Epistemology Search for the Treasure with William Wallace

Epistemology: Search for the Treasure with William Wallace & Kenneth Gallagher A big picture approach to epistemological study with an application from the work of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

“Things are manifested when they are distinguished from things that are like them. ” Msgr. Robert Sokolowski Professor of Philosophy Catholic University of America

“What is EPISTEMOLOGY? ” Then, “Where do we start from? ” and “Where may it lead us? ” To a beginning philosophy student, these are very good questions.

“What is EPISTEMOLOGY? . . . ” As I pondered these questions, assisted by class readings & notes, I realized: • What I needed was a clear context for epistemology within philosophy, both as a field of study and how it relates to the whole. • What I needed was a pre-thought plan to apply to subsequent reading and reflection about knowledge. As our course in epistemology progressed, the following plan emerged.

Plan for epistemological study Method: I. Look at philosophy as a whole and the role Epistemology plays in it, both as a A. B. Category/Branch of philosophy itself, and Role it plays throughout all branches of philosophy, taking into account i. time ii. space iii. culture iv. language II. Be consciously aware that study of philosophy both as A. B. System and History are necessary to understand any problem or mystery with depth, accuracy, and most possible fullness. Application: III. Consciously search out those manifestations of thought that may contribute to a philosophia perennis, furthering the foundational knowledge of man in his search for truth.

These basic understandings came together by juxtaposing the summarized work of William Wallace, OP, a traditionalist expert in philosophy… Editor of the New Catholic Encyclopedia & its summary, The Elements of Philosophy William Wallace, OP 1918 -2015 Kenneth T. Gallagher Prof. Emeritus of Philosophy Fordham University …with the work of Kenneth Gallagher, a master guide in the field of Epistemology: The Philosophy of Knowledge.

Edith Stein Karol Wojtyla St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD Pope St. John Paul II 1891 - 1942 1920 - 2005 With the use of this “gleaning with a purpose” approach to my student reading, I was able to attempt an application that stems from the point of juxtaposition of the study of knowledge with the study of being, examined particularly through the lens of Edith Stein’s dissertation on empathy. Fruits of this labor, which she applied to Edmund Husserl’s Logic II as his assistant, had widespread impact and may have led to theology contained in Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (per John Wilhelmsson, The Transposition of Edith Stein). First, we will follow our plan for study and take a quick look at the broad spectrum of philosophy in order to gain a context for the application we are about to attempt.

I. Traditional Classification Map of Natural Knowledge Into the Branches of Philosophy Speculative Knowledge for its own sake 1. Metaphysics (most abstract) • Epistemology* *Role: Defend knowledge claims in all disciplines. Practical Knowledge for the sake of operation or conduct 1. Arts of Making 2. Arts of Directing Human • Natural Theology 2. Mathematics (intermediate Activity • Ethics • Politics 3. Natural Philosophy (objects here have sensible matter by definition) Special Disciplines abstractness) Now treated as a “special discipline” – the philosophy of math • Phil. Anthropology /Psychology “The Philosophy of x, ” where x can stand for Language, Art, Religion, Math, and so on. The foundation for the study of all branches of philosophy, not properly considered a branch in itself: Logic (Wallace, Elem of Phil. , pp 4 -5)

A big picture mapping serves as a constant reference. Here it pinpoints something we need to know about epistemology for our application: that our reflection on knowledge (epistemology) properly flows from our reflection on being (metaphysics). ME TA P H Y S I C A KNOWLEDGE Dig here! • Being Down Under ~PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS PARADISIO~

II. We also need to consider both Systematic and Historical Philosophy in our search for knowledge (Wallace, p 9). Systematic Philosophy is “an attempt to give a consistent exposition of the main conclusions of philosophy that provide the most adequate explanation of reality now available. ” (Wallace, p 9) Example of application: How to best answer the question, “What are the implications of being on knowledge? ” The History of Philosophy “aims to survey the vast diversity of philosophical systems in their chronological development so as to fill out, and complement, the synthetic account. ” (Wallace, p 9) Example of application: How to best answer the question, “Do we need an escape route from subjectivism? ” (P. Yates, Epistemology Class Assignment Week 10) (K. Gallagher, Philosophy of Knowledge, Ch. 10) Now let us see what a reflection on knowledge that stems from a very particular idea of being unfolds for us.

III. We will begin with the idea that the “being” of metaphysics we refer to in this case is “self” as knower. The knowledge I am examining here is knowledge that stems from my being as a human person capable of knowing. “Being” as Mystery Gabriel Marcel makes the distinction for us: “A problem is an inquiry which is initiated in respect to an ‘object, ’ something which I encounter as external to me. In an objective situation, I am here and the object is there, complete and open for inspection. For the reason that I meet the object as juxtaposed to myself and as not involving myself, I can envelop it in a clear and distinct idea which delineates its limits. … A problem, then, is an inquiry which the self apprehends in an exterior way. … Science embodies the ultimate achievement of problematic knowledge…. “A mystery, on the other hand, is a question in which what is given cannot be regarded as detached from the self. … If I ask ‘What is being? ’ can I regard being as an object which is thrown across my path? No, for being includes me” (Gallagher, pp 236 -238).

“Body” in Two Realms Gallagher shows us that Marcel takes us further, on to the idea of the human body. “My body in so far as it is mine cannot be adequately rendered in problematic categories; the body which the physiologist studies is an objective structure available for an observer, but the body as mine simply is not accessible in this manner” (Gallagher, p. 240). Here we stop to consider. Referring back to the big picture map, we see we are suddenly dealing with two fields of Speculative Knowledge: 1) the body the “physiologist studies” is within the realm of the Philosophy of Nature according to its sensible properties; but 2) the body as mine remains within the realm of Metaphysics. How very interesting. Gallagher goes on: “The knower of mystery is not a spectator but a participator: some evidence is only available to the participant and not to the neutral observer” (Gallagher, p. 240). [Note: We see the role of epistemology to “defend knowledge claims in all fields” (Wallace) at work here. Body is viewed as problem according to the subject/object relation in the Philosophy of Nature. Body is viewed as mystery in the Metaphysical realm, mine and that which comes to knowledge through participation, open to transcendence. ]

Edith Stein’s use of body in her doctoral dissertation on empathy We see this same type of thought regarding the body taken up in the work of Edith Stein. What Marcel refers to as “body as mine, ” Stein explores as the “living body. ” How is my body [Leib] constituted within consciousness? I have my physical body [Korper] given once in acts of outer perception. But if we suppose it to be given to us in this manner alone, we have the strangest object… and we find ourselves bound to it perpetually. Precisely this affiliation, this belonging to me, could never be constituted in outer perception. A living body [Leib] only perceived outwardly would always be only a particularly disposed, actually unique, physical body, but never “my living body”… The distance of the parts of my living body from me is completely incomparable with the distance of foreign physical bodies from me. The living body as a whole is at zero point of orientation with all physical bodies outside of it. “Body space” [Liebraum] and “outer space” are completely different from each other. Merely perceiving outward, I would not arrive at the living body, nor merely “perceiving bodily” [leibwhrnehmend], at the outer world. (Edith Stein, On Human Empathy) [Note: We see the importance of “space” listed on the student outline, here getting at in another way knowledge that unfolds from the Metaphysical idea of “body. ”]

Knowledge gained by the “Living body” By “living body, ” Stein refers not to the physical body, but the experiencing “body within” devoid of external physicality, capable of being informed by sensation, not the same as but contributing to the abstract “I” of the singular, human person. She writes of the “living body” in conjunction with sensation and the faculties of the emotions, the will, and the soul itself (see Edith Stein, On Human Empathy). Intersubjectivity John Wilhelmsson in The Transposition of Edith Stein, the spin-off of his 2007 dissertation, cited Stein’s view of intersubjectivity: “we understand ourselves through the pairing of our living body with our physical body and we understand the other through the pairing of our living body with the foreign physical body of the other” (Wilhelmsson, p. 137). By this, Stein means that we know the other through empathy – that ability to consider our experience of our own “living body” and extend it in an abstract way upon the physical being of another.

Knowledge through “being-by-participation”: empathy Gallagher: “In the region of mystery what my thought does is to try to recover and express a participation which is there prior to thought. The thought which attempts this expression must do so by returning to the participation itself” (Gallagher, p 242). We come back to this idea expressed by Gallagher regarding knowledge through the mystery of being, and find it expressed now again in Stein’s idea of empathy between persons. In a sense, we can say that we “return to the participation itself” when we reflect on our own “living body” – the abstract experience of our own embodiment. We remember from the previous slide that Stein said: “we understand ourselves through the pairing of our living body with our physical body and we understand the other through the pairing of our living body with the foreign physical body of the other. ” So there are two manifestations of knowledge here: that of self, and that of the other, both through “being-by-participation, ” so to speak.

I transpose my “living body” onto the foreign physical body of the other We understand that when Stein says we “understand ourselves through the pairing of our living body with our physical body” she is talking about our human nature. When she says “we understand the other through the pairing of our living body with the foreign physical body of the other” she is talking about empathy – our coming to knowledge of the other person through “transposing” our “living body” onto the foreign physical body of the other. By this experiential “participation” in the other through the organism of our own lived experience, our own embodiment, we come to knowledge of the other. We empathize through our shared experience of embodiment. EMPATHY transposition My “living body” “I” my perception of the other “Thou” Transposition of my abstract, “living body” onto your foreign physical body to achieve empathy – I recognize the other by transposing my own lived experience of embodiment upon the body of the other to gain knowledge of the other.

The impact of Edith Stein’s concept of body on philosophy The understanding of the “living body” concept of self and the empathetic perception of the body of the other did much to add to the phenomenological thought of the time. In a letter Edith Stein wrote to her friend, Roman Ingarden, while working as Edmund Husserl’s assist editing his Ideas II manuscript, she writes, “For the past two days, just to see if I can actually still do something on my own, I have begun to examine more closely one of the points on which the Master [Husserl] and I differ (the necessity of a body for empathy). ” [parentheses Stein’s] (Wilhelmsson, p 107) Wilhelmsson goes on to show through evidence that it was Edith Stein’s idea of the necessity of the body which she used to revise Husserl’s Ideas II manuscript that changed his content from a “disembodied idealist standpoint” to one in which “the transcendental ego becomes embodied in a living body. ” Husserl also speaks there of the body being the “zero point” of orientation in space for a given person as well as the implications of space on the phenomenological view – also Edith Stein’s ideas stemming from her view of the body and present in her dissertation (and quoted on previous slides), written prior to her revision of Husserl’s Ideas II. (Wilhelmsson, p. 109)

The impact of Edith Stein’s concept of the body on theology Stein also applied her idea of embodiment to studies involving gender contained in her work Essays On Woman. “I am convinced that the species humanity embraces the double species man and woman, that the essence of a complete human being is characterized by this duality; and that the entire structure of the essence demonstrates the specific character. ” Wilhelmsson suggests relationship with Roman Ingarden as a common denominator between Edith Stein and Karol Wojtyla. Many letters of philosophical depth were exchanged between Stein and Ingarden, and in later years Ingarden was both teacher and friend to Karol Wojtyla. Wilhelmsson suggests that as phenomenologists, Ingarden and Wojtyla discussed topics such as Stein’s view of embodiment, which shaped the subsequent theological thought of Pope St. John Paul II. “There are two ways of ‘being a body’ and at the same time a man, which complete each other. They are two complementary dimensions of self-consciousness and self-determination and, at the same time, two complementary ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body. ” (Karol Wojtyla, Theology of the Body)

Where distinctions regarding knowledge may lead us The importance of philosophical pursuit is made clear in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio. The work of Edith Stein epitomizes this. St. Edith Stein makes an appearance in Fides et Ratio as a paradigm of faithful philosophical enquiry. Edith Stein offers a challenge to women and men to pass beyond the constraints imposed on our created and sin-affected human reason, and to welcome the full truth of the Gospel. In his diocesan paper, Cardinal Bernard Law expressed this view: “Edith Stein appears in the encyclical as an example of one whose work in philosophy led her to the Truth and, in a mystery of divine providence that must strike us all with awe, ultimately led her to a unique share in the Holy Cross of Christ. ” Her martyrdom confirms the possibility of achieving even the most difficult reconciliations. The witness of Edith Stein also alerts us to the sense of urgency that we find in Fides et Ratio. In the month following the publication of the encyclical, the pope made this plea explicit in an address at the Pontifical Urban University. There he announced “not only the necessity but the urgency” of bringing faith and reason together. Philosophy should not be a study only for specialists, he explained, but should play a role in the formation of conscience for all Christians. After all, “only in Christ is it possible to know the fullness of the truth which saves” (98). As the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 approaches, the pope continues to urge reconciliation so that everyone will be ready for the special graces the celebration promises. But what is the source of his confidence? St. Paul put it simply when he reminded the Corinthians, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. ” (Rev. Romanus Cessario, O. P. , Crisis Magazine, Jan. 1999)

Applications now and for the future In recent years the philosophy of the day has been applied to some of the greatest aspects of the faith such as the sacramental life, the praying of the liturgy, the Eucharist, our experiential knowledge of the mystical life, and methods of evangelization, all to further benefit our understanding and experience of our relationship with God and his Church. (Please see the accompanying annotated bibliography. )

Cast of experts, in order of appearance: Msgr. Robert Sokolowski Rev. William Wallace, OP 1934 - 1918 -2015 Edith Stein St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross 1891 -1941 Kenneth T. Gallagher (photo not available) Karol Wojtyla Pope St. John Paul II 1920 -2005 Gabriel Marcel 1889 -1973 Rev. Romanus Cessario, OP 1944 -