Advancing Phenomenology by Thomas Nenon & Philip Blosser

Author:Thomas Nenon & Philip Blosser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

3 A Classical Assessment

The phenomenological approaches of both Strasser and Wojtyla assume the classical view of the primacy of the intellect over the emotions, as we have seen. This assumption is usually part of a larger, classical frame of reference of the sort found in the Lublin Thomist background of Wojtyla’s writings.15 In the interests of furthering this conversation between the classical and Schelerian perspectives, let us imagine how a classical response might proceed.

It may be pointed out that Spader’s analysis, as insightful and nuanced as it is, appears to have overlooked something essential. It seems either to offer no place for the intellectual understanding of moral experience in the course of moral decision making, or else to appropriate to the affective intentionalities of value-feeling and preference those prerogatives of discernment that are traditionally ascribed to rational understanding and rational judgments about the good. In short, Spader’s account seems to collapse the role of intellectual understanding into that of feeling. This cannot be seen as helpful from the classical perspective, since it would seem to undercut the deliberative and adjudicative relation of intellectual understanding to willing. Let us follow this conversation a bit further.

First, if acting in the name of values that are not felt, or even against one’s actual value-feelings, is to be explained by reference to other (perhaps more weakly) felt higher values, as Spader suggests, then the question must be answered as to what galvanizes our will to choose in the name of these other (perhaps more weakly) felt higher values, against the often more strongly felt “call of the lower.” The first issue here concerns how we come to the moral awareness that we must act on the basis of these other (more weakly) felt values. Spader says that it is through an “affective reflection” (Spader 262). Granting that affective feeling is involved in such reflection, it may still be asked what the cognitive conditions are for the possibility of such a reflective operation. It cannot involve intellectual understanding, on Spader’s view, since that has been precluded as a matter of principle by his commitment to the Schelerian ideal of the autonomian heart and its primordial feelings. The second issue here concerns how affective value-feelings of the heart can be harnessed in the service of moving the will in acts of choosing between alternative moral actions in the absence of intellectual understanding of, and rational deliberation upon, these moral alternatives involved in our choice. We have seen Wojtyla acknowledge that the emotional dynamism involved in value-feeling introduces a “spontaneous turn toward certain values,” but we have also seen him insist that such an inclination is not yet a sufficient ground for establishing moral choice, since it is not yet morally defined as to its object – a task that in his view requires rational analysis (Wojtyla, Acting Person, 251).

Second, it is hard to see how Spader’s Schelerian account of the feelings of love and hate involved in the ordo amoris can avoid the accusation of equivocating between affirming and denying that these feelings are “chosen.

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