Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) was a German Catholic philosopher, part of a circle of thinkers that first formed around Edmund Husserl, founder of the philosophical method known as “phenomenology.” Others in that circle included Max Scheler, on whom Karol Wojtyla (St. John Paul II) wrote his second doctoral thesis, and Edith Stein, now St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. The phenomenologists thought philosophy had gotten detached from reality, drifting into the quicksand of thinking-about-thinking-about-thinking. Their motto was “to the things themselves,” and their project was to reconnect thought to reality by a precise observation and analysis of Things As They Are.
Phenomenology, alas, also rates a special shrine in the philosophy wing of the Opacity Hall of Fame. The phenomenological method lends itself to a certain circularity, and a lot of patience is required to work through a typically dense phenomenological text—especially when the author is German. In my brief experience of him as a philosopher, Dietrich von Hildebrand was no exception to this rule.
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