studies, Wojtyla believed that Aquinas presupposed “subjective experience,” but lacked the tools to explore it, tools that phenomenology would later provide. In the end Wojtyla came to recognize that Thomism and phenomenology are compatible. Phenomenology lacks the metaphysics which those steeped in the Aristotelian or scholastic tradition can provide.
It can be noted that Michael Gubser’s sweeping historical study may be fruitfully approached in conjunction with Robert Sokolowski’s popular Introduction to Phenomenology.
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(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.)
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