John Crosby

The Christian personalism represented by Karol Wojtyla, as well as by von Hildebrand, Ratzinger, Guardini, Scheler, Newman, and others, sometimes stands in tension with pre-modern Catholic philosophy centered around Thomism. In the coming century Catholic philosophers will have to work through these tensions. My paper tries to frame some of the debates that are coming, especially the debate over the dignity of the human person. I argue that much of the growing consciousness of personal dignity in our time is well-founded. Though it involves a certain turn to the subject, it does not have to be subversive of the Catholic tradition; it rather is capable of being an asset for it. The encounter of the Catholic tradition with personalism is not unlike its encounter with Aristotelian philosophy in the 13th century: the same boldness that St. Thomas showed in his reception of Aristotle is needed again in our time in our reception of personalism.

I begin by explaining why individuality in persons is something different from and something stronger than individuality in non-persons. In the second part I offer a metaphysical account of this distinctly personal individuality of a human being, an account that comes to us from Edith Stein. I consider her proposal that each person has, besides the common human essence that we all share, an unrepeatable essence as this person. In the third part I provide some historical setting for Edith Stein’s idea; it is a setting that makes her idea more understandable and more plausible. And in the fourth and final part of my paper I consider two objections to Edith Stein’s position, and I attempt to respond to them, thereby clarifying her position and making it more convincing.

In this paper I ask what subjectivity is and why it reveals man as person, as Karol Wojtyla and others claim. First, I explain subjectivity, which I also call interiority, in terms of self-presence, which is a mode of relating to myself from within myself. I am present to myself as subject, not only as object. Only I can encounter myself in the intimacy of my self-presence; no other person can be present to me as I am to myself. Next, I further explore self-presence as weak or strong, calling strong self-presence recollected self-presence. Finally, I conclude by explaining how it is that recollected self-presence reveals man as person. Against the suspicion that this “turn to the subject” opens the door to a bad subjectivism, I argue that it entirely coheres with the realism of Christian philosophy.

In this article I explain various points of contact between Newman and the Catholic philosophical tradition. I begin with Newman’s personalism as it is found in the Grammar of Assent, especially in the distinction between notional and real assent, and in the distinction between formal and informal inference. Then I proceed to Newman’s personalism as it is found in his teaching on conscience and on doctrinal development. I then consider Newman as proto-phenomenologist and also as an Augustinian thinker. Finally, I discuss Newman’s teaching on moral and intellectual virtue in The Idea of a University. If I had to pick one utterance of Newman that epitomizes his philosophical thought in a way that engages Catholic philosophers, I would pick the motto of the Grammar of Assent: “Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum tuum.”

In this essay, I try to advance the reception of Karol Wojtyła’s seminal essay “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man.” In particular I try to understand and to think through the distinction that he makes between the “personalist” and the “cosmological” image of man. I unpack Wojtyła’s concept of subjectivity, which underlies all that he says about the personalist image of man. I give particular attention to all that he says about the unity formed by the two images. I then proceed to apply Wojtyła’s analysis to a certain cosmological challenge to a personalist understanding of man: it is the challenge that comes from looking at the immensity of the cosmos and at the infinitesimal smallness of man in it and of thinking that man is swallowed up in this immensity and obliterated in his importance. I argue that precisely the subjectivity of the person implies that there is in each person an “infinite abyss of existence” so that each person is in reality his or her own whole and is no mere part of the cosmic whole but is incommensurable with it.

Phenomenologists were concerned with showing that essential structures of being, knowable by rational insight, are found more abundantly than commonly thought. Reinach shows that in the civil law there are essential structures, such as the structure of promising or of owning. These pre-positive structures provide the civil law with a foundation that can be known by philosophical insight. Though the enactments of the civil law are changeable, essential foundations are not. Of particular significance is Reinach's concept of a social act, that is, of an act that addresses another and has to be heard by the other in order to be complete. Reinach shows that the essence of legally relevant acts, such as promising, comes to evidence when they are understood as social acts.

I explore the personalism embedded in von Hildebrand’s moral philosophy, and then I explore the personalism in his later account of love. I claim that his personalism was significantly developed in his later work, and that it can be still further developed by us. I begin by explaining what Hildebrandian value-response is, and then I proceed to show how he subsequently qualified this foundational concept, first in his Ethics but especially in his late work, The Nature of Love, and here especially through the concept of Eigenleben that was introduced in that work. I am particularly interested in showing why the personalism of von Hildebrand’s thought is enriched through this concept.

In the course of his polemic against Kant’s moral philosophy, Scheler was led to depreciate moral obligation and its place in the existence of persons. This depreciation is part of a larger anti-authoritarian strain in his personalism. I attempt to retrieve certain truths about moral obligation that tend to get lost in Scheler: moral obligation is not merely “medicinal” but has a place at the highest levels of moral life; the freedom of persons is lived in an incomparable way in responding to moral obligation; obligation and obedience even have an indispensable place in the existence of Christians. Drawing on the studies of Scheler by Rudolf Otto, Karol Wojtyla, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, I show how Scheler’s personalism is corrected and enhanced once we distance ourselves from his anti-authoritarian animus against obligation and restore obligation to its place in the existence of persons.

Towards the end of his response to me, Lee presents an argument for the necessity of interpreting all evil as privation. I counter this argument by showingthat it works only for what I call “formal” good and evil, but not for what I call “contentful” good and evil. In fact, evil that is “contentful” presents a challenge tothe privation theory that I had not discussed in my article. I then proceed, in the second part of my response, to revisit the three cases of evil that in my original paper I had presented as challenges to the privation theory. I engage Lee’s objections to these three counterexamples and I try to explain in a new way why the principle of badness in each of them, especially in pain/suffering and in moral evil, is not just a lack or a deficiency.

My purpose in this paper is to set forth a case for inclusion, without any restriction whatsoever, of gays and lesbians in the legal definition of marriage within the various jurisdictions within the United States of America. Historical and cross cultural definitions of marriage are usually based on two basic premises or components, structure and function. Structural definitions of marriage, with which most people and jurisdictions identify, are based on exclusion and inclusion, i.e. on who is eligible for inclusion and who must be excluded. Ordinarily the restrictions exclude those not having reached the age of majority, those who are not judged mentally competent, and those of the same gender. Functional definitions of marriage are based on the willingness of the partners to engage in the duties and responsibilities to each other and to all offspring regardless of their physical or mental fitness. I intend to defend the proposition that legal marriage for gays and lesbians is better defined and defended when based on function rather than structure. Specifically, this means that marriage is the union of those who 1.) without mental equivocation embrace their mutual commitment to support and care for each other; 2.) are of legal age; 3.) are of sound mind; and 4.) affirm their commitment to fulfill, to the best of their ability, the following functions as they pertain to the natural birth, legal adoption, or foster care of any and all children included in the marital union: These functions include but are not limited to: protection (physical and mental), economic, affect-giving, socialization, acculturation, education, and sexual access between the conjugal partners. Historically, there is no record throughout the history of humankind, of any state or body politic that does not profess a vested interest in the mate selection patterns of its young. This is not generally for the edification of the married, but rather for the assurance of the socialization and acculturation of the ascending generation.

I use concepts of Karol Wojtyla’s personalism, especially the concept of subjectivity, to explain Newman’s personalism. There is a “turn to the subject” in Wojtyla, and there is a similar “turn to the subject” in Newman; and they explain each other. Thus Newman’s distinction between the theological intellect and the religious imagination, and his particular concern with the latter, is shown to be an expression of his personalism. I try not only to throw new light on Newman’s personalism, but also to explain why his personalism, as Wojtyla’s, has been mistaken for subjectivism. I show that there is in Newman, as in Wojtyla, a unity of subjectivity and objectivity that secures his thought against subjectivism.