Have you witnessed the moment when a young mother first sees her newborn child? Mother is holding her infant to herself, gazing into their face in rapture, smiling a joyous, self-giving, surprise-filled, welcome. Recently I learned from a seasoned delivery room nurse that a French phrase, “en face,” names the first face-to-face encounter; medicine deems it critical to the infant’s emotional and physical well-being.[1]
Imagine for a moment, in stark contrast, the horrific alternative: a mother who refuses to see her child, refuses the child’s seeing her; imagine her wholesale rejection of her newborn. Heartbreakingly, this happens. But we are right to sense that it isn’t natural.
More than physical and emotional factors are in play in the primal encounter of mother and child at birth. Philosophical ones are as well—matters which profoundly address, subvert and heal the skewed, damaging, philosophical baggage we inhale in our cultural milieu in this our modern age.
Philosophy concerns the most fundamental matters we human persons can’t help but live out responses to: who we are as persons, what reality is, and how we are involved with it in understanding and acting. One need not have taken a philosophy course; we all enact philosophy concretely in our everyday lives. It bears getting in touch with our own philosophical orientation, and checking on its wellness.[2]
By the modern age, or modernity, I have in mind our milieu in the West dating from the 1600s to the present, and important ways only growing more strident. Several things characterize our inherited way of thinking; the one I want to attend to here is modernity’s rejection of the other. Philosophically, our milieu enacts the horrific birth scenario. If we are to be effective caregivers for the world, in our lives and professions, we must return philosophically to the more natural, original version—the one forged in the mother’s smile.
I’m playfully pleased to offer a reflection which shares the same title as this journal! It is my honor to participate as a first Senior Scholar for The Seattle School—an institution whose vision is such as to name its journal, The Other. I want to show how the matter of the other is profoundly philosophical and powerfully formative of our milieu, for better or for worse. I want to offer a philosophy anchored in regard for the other. Reinstating it is necessary for effective efforts to bring shalom to the world.
Over the years I have developed my own philosophical proposals out of a need to work out responses to my own youthful, urgent questions. But I grew to see that others born into modernity can’t help but share a similar philosophical plight. And this is all made complex because modernity has disavowed philosophy itself. Most people style themselves as not interested in abstracts, but rather in what works. (Now, that statement is philosophically loaded and oozing modernism!)
Other refers to another being—the world, a person or thing—beyond me. Although people sometimes take the use of “other” to be dismissive, I lobby for the exact opposite. The other is there, the same as me and different from me, meriting my regard by virtue of its existing. For the other, I too am other. So my treatment of the other rebounds on me. Even the mention of the other rightly wakens us to consider presences beyond ourselves.
Knowing (in philosophy, this is the matter of epistemology) involves a knower and the known or yet to be known (which is, evidently, the real). The known, the real, the world outside me is—or ought to be—other, with respect to the knower—with respect to me.
Our modern age, at the core of its defining philosophical orientation, rejects the other. In direct opposition I affirm that in knowing, knower and yet to be known enact an interpersoned, mutually transformative, intimate encounter and unfolding communion—with the other. Encounter and communion require two centers of presence, each other to the other, but involved together in mutuality. Knowing fundamentally requires regard for the other. This account of knowing is far more three-dimensional and true-to-life (and dynamic, and healing) than the way of thinking that modernity forwards. Knowing is communion with the real; human persons were made for communion with the real. The mother smiling at her child is not merely an example of this, or merely a helpful analogy. Rather, not only is mother and child philosophically paradigmatic; that en face is philosophically, fundamentally formative of our involvement with the world. All human persons, the world over, able to read an essay such as this have been philosophically formed in this way.
My newest book, Doorway to Artistry, endeavors to “attune our philosophy to enhance our artistry.”[3] In my everyday reflections there I briefly speak of the real as other, drawing on the philosophical work of D. C. Schindler.[4] In this essay, I look more closely at what he says in order to consider the matter of the other more thoroughly.[5]
Getting the point about the other, I believe, resonates profoundly with the vision of transformative engagement forwarded in this institution, The Seattle School, as well as with the professional practice of therapy. I want to suggest that the mutual, therapeutic encounter should be tapped philosophically to address, subvert, and heal our culture at its definitive philosophical root.
Modernity Disavows the Other
How is it that our modernist milieu disavows the other? The 1600s saw a shift from seeing knowledge as concerning the real, to seeing knowledge as concerning power, human mastery of nature. “Knowledge is power”—we still laud Francis Bacon’s vision. Father of modern philosophy (and mathematician) Rene Descartes commended to humankind all effort to “make ourselves lords and possessors of nature.” According to modernist philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “To know something is to know what we can do with it, once we have it.” [6] Utility became king, reconstruing knowing in the process. By the way, utility also disavowed philosophy as useless. So this is an anti-philosophical philosophy (which you rightly sense is problematic).
As essential to this vision, Father of Modern Philosophy Rene Descartes famously offered a powerful picture of the knowing self as the absolute anchor of certain, comprehensive knowledge, and in suspicious opposition to whatever might be external, other, to the solitary mind—even his[7] own body.
One respect in which modernity’s rejection of the other comes to expression is in the early modern tradition of philosophical empiricism. Through the thought of John Locke, to David Hume and on to 20th century Bertrand Russell, the more rigorous philosophical empiricism, the more suspect became “the object.”[8] This is utterly ironic for a tradition called empiricism! But empiricism is about data, often in opposition to the real itself.
Philosopher Robert Spaemann claims that modernity denatured nature.[9] The project of modernity, he writes, is “the progressive mastery of nature through the despotic objectification of nature.”[10] Scientific reductionism, fragmentation, and instrumentalization, characterize modernity’s ethos. And mastery of nature entails mastery of the other, of things, of human persons, and of oneself. If one is setting out to misuse, abuse, an other, as utility does, it is likely that one first begins by vilifying the other, reducing its reality.[11] Spaemann, a German in the twentieth century, no doubt has in mind the widely known dehumanizing rationales offered for slavery, for Neoimperialism, for eugenics and for the Holocaust.[12]
Spaemann insists that a fundamental challenge to the consciousness of the age must be proposed. The opposite of domination involves letting be, reciprocally acknowledging the other, letting the other be free.[13] “We need to rethink the concept of mastery, and moreover, to attribute something like selfhood to other entities simply as partners able to dialogue with Homo Sapiens at various levels.”[14] We need to recover the other.
Challenging Modernism to Recover the Other: D. C. Schindler
Offering affirming resonance with my own proposals, Schindler challenges modernity to assert that to desire knowledge is by definition to desire for intimacy with the world; and this desire is fundamental to our humanness. We were made for this contact.[15] This is the premodern vision, he says: human persons are “ordered to [intended for] communion with reality”—knowing and cultivating it.[16] To address the fundamentally philosophical ravages of our time, we must administer philosophical therapy. We must restore—return to—a way of thinking about the real and our involvement with it in knowing that also reinstates the other in the regard he, she, they or it are due.[17]
In Schindler’s extended analysis of modernism, he reveals how its definitive philosophical proposals jettison critical features of the world and about our knowing it—things like the thing itself,[18] and the human person’s native desire for the good.[19] But Schindler attends especially to more recent well-intended philosophical challenges to modernism. Recent generations have rightly noted and regretted the arrogance of Enlightenment and earlier claims to totalizing mastery and control.[20] In response they have sought to reinstate humility, modesty, and mystery, often by limiting or qualifying knowledge. Schindler argues that these attempts turn out to be just as arrogant as the original—only worse because of their false pretense to modesty. This is because they perpetuate unexamined modernity’s skewed presumptions about what knowing is. True epistemic modesty can only be achieved by reinstating the robust account of knowing which modernity dismissed in order to achieve its pragmatic ends—this is Schindler’s main claim. “My argument is that setting limits to reason in this way in fact makes modesty impossible, and that the only way to avoid a closed system is vigilantly to insist on “totality.”[21] That is, Schindler would have us embrace a robust account of knowing which is responsible to the whole of things.
To take a commonly known example, Father of Contemporary philosophy Immanuel Kant (ca. 1800) is widely known for his agenda “to limit reason to make room for faith.” His milieu-shaping move, made to offer protective philosophical justification for scientific knowledge, involved attributing to the human mind structures that constitutively shape the amorphous “experience” which we take in from outside us.[22]
Can you see how this “modest” philosophy disavows the other? According to Schindler, for Kant the world now only is a mere occasion for understanding. Kant’s famous aesthetic Sublime proves to be just introspection, as is religion. “Reason by definition cannot be moved by its other.”[23] As to limiting knowledge to make room for faith, Schindler argues repeatedly that “there is simply no way at all to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith without by the very same gesture eliminating any room for faith.”[24]
On the streets of our lives, we’re all familiar with common attempts to qualify knowledge. People say, we can’t know anything really, or, we can only know in this particular field, but others are off limits. People qualify their own claims, and dismiss those of others, citing as grounds that we can’t move beyond our own perspectives. Most people don’t even realize that these are philosophical claims, let alone that they might be the very opposite of modest. People preemptively suspect and reject what they deem as authoritarian pretense to knowledge.[25] This displays what Schindler notes is a postmodern nostalgia for “epistemological humility” as respect for the deep mystery of things.[26] But in fact these claims perpetrate the very thing that they style themselves as combatting. This especially happens with respect to religion, as Kant exemplifies.
Schindler points out: “Modesty that withdraws a priori [in advance of knowledge] is a presumption that sets the conditions of possibility. Modesty of this sort, that is, obtrusively imposes itself.”[27] Schindler’s assessment: “This position, in spite of its explicit modesty, tends to encroach upon the ‘big questions’ and in fact to impose certain answers to those questions.” This is inevitable, built as it is into the logic of epistemological modesty. Modern science, he says, “is built on this conceit.”[28]
It isn’t only people in the streets who inadvertently do this. Major contemporary philosophers, even Christian philosophers, have followed Kant. While respectful of their other contributions, Schindler carefully exposes this penchant in the work of major contemporary philosopher Martin Heidegger, and, conceding Heidegger’s claims in part, Christian philosopher Merold Westphal.[29] These philosophers both concede that philosophy itself is in essence self-aggrandizing.[30] On the contrary, says Schindler: “the inclination philosophy has tended to evince toward mastery is due, not to the essential nature of reason [knowing], but specifically to its fallen [modernist] form.”[31] To challenge modernity and heal our age, we must reinstate a philosophy of knowing true to its essential nature. We must reinstate one that is native and natural, actual, and in fact more, not less, robust.
According to Schindler, the way modernity commonly thinks of knowing—including when it is wrongheadedly attempting to be modest—is grounded in two powerful but mistaken, overlooked presumptions about knowledge. If you are going to challenge modernity’s self-aggrandizing, totalizing claims, without surreptitiously continuing to commit them—if you are to restore human persons, the real, and our involvement with it, Schindler is posing, you must refuse these underlying assumptions about knowing.[32]
One assumption is that knowledge itself is “possessive.” According to modernity’s way of thinking, knowledge, to be knowledge, must exhaustively state (from the bottom up) what it’s about. The known must be completely possessed by the knower; it must be taken entirely inside the knower to comprehend it.[33] Knowledge as possessive imposes itself on the real. Late- and post-moderns rightly sense this objectifying offense. But since often they fail to challenge the view of knowledge presumed herein, in order to avoid offense they choose to discredit the idea of knowledge itself.
The second, related, presumption is that knowledge is “egological.” This means that knowledge is entirely about the knower’s knowing—not about the object known. This is the Cartesian picture. As a result, “to conceptualize is to dominate,” Schindler explains.[34]
You can see that these two presumptions about knowledge behave appallingly with respect to the other—with respect to the very real it is imagined that we know in our knowledge. Says Schindler about modernity: “[Knowledge] appropriates only by eliminating the ‘otherness’ of its object.”[35] (And by the way, how can we imagine that objectification and control represent a sound way to get to know something?)
If we do not revise our underlying epistemology, even our best efforts to combat modernity will continue to commit modernity’s sins. The only way out of modernity’s ravages is to refuse both of these assumptions. But engrained as we are in modernity, it is difficult to imagine that knowledge could be knowledge apart from those assumptions. As we have seen, even foremost thinkers, Christian and otherwise, attempt to handle the situation by actually giving up on knowledge.
We need to rework our fundamental philosophy of knowing. We need a positive account that redraws the playing field. And we need to recognize that, far from modernism’s misleading caricature, this positive account actually describes what we have been doing all along in our best knowings of the real. It describes what we were born to do, and born into doing.
Schindler, Balthasar, and the Mother’s Smile
(And now the fun begins!) This is just what Schindler endeavors to do, and it’s what I’ve addressed in my own work over the years. Schindler draws on philosopher and theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar’s philosophical exposition of “the mother’s smile.” According to Schindler, Balthasar “roots the knower’s contact with the world in a more fundamental ‘contact,’ one that gives everything else a particular coloring: namely, the mother’s smile. As deceptively simple as it seems, this principle is arguably the foundation of Balthasar’s epistemology.”[36]
Balthasar and Schindler say that reason (knowing) is not “possessive,” but rather, “dramatic.”[37] And it is not “egological,” but rather, “ecstatic.”[38] Knowing is dramatic in the sense that it is in essence unfolding, delighted mutual encounter with the other. Knowing is ecstatic in the sense that in essence it is out there beyond itself in and with the other.
Fundamental philosophy is forged in the mother’s smile. “The little child awakens to self-consciousness through being addressed by the love of his mother,” Balthasar writes.[39] It would never occur to the child that the initiative might have come from within its own self—that it had produced the mother’s smile. Thus, “the entire paradise of reality that unfolds around the ‘I’ stands there as an incomprehensible miracle: it is not thanks to the gracious favor of the ‘I’ that space and the world exist, but thanks to the gracious favor of the ‘Thou.’”[40]
As he expounds this text, Schindler affirms: “The personal gesture that the mother addresses to the child is what gives rise to his capacity to respond in kind.” And “because the mother’s smile is a gesture of love that ‘welcomes’ the other, her child, it does not impose itself as an opaque and indeed violent demand, but as an enabling invitation.” The mother’s smile is a gesture, an action, a personal address; it can be received only through a reciprocating response.[41] In decided challenge to Kant’s a priori[42]conditions: “The conditions of possibility are given in the encounter, as a gift from above, which, precisely because of its generosity, creates the space for the “from below” capacity to receive it.”[43]
For Balthasar, reason is not essentially egological but is rather essentially dramatic. As per the discussion of the mother’s smile, “consciousness, the home of all that a person will ever perceive, think, understand, or believe, is not a prestructured categorializing activity, but is first and foremost given to oneself.” Knowing is dramatic encounter that is the generous gift of love, in which the knower “receives its limits from its other precisely in its extending itself, as it were, to meet the other, and these limits therefore do not arise as a violence that frustrates reason’s presumed self-centeredness, but rather again and again bring to fulfillment what reason is in its most profound and original form: a generously appropriating encounter with its other. From a dramatic perspective, thinking is not an autonomous activity, but is at its core a ‘being moved by an other.’” [44] This means, according to Schindler, that a central dimension of knowing is generous, self-giving pledge to the other.
This connects with Balthasar’s and Schindler’s other intertwined claim about knowing: reason is essentially ecstatic. “Reason is always already out beyond itself—and so in and with the other—from the beginning. As natively ecstatic, reason always exceeds explicit consciousness.”[45] Schindler continues: “the fundamental act of reason cannot simply be a passive taking in; instead, it is, so to speak, a ‘going out to meet’ being.”[46] The act will necessarily include “other-directedness”; it is a movement of the center of the knower beyond themself. It’s because reason is ecstatic that knowing can concern the totality of the real without being totalizing. One wholly and deeply loves one’s mother, embracing her in knowing wonder—and therein preserves her “abiding otherness” and freedom.
Schindler avers: “Concretely speaking, it means that we do not ‘begin’ our reasoning from a position outside of things, and gradually by degrees make our way toward them. Instead, conceived ecstatically, reason is already, from the beginning, at the destination of this path: it begins its activity already from within the beings it encounters, and indeed, as profoundly intimate with beings as it is possible to be.”[47] Empathy, he continues, is not an extreme achievement of an otherwise self-preoccupied being, but the natural structure of our knowing. It is because knowing is structurally ecstatic that knowing is structurally nonpossessive.[48] It is possible to know something without simply subordinating it to oneself. “One enters into knowledge and so one need not keep it nervously for oneself. It is thus that the act of knowledge is itself, in its very structure, a generous act.”[49] I love what he says next: thus, “to know is a very precise, indeed perhaps the most profound, way to love.”
Schindler’s talk of ecstatic and dramatic converge: “When we know something different from ourselves we are therefore in ontological communion in some genuine way with that other.”[50]
“Reason is a certain intimacy with reality, or rather is a certain intimacy with reality: to understand is to read the interior of things.”[51]
And it is precisely this robust account of knowing as it is ours in birthright which restores the mystery longed for by many in our time: “If reason is constituted dramatically, the more it internalizes, the more it is expropriated and joyfully immersed in a luminous mystery.”[52] Truth and mystery coincide.[53]
The “Other” in “M(other)” and in Knowing, and Why it Matters
Let us attend to the other in this account of knowing. Schindler writes: “What reason itself demands is in fact the priority of its irreducibly other; in the natural order, it is the priority of the object to be known.”[54] Knowing in its natal and native form requires the other, responds to the other, honors the other, and obediently serves the other. It preserves “an abiding otherness in the completed act of knowledge even within the soul’s union with its object.”[55] “The mind, one might say, leaves its own home . . . in order to cleave to its object and become one with it. The identity that the mind thus achieves with the thing that it knows is therefore not the elimination of its difference from it, but instead an appropriation of that difference as difference.”[56] Thus, otherness does not compromise our union with the other that we know, nor does union compromise the otherness of each.[57]
We need to restore the “other” in “mother,” and have this restore our philosophy of knowledge. Knowing requires an other. Knowing requires holding the other in regard and attentive empathy. Knowing is an intimate encounter and communion which is the dynamic of love. Where this dynamic is not present, there is damage to knower and known. And there is no knowing. “Knowledge is personal presence”; information, as Schindler says, is an inferior substitute for knowledge, which may be necessary or useful in particular circumstances, when knowledge is not possible.[58]
In light of all this, the Seattle School for Theology and Psychology presents as a breed apart. TSS attends assiduously to the other as its defining focus. Healing of the other is the mission; the therapeutic encounter is central. And therapeutic encounter need not be clinical and private; my TSS colleague Dr. Ron Ruthruff astutely places invitation to the table, extended to the other, at the heart of healing cultural outreach.[59] All that may remain to be affirmed is that all this is philosophically normative and profound, and as such is the thing necessary to subvert modernity’s philosophical ravages. Therapy and transformative engagement strategically address our culture because they enact knowing as intimate encounter with the other—as it is natively forged in the mother’s smile.
If we are to enact genuine regard for the other, we must fix our fundamental epistemology. This is not to say that breadths of detailed, precise, information, long-cultivated expertise and technique are not essential. What these aren’t is the epistemic paradigm. Once we have restored our natal philosophical orientation, information recovers its proper philosophical role as bodied, artful virtuosity.[60] It enacts the very regard for the other we seek to live out. It is the caring love in the knowing that is love. And we all are familiar with this distinction in ordinary life: it’s the difference between a doctor with a “good bedside manner,” and a doctor without one.
What does it look like to live out a philosophical paradigm of knowing as encounter and communion with the other? I believe that it comes to expression in author Wendell Berry’s “Port William membership.” Berry’s artistic agenda includes challenging the thrall of Modernity. He portrays an alternative vision that might heal the whole of culture and humanness—and the world. At the center of his modernity-dispelling vision is a kind of knowing defined by covenanted response to and regard for the other. It is a knowing that is also being known.[61]
Remembering, Berry’s story of Andy Catlett’s horrific farm accident leading to the amputation of his right hand, palpably displays the difference that this philosophical return makes.[62] The amputation has precipitated Catlett’s dismembering self-rejection and rejection of all who love him. Absence somehow lives at the end of his arm. He even runs away, as far as he can run. Berry baldly associates Andy’s dismembering absence with the Modern Age, with its aspiration to universality, power, abstraction, isolation, anonymity, disembodiment and irresponsibility.
But remembering re-members him—remembering the others and the membership in which he has always been gently held and known. “Member” is a verb, as is “neighbor”: in Port William one responsibly and actively undertakes an obligation of mutuality to the others who farm and to the ground tilled together. The memories that return to Andy, Berry suggests, reside in his flesh—beginning with the bodied memory of Nathan Coulter’s gentle, welcoming grasp of Andy’s stump of a forearm.[63] They draw him back toward the others.
Berry’s account of that day of re-turning reads in the present tense. Its earliest glimmering is signaled by Andy beginning again to smell and hear and see and taste and feel with his skin. He comes back down out of his head, where he has been acedically absent, into the present. Consenting attentiveness to the other that we sense here, now, restores us to ourselves and our world.
Andy re-calls the others in the Port William membership, and he is re-membered. To consent to be implicated covenantally in the partial and palpable is the alternative that Berry commends. No longer absent, he is present. Isolation is replaced with membership; abstract with concrete; anonymity with being known. No longer mastery, but rather redemption.
For Berry, we would do well to note: no longer universal, the healing reorientation is partial. Catlett understands that his choice to return is a resolve once again to be partial. “The other,” as we have been speaking of him, her, they, it, by definition cannot be rendered in the abstract and universal. For Berry, with respect to his own context of traditional farming, this seems to suggest that this is a hopeless cause.
But here is where we must remember and take heart from the mother’s smile. There is no human person living in an ordinary way on the face of the earth who has not been joyously apprehended in the mother’s smile in the first moments of their life. This is not a universality of abstraction, but rather a universality of concrete, singling-out encounter of oneself with the other. There is no human person who has not been philosophically formed at birth to respond and reciprocate rapturous love to the other. That means that there is no other who/which is invulnerable to delighted welcome. And this means that our hope for the world and our involvement with it rings and overflows with confidence and joy.
May we enact regard-filled encounter with the other, with philosophical awareness and intentionality, to the healing of our time.
[1] If you haven’t been present in a birthing room, you can regularly mark this rapture on parents’ and grandparents’ faces, in person or on Facebook.
[2] I devote much of my own work to “philosophical therapy” for all of us. See Esther Lightcap Meek, Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003); Loving to Know: Introducing Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011); A Little Manual for Knowing (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014); Doorway to Artistry: Attuning Your Philosophy to Enhance Your Creativity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023).
[3] This is the subtitle of Doorway to Artistry.
[4] Meek, Doorway to Artistry, 29–30 and throughout.
[5] Even if a reader is philosophically trained, any new philosophical writing can feel dense with inscrutable terminology. But let me encourage you: this very account of knowing that I and Schindler propose accredits half-understanding. A person may (in fact, always will and must) half-understand and come away with riches. And I trust that you will also sense the utter joy that overflows these ideas.
[6] Meek, Doorway to Artistry, 11–12.
[7] Gender specificity intentional and appropriate here. And notice the absence of Descartes’ mother.
[8] I have in mind the modern empiricist tradition traced from John Locke to David Hume; it continues into the early 20th century, for example, in Bertrand Russell.
[9] Robert Spaemann, “Nature,” in A Robert Spaemann Reader: Philosophical Essays on Nature, God, and the Human Person (edited and translated by D. C. Schindler and Jeanne Heffernan Schindler; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 22–36.
[10] Spaemann, Reader, 222.
[11] Spaemann, Reader, 6.
[12] Spaemann, Reader, 7.
[13] Spaemann, Reader, 36.
[14] Spaemann, Reader, 21.
[15] Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, 1–2.
[16] Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, 3.
[17] In Doorway to Artistry, I call readers to exercise “noble courtesy” toward the real (chap. 8).
[18] Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, 76.
[19] Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, 51–55. Here he identifies changes which John Locke made in his own text to exalt the human will to arbitrary power of choice.
[20] As totalizing, the Enlightenment metanarrative is unholy as well. It is Absolute and complete; thus, it shows God the door and gets religious about reason.
[21] Schindler, The Catholicity of Reason (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 22.
[22] Add to Kant the growing realization in the 19th and 20th centuries that different people have differing perspectives, and the result is severe relativism.
[23] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 42.
[24] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 251. Compare Meek, Longing to Know, 41–45.
[25] My discussion here speaks to insightful comments of my TSS colleague, Dr. Paul Hoard.
[26] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 31.
[27] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 251. Arguably, this is why the postmodern milieu of the 1980s confined itself to suspicion and exposure; to propose an alternative narrative would be to commit the same sin of metanarrative. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
[28] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 26.
[29] Schindler, “The Problem of the Problem of Ontotheology” (Catholicity of Reason, chap. 8 (231-61)). Schindler also critiques Hegel: if Heidegger is guilty of false modesty, Hegel is guilty of unholy zeal. (254-55)
[30] This is the “sin” of “ontotheology”: metaphysics, the philosophy of real things, brings god in inappropriately as it utters absolutes about the real. So for Heidegger and Westphal, to be truly religious, one must reject metaphysics (Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 234–38).
[31] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 253.
[32] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 254–55.
[33] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 101.
[34] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 259.
[35] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 56.
[36] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 45. And that is saying something, given that Balthasar has written many, many books.
[37] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 110, 112.
[38] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 9, 13, 14.
[39] Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Movement Toward God,” in Explorations in Theology, III, 15–17. According to Balthasar, Christianity will be the only fully satisfactory unfolding of the promise implicit in the first experience of Being on the part of the awakening human spirit.
[40] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 44–47.
[41] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 49.
[42] A priori means prior to all our sense experience.
[43] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 45.
[44] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 259–60.
[45] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 9. Here Schindler references Michael Polanyi’s famous aphorism, “We know more than we can tell.” Polanyi is propounding his central epistemological claim, which I adopt in my own work, that all articulate knowing is rooted in and outrun by the inarticulate; all knowing is subsidiary focal integration (Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Foreword by Amartya Sen; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3–25; Meek, Longing to Know, chap. 6; Loving to Know, chap. 4; Little Manual for Knowing, chap. 4; Doorway to Artistry, chap. 6).
[46] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 11.
[47] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 18.
[48] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 20.
[49] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 113.
[50] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 12.
[51] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 9.
[52] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 56.
[53] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 108.
[54] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 54.
[55] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 45. This deeper aim of Balthasar’s, Schindler comments, contrasts to other contemporary approaches such as phenomenology, and is ultimately necessary for a consistent realism.
[56] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 111.
[57] Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 82.
[58] Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, 80.
[59] Personal conversation.
[60] Meek, Loving to Know, 104–22. I note that it can be especially tough for a graduate institution to keep this mind and enact it.
[61] Psychiatrist Dr. Curt Thompson, as part of his antidote to shame, has instituted a Center for Being Known and confessional communities. The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2015).
[62] Wendell Berry, Remembering: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008).
[63] I love that somewhere Berry calls Nathan, “that accurate man.”