PHENOMENOLOGY OF LOVE ACCORDING TO Dietrich von Hildebrand
The historical roots of humanistic psychology are firmly planted deeply in the European traditions of existentialism, phenomenology, and personalism. Most humanistic psychology scholars readily acknowledge a debt to existentialism and phenomenology, yet the contributions of thought within personalism are often unacknowledged. In part, personalism often is forgotten because the term “personalism” speaks less to a system of philosophy or psychology than to a general concern with positivism’s tendency to lose the person within a reductive, scientistic, mechanistic, metaphysical materialism.
Personalism is the ongoing attempt to save the person from modern thought while avoiding the twin pitfalls of individualism and collectivism. The person is neither an individual nor merely a mindless sheeple dumbly pushed along by a brute herd of the blind leading the blind. The person is always already a person-in-community—or as Aristotle put it, the human being is a social animal. Human beings are always already related, yet rarely undifferentiated. To be human is to belong and yet to stand apart, always at the same time. One of my scholarly goals is to flesh out the historical and theoretical foundations of humanistic psychology within a personalistic philosophical anthropology. A key piece of this puzzle is a project Bob McInerney and I have been working on together, which we call a “hermeneutics of love.”
If humans are social beings by nature, love is the expression of the intrinsic bond that sustains our intrinsic connections to others. A hermeneutics of love, as I understand it, makes a bold claim that, if we want to know the truth about another person, the best access to that truth is not through a detached indifference, but through a genuine, deeply felt love for that person. If I really want to know someone, a friendship with that person, for example, is more likely to yield a more impactful insight than treating the person like a rat in an experimental maze.
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Personalism is the ongoing attempt to save the person from modern thought while avoiding the twin pitfalls of individualism and collectivism. The person is neither an individual nor merely a mindless sheeple dumbly pushed along by a brute herd of the blind leading the blind. The person is always already a person-in-community—or as Aristotle put it, the human being is a social animal. Human beings are always already related, yet rarely undifferentiated. To be human is to belong and yet to stand apart, always at the same time. One of my scholarly goals is to flesh out the historical and theoretical foundations of humanistic psychology within a personalistic philosophical anthropology. A key piece of this puzzle is a project Bob McInerney and I have been working on together, which we call a “hermeneutics of love.”
If humans are social beings by nature, love is the expression of the intrinsic bond that sustains our intrinsic connections to others. A hermeneutics of love, as I understand it, makes a bold claim that, if we want to know the truth about another person, the best access to that truth is not through a detached indifference, but through a genuine, deeply felt love for that person. If I really want to know someone, a friendship with that person, for example, is more likely to yield a more impactful insight than treating the person like a rat in an experimental maze.
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