The Place of the 'Heart' in Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract

In his discussion of the Gorgias in Volume Three of Order and History, Eric Voegelin says: “The substance of man is at stake, not a philosophical problem in the modern sense.” At the heart of the dialogue is the confrontation between Socrates, who is in love with philosophy, and Callicles, who is in love with the demos of Athens. Can a bridge between them be found? “The issue at stake is that of communication and intelligibility in a decadent society.” The level of possible communication between Socrates and Callicles lies not on the level of principles of conduct, or of politics, or of intellectual agreement. If “existential understanding” is to be reached at all, it must be on a “deeper” level: “This deeper level Plato designates by the term pathos...” Pathos designates not human action, but those passive experiences to which persons are vulnerable by virtue of their nature as human. Pathos is what all persons have in common, what happens to them in the course of a lifetime, what they suffer or undergo. Pathos is “what touches [the human person] in his existential core — as for instance the experience of Eros...” “The community of pathos,” says Voegelin, “is the basis of communication. Behind the hardened, intellectually supported attitudes which separate men, lie the pathemata which bind them together. However false and grotesque the intellectual position may be, the pathos at the core has the truth of an immediate experience.” Pathos is the “logique du coeur.” The heart has its reasons which the reason does not know, in the familiar saying of Pascal. But how can one penetrate to this core? In the Gorgias itself, communication in the existential sense between Socrates and Callicles is never reached.The purpose of the paper is to consider, in a relatively brief compass, the question of the meaning of “the heart,” and how it may assist us in remembering and returning to a much more complete philosophical anthropology than the one with which we are publicly familiar. To do this, the paper considers some of the philosophers and theologians down the ages who have left us with memorable treatments of the subject, thinkers who have demonstrated that if we peel back the illusions of rationalism under which we operate, we will find that the heart has always been one of the deepest, most fundamental human concerns. The paper discusses in summary fashion some of the relevant works of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Pascal, Miguel de Unamuno, Ernest Becker, Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, and goes into some detail on the work of Thomas Aquinas, because of the completeness of his philosophical anthropology with its emphasis on desire, and because of the contrast that can be drawn between him and certain modern thinkers.The issue of communication and intelligibility arises in any decadent society. A time which puts its faith in purely instrumental or discursive reason tends to lose connection with the heart. The paper explores the role of the heart as a source of personal and political order in a complete philosophical anthropology.