Von Hildebrand, Dietrich – Maverick Philosopher

Faith: Life-Enhancing Only if True?

In July of 2022 I published a post entitled Faith's Immanent Value. Here are the opening paragraphs slightly redacted:

Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably. My question is whether that possible upshot would matter. If it should turn out there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide, would that retroactively remove your faith's immanent value?

My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. There will be no disappointment. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be. If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.

Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had.

The post received a strong response positive and negative. I return to the topic now, as I re-read for the third time Dietrich von Hildebrand's Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press, 1991, tr. Alice von Hildebrand. The German original appeared in 1980 under the title Über den Tod (On Death)).

On pp. 109-110, von Hildebrand says things that seem to contradict what I am saying. My purpose in this entry is to re-think the question so as to test my view against his. Here is the paragraph that gives me pause and prompts me to re-examine my position:

Nothing would be more absurd than for us to regard the subjective happiness that results from the supernatural view of death as an end, and to see faith as a means for obtaining this end. To do so would mean detaching from truth both faith and the supernatural view of death. Such a pragmatic interpretation of faith comes close to a total misunderstanding of it. We must, therefore, condemn as blind nonsense the idea that, because it cheers and comforts us, supernatural view of death is worth nourishing even if it is an illusion. Faith gives comfort only if it is true. (110, emphasis added)

The pragmatic interpretation of faith as described by von Hildebrand is not mine. My first task, then, is to explain why. I turn then to an evaluation of von Hildebrand's positive view.

My claim is that religious faith has an immanent value, a value for this life in the here and now, whether or not the objects of this faith, God and the soul,* really exist. This is equivalent to saying that faith has immanent value whether or not the faith is objectively true. I am not saying that that faith has immanent value whether or not the believer really believes in God and the soul. I assume that he really does believe, and shows that he really does believe by living his faith, by 'walking the walk' and and not merely by 'taking the talk.' My claim is that a believer who really believes derives an important life-enhancing benefit from his sincere belief whether or not the objects of his belief really exist.

It is important to understand that one who really believes in God and the soul believes that they really exist whether or not he or anyone else believes that they do. His believing purports to target transcendent entities that exist independently of his believing. But note that this purport to target the transcendent is what is whether or not the targets exist. In other words, from the fact that one really believes that a transcendent God exists, it does not follow that a transcendent God really exists.

Am I saying that faith is a means to the end of subjective happiness? No. The sincere believer does not make himself believe in order to make himself feel good or to comfort himself. He is not fooling himself so as to comfort himself. To fool himself, he would have to know or strongly believe that God does not exist and then hide that fact from himself.

The believer believes because of various experiences he has had: he feels (what he describes as) the presence of the Lord on certain occasions; he senses the absoluteness of moral demands and the gap between what he is and what he ought to be; he feels the bite of conscience and cannot bring himself to believe any naturalistic explanation of conscience and its deliverances; he has religious and mystical experiences that seem to tell of an Unseen Order; he takes the beauty, order, and intelligibility of the world to point beyond it to a transcendent Source of this beauty, order, and intelligibility; he feels that life would be meaningless if there were no God, that there would be no ultimate justice; he senses the presence of purely spiritual demonic agents interfering with his attempts to pray and meditate and conform to the demands of morality.

Or it may be that a sincere religious believer never has any experiences that purport to reveal the reality of God and the soul, and has never considered any of the arguments for God and the soul; he believes because he was brought up to believe by people he admires and respects and trusts. Even in this case the believer is not making himself believe as a means to the end of feeling good or comfortable or subjectively happy; he believes simply because he has taken on board the beliefs of others he trusts and respects. I seem to recall Kierkegaard somewhere saying that he believes because his father told him so. Some imbibe belief with their mother's milk.

Despite these clarifications of my position, it still seems that if von Hildebrand is right, then I am wrong, and vice versa. He holds that "Faith gives comfort only if it is true." I will take that to mean that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit only it is objectively true and not merely believed to be truth by a sincere believer. What I am saying, however, is that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit to the sincere believer whether or not it is objectively true.

Who is right? In all intellectual honesty, it seems to me that I am right. Why should it be necessary that the faith be true for it be life-enhancing, for it to be good for me to believe it? An analogy may help me get my point across.

At age 60 I attempted a marathon. At the starting line I did not know whether I could cover the 26.2 miles within the allotted time (under seven hours). I did not know whether I could pull it off, but I strongly believed that I could, and surely this strong belief, whether true or false, was good for me to believe: it had race-immanent value in that with this belief I performed better than I would have performed without it. As things turned out, I completed the marathon in six hours. But suppose I hadn't. Suppose that my belief in my ability to complete the marathon in the allotted time was false. It would still have been the case that my belief in completion had race-immanent value. I would still have been better off with that belief than without it.

Now in the Great Race of Life we compete against our own hebetude, decrepitude, and sinfulness for the crown of Eternal Life, the Beatific Vision. But here below we cannot know whether we will attain the crown, or even whether it exists, so here below we need faith. Living by faith we live better than we would have lived without it. We run the Race better, with more enthusiasm, commitment, and resoluteness. Clearly, or so it seems to me, we reap the benefits of this faith in the here and now whether or not there is anything on the other side of the Great Divide.

So I say that von Hildebrand does not understand the pragmatics of faith. One problem is that he caricatures the pragmatic approach as I showed in the first section. The other problem is that he is a dogmatist: his doxastic security needs are so strong that he cannot psychologically tolerate the idea that he might be wrong. He wants objective certainty about ultimates, as all serious philosophers do, but he confuses his subjective certainty, which falls far short of knowledge, with objective certainty, which knowledge logically requires.

He claims to know things that he cannot possibly know. He writes,

We ought to have faith because by our belief in God we give the response to which He is entitled. We ought to believe in divine Revelation because it is absolute truth. (110)

What von Hildebrand is doing here is simply presupposing the existence of God and the absolute truth of divine revelation. If God exists, then of course we ought to have faith in him. And if divine revelation is absolute truth, then we ought to believe in it. But how does von Hildebrand know that God exists and that revelation is true? He doesn't t know these things, he merely believes them. He is claiming to know what he cannot know, but can only believe.

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*'Soul' in the Platonic sense, not the Aristotelian one according to which the soul is the mere life-principle of the body.

Steven Nemes’ Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics: Some Questions

The review is a well written and very fair summary of von Hildebrand's book. (I read portions of the latter in graduate school days but I do not currently have it in my library.) Here is the review's main critical passage together with my remarks.

[Von] Hildebrand’s arguments for the objectivity of value therefore seem unsuccessful. It is true that one experiences an object as possessing some value which motivates a particular form of response to it. But it is another matter whether one has grasped a value in the object on its own or in the object as it is related to oneself in experience. Food is experienced as delicious, but there is no property of gustatory value inhering objectively in chicken tikka masala. It can be appetizing to one but not to another. Or consider that human beings love fruit, but dogs and cats generally do not.

BV: Nemes invokes the fact that for beings capable of gustatory experience, what is appetizing/delicious/tasty can vary across individuals in a species, and across species. This is because the property of being appetizing is not an intrinsic property of the edible or potable item, but involves a relation to the consumer. I have been called 'Old Asbestos Tongue' on account of the pleasure I derive from fiery comestibles. The positive or negative gustatory value resides not in the comestible itself, but in the relation between consumer and comestible between, say, 'Old Asbestos Tongue' and the jalapeno pepper. My constitution is such as to allow for the enjoyment of what others will find highly disagreeable. Hence, de gustibus non est disputandum. There is nothing to dispute since there is no fact of the matter. It is 'subjective' in one sense of this polysemous term.

But how negotiate the inferential move from

1) That which has the value of tasting good often varies from individual to individual and from species to species

to

2) The value of tasting good is subjective, not objective.

This looks to be an illicit slide. (1), which is plainly true, is consistent with the negation of (2). For it could be that the value of tasting good is objectively the same for all despite different edibles being tasty to different people or animals.

That is to say: tasting good could be an objective value despite the fact that different edible items have this value for different people. The perceiver-relativity of taste, which makes taste subjective, is consistent with the objectivity of gustatory values.

If values are essences and essences are ideal objects that subsist independently of our value responses (Wertantworten), as von Hildebrand maintains, then, while different perceivers find different things appetizing/delicious/tasty, this needn't affect the value itself. The tasting of an incendiary comestible involves a physical transaction; the intellectual intuition of the value does not. One does not taste the value, one tastes the jalapeno-laden enchilada; and one does not intellectually intuit the enchilada, one tastes it.

SN: Similarly, a purported moral value can be “noble” in the eyes of the “virtuous” but repellent to the “profligate.” It could well be that the difference in perception is accounted for merely in terms of the different structures of the persons involved.

BV: It is not the value as ideal object that is noble, but a person who has the value. The person is noble in virtue of instantiating the value. The base are value-blind (wertblind): they cannot 'see' or appreciate the value that noble people instantiate. But that fact is consistent with the value's objective existence in itself apart both from anyone's appreciating it and anything's instantiating it.

My point is that von Hildebrand has the resources to turn aside Nemes' objections. The latter are not rationally compelling. Give von Hildebrand's Platonism about values, Nemes' arguments are non sequiturs. This is not to say that von Hildebrand's axiology is true; it is to say that Nemes hasn't refuted it.

His review raises for me a fascinating question: does phenomenology by its very nature, and given that intentionality is its central motif, support realism or idealism? For von Hildebrand and J-P Sartre the former; for Husserl the latter. I should take this up in a separate entry.

For now I recommend that Nemes study chapter V, "Objectivity and Independence," in von Hildebrand's What is Philosophy?

Words of the Day

Thanks to, or rather, because of 'liberal' dumbing-down, people these days have terribly limited vocabularies. Here are a couple you should know. Both definitions from Merriam-Webster.

Definition of avulsion

: a forcible separation or detachment: such as

a : a tearing away of a body part accidentally or surgically

b : a sudden cutting off of land by flood, currents, or change in course of a body of water especially : one separating land from one person's property and joining it to another's.

Definition of affine

(Entry 1 of 2)

: a relative by marriage : in-law

affine

adjective

Definition of affine (Entry 2 of 2)

: of, relating to, or being a transformation (such as a translation, a rotation, or a uniform stretching) that carries straight lines into straight lines and parallel lines into parallel lines but may alter distance between points and angles between lines affine geometry.

Here is an interesting use of 'affine' that I found this morning in Dietrich von Hildebrand, In Defense of Purity (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1962, p. 37):

But not only are insensibility and purity in no way identical; insensibility [Unsinnlichkeit] . . . does not even constitute an environment particularly favorable to the virtue of purity. For it is not even the temperament which is affine to that virtue and which makes it easier. That is to say, it is not the temperamental counterpart of purity.