St Thomas says curiosity is a sin and a species of pride. It seeks knowledge that either distracts us from pursuing, or is cut off from, our final end.
Former-pastor's kid here: this was fascinating, and brought about a sense conviction that I am currently not educated enough to put into words. The tennis parable was illuminating. Thank you for your thoughts
Read this one expecting to be mad, and you’ve made some brilliant points. The application of curiositas to the fruitlessness of phenomenonology was interesting.
Would be interesting to compare with Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.” Also that experience is TW gives the craftsman knowledge of the causes of a thing. So for Aristotle, our “structures of consciousness” being things that reveal our desire to know the Good, and one step on the way to doing so. Anyways—those are just my thoughts that come up in reading.
Have you read Jacques Maritain? His Existance and the Existent is a great (Thomistic) look at experience and ultimate Being.
ha, i pleased to hear the argument had some persuasive pull to someone not already convinced. also to find someone who reads opposing points of view. ive been reluctant to publish this to my list, and still havent, because its so rough and ive been sort of waiting for someone to tell me why its a terrible argument, so please let me know if you see gross errors or faux pas.
re: metaphysics. by all means delight in the senses themselves! my arguments jist, and my experience reading husserl and heidegger was that phenomenology is counterproductive on this front.
its also true, we do learn by or through experience, but the carpenter learns by experience the nature of nails, hammers, saws, wood, etc, and these things as they move toward their end, not as they present themselves to consciousness. but even if you go on a sort of heidegger contra husseral zuhandenheit sorta trip, why do we need these words? cant we just say the carpenter learns by doing? i put the quote at the top because phenomenology seems to seek to know the thing in its presentation to consciousness rather than in its nature in the classical sense. correct me if i am wrong, but its not a structure of consciousness that reveals our desire to know the good in aristotle, but our human nature possesses this desire intrinsically (at least potentially), and this potential is made actual and given form in how we are co-natured by the shared objects of action (ends) given to us primarily by our parents, but also our sociality and our material environment. Heideggers project seems like a gnostic cult that believes a relatively obscure theoretical apparatus could take the role of our parents in imparting the meaning of being. hard pass. the brunt of my argument, perhaps i didnt communicate it well, is that the structure of consciousness doesn´t reveal anything, a theoretical thematization of it can be useful for defensive purposes, like husserls k of scientism, perhaps for offense regarding the particular activities of consciousness itself, like gadamers hermeneutics (which ive always liked), but its not going to help us act well writ large outside of this scope, it certainly cannot help us find the summum bonum, which is given by parents or for the christian by baptism and sacraments. accourding to aristotle and st thomos, the summum bonum cannot be an object of deliberation, it is simply there. you cant choose it or will it. my fear is that phenomenology just reifies a particular cultural or individual mindset and tries to claim universality to it, which can be interesting if someone is as interesting as emmanuel levinas. but phenomenology per se is going to tell levinas that the face is the ground of ethical being and obligation, just like phenomenology would tell the hindu that its the cow. there is nothing about the nature of cows or faces themselves that suggest this objectively, nor is there anything about first-person consciousness itself that helps us discern between face and cow as ground of being. at least for me, im only moved by pretty faces and holsteins, a superficiality aristotle says i could blame on my parents, but hopefully these peferences are trumped by the intellect or reason considering the natures of things and being moved by reality, looking at the relation between form and end as apart of a historical tradition which prizes doing this sort of thing and affords regular surgical assistance concerning my tendency to defect from my final end.
ive never read maritans properly thomistic works. i read integral humanism before i became cahtolic and loved it, post-conversion i came to think the book is almost singularly unique in its causing negative developments in the church. so i don´t really trust maritain for this reason and lack the impulse to dive in deeper. thanks for the rec anyway, i dont doubt it would help me make my argument here clearer. but i dont have time to do a lot of work on this front and am just focusing on fr josef kleutgen sj as my thomistic guide for the time being. he is wonderful.
No gross errors at first glance. The way you bulleted your points at the beginning was helpful + the different images you used, especially the tennis one (and I thought the riff on Heidegger was fun). My only thought is that you're making a great point about a key 20th century philosophy--most of us have inherited an imbalanced emphasis on experience and subjectivity and a loss of categories like teleology and quiddity, so your point about the ethical worth, or lack thereof, in phenomenology is really important, I think--but this is pretty technical writing for anyone who's not studied philosophy. I might share it with a friend who was a committed and well-read phenomenologist; I couldn't pass it on to like, any average coworker and expect them to benefit from it. But that has to do with your audience and your aim-- it's certainly worthwhile to engage in technical philosophy.
Secondly, (and this may be my misunderstanding), but your framing of curiositas is a little different than how I've heard it parsed. You said: "Curiosity seeks knowledge of what cannot be ordered toward the good. This first-person experiential knowledge cannot be ordered towards the good because it cannot be desired as the proper object of the most crucial acts of human life etc" But the categories of curiositas that Thomas gives are 1) being distracted from a more important study by an obligation, 2) learning from a forbidden source, like a demon, 3) desiring to know about creatures without reference to their proper end, ie God (that's maybe the closest to what you've got here), and 4) seeking things beyond our understanding in arrogance and thereby falling into error. (S.Th., II-II, q. 167, a. 1). So it's not "knowledge of what cannot be ordered towards the good"--I'm not sure what a category of things that cannot be ordered to the good would even look like? Other than maybe sin, but in the tradition, that's usually construed as a privation--but knowledge about things which should be ordered to the right end, either pursued in the wrong way or without reference to God. That *is* the point you're making about phenomenology, but in your section 11, you make it sound like pursuit of subjective, experiential knowledge itself is the sin of curiositas, which--at least by Thomas' definition--it wouldn't be, only if that knowledge is pursued without an eye to God or out of arrogance, which is the larger argument you're making. Again, I may be misunderstanding your language in that section though.
Ha, sorry, I was being a bit playful with the Aristotle comment. I don't think his metaphysic is the same as a Husserlian structure of consciousness (hence why I used the quote marks), if you took it that way--my intent was more just to highlight that the things that are compelling about phenomenology (the emphasis on sensitive knowledge and experience as an intuition of being) can be found in the Philosopher--along with the teleological, ethical, and ontological components that you've pulled out here. "my fear is that phenomenology just reifies a particular cultural or individual mindset and tries to claim universality to it" --that seems accurate to me, though in all honesty, I've not read half the guys you just referenced.
When you said, "we do learn by or through experience, but the carpenter learns by experience the nature of nails, hammers, saws, wood, etc, and these things as they move toward their end, not as they present themselves to consciousness"-- I'm not sure what the difference between those two things are? Unless what you mean by "present themselves to consciousness" is "these things are only being subjectively apprehended, *and not also moving toward their end*", because my understanding of a Platonic/Aristotelian (maybe Thomistic?) ontology would be that we are able to know natures because we have consciousness/interiority, being part of the imago dei or a facet of reason. so there's both an object + a knower, which is why it's helpful to be able to say that the carpenter learns through doing, but also because he is the kind of creature--ie, one that has consciousness, interiority, reason--that can recognize being. (see the wax and the seal in Plato's Meno). So the nature of a thing + the consciousness of the knower are two sides of the coin (which leads to the tradition of active/receptive (masculine/feminine) imagery in talking about knoweldge.) Those are half-baked thoughts and I may have misconstrued what you meant by that comment, though. Consciousness is an important category to work through, especially with the heyday it's having in current philosophy.
I've not read Josef Kleutgen, I may have to look into him--Jesuit + Thomist is right up my alley.
this is so helpful and insightful. thanks a lot. so outside of a catholic bishop who might convene an ecumenical council to condemn various errant philosophical trends in catholic theology, you are sorta my ideal reader, someone who is interested in philosophy, intelligent, conversant in philosophy but not a professional philosopher. who might read and then decide to read more ancient and medieval philosophy and not wallow in the slough of despond with the phenomenologists. id have to do a lot more work fine tuning the argument and textual work to get this up to professional standard. i was apart of that world for a time but its not been my focus for a few years.
re curiosity i should do a little more work to tie it textually. so thanks for pointing that out. id say a combo of 1 its distracting knowledge (st thomas also mentions for the purpose of arrogance here i think) and 3 its not leading toward knowledge of our proper end. and not strictly God, but also proximate ends like virtues and how we make sense of the nature of moral action, obligation, responsibility, and complicity. the tennis example was supposed to show how there could be knowledge or a method of generating knowledge that cannot be ordered toward the good. why wasn´t this obvious? or how could i make this more obvious? the coach was mandating a privation of tennis form by not teaching about proper posture but about proper forms of tennis experience. the experiential tennis language he developed as well as the knowledge it facilitated is marked by an absence of even potentiality to give proper normative direction to a tennis player. sort like the ethics of authenticity in being and time. or so was my thought.
regarding the other philosophical points maybe i will respond later, your objections are excellent or at least show me i need to be clearer and perhaps explain exactly what i mean. but basically in the ancient philosophy there is a tight relationship between formal and final cause, so the essence of the thing is its tending towards its end. phenomenology seems to say the essence of the thing is known in its experiencing on the thing, in its presentation to consciousness. this was the point of the sex analogy. if the act is for the objective, natural end, well, in this case, this end is not immediately present in how the act appears to consciousness, so how can it be evaluated. the phenomenological method has a problem with comprehending final causes in general i think, because the essence is the appearnace of thing to consciousness, not a consideration of that nature as it tends toward its end. or so i thought, i would guess a real phenomenologist would say im straw manning in some fashion and I would be all ears as its probably true.
kleutgen is almost entirely untranslated, and not at all someone who is read today. but all his stuff is free on google books if you can read the old german script. but truly he very diligently brings what he calls the ancient or perennial teachings of philosophy (from the greeks through the middle ages) to terms with modern philosophers like descates kant and hegel whom he accuses of breaking with this form in self-destructive ways. its thrilling as others do it either poorly or incompletely or without insight into modern philosophy. but after im through with the two volume philosophie der vorzeit, ill be able to return to this argument with a lot more clarity i think.
thanks again for your help. i owe you a good critical reading\edit if you ever need one.
Happy to be a helpful reader; I really did enjoy reading your piece. “conversant but not a professional philosopher”— maybe I should put that in my substack bio. I did go to school for it (specifically ancient and medieval philosophy), but not beyond the undergrad level.
Out of curiosity: what errant philosophical trends in catholicism would you want to see corrected?
I think you’ve done a fine job in the tennis example outlining an example of curiositas— what’s confusing is whether you’re talking about the object of phenomenology (ie, sensitive knowledge or subjective experience) or the method of phenomenology when you say “knowledge that cannot be ordered to the good.” because the second might only frustrate our pursuit of the good, but the first can, and should be, ordered towards it. does that make sense/help? (you actually say “knowledge or method of generating knowledge”; I’m not sure those are the same. But I could be splitting hairs, or the maybe object and the method are more closely the same thing in phenomenology than I’ve realized, which is maybe what you’re getting at—I’ve only read Heidegger and a bit of Husserl, so I am working with a pretty light sketch here.)
“This end is not immediately present in how the act appears to consciousness, so how can it be evaluated. the phenomenological method has a problem with comprehending final causes in general i think, because the essence is the appearnace of thing to consciousness, not a consideration of that nature as it tends toward its end.” Gotcha, that’s a really helpful distinction in thinking about ancient philosophy vers phenomenology. How are you using essence vs nature? what do you think plato/aristotle would say the role of consciousness is in apprehending nature? is the phenomenological take more like the shadows on the wall in Plato’s allegory vs seeing the real world? Free free to not answer any of that; I’m just curious/thinking out loud.
Sadly, I cannot read German at any level. Sounds like a fascinating read, though.
conversant philosopher, sure, i mean professional philosopher is often no badge of honor, for many its pracctially like a professional sand castle maker. seems like you made the most out of your course of study as you seem to think clearly and have a good grasp of the terrain.
"what errant philosophical trends in catholicism would you want to see corrected?" kyrie eleison. I claim...gulp...that the catholic church of late is dominated by a thought form that inverts the normal christian metaphysic of good and evil. so it makes good a privation of evil. this is the fundamental metaphysical error. and im the only one in the world who thinks this. i call it privationism and one of my life´s missions/dreams is to start a new inquisition of sorts on this front by means of a surrealist band of itenerant hate preachers. but as of yet its just been me wandering around europe alone by foot. my unfinished doctoral thesis was about this but i had to veil it somewhat. if you are interested ive written a few things on this theme here on substack: https://sanctistulti.substack.com/s/on-reign-of-anti-christ. its basically a more simple and thoroughgoing way to make sense of "theological modernism" which was the last major defined heresy and battle in the church (~1870-1960) before the modernists basically won. (here is the best philosphical summary of the heresy: https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html) the thought about privationism is adjacent to my argument in this post, and the critique of phenomenology, as this thought form privaledges immanent subjective experience over transcendent, abstract thought at the speculative level, with the practical consequence that the good to be desired is gradually drained of positive normative content. and heidegger basically at least partially replaced the thomistic basis of catholic theology in the major figures that came to dominate the post-conciliar church or nouvelle theologie, ppl like rahner and von balthasar. so my argument here could be extended to them as well. and, more immediately, without the thomistic basis, traditional distinctions like nature/supernature, form/matter, lost their meaning. but without hte first disctinction you struggle to explain why unbaptized will be damned, so no one believes it anymore. without the second, its impossible to defend why contraception is evil and nfp is licit, so even the few priests who do believe the traditional teaching cannot explain it to the skeptical. with the consequence that next to no one believes let alone follows the teaching anymore, as they cannot grasp it intellectually , and thus they think the old church with the strict doctrines was evil, and the absence of these evil doctrines is taken to be "good." catholicism-lite is privationism. anathema sit!
regarding the latter questoins: i think, at least when applied to clarifying the ends of things and actions, phenomenology is a poor method that produces a retrograde sort of knowledge. but distinguishing the two is a good suggestion, even if they are interdependent, as well as clarifying how each can go wrong, so thank you for noticing that. i do think the method can be applied well in its proper terrain, and produce useful knowledge. for instance, c.s. peirce uses what he calls phenomenology to deduce his three categories of experience, and these are brilliant.
regarding nature and essence and the role of consciousness in apprehending nature. i am not so sharp as to be able to answer off the cuff. i am working on them now actually as i go through this book philosphie der vorzeit and will probably post on them relatively soon. one of my projects on substack is just writing essays on basic scholastic distinctions, partially so i finally learn them. truly you are probably better schooled than i on this front as i sort of worked backwards in my philosophical journey, and have basically been trying to teach myself, when i have time, a form of neo-scholastic thomism that no one adheres to anymore. but ive spent much more time reading modern philosphy and really still love a lot of the insights of the great modern philosophers. yet its a period of overall disintegration and there is a much more wild variance of vocabulary, and use of terms as one finds in ancient and medieval philosphy. so its really cool you could do an undergrad in philosophy and just focus on pre-modern philosophy, that would have been wonderful i think.
wow, great idea with the cave reference, yeah maybe, turning around and facing the sunlight is the work of reason investigating or discerning the true causes of things, realizing that the light is the true cause of the shadow. and this isnt really the focus of phenomenology as i understand it, uncovering the causes of things.
its not the sinful type of curiosity so thanks for your questions! they helped me clairify my thoughts as well.
I wonder what you would think about Thomistic psychology. Thomas talks a lot about rational faculties, appetites, etc. Of course, it's in an objective way. He's claiming to describe them as they actually exist, not as they are experienced. (Well, sometimes both, but the GOAL is the objective part.) Maybe, phenomenology is something like that. But, I agree with what you're saying. Of course, we "see through a glass darkly." Obviously we are embodied and can see only a certain perspective. But the point is to "triangulate" so to speak to get at the objective reality. Phenomenology seems preoccupied with making what is really a pedantic point, which is that we see through a glass darkly. It's like if someone looked through a telescope and saw a ship on the horizon and said "there is a ship approaching," the phenomenoloigist would "correct" him by saying "ah, you should say that you see in your telescope there is a ship." It may be that there is some intersection of philosophy and psychology that is helpful. Maybe they are trying to systematize what was traditionally the realm of mystical theology. But like you said, I agree a lot of it is misleading pedantry.
on second thought i think i get your point and probably need to revise this considerably. perhaps phenomenology does or could have a role to play in psychology. i also like gadamers hermeneutics, charles taylors wk on the self, so i need a clear way to discuss proper application and limits rather than wholesale dismissal. thanks a lot for this comment. i still think the argument holds as regards the whole but i should more clearly circumscribe it.
thanks for your thoughtful comment. i m not entirely convinced you grasped my argument, but that is likely my fault and i will work to revise this so the argument is clearer. i have no problem with the field of psychology thomistic, freud even has some profound insights and his vocabulary is also objective if i think his framework flawed. i don´t think the gist of phenomenology is to say we see through a glass darkly so much as its method to needlesly muddy the waters. the tennis parable is supposed to drive home that the false assumption that we can approach reality through the description of experience, we cannot do this because then reality will become something mpracticable, and reality the ultimate reality should qucken us to virtue and the good. i also dont think phenomenology is working in the realm of mystical theology though perhaps someone like heidegger thought himself to be doing so. perhaps i fail to see your point here. but its aiming at establishing a new bASis for philosophy in a particular method and concommitant assumptions about the world that justify the method. to me the false assumption is that we get to the knowledge of things through the experiencing of things. or that interrogating and describing our experiencing of things is going to get us to the knowledge of htings, as i said this bifurcates the harmony between speculative and practical reasoning. i dont think a phenomenologist says you need to say i see a ship coming, but something more obstruse like: " on the horizon that presents itself always already as an opening to marine vessels, there is a disclosing of shipness, a pressencing of that which is a floating but also encloses a sinking, a tension in the manifestation of the presencing of boyancy..." i see phenomenology as a sort of sterilized and mindnumbingly boring poetry, all with the aspirations of the most ambitious novelist to create a literary world that moves the soul. perhaps this is what you mean by mystiicism, but real mystical theology is a guide to prayer and doesnt supplant prayer itselff. my point here is phenomenology as a method is opposed to living, it doesnt support living well but makes it more difficult.
I think this a really interesting argument. I disagree, but I definitely see how you get there. My only contribution would be that your critique of phenomenology as faux experience to a certain extent is exactly what others have leveled (Heidegger the biggest target—how is he living out being-in-the-world, tucked away in the Blackforest, isolated from the world in his post Nazi years?) There are a few Christian writers who take phenomenology in very fruitful ways. Try out Gabriel Marcel if you feel like it; I love his definitions of hope and charity—much more readable than, say, MMP. Contemporarily, Jean Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falaque are likewise lovely.
thanks for the comment. i wasnt going for an ad hominem. but moreso that this philosophical method produces a type of knowledge that cannot translate into practical knowledge, which if it holds would be a thoroughgoing K. i have read and actually taken a few classes with marion. i read a lot of christians trying to make use of this philosophcal framework to extend or ground their work. i generally dont find their writing helpful or edifying. but i am sort of a curmudgeon.
Fair enough! I only bring up the Heidegger example because he seemed to fit your tennis analogy, in that he seemed to have stopped playing the game altogether. I’d go on but don’t feel qualified to discuss the critique of curiosity (via St. Thomas) due to just not being super familiar. (Although perhaps Marcel’s conception of “mystery” helps here? He straddles complete uselessness in a way you might find irritating while also prescribing Christian living.)
Nevertheless I’m afraid I’ll have to be the friend in Rome again, simply walking away haha! Thanks again for the thoughts.
this sort of feedback and encouragement is so helpful. as im still relatively new to writing on here and trying to figure out what works. so thanks for taking the time to read and comment. God Bless.
Firstly, exceptionally written and argued essay. I'm responding at length because it's so well done. This is precisely why I'm here on Substack (although I wish you would've responded more to my essay, haha).
If your point is that, ultimately, phenomenology does not arrive at biblical wisdom and divine revelation on its own, I agree. If your contention is that phenomenology cannot generate ethics, then I agree. It's absurd to think interrogating first-person experience could, on its own, generate ethics. (I think it can provide insight—for example, the place of compassion and empathy, or the way sin brings about conviction and guilt).
However, reason, the Enlightenment project of reason, (as you hint at) also fails, and does not, on its own, arrive at a complete ethics or metaphysic either. This does not make reason sinful or unhelpful or unfruitful for philosophy—per se. In the same way, the pitfalls of phenomenology (which you beautifully outline here) do not make it unhelpful, unfruitful, or sinful per se. Edith Stein, who you quote, was a phenomenologist after all, a student of Husserl who helped introduce empathy into the canon of phenomenology. (Many thinkers believe Husserl ripped her off, interestingly enough). Heidegger had famously horrendous/non-existent ethics as a Nazi, which I discuss in my essay. But, again, this does not make the entire tradition or his thought sinful to study.
Consider that Aquinas believed we can know God via his effects in nature in his five ways to God. Of course, Aquinas rightly sees the limits of reason, too. It cannot demonstrate God’s nature as trinitarian, for example. However, this does not make Aquinas abandon natural theology or reason. Its incompleteness does not make it sinful curiosity. Aquinas frequently quotes from the Muslim thinker Ibn Sina (Latin: Avicenna). You’d also be hard-pressed to argue that every single minute detail of theology that Aquinas examines in just the Summa brings us to practical, lived wisdom of goodness.
If you think philosophy’s only goal is toward ethical goodness, I tend to disagree. Philosophy of mind, psychology, cognitive science, metaphysics, history of philosophy, ancient philosophy, and more, all seem like praiseworthy pursuits. I, ultimately, see psychology and phenomenology on equal footing—not quite on the plane of logic, reason, or the scientific method as such, but close to on par.
The tennis Heidegger example is quite fun. I enjoyed it. Heidegger eventually comes to an impenetrable wall—and cannot surmount it through his method, but I’m discovering where and how his project fails by studying him. You’ve clearly studied them yourself, so writing about them, drawing insights from them, and, therefore, doing phenomenology, is clearly not sinful.
In conclusion, perhaps regarding the point about sinful curiosity, your tennis example is helpful. What about a tennis player that both seeks to achieve the telos of tennis by practicing, winning, and simultaneously studies the Heidegger tennis? Your analogy is quite flawed and shows where your argument goes awry. Breakthroughs in sports (and basically every discipline) usually do come from idle curiosity, passion, and theoretical re-considerations in addition to practice and repetition of acting towards the final end.
In short, your call for me to repent is presumptuous, and your statement “phenomenology is sinful,” while I find it rhetorically provocative, seems unnecessarily overstated and, ironically considering the piece, un-humble.
Thank you again for a brilliant essay. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time!
mark, thanks so much for reading and for these thoughtful comments. A few rejoinders. Yes the title is meant to be overstated, but its often hard to be precise with a titel, and my post on your stack provokative, it achieved more than its intended effect, i.e. i want phenomenologists to give me feedback on my critique here.
This being said, I did qualify my claim and never said phenomenology per se is sinful, my point about misplaced concreteness is that it fails to grasp moral reality well, and thus trying to develop an ethics from a purely phenomenological pov is sinful. heidegger does this with his ethics of authenticity, levinas with his face fetish. So, to be clear this was the scope of my argument, morality, I didn´t really get into the problems with phenomenology for the practice of theology here at all. Maybe some other time.
The game analogy doesn´t break down because of your example, people discover new form because they believe in the usefullness of discovering an ideal external form. the history of swimming is fascinating on this front. thus people do a biodynamic analysis of swimming to arrive at the proper form, other times, as you say its through discovery, but in any case i think the people who do make these discoveries make them after having a specific form imparted to them that allows them to reach a high level and love for the game. I never wrote that the form cannot be changed, or a better form cannot be discovered, just that one cannot arrive at the proper form through the analysis of the structure of experiencing the game, this will not help one at all on this front. in your objections you seem to skip over the role that misplaced concreteness plays in the argument. good philosophy will turn ones attention, in any realm to the essential factors at play, in moral philosophy good philosophy will highlight clearly what makes an action good or bad, or what virtue consists in, and do so in such a way that it becomes easier to desire and act well. i think the aristotelian thomistic pov is the best sort of philosophy because it does turn one´s attention to the right sorts of things, it turns ones attention to the objective form of virtues, of the natural law, etc. these can be desired, obeyed rather simply. phenomenology, like the heidegarian tennis teacher, doesnt help one see or desire the proper form, on the contrary it masks this and makes one less likely to know or desire it. so was my argument, whether it was prideful to argue thusly, i do not know. but the thoughtful comments i have recieved, like yours, make it difficult to regret my doing so. thanks again, stephen
Former-pastor's kid here: this was fascinating, and brought about a sense conviction that I am currently not educated enough to put into words. The tennis parable was illuminating. Thank you for your thoughts
Read this one expecting to be mad, and you’ve made some brilliant points. The application of curiositas to the fruitlessness of phenomenonology was interesting.
Would be interesting to compare with Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.” Also that experience is TW gives the craftsman knowledge of the causes of a thing. So for Aristotle, our “structures of consciousness” being things that reveal our desire to know the Good, and one step on the way to doing so. Anyways—those are just my thoughts that come up in reading.
Have you read Jacques Maritain? His Existance and the Existent is a great (Thomistic) look at experience and ultimate Being.
ha, i pleased to hear the argument had some persuasive pull to someone not already convinced. also to find someone who reads opposing points of view. ive been reluctant to publish this to my list, and still havent, because its so rough and ive been sort of waiting for someone to tell me why its a terrible argument, so please let me know if you see gross errors or faux pas.
re: metaphysics. by all means delight in the senses themselves! my arguments jist, and my experience reading husserl and heidegger was that phenomenology is counterproductive on this front.
its also true, we do learn by or through experience, but the carpenter learns by experience the nature of nails, hammers, saws, wood, etc, and these things as they move toward their end, not as they present themselves to consciousness. but even if you go on a sort of heidegger contra husseral zuhandenheit sorta trip, why do we need these words? cant we just say the carpenter learns by doing? i put the quote at the top because phenomenology seems to seek to know the thing in its presentation to consciousness rather than in its nature in the classical sense. correct me if i am wrong, but its not a structure of consciousness that reveals our desire to know the good in aristotle, but our human nature possesses this desire intrinsically (at least potentially), and this potential is made actual and given form in how we are co-natured by the shared objects of action (ends) given to us primarily by our parents, but also our sociality and our material environment. Heideggers project seems like a gnostic cult that believes a relatively obscure theoretical apparatus could take the role of our parents in imparting the meaning of being. hard pass. the brunt of my argument, perhaps i didnt communicate it well, is that the structure of consciousness doesn´t reveal anything, a theoretical thematization of it can be useful for defensive purposes, like husserls k of scientism, perhaps for offense regarding the particular activities of consciousness itself, like gadamers hermeneutics (which ive always liked), but its not going to help us act well writ large outside of this scope, it certainly cannot help us find the summum bonum, which is given by parents or for the christian by baptism and sacraments. accourding to aristotle and st thomos, the summum bonum cannot be an object of deliberation, it is simply there. you cant choose it or will it. my fear is that phenomenology just reifies a particular cultural or individual mindset and tries to claim universality to it, which can be interesting if someone is as interesting as emmanuel levinas. but phenomenology per se is going to tell levinas that the face is the ground of ethical being and obligation, just like phenomenology would tell the hindu that its the cow. there is nothing about the nature of cows or faces themselves that suggest this objectively, nor is there anything about first-person consciousness itself that helps us discern between face and cow as ground of being. at least for me, im only moved by pretty faces and holsteins, a superficiality aristotle says i could blame on my parents, but hopefully these peferences are trumped by the intellect or reason considering the natures of things and being moved by reality, looking at the relation between form and end as apart of a historical tradition which prizes doing this sort of thing and affords regular surgical assistance concerning my tendency to defect from my final end.
ive never read maritans properly thomistic works. i read integral humanism before i became cahtolic and loved it, post-conversion i came to think the book is almost singularly unique in its causing negative developments in the church. so i don´t really trust maritain for this reason and lack the impulse to dive in deeper. thanks for the rec anyway, i dont doubt it would help me make my argument here clearer. but i dont have time to do a lot of work on this front and am just focusing on fr josef kleutgen sj as my thomistic guide for the time being. he is wonderful.
No gross errors at first glance. The way you bulleted your points at the beginning was helpful + the different images you used, especially the tennis one (and I thought the riff on Heidegger was fun). My only thought is that you're making a great point about a key 20th century philosophy--most of us have inherited an imbalanced emphasis on experience and subjectivity and a loss of categories like teleology and quiddity, so your point about the ethical worth, or lack thereof, in phenomenology is really important, I think--but this is pretty technical writing for anyone who's not studied philosophy. I might share it with a friend who was a committed and well-read phenomenologist; I couldn't pass it on to like, any average coworker and expect them to benefit from it. But that has to do with your audience and your aim-- it's certainly worthwhile to engage in technical philosophy.
Secondly, (and this may be my misunderstanding), but your framing of curiositas is a little different than how I've heard it parsed. You said: "Curiosity seeks knowledge of what cannot be ordered toward the good. This first-person experiential knowledge cannot be ordered towards the good because it cannot be desired as the proper object of the most crucial acts of human life etc" But the categories of curiositas that Thomas gives are 1) being distracted from a more important study by an obligation, 2) learning from a forbidden source, like a demon, 3) desiring to know about creatures without reference to their proper end, ie God (that's maybe the closest to what you've got here), and 4) seeking things beyond our understanding in arrogance and thereby falling into error. (S.Th., II-II, q. 167, a. 1). So it's not "knowledge of what cannot be ordered towards the good"--I'm not sure what a category of things that cannot be ordered to the good would even look like? Other than maybe sin, but in the tradition, that's usually construed as a privation--but knowledge about things which should be ordered to the right end, either pursued in the wrong way or without reference to God. That *is* the point you're making about phenomenology, but in your section 11, you make it sound like pursuit of subjective, experiential knowledge itself is the sin of curiositas, which--at least by Thomas' definition--it wouldn't be, only if that knowledge is pursued without an eye to God or out of arrogance, which is the larger argument you're making. Again, I may be misunderstanding your language in that section though.
Ha, sorry, I was being a bit playful with the Aristotle comment. I don't think his metaphysic is the same as a Husserlian structure of consciousness (hence why I used the quote marks), if you took it that way--my intent was more just to highlight that the things that are compelling about phenomenology (the emphasis on sensitive knowledge and experience as an intuition of being) can be found in the Philosopher--along with the teleological, ethical, and ontological components that you've pulled out here. "my fear is that phenomenology just reifies a particular cultural or individual mindset and tries to claim universality to it" --that seems accurate to me, though in all honesty, I've not read half the guys you just referenced.
When you said, "we do learn by or through experience, but the carpenter learns by experience the nature of nails, hammers, saws, wood, etc, and these things as they move toward their end, not as they present themselves to consciousness"-- I'm not sure what the difference between those two things are? Unless what you mean by "present themselves to consciousness" is "these things are only being subjectively apprehended, *and not also moving toward their end*", because my understanding of a Platonic/Aristotelian (maybe Thomistic?) ontology would be that we are able to know natures because we have consciousness/interiority, being part of the imago dei or a facet of reason. so there's both an object + a knower, which is why it's helpful to be able to say that the carpenter learns through doing, but also because he is the kind of creature--ie, one that has consciousness, interiority, reason--that can recognize being. (see the wax and the seal in Plato's Meno). So the nature of a thing + the consciousness of the knower are two sides of the coin (which leads to the tradition of active/receptive (masculine/feminine) imagery in talking about knoweldge.) Those are half-baked thoughts and I may have misconstrued what you meant by that comment, though. Consciousness is an important category to work through, especially with the heyday it's having in current philosophy.
I've not read Josef Kleutgen, I may have to look into him--Jesuit + Thomist is right up my alley.
this is so helpful and insightful. thanks a lot. so outside of a catholic bishop who might convene an ecumenical council to condemn various errant philosophical trends in catholic theology, you are sorta my ideal reader, someone who is interested in philosophy, intelligent, conversant in philosophy but not a professional philosopher. who might read and then decide to read more ancient and medieval philosophy and not wallow in the slough of despond with the phenomenologists. id have to do a lot more work fine tuning the argument and textual work to get this up to professional standard. i was apart of that world for a time but its not been my focus for a few years.
re curiosity i should do a little more work to tie it textually. so thanks for pointing that out. id say a combo of 1 its distracting knowledge (st thomas also mentions for the purpose of arrogance here i think) and 3 its not leading toward knowledge of our proper end. and not strictly God, but also proximate ends like virtues and how we make sense of the nature of moral action, obligation, responsibility, and complicity. the tennis example was supposed to show how there could be knowledge or a method of generating knowledge that cannot be ordered toward the good. why wasn´t this obvious? or how could i make this more obvious? the coach was mandating a privation of tennis form by not teaching about proper posture but about proper forms of tennis experience. the experiential tennis language he developed as well as the knowledge it facilitated is marked by an absence of even potentiality to give proper normative direction to a tennis player. sort like the ethics of authenticity in being and time. or so was my thought.
regarding the other philosophical points maybe i will respond later, your objections are excellent or at least show me i need to be clearer and perhaps explain exactly what i mean. but basically in the ancient philosophy there is a tight relationship between formal and final cause, so the essence of the thing is its tending towards its end. phenomenology seems to say the essence of the thing is known in its experiencing on the thing, in its presentation to consciousness. this was the point of the sex analogy. if the act is for the objective, natural end, well, in this case, this end is not immediately present in how the act appears to consciousness, so how can it be evaluated. the phenomenological method has a problem with comprehending final causes in general i think, because the essence is the appearnace of thing to consciousness, not a consideration of that nature as it tends toward its end. or so i thought, i would guess a real phenomenologist would say im straw manning in some fashion and I would be all ears as its probably true.
kleutgen is almost entirely untranslated, and not at all someone who is read today. but all his stuff is free on google books if you can read the old german script. but truly he very diligently brings what he calls the ancient or perennial teachings of philosophy (from the greeks through the middle ages) to terms with modern philosophers like descates kant and hegel whom he accuses of breaking with this form in self-destructive ways. its thrilling as others do it either poorly or incompletely or without insight into modern philosophy. but after im through with the two volume philosophie der vorzeit, ill be able to return to this argument with a lot more clarity i think.
thanks again for your help. i owe you a good critical reading\edit if you ever need one.
Happy to be a helpful reader; I really did enjoy reading your piece. “conversant but not a professional philosopher”— maybe I should put that in my substack bio. I did go to school for it (specifically ancient and medieval philosophy), but not beyond the undergrad level.
Out of curiosity: what errant philosophical trends in catholicism would you want to see corrected?
I think you’ve done a fine job in the tennis example outlining an example of curiositas— what’s confusing is whether you’re talking about the object of phenomenology (ie, sensitive knowledge or subjective experience) or the method of phenomenology when you say “knowledge that cannot be ordered to the good.” because the second might only frustrate our pursuit of the good, but the first can, and should be, ordered towards it. does that make sense/help? (you actually say “knowledge or method of generating knowledge”; I’m not sure those are the same. But I could be splitting hairs, or the maybe object and the method are more closely the same thing in phenomenology than I’ve realized, which is maybe what you’re getting at—I’ve only read Heidegger and a bit of Husserl, so I am working with a pretty light sketch here.)
“This end is not immediately present in how the act appears to consciousness, so how can it be evaluated. the phenomenological method has a problem with comprehending final causes in general i think, because the essence is the appearnace of thing to consciousness, not a consideration of that nature as it tends toward its end.” Gotcha, that’s a really helpful distinction in thinking about ancient philosophy vers phenomenology. How are you using essence vs nature? what do you think plato/aristotle would say the role of consciousness is in apprehending nature? is the phenomenological take more like the shadows on the wall in Plato’s allegory vs seeing the real world? Free free to not answer any of that; I’m just curious/thinking out loud.
Sadly, I cannot read German at any level. Sounds like a fascinating read, though.
conversant philosopher, sure, i mean professional philosopher is often no badge of honor, for many its pracctially like a professional sand castle maker. seems like you made the most out of your course of study as you seem to think clearly and have a good grasp of the terrain.
"what errant philosophical trends in catholicism would you want to see corrected?" kyrie eleison. I claim...gulp...that the catholic church of late is dominated by a thought form that inverts the normal christian metaphysic of good and evil. so it makes good a privation of evil. this is the fundamental metaphysical error. and im the only one in the world who thinks this. i call it privationism and one of my life´s missions/dreams is to start a new inquisition of sorts on this front by means of a surrealist band of itenerant hate preachers. but as of yet its just been me wandering around europe alone by foot. my unfinished doctoral thesis was about this but i had to veil it somewhat. if you are interested ive written a few things on this theme here on substack: https://sanctistulti.substack.com/s/on-reign-of-anti-christ. its basically a more simple and thoroughgoing way to make sense of "theological modernism" which was the last major defined heresy and battle in the church (~1870-1960) before the modernists basically won. (here is the best philosphical summary of the heresy: https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html) the thought about privationism is adjacent to my argument in this post, and the critique of phenomenology, as this thought form privaledges immanent subjective experience over transcendent, abstract thought at the speculative level, with the practical consequence that the good to be desired is gradually drained of positive normative content. and heidegger basically at least partially replaced the thomistic basis of catholic theology in the major figures that came to dominate the post-conciliar church or nouvelle theologie, ppl like rahner and von balthasar. so my argument here could be extended to them as well. and, more immediately, without the thomistic basis, traditional distinctions like nature/supernature, form/matter, lost their meaning. but without hte first disctinction you struggle to explain why unbaptized will be damned, so no one believes it anymore. without the second, its impossible to defend why contraception is evil and nfp is licit, so even the few priests who do believe the traditional teaching cannot explain it to the skeptical. with the consequence that next to no one believes let alone follows the teaching anymore, as they cannot grasp it intellectually , and thus they think the old church with the strict doctrines was evil, and the absence of these evil doctrines is taken to be "good." catholicism-lite is privationism. anathema sit!
regarding the latter questoins: i think, at least when applied to clarifying the ends of things and actions, phenomenology is a poor method that produces a retrograde sort of knowledge. but distinguishing the two is a good suggestion, even if they are interdependent, as well as clarifying how each can go wrong, so thank you for noticing that. i do think the method can be applied well in its proper terrain, and produce useful knowledge. for instance, c.s. peirce uses what he calls phenomenology to deduce his three categories of experience, and these are brilliant.
regarding nature and essence and the role of consciousness in apprehending nature. i am not so sharp as to be able to answer off the cuff. i am working on them now actually as i go through this book philosphie der vorzeit and will probably post on them relatively soon. one of my projects on substack is just writing essays on basic scholastic distinctions, partially so i finally learn them. truly you are probably better schooled than i on this front as i sort of worked backwards in my philosophical journey, and have basically been trying to teach myself, when i have time, a form of neo-scholastic thomism that no one adheres to anymore. but ive spent much more time reading modern philosphy and really still love a lot of the insights of the great modern philosophers. yet its a period of overall disintegration and there is a much more wild variance of vocabulary, and use of terms as one finds in ancient and medieval philosphy. so its really cool you could do an undergrad in philosophy and just focus on pre-modern philosophy, that would have been wonderful i think.
wow, great idea with the cave reference, yeah maybe, turning around and facing the sunlight is the work of reason investigating or discerning the true causes of things, realizing that the light is the true cause of the shadow. and this isnt really the focus of phenomenology as i understand it, uncovering the causes of things.
its not the sinful type of curiosity so thanks for your questions! they helped me clairify my thoughts as well.
I wonder what you would think about Thomistic psychology. Thomas talks a lot about rational faculties, appetites, etc. Of course, it's in an objective way. He's claiming to describe them as they actually exist, not as they are experienced. (Well, sometimes both, but the GOAL is the objective part.) Maybe, phenomenology is something like that. But, I agree with what you're saying. Of course, we "see through a glass darkly." Obviously we are embodied and can see only a certain perspective. But the point is to "triangulate" so to speak to get at the objective reality. Phenomenology seems preoccupied with making what is really a pedantic point, which is that we see through a glass darkly. It's like if someone looked through a telescope and saw a ship on the horizon and said "there is a ship approaching," the phenomenoloigist would "correct" him by saying "ah, you should say that you see in your telescope there is a ship." It may be that there is some intersection of philosophy and psychology that is helpful. Maybe they are trying to systematize what was traditionally the realm of mystical theology. But like you said, I agree a lot of it is misleading pedantry.
on second thought i think i get your point and probably need to revise this considerably. perhaps phenomenology does or could have a role to play in psychology. i also like gadamers hermeneutics, charles taylors wk on the self, so i need a clear way to discuss proper application and limits rather than wholesale dismissal. thanks a lot for this comment. i still think the argument holds as regards the whole but i should more clearly circumscribe it.
thanks for your thoughtful comment. i m not entirely convinced you grasped my argument, but that is likely my fault and i will work to revise this so the argument is clearer. i have no problem with the field of psychology thomistic, freud even has some profound insights and his vocabulary is also objective if i think his framework flawed. i don´t think the gist of phenomenology is to say we see through a glass darkly so much as its method to needlesly muddy the waters. the tennis parable is supposed to drive home that the false assumption that we can approach reality through the description of experience, we cannot do this because then reality will become something mpracticable, and reality the ultimate reality should qucken us to virtue and the good. i also dont think phenomenology is working in the realm of mystical theology though perhaps someone like heidegger thought himself to be doing so. perhaps i fail to see your point here. but its aiming at establishing a new bASis for philosophy in a particular method and concommitant assumptions about the world that justify the method. to me the false assumption is that we get to the knowledge of things through the experiencing of things. or that interrogating and describing our experiencing of things is going to get us to the knowledge of htings, as i said this bifurcates the harmony between speculative and practical reasoning. i dont think a phenomenologist says you need to say i see a ship coming, but something more obstruse like: " on the horizon that presents itself always already as an opening to marine vessels, there is a disclosing of shipness, a pressencing of that which is a floating but also encloses a sinking, a tension in the manifestation of the presencing of boyancy..." i see phenomenology as a sort of sterilized and mindnumbingly boring poetry, all with the aspirations of the most ambitious novelist to create a literary world that moves the soul. perhaps this is what you mean by mystiicism, but real mystical theology is a guide to prayer and doesnt supplant prayer itselff. my point here is phenomenology as a method is opposed to living, it doesnt support living well but makes it more difficult.
I think this a really interesting argument. I disagree, but I definitely see how you get there. My only contribution would be that your critique of phenomenology as faux experience to a certain extent is exactly what others have leveled (Heidegger the biggest target—how is he living out being-in-the-world, tucked away in the Blackforest, isolated from the world in his post Nazi years?) There are a few Christian writers who take phenomenology in very fruitful ways. Try out Gabriel Marcel if you feel like it; I love his definitions of hope and charity—much more readable than, say, MMP. Contemporarily, Jean Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falaque are likewise lovely.
thanks for the comment. i wasnt going for an ad hominem. but moreso that this philosophical method produces a type of knowledge that cannot translate into practical knowledge, which if it holds would be a thoroughgoing K. i have read and actually taken a few classes with marion. i read a lot of christians trying to make use of this philosophcal framework to extend or ground their work. i generally dont find their writing helpful or edifying. but i am sort of a curmudgeon.
Fair enough! I only bring up the Heidegger example because he seemed to fit your tennis analogy, in that he seemed to have stopped playing the game altogether. I’d go on but don’t feel qualified to discuss the critique of curiosity (via St. Thomas) due to just not being super familiar. (Although perhaps Marcel’s conception of “mystery” helps here? He straddles complete uselessness in a way you might find irritating while also prescribing Christian living.)
Nevertheless I’m afraid I’ll have to be the friend in Rome again, simply walking away haha! Thanks again for the thoughts.
this sort of feedback and encouragement is so helpful. as im still relatively new to writing on here and trying to figure out what works. so thanks for taking the time to read and comment. God Bless.
Your imitation of their writing style is so funny it's cathartic!
Hey Stephen,
I'm over here from a cryptic comment you left on my overview of Heidegger: https://agapesophia.substack.com/p/a-brief-introduction-to-martin-heideggers
Firstly, exceptionally written and argued essay. I'm responding at length because it's so well done. This is precisely why I'm here on Substack (although I wish you would've responded more to my essay, haha).
If your point is that, ultimately, phenomenology does not arrive at biblical wisdom and divine revelation on its own, I agree. If your contention is that phenomenology cannot generate ethics, then I agree. It's absurd to think interrogating first-person experience could, on its own, generate ethics. (I think it can provide insight—for example, the place of compassion and empathy, or the way sin brings about conviction and guilt).
However, reason, the Enlightenment project of reason, (as you hint at) also fails, and does not, on its own, arrive at a complete ethics or metaphysic either. This does not make reason sinful or unhelpful or unfruitful for philosophy—per se. In the same way, the pitfalls of phenomenology (which you beautifully outline here) do not make it unhelpful, unfruitful, or sinful per se. Edith Stein, who you quote, was a phenomenologist after all, a student of Husserl who helped introduce empathy into the canon of phenomenology. (Many thinkers believe Husserl ripped her off, interestingly enough). Heidegger had famously horrendous/non-existent ethics as a Nazi, which I discuss in my essay. But, again, this does not make the entire tradition or his thought sinful to study.
Consider that Aquinas believed we can know God via his effects in nature in his five ways to God. Of course, Aquinas rightly sees the limits of reason, too. It cannot demonstrate God’s nature as trinitarian, for example. However, this does not make Aquinas abandon natural theology or reason. Its incompleteness does not make it sinful curiosity. Aquinas frequently quotes from the Muslim thinker Ibn Sina (Latin: Avicenna). You’d also be hard-pressed to argue that every single minute detail of theology that Aquinas examines in just the Summa brings us to practical, lived wisdom of goodness.
If you think philosophy’s only goal is toward ethical goodness, I tend to disagree. Philosophy of mind, psychology, cognitive science, metaphysics, history of philosophy, ancient philosophy, and more, all seem like praiseworthy pursuits. I, ultimately, see psychology and phenomenology on equal footing—not quite on the plane of logic, reason, or the scientific method as such, but close to on par.
The tennis Heidegger example is quite fun. I enjoyed it. Heidegger eventually comes to an impenetrable wall—and cannot surmount it through his method, but I’m discovering where and how his project fails by studying him. You’ve clearly studied them yourself, so writing about them, drawing insights from them, and, therefore, doing phenomenology, is clearly not sinful.
In conclusion, perhaps regarding the point about sinful curiosity, your tennis example is helpful. What about a tennis player that both seeks to achieve the telos of tennis by practicing, winning, and simultaneously studies the Heidegger tennis? Your analogy is quite flawed and shows where your argument goes awry. Breakthroughs in sports (and basically every discipline) usually do come from idle curiosity, passion, and theoretical re-considerations in addition to practice and repetition of acting towards the final end.
In short, your call for me to repent is presumptuous, and your statement “phenomenology is sinful,” while I find it rhetorically provocative, seems unnecessarily overstated and, ironically considering the piece, un-humble.
Thank you again for a brilliant essay. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time!
mark, thanks so much for reading and for these thoughtful comments. A few rejoinders. Yes the title is meant to be overstated, but its often hard to be precise with a titel, and my post on your stack provokative, it achieved more than its intended effect, i.e. i want phenomenologists to give me feedback on my critique here.
This being said, I did qualify my claim and never said phenomenology per se is sinful, my point about misplaced concreteness is that it fails to grasp moral reality well, and thus trying to develop an ethics from a purely phenomenological pov is sinful. heidegger does this with his ethics of authenticity, levinas with his face fetish. So, to be clear this was the scope of my argument, morality, I didn´t really get into the problems with phenomenology for the practice of theology here at all. Maybe some other time.
The game analogy doesn´t break down because of your example, people discover new form because they believe in the usefullness of discovering an ideal external form. the history of swimming is fascinating on this front. thus people do a biodynamic analysis of swimming to arrive at the proper form, other times, as you say its through discovery, but in any case i think the people who do make these discoveries make them after having a specific form imparted to them that allows them to reach a high level and love for the game. I never wrote that the form cannot be changed, or a better form cannot be discovered, just that one cannot arrive at the proper form through the analysis of the structure of experiencing the game, this will not help one at all on this front. in your objections you seem to skip over the role that misplaced concreteness plays in the argument. good philosophy will turn ones attention, in any realm to the essential factors at play, in moral philosophy good philosophy will highlight clearly what makes an action good or bad, or what virtue consists in, and do so in such a way that it becomes easier to desire and act well. i think the aristotelian thomistic pov is the best sort of philosophy because it does turn one´s attention to the right sorts of things, it turns ones attention to the objective form of virtues, of the natural law, etc. these can be desired, obeyed rather simply. phenomenology, like the heidegarian tennis teacher, doesnt help one see or desire the proper form, on the contrary it masks this and makes one less likely to know or desire it. so was my argument, whether it was prideful to argue thusly, i do not know. but the thoughtful comments i have recieved, like yours, make it difficult to regret my doing so. thanks again, stephen