Ethics by Dietrich von Hildebrand

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ethics by Dietrich von Hildebrand Peter C. Meilaender Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethics. Steubenville, OH: Hildebrand Press, 2020. 500 pp. It is unlikely that most readers of The Journal of Austrian Studies are well acquainted with the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand. This new edition of von Hildebrand's Ethics, last published in English 50 years ago, offers a welcome opportunity to remedy that. Von Hildebrand was an important twentieth-century Christian phenomenologist. A student of Edmund Husserl and Adolf Reinach and a friend of Max Scheler, von Hildebrand went on to teach philosophy at the University of Munich. One of the most dramatic episodes of his biography, however, is intimately linked to the city of Vienna. Von Hildebrand had been an early and consistent critic of Nazism. When Hitler came to power, therefore, he was compelled to flee, traveling initially to Vienna in 1933. For approximately the next five years, he edited an important anti-Nazi weekly review, Der christliche Ständestaat. (He also wrote a study of Engelbert Dollfuss.) Hitler came to regard him as one of his most important enemies and even ordered his execution. When Germany annexed Austria in [End Page 123] 1938, therefore, von Hildebrand once again had to flee. After several stops in Europe, he ultimately ended up in the United States, where he taught philosophy at Fordham University until his retirement. Among the projects that von Hildebrand—who made contributions in many areas of philosophy—was able to finish after settling in the United States was his Ethics, originally published in 1953, but on which he had already been working 20 years earlier, while in Vienna. In his introductory essay to the present edition, John F. Crosby, the country's leading interpreter and translator of von Hildebrand, describes the Ethics as "the central text in Hildebrand's philosophy as a whole and in his moral philosophy in particular." Von Hildebrand distinguishes among several basic varieties of goods that call for affirmative responses from us. One such category is the merely "subjectively satisfying," those things that appeal to us for various reasons but are not necessarily of great intrinsic importance. As I type this review, for instance, I am munching on a chocolate bar and sipping an espresso, both of them subjectively satisfying, but neither a source of significant moral value. Other things are "objective goods" for the person. The salad that I ate for lunch before the chocolate, for example, was objectively good for me (as well as being a source of subjective satisfaction). Food and shelter, exercise, education, friendship—all of these are objective goods for me and in that sense genuine sources of value. But not the highest source. The most fundamental category of good is that which is important "in itself," quite apart from any subjective satisfaction it might offer or even whether it supplies any objective good for me. Von Hildebrand refers to such goods as "values"—the most important concept in his ethical thought. While there are different types of value, such as intellectual or aesthetic value, the highest variety is moral value. Thus, an act of forgiveness or charity, even one that bears no relation to me personally, possesses a depth of objective value demanding an affirmative response. Only when I recognize and respond to the call of these values is my soul properly attuned to the ontological structure of the universe. Indeed, the great nobility of the human soul is revealed precisely in its ability to transcend both what is subjectively satisfying and even what is objectively good for us and instead to affirm that which is truly valuable in and of itself. Hildebrand's philosophy of value allows him to give a rich account of the moral life, in ways too detailed and subtle than can be done justice in a brief review. He offers a detailed phenomenological analysis of a wide range [End Page 124] of moral attitudes and behaviors. In a pair of late chapters, for example, he provides a remarkably deft synopsis of the various forms of concupiscence and pride, which he identifies as the two sources of moral "disvalue." I defy anyone to read these without repeated twinges of guilty...