of philosophy stands at a distance from our own hearts in order to arrive at an understanding of what and why our hearts desire what they do and in order to arrive at criteria for judging the movements of our hearts within a responsibly developed view of the Whole. Philosophy holds open the space for the fullest development of the heart and clarifies the heart to itself. But philosophy itself is not directly a matter of the heart; it is a matter of the intellect and its pure, unrestricted desire to understand, apart from how we might feel about things.
* * * *
Armed with the basic concepts we have highlighted in our dealing with everyday things, we turn to focus upon select highlights in the history of thought, beginning with Plato, passing through Aristotle, on to Augustine and Aquinas, who took up Plato and Aristotle respectively, and then to Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger. The aim is not to present how they used to think and thus satisfy historical curiosity, but to learn how to think by attending to the things with which the classic texts deal. The lives of the thinkers are to that extent irrelevant. It is the things themselves that we learn to focus in various ways by studying the great philosophers.1
QUESTIONS
1. What are the essential features of each of the sensory fields?
2. What is the difference between the “lived body” and body object? You know of bodies by sensing them in various ways as objects appearing within your sensory fields. But you know your own body in a different way. Describe that difference as exactly as you can.
3. What is different about touch than is the case with the other senses?
4. How is intellection different from sensation?
5. How is a natural capacity different than a sensory object? How is it like the intellect? How is it different?
6. Heraclitus once said: All things flow and nothing remains the same. You can’t step into the same river twice. Is that true of all of experience and its objects?
7. Red thing, redness, color, sensory feature, quality, property: these terms are arranged from more concrete to more abstract. Each more abstract term covers more items in experience than the more concrete terms that precede it. This is an instance of a logical hierarchy—parallel to the Church hierarchy in which you find broader and broader spheres of authority. How do the notions of sameness and difference function in this logical hierarchy?
8. Universal notions function like glasses. How so?
9. How are humans related to space and time?
10. The pope says that what we need is a renewal of the philosophy of being (FR 97/119). How does the notion of Being enter into the discussion of the mailbox? What features of human experience does it make possible?
11. What are the essential features of the way in which different kinds of things present themselves: the nonliving, the living, the animal, the human?
12. What are the essential features involved in speech? How does writing modify those features?
13. How does aesthetic experience move us from essence to existence?
14. How are the big questions made possible by the structure of human awareness?
15. Describe the bipolar structure of human existence. How does that make the human being the culture-creating animal?
16. Describe the distinction between I and Me. How does the heart fit into the picture?
FURTHER READINGS
1. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. This is one of the founder of phenomenology’s most readable works, set against the background of modern thought from Galileo and Descartes through the British Empiricists and Kant in relation to the development of Western thought generally.
2. Robert Sokolowski, An Introduction to Phenomenology. Short and readable, it gives a good sense of phenomenological method by practicing it.
3. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology. A substantial history of the phenomenological movement.
4. Dermot Moran, The Phenomenology Reader. Readings from the thinkers covered in Moran’s history (3, above).
* * * *
1. This essay is the result of a collaborative effort in a phenomenology workshop at the University of Dallas. I wish to thank Glenn Chicoine, Michael Jordan, Landon Lester, Lynn Purcell, Michael Tocci, and Matthew van House for their contributions to the development of the work.
PLATO’S REPUBLIC
The philosopher keeps his eyes always fixed on the Whole . . . and the universal nature of every thing that is, each in its wholeness.
—Plato,Theaetetus, 173c
. . . always devoting himself through reasoning to the idea of Being.
—Plato, Sophist, 254a
READINGS
The Republic of Plato:
1. The opening and the discussion with Cephalus: death, justice, and philosophical reflection (327a–329e)2
2. The Ring of Gyges (359d–360d)
3. The soul and the cardinal virtues (end of Book IV, 427d–445e)
4. The Sun, the Cave, and the Line (middle of Book VI, 505a–511d; VII, 514a–524e)
5. Immortality and the Judgment of the Dead (end of Book X, 608c–612a, 3pp; 614b–621d)
1.
Twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato.3 American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “Philosophy is Plato, and Plato, Philosophy.”4 The best introduction to Western philosophy is a careful study of Plato’s works. Plato is particularly important for understanding the way reflection upon revelation occurred among the Church Fathers, for early theology was dominated by Platonic ways of thinking. And that influence continued unabated—for better and for worse—throughout the centuries.
Plato (429–348 BC) was originally a tragedian—until he met Socrates who subjected him to a philosophic grueling. After that he burned his plays (alas!) but turned his literary talents to writing philosophic dialogues where he combines the use of imagery, the description of character, dramatic action, allegorizing, and myth-making with philosophic questioning and construction. His early work was a retelling of the trial and death of Socrates who was killed for unsettling Athenian authorities by his relentless questioning of their understanding of ultimate things.5 Thereafter Socrates becomes the main character in the dialogues; but later he becomes secondary, finally disappearing in favor of other major speakers. So it becomes difficult to say what is Socrates’s and what is Plato’s in the dialogues. But that is only of historical interest and irrelevant to understanding their philosophic content.
2.
In the center of Plato’s works stands the Republic: all the chronologically previous dialogues lead up to it; all those subsequent follow from it. The work is structured around an ascent and a descent, beginning with the first line where Socrates said “I went down” and was about to “go up.”6 “Down” is allied with darkness, “up” with light. These are the central metaphors that structure the work: up/down, darkness/light. Plato chose them because they are metaphors used in everyday life for our own thinking in terms of meaning. When we are “down” our life is dark and gloomy, when we are “up” it is bright and sunny, etc.
“Down” at the beginning is literally the Piraeus, the sea port down by the sea from Athens that stands up on a hill. The occasion is the celebration of the feast of the goddess Bendis, a goddess of the dark underworld. Socrates and his companion Glaucon are playfully threatened with the use of force to keep them down in the “underworld” in order to watch a torchlight procession