Judging by the book’s index and the copious notes and references this book is clearly intended as an academic text. The ample detail in some of the essays about the plot, purpose and criticism of Bioshock will appeal to those who know the series well. But I am a philosopher, not a gamer. While philosophizing about gaming, I thought about how the various aspects of posthuman humanity have made themselves explicit in gaming and if these aspects of posthuman humanity concealed any philosophical unity behind their creations. (In general philosophical activity, in contrast to gaming activity, has purposes that are non-manipulative, and as such does not directly change the experienced world.) I suggest that the reader may want to keep in mind this “Player’s Creed” while assessing my review/critique of Beyond the Sea: Navigating Bioshock.

I make the gaming world. There is no overall system which determines what I make.
I choose what kind of world I want to make. My actions show what things I regard as valuable.
I create value and do not participate in value already given.

I make what order there is. I am not made by it. I am independent, not bound by any dependence more powerful than myself.

I am free because what happens in the world depends on me; not a providence beyond my control.

My fate is in my hands. I, and only I, create history.*

*Cf. Grant, George P. (1966:40) Philosophy in the Mass Age, Copp Clarke Publishing.

I cannot look back upon the gaming life as others of a certain age may be inclined to do as “anything other than exaggerated nostalgia or bemused dismissal” (Keogh). I read this collection of essays conscious that I have never played video games of any sort. I believe, however, that a philosophical inquiry into the games and their construction might yield some unifying factors concerning the notion of posthuman humanity that has developed within the games via Western technology. Thus, I put emphasis on the subjectivity, not the objectivity, of game interpretation as it developed in new directions. My review accepts the political and social themes of gaming in this particular set of games as representative of the themes of present gaming culture. I concentrate on those issues that impinge on the understanding of the human player engaging with the game. (Other reviewers will no doubt make other choices.) There are, to my mind, philosophical presumptions in the development of video games which are rooted in Hellenic philosophy, and I question their appropriateness for the posthuman player. Programming catering to an earlier consumer logic, has come of age and is “self-evidently worthy of study to those outside the field,” (Parker & Aldred) thus providing a much-needed renewal of critical perspectives involving interdisciplinary conversations – particularly with respect to what it means to be human. More than the game’s status in a hypercapitalist industry, the game’s conception of the human player invites philosophical discussion. As Parker and Aldred state: “Issues of power, identity, and representation relating to gender, race, secularity and class run through the book, and this by editorial design.” (Brown’s essay which appears later in this collection is of particular importance in laying out some pertinent philosophical perspectives that may be used to question the underlying presumptions and ideologies that characterize the notion of the human being.)

Part One: Unity and Metamorphosis: Making and Braking Family Bonds in Bioshock.

The philosophy of Ayn Rand, identified as “Objectivist philosophy,” is introduced into the collection describing “a capitalist society free of religious and government interference, where any citizen could achieve for their own gain, rather than for the altruistic fulfillment of the wants of others” (Strang). This resembles Marx’s understanding of the proletariat as accounted by Grant. “The proletariat consists of those who have no creative responsibility for the society through their work, because they do not own the means of production with which they have to work. They are employees serving the private interests of their employers” (George Grant, 1966:63, "Philosophy in the Mass Age.") Such an objectivist philosophy is rooted in Hellenic ideals that have been modernized and often without their limitations for the current context being recognized. Many theories constituting understanding the human being, including feminist psychoanalysis, continue this objectivist approach and may present a “deployment of a specific analytical instrument across a body of video games that reveal a cultural problematic unfolding across media” at large (Vanderhoef & Payne). Because of this objectivist philosophy the theme of “co-creation” is inadequately developed in posthuman gaming which continues to rely on a classical understanding of the person. In classical philosophy humans can be nothing but “creatures” of a transcendent creator-God, characteristic of the Judaic, Islamic and Christian tradition. There is much food for thought in preparation for the posthuman future of gaming as it tries to solve the tension that now exists “between wanting to constrain and protect the game experience for the player, versus opening up the experience to co-creation with the player” (Schrier). Co-creation, as an approach to game programming, cannot but result in novel interpretation, I suggest. The opening essay in Part Two in this collection has attempted a “queer” interpretation of game programming, where “queer” is in opposition to heteronormativity in sexual matters and “does not necessarily refer to a particular gender or sexuality, though it often does” (Mejeur).

Part Two: To Seduce the Ear and Delight the Spirit: Bioshock, Gender, and Sexuality.

Although some research into heteronormativity is occurring, “a reconsideration of the familiar is just what queer theory, particularly as applied to game studies, needs right now” (Mejeur). Game programming requires a philosophy that enlightens programmers who struggle in constructing games based on current social conventions to hold the illusion of gaming together. Lacking such a philosophy of creativity, “Bioshock proves itself unable to fully rupture the frames of both gametime and reproduction, leaving us bound once again to a repeatable, recognizable future” (Youngblood). Following the mind of the religious philosopher Leslie Dewart, I suggest that a recognizable future of gaming activity is to be expected because the classical philosophy that underpins game programming remains operative. What goes unrecognized here is the static ideology of Hellenic (Platonic) philosophy that limits the options of authentic co-creativity in the gaming experience. These hidden Hellenic philosophical roots are forces that facilitate “the repeated inability of games to imagine plots outside the existing structures that have governed game design for years” (Youngblood). A critical philosophical interpretation may allow for radically and distinctively new endings for gaming’s posthuman experience. The highly relevant topic of violence as part of gaming is critiqued in one essay in the collection via “a subjectivity,” that is, another way of identifying the gamer. From the point of the view of the player and the programmer, violence manifests “the paranoia of political structures, the constant need to control all resources, to stop rebellions, to prompt fear about violence while mobilizing sanctioned institutions of violence” (Ante-Contreras). Given that gaming will most likely continue to be influential in understanding humanity it needs an adequate philosophy of interpretation of what humanity is to assess correctly the violence done to humans by paranoid humans in the posthuman age.

Part Three: The Flesh Becomes Clay: Technology, Humanity, and Embodiment in Bioshock.

Posthumanism “takes the position that actions of both human and nonhuman entities affect situation outcomes, often in ways one might not expect,” (Henthorn). A concern for posthuman interpretation of the games’ outcomes, as I see it, is that classical humanism has not been adequately understood or explained from a phenomenological point of view so as to act satisfactorily as a basis for posthuman understanding. That is, there is little in contemporary philosophy to definitely specify (or to achieve consensus) in what it means to be a human being, from which posthuman thought may draw, outside the foundational thought of ancient Greek philosophy. This leads Henthorn to observe that when “posthuman analysis does not accept the border between human and machine, and instead critiques the structures that maintain humanity in the face of a progressively posthuman world;” I question what concept of humanity is being maintained – one that is classical or one that is fictional? Or, in George Grant’s phraseology, what human concept discloses “the progressive incarnation of reason?” If indeed, reason specifies what it means to be human ("Philosophy in the Mass Age," 1966:vi). The philosophical ideas expressed in current gaming programming lead me to affirm that many gaming programmers continue to create architectural backdrops that extend “ideas pursued by a particular scientific paradigm effective during the first half of the twentieth century” (Schott). Thus, it follows that an alternative philosophical understanding has the potential to take game programming into new paradigms of postmodern experience — including what it means to be human without technological intervention, but merely in a context that is no longer classical, but techno-digital. However, it may be safely said that currently the status of humanity is in a quandary as it transitions from an enlightenment humanism to posthumanism. “The human in relation to Bioshock 2 is a decaying, undead thing that continues to act on the world despite it being no more important or powerful than anything else it is relating to” (Kunzelman). But this decaying, undead thing is a product of science fiction need not remain the standard. A new conception of humanity, without technological addition, but rather interpreted through a dehellenized philosophy may afford a more positive set of optional endings to gaming activity. Naturally, this interpretation would require any philosophy of what it is “to be,” in the Western sense, to re-examine itself in light of the non-western cultural philosophies of the human experience.

Part Four: There’s Always a City: The Many Histories of Bioshock.

Gaming predominately incorporates the American political experience. “These failed utopias [Rapture and Columbia] were created during periods of social and political transition in America” (Zaidan). Hers is an historical interpretation which accounts for “how we got here,” through exploring player biases, not simply rehearsing a chronology of events. A challenge for the future presented by the essays in this collection might be how to explain an authentic human presence in a posthuman world that has been altered by technology. What might then result, then, is a game catering less to science fiction and more to philosophy and afford more of a “globalized” experience open to the player, since philosophical thinking is a habit natural to the human, not requiring a Western intellectual framework. This is not an impossibility since the game experience, “holds the potential to incite player reflection upon their role as citizens and about their own agency and choices of the doomed yet timeless worlds of Rapture and Columbia” (Zaidan). Game design need not confine itself to the inspiration that arises from Western technological philosophical interpretation. Rather, there is potential for a game programming theme to be presented as floating “in a quantum state, in which its definition remains simultaneously unclear and has the seeds of its failure as well as the seeds of its success inbuilt” (Fuchs). Quantum mechanics views the universe as a “wave” function which cannot be experienced at a quantum level, only macroscopically through choices made by the player. Quantum mechanics’ influence notwithstanding, however, current experience is that “the same economic and creative challenges that frustrate characters in [Bioshock and Aliens] are often at work on the very designers, programmers, and producers who bring those games to life” (Arnott).

Part Five: All That’s Left Is the Choosing: Rethinking Agency in Bioshock and Beyond.

Those who programme games differ from those who author books. The task of the authors of books is to make their readers subject to them and to the books’ plot in order to evoke a critical reflection from the plot, or simply to provide entertainment. In gaming, however, “the challenge for developers is to find a space for critical games in an industry that is driven by player demands” (Thorne). The “involved” choices on the part of the player ultimately result in “the ever-fluctuating definition of the human” (Brown) which often departs significantly from traditional Western understanding. “Humanity has been called an inherited deposit, and we only become "fully" human as we make that deposit our own” [my emphasis] (George Grant, 1966:2, "Philosophy in the Mass Age." Copp Clarke Publishing). While this perspective may be tenable in Modernity, it is likely not to be so in the Posthuman age. The reason for this, I suggest, is that Modernity, and its variants, has not succeeded in satisfactorily specifying (identifying) what is to be human. Thus, some philosophical work remains to be done before Posthuman gaming can accept a specificity of the human as the foundation upon which to design its games. (Perhaps, to be human means to lack, or defy, such specificity.) From my point of view, as in the initial age of the computer in this age of gaming, “garbage in: garbage out” remains a force that cannot be ignored except to the players’ and game’s peril. Improvement (not progress) is required and is, in fact, built into the gaming experience. Improvement, being built-in to the experience, begs the moral question of a human definition. “The fact that players do not have consistent agency or control over the character or gameplay does not limit play or meaning – in fact, it defines them” (Wysocki & Brey). Hence the need for an appropriate interpretive philosophy of gaming as this collection of essays demonstrates.

WORLDCAT Link: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1099930915

Like all worthwhile traditional travel guides not all the sights available are covered in one tour – just the most significant – leaving us to explore the side streets on our own. Mahon’s guide highlights the various sights of interest for the contemporary philosophical inquirer whose vision has been whetted to explore further what Mahon has introduced in this deeply researched and copiously noted book. My review is limited to a few observations that from my perspective I hope will encourage others to consider his research. It is not the last word on posthumanism, as he has noted, but is certainly cutting-edge thought, as I understand him.

There is more that constitutes us humans than just ourselves, as traditionally understood from a classical Western philosophy, if Mahon’s exposé of “concrete” posthumanism is correct. Religion, politics and philosophy are being rewritten as we enter the posthuman stage of an evolutionary process, he has suggested. In this evolutionary process, his “unit of analysis” is “humans + tools,” not just humans. In analyzing this unit, he has placed emphasis on the boundary between “human” and “tools,” which is increasingly becoming blurred. What is significant is that such blurring of boundaries (not merely a shifting of boundaries) opens the possibility for us to do consciously, in the posthuman stage of evolution, what we thought nature did unconsciously in the classical stage of evolution. In short, we as “humans + tools” consciously direct our evolution in the posthuman world. That is one conclusion I draw from his essay. Secondly, the unit “humans + tools” constitutes a changed status (within a philosophical point of view) of human beings from that of being mere creatures of another entity or entities to being “co-creators” of themselves.

Active engagement, not passive representationalism, is the key here as I understand Mahon. He writes: “I have been endeavouring to give you a concrete sense of posthumanism that actively seeks to avoid getting stuck at the superficial level of ‘representations’ or ‘images’ or ‘metaphors’ of science and technology through an insistence on engaging actively with actual techno-scientific developments and research” (p. 155). Representations, images and metaphors constitute the classical philosophical perspective, (inspired by Hellenic philosophy) whereas, engaging actively with actual techno-scientific developments and research characterize the posthuman context (inspired by attempts at existential dehellenization) as I see it.

Has he succeeded with this guide? I asked myself this question in preparing this review. What overall success there may be that I do not know. But he has succeeded in clarifying for me some of the same issues that I had been pondering. The follow-up question (to myself since I am retired and no longer engaged in active teaching) was: So, what’s next? To write this review I answered. On the presumption that a review is to assist the potential reader in making a decision for or against reading a book, I offer the following suggestions to potential readers. 1) Readers and future reviewers should note the subjunctive tense throughout the guide – nothing is truly fixed and options remain. 2) Brush up on classical or humanist philosophical concepts (if needed) to bring Mahon’s understanding of concrete posthumanism into sharper relief. 3) Heed his advice to persevere with the difficult concepts he discusses; the more information the better the understanding. 4) Read this guide as the author’s attempt to put order into chaos – which was the same purpose made by classicists at their particular stage of human evolutionary self-knowledge. 5) Mahon’s presentation of concrete posthumanism suggests engaging techno-scientific “reality.” Deeper probing and further clarification are needed into techno-scientific reality in the critical style of Leslie Dewart, particularly for the more philosophically minded reader, which considers the possibility of reality “beyond being.” In critiquing our Hellenic heritage Dewart has suggested that “being” and “reality” are not always to be identified. Reality may be conceived of as that which is somehow “beyond being,” and not being itself, which to my mind is characteristic of a posthuman stage of self-knowledge. As I understand him then, “to be, or not to be (human),” characterizes the posthuman context that his guide encourages us to navigate.

WORLDCAT: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1123964502

Clearly this book is intended for professional academics. However, it can serve as a point of departure to introduce anyone knowledgeable about the gaming phenomenon but lacking a philosophical background the book serves it purpose well in this regard.

I came across the book by happenstance and was captured by the authors' approach from the beginning especially since I am totally unfamiliar with the genesis of the contemporary gaming phenomenon. In light of gaming’s popular interest, I did expect more than one philosophical review for the book on Amazon. But perhaps that speaks to the status of philosophy in contemporary North American culture. In their Preface the authors note that not all individuals are philosophically inclined and state clearly that they draw upon the resources of Western philosophy, i.e., the analytical tradition. Although, as I read through the chapters there seemed to be moments when a phenomenological understanding (not phenomenalism) was given some expression. This review is from the point of view of a phenomenological philosopher and hopefully my observations will bring out some valued differing approaches to the interpretation between the analytic and phenomenological (Continental) ways of thinking. Naturally, not all that could be said, has been said in this review.

Chapter One, I, Player: The Puzzle of Personal Identity (MMORPGs and Virtual Communities) discusses personal identity through statements about the person, rather than inquiring into the constitution of the person as a living organism. The authors “focus on issues about the metaphysical status of the self that arise specifically in the status of video games.” For the phenomenologist, the problem here is the same for the analytical philosopher, i.e., does the metaphysical status of the self always equate to the person? Rather than an epistemological approach to this problem the phenomenologist properly focuses on human understanding as a psychological phenomenon but interpreted philosophically. That is to say, where the epistemologist encounters a puzzle in life, the phenomenologist encounters the mystery of life. While both approaches are grounded in individual experience, a Hellenic-grounded interpretive philosophy may not be the only viewpoint for a satisfactory personal understanding. A phenomenological philosophy of consciousness interprets the individual’s “life in progress,” not a static “state” in life. Gaming has the potential to disclose a philosophical anthropology of the person, not only a philosophy of human functional abilities, it seems to me.

Chapter Two, The Game Inside the Mind, the Mind Inside the Game (The Nintendo Wii Gaming Console) discusses the “tools” of gaming in light of the unsatisfactory theory of phenomenalism. The authors suggest that enactivism as a theory is the better approach, thus remaining within the Hellenic epistemological tradition which attempts to ascertain the manner in which experience represents the way things are in themselves. The phenomenologist attempts to disclose the way things are in the experience of the person, but through the medium of consciousness, not the classical perspective of knowledge. Hence, the phenomenologist (a philosopher of the mind) attempts to transcend the limitations of analytic philosophy by identifying a different starting point for reflection, rather than develop further the scientific one that remains dominant in Western culture. The phenomenological starting point of conscious interpretation has been influenced more by Continental philosophy than by scientific methodology.

Chapter Three, “Realistic Blood and Gore”: Do Violent Games Make Violent Gamers? (First Person Shooters) discusses the heritage of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophical understandings in approaching the design of games, particularly with respect to violence. The authors’ Hellenic and thus Christian interpretation makes their conclusions and preferences predictable concerning the ethical norms to be considered when designing games. (I wonder: Is there any significance to be drawn that Chapter Three ends with a “Concluding Homily,” and Chapter Seven with “The Games We Choose;” whereas all the other chapters, save Chapter Four which has no “Conclusion,” end simply with “Conclusions?”)

Chapter Four, Games and God’s Goodness (World-Builder and Tycoon Games) clearly reveals the traditional approach to understanding God within Western culture with all its attending problems and contradictions. The authors, being analytical philosophers, accept reason as the faculty that specifies the living organism as a person – an epistemological perspective rooted in classical philosophy. Many phenomenologists however, consider possessing a self-reflexive function of consciousness as specifying the living organism as a person – a psychological perspective considered philosophically, not scientifically. Here the focus is on the person; not on principles or propositions of knowledge. Terminating their discussion, the lesson to be learned the authors state is that to understand God even as “a being with unimaginably vast knowledge, power, and goodness, decisions about when and how to interfere with the natural order…,” would have to be atrociously difficult and demanding. The phenomenologist does not understand such difficulties arising from God interfering with the natural order, but such difficulties arise from our self-conscious relationships within the natural order.

Chapter Five, The Metaphysics of Interactive Art (Puzzle and Adventure Games) hint, as I see it, at a phenomenological understanding which is not evident in the classical heritage of Western philosophy. That is, the creative participation of the observer in what is observed is a novel perspective with no antecedent in Hellenic philosophy. This changes the overall paradigm from a purely Hellenic one, where Fate rules the day, to a phenomenological one, where humans contribute to the determination of their future. The authors speak of “The Objectivity Argument,” which is an active process and not to be confused with “objectivism” which is an ideal concept. (When philosophizing in English, individuals often confuse “- ity” words with “-ism” words. Although addressing the same phenomenon, they do not always mean the same. Consider this statement: “I respect your nationality, but I am suspicious of your nationalism.” In short, the latter is less than the former and can be interpreted negatively.) Such distinction is often not clearly made or understood by contemporary philosophers. The objectivity argument attaches to the person, not an external norm. In fact, I can learn much from understanding “your personal psychology” (p. 95). In short, for the phenomenologist intersubjectivity (an activity) replaces external norms (objective ideals). Drawing on Stanley Fish the authors speak of a player’s actions and decisions understood as “coconstituting the work of art” (p.100).

Chapter Six, Artificial and Human Intelligence (Single-Player RPGs) treats of AI in the context of time. Predictably, a Hellenist approach to time is accepted without question. That is, time is linear, not cyclic. Philosophically, cyclic time has no beginning, nor ending as linear time does. As well, the correspondence theory of truth is accepted as the norm. In explaining the development of CRUM (Computational-Representational Understanding of Mind), it is presumed that the rules of the English language (or Western idiom, if you prefer) are operative and these have contributed the basics of a “computer language.” The discussion of the phenomenon is undertaken from this perspective. Given that the ontic culture of the West and not a phenomenological culture has given rise to computer science, this is not surprising. After acknowledging that the “flexible adaptive behavior characteristic of human cognition,” to use the authors’ words, is an activity, not a fixed reality, the authors then ironically enter on a discussion of “fixing” the content of thought. For the contemporary philosopher content is dynamic, not fixed. Flexible adaptive behavior has not, to date at least, been replicated by computers as I understand. At present, most phenomenologists do not hold out any expectation that a non-living entity ever will spontaneously “adapt” itself to its environment. The “I’m sorry, Dave I can’t do that” remark of 2001 Space Odyssey fame remains in the imagination and as a puzzle to the analytical philosopher. It presents, however, as a possible mystery for the contemporary philosopher who questions the “fixity” of content.

The final chapter, Epilogue: Video Games and the Meaning of Life sums up the whole thrust of the authors' purpose which, as I understand it, is to investigate the games as a means to introduce philosophical thinking. This enterprise has considered only the Western analytical perspective, which is not surprising since it is highly doubtful that the computer phenomenon could have arisen in any context but the Western scientific tradition with its roots in Hellenic philosophy. This is similar to the notion that atheism could only have arisen with the Christian culture, (due to modern scientific criticism) and not in any phenomenological culture. As it reads the whole book, to my mind, is an exercise in the “fine tuning” approach to classical philosophy through gaming. But there is more. The authors remark: “And perhaps, therefore, philosophical questions about the meaning of life are better re-phrased as questions about what we are to do with ourselves after we have finished all of our basic, unalterable biological 'functions'” (p. 154). I would suggest that this to do question could be replaced with a who am I question inquiring into the meaning of life. That is, the awareness of the time spent gaming is not as revealing philosophically in the contemporary culture as who is gaming, it would seem to me.

WORLDCAT: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/443273453

Gabriel’s book amounts to presenting a threshold for posthuman philosophical thinking. My review of his book is limited to one significant concept: that of human consciousness and his contribution to the understanding of it. Since it is after consciousness that all else about the human mind follows. Referring to human consciousness, he writes: “We are once again dealing here with old wine in new bottles” (p. 130). Consciousness belongs to the mind and, there is no objective solution to the question of the mind, according to Gabriel. However, subjectively, the mind has the capacity to create self-conceptions, he maintains. Besides material realities, “immaterial realities” also exist which cannot be investigated by the natural sciences. Nor do these immaterial realities belong to another world. They are part of this world. Here his perspective is reminiscent of that of the religious philosopher Leslie Dewart (1922-2009) that is, only one world exists, the one in which we currently live. There is no other transcendent world affording humanity a better life. Gabriel’s view supports a duality since he holds that there is no mind (an immaterial thing) without a brain (a material thing). Mind and brain are distinguishable but not separable. From my perspective this view amounts to a preservation (although altered) of Hellenic metaphysical principles, interpreted phenomenologically, which are often somewhat forgotten in philosophical modernity. Gabriel insists that contemporary sciences cannot avoid a role for philosophy in the interpretation of technological social experience.

Influenced by the Continental tradition in philosophy, Gabriel distinguishes philosophy of mind from philosophy of consciousness. He avoids thinking of the mind as equivalent to consciousness. However, such equivalency often occurs in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. Unless I have misread him, he thinks it is a misguided effort to view the human mental life as part of the directionless world of the natural sciences. Human mental life always has motives, and he suggests that Hellenic inspired metaphysics (reflecting fixed conceptual thinking) is “just another form of superstitious overextension of one model of explanation over the entirety of the cosmos, a modern form of mythology” (p. 44).

Knowing that we are conscious is not equivalent to knowing what consciousness is (a moment’s reflection confirms this) and human consciousness allows the human being the unique capacity to say “I.” However, philosophically, the form needed to manifest this “I” is not clearly understood, as yet. In our techno-scientific age the classical concept “animal rationale” no longer specifies the human being as it had in classical times, he believes. Rather, the human being is a conscious “self” that knows some “thing” and able to communicate it to others and to itself. Leslie Dewart had much the same notion earlier when he distinguished between thematic and non-thematic speech. “We shall see, however, that the ability to experience meaningfully is the basis of self-definition, the creation of a self that is meaningful to itself: therefore, the thematic consciousness may be best referred to as the “self-defining” mode of conscious life” (Evolution and Consciousness, 1989:118). Gabriel’s whole work is a subtle appeal to retain philosophy (of consciousness) as a legitimate concern in itself, countering the tendency in the English-speaking world to “outsource philosophical issues from philosophy to natural science, which is a fundamental mistake” (p. 176). Gabriel notes that a “realm of ends” specifies the conscious human being. In the “realm of ends” there is no Hellenic sense of an “essence” needed for a posthuman understanding of the individual human being. Rather, “the realm of ends is a system of concepts that we use to make conscious human action understandable to ourselves,” which is characteristic of posthumanity, according to my view (p. 206).

While I am sympathetic to Gabriel’s overall assessment of the current situation constituting a threshold of posthumanism, I cannot help but conclude that he is less optimistic about the future of posthumanity than I am. “It is a central task of philosophy to work on an avatar of the human mind that can be led into the field, in the sense of an ideology critique, against the empty promises of a post-human age” (p. 220).

WORLDCAT Link: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1086008629

As I evaluate it, this is a book on ideas philosophically understood from within the analytic tradition which seriously tries to avoid the ultimate problem of skepticism. In the Introduction, Williamson notes Descartes’ “radical strategy of doubting what he could, including the whole world outside his mind, in order to rebuild science on the firm foundation of the few remaining certainties” (p. 1). Prior to its professional status in academia, philosophy is already in our lives both in trivial and important ways, the author maintains. In other words, philosophy is there as common sense. With this observation, I have no quarrel. But having read Leslie Dewart’s (1922-2009) Hume’s Challenge and the Renewal of Modern Philosophy, published posthumously, I do not concur with many of Williamson’s conclusions, since I am a philosopher who favours the phenomenological perspective. He seems to be aware of such a possibility when he writes: “Many philosophers will hate my picture of how to do philosophy. I leave the reader to judge” (p. 5).

I am not convinced that contemporary philosophy’s stagnated state (as Dewart described it) is solved by philosophers embracing the “appropriate scientific methods for answering their questions, which are questions of the traditional ambitious kind” (p. 5). However, that is not to say that the book is not worth the time taken to read it. In Chapter 9 Williamson advances some ways by which philosophy “learns from elsewhere” (p.111). He concludes the book by expressing the hope that philosophical methods can be improved, (possibly with the assistance of a future reader of his essay) just as scientific methods have been improved over time. I share a similar hope for the development of philosophy but, in light of Dewart’s insights, my hope is expressed through a phenomenological perspective.

WORLDCAT Link: (review form failure; 21 October, 2019)

"While ethics has always been embedded in technological contexts, humans have, until very recently, been the primary authors of their moral choices, and the consequences of those choices were usually restricted to impacts on individual or local group welfare. Today, however, our aggregated moral choices in technological contexts routinely impact the well-being of people on the other side of the planet, a staggering number of other species and whole generations not yet born" (p. 2).

Comment: I fail to understand how in their “aggregated moral choices” humans do not remain primary authors of their moral choices, as the author seems to imply.

"Such complexities [of the contemporary human situation] remind us that predicting the general shape of tomorrow’s innovations is not in fact, our biggest challenge: far harder, and more significant, is the job of figuring out what we will do with these technologies once we have them, and what they will do with us. This cannot be done without attending to a host of interrelated political, cultural, economic, environmental, and historical factors that co-direct human innovation and practice" [Vallor’s emphasis] (p. 5).

Comment: The human being is the only consciously deliberate agent in moral ethical situations. I see no reason to posit any conscious deliberate initiative on the part of human environmental factors, unless it is another human being, of course. I distinguish between movement and action. While parts of the human being’s environment may move, they do not consciously act.

"To see what relational understanding is and why it is essential to the practice of moral self-cultivation, it helps to recognize how classical virtue traditions conceive of the human person: namely, as a relational being, someone whose identity is formed through a network of relationships. While some virtue traditions regard one’s relationships with other living things, objects, places, or deities as part of one’s unique identity, all virtue traditions acknowledge the central importance of our formative relationships with other human beings: our family, friends, neighbors, citizens, teachers, leaders, and models" [Vallor’s emphasis] (p.76).

Comment: It is a bit of a stretch, I think, in classical virtue ethics to recognize a person’s identity as formed by relationships. (Perhaps she means character.) Her suggestion of relational formation, in fact, belongs to a distinct contemporary philosophy of consciousness that requires the rejection of the Hellenic concepts of essence and existence, characteristic of classical philosophy in forming personal identity.

In discussing “competing visions of human (or Posthuman) flourishing” on page 231 she opts not to expand on the clarification and significant difference between “transhumanism” and “a coming posthuman era” for reasons of space, as she admits in an endnote (p. 277).

"For reasons of space, this [discussion] passes over two key distinctions: the first is between the strong transhumanist program for enhancement and more modest enhancement goals that stop short of radical alteration of the human species. The second is the distinction between “transhuman” and “posthuman” philosophies; some transhumanists explicitly call for a posthuman future, that is, one in which humanity has been surpassed. Others … reject the notion of leaving our humanity behind, while simultaneously regarding the nature of our humanity as almost infinitely malleable. Finally, there are uses of “posthuman” in literary theory, gender, and culture studies … that do not map neatly onto the transhumanist conception of posthumanity. Both distinctions are important but fluid and contested.

Comment: To my mind, the very reasons she cites to pass over in this distinction ought to merit a deeper and more serious study. A return to classical principles, no matter how successfully “tweaked” cannot do justice to this contemporary philosophical question. Our human experience already indicates that the products of digital technology are not impossible fictions in many cases, and we experience the boundaries of such products, not as “fixed” (as is Hellenistic philosophy) but as fluid (as in phenomenological philosophy). Since human experience has not ceased to evolve, since the human being has not ceased to evolve, it follows that to be human is not a static state, but a fluid one subject to further evolutionary development — under the direction of a conscious human agent — unlike the previous process of pre-conscious biological evolution. That is to say, “pre-conscious humanity” has been surpassed by a “conscious humanity,” which, potentially, may be surpassed again in the future. That there are “uses of ‘posthuman’ in literary theory. gender, and culture studies” that do not integrate well with our present understanding is no reason to opt for an up-dating of the classics, and ignore an alternate philosophical approach that is likely to be more fitting to contemporary human experience. To my mind, this rejection is a major weakness of Vallor’s approach to the whole challenge of technology and virtues, which cannot be resolved by a sophisticated return to traditional thinking.

A note for the theologically erudite: It might be advantageous to view Vallor’s perspective at updating classical philosophy to meet the experience of the contemporary age as similar to that of the ecclesiastical authorities’ attempt at updating theology to meet the experience of the modern world. They opted for an aggiornamento, rather than for a ressourcement of philosophical thought, the latter being the more resourceful.

WORLDCAT Link: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1073862407

With the presumption that our early biography influences the way we think, Baum sought to detect “styles of theology” of notable American theologians during the 1970’s. Their stories, he writes, “persuade us that hidden in our lives are resources for reflection.” (p.2) This review supports Baum’s conclusion. However, the reader may assess the stories differently.

Being somewhat a contemporary of these individuals, I read with interest their recollection of their histories that unfolded within the American religious context of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Studying theology in the 1960’s and 1970’s, I was aware, by reputation only, of some of the individuals Baum invited to tell their story. However, I had read the work of some others more deeply as part of my own course work.

I first became aware of Baum’s book in 2019, not knowing it existed since 1975. I discovered a common attitude in the contributors’ accounts which I believe reflected accurately “the sign of the times,” to use a Vatican II expression. Despite their diverse starting points, they all arrived at the common conclusion of looking towards an optimistic future that, in fact, never materialized, or at least has yet to unfold. I summarize their respective visions below.

• Gregory Baum’s personal revelation was that, after a traditional education: “The study of this ‘new’ theology was extraordinarily liberating for me. I readily followed the new theological perspective, even though it took me many years to work out for myself the many implications of the new view point. What was demanded of me was a total rethinking of the theology I had studied: there was not a single topic that remained unaffected by the new perspective. Eventually the very doctrine of God would have to be rethought, for if the divine mystery is present in man’s discovery of herself as situated in the human world, and is operative in man’s ongoing creation of her future, then God is not extrinsic to human life but the gracious presupposition of man’s humanity and hence in no way, however qualified, a possible object of the human mind.” (p.22) Anyone familiar with Leslie Dewart’s perspective on the philosophy of human consciousness will recognize the significance of Baum’s comment.

(Note: Baum died in 2017 at the age of 94. He left the priesthood in 1974 and subsequently married without ecclesiastical permission. In his last book, The Oil Has Not Run Dry he recounts his first homosexual experience at the age of 40.)

• Somewhat naïvely, it seems to me, Rosemary Radford Ruether confirms her tenacity to Catholic Christianity at the end of her story. “Catholicism, for me, is my paradigm for the human dilemma. I relate to it, not as a repository of truth by which to make a fixed identity, but as a terrible example of what we all are. It is in much the same way that I am passionately an American. It is impossible for me to do otherwise. This is my history, my people. It might be more pleasant to be a Quaker or a Canadian, with less time, less opportunity, less power for evil, but perhaps also more dull.” (p. 55) She engaged in an “exciting” life in the Church via women’s studies and related activities.

• Admitting that the American religious and secular loyalty was shaken in his time David J. O’Brien still was able to pen these words. “Throughout my life, people in and out of the Catholic community have constantly helped me to discover unknown parts of myself. I continue to believe that we in the Catholic community could do great work in the world if we could constantly offer one another a challenge and an invitation. The challenge — to change our lives to become more fully a people living for others — and the invitation — to be part of a community of people trying to do the same — both derive from a continued faith in Jesus Christ, whose promises remain ever before us, calling us to be better than we thought we could be, together, all of us, with him.” (p. 85) 

• Charles Curran concludes his essay on a personal note after discussing his theological development “in terms of events and the thoughts of others” that had influenced him. (p. 114) Reflecting on his personal situation, he had come to recognize that, “although I am constantly impatient with the rate of change in the Church, the recognition of my own sinfulness and of how slow I am to change has made me more patient (perhaps too patient at times) with regard to progress and change in the Church.” (p. 114) Despite his criticism of the Church he remained a true supporter on a very profound level, but he said that there is a stubbornness in him that also contributes to his willingness to take controversial stands. He sums up his reflection by this significant and psychologically accurate description: “In fact, my own experience in writing this essay has made me even more conscious of the influence that personality, events, personal history, and the thoughts of others have had on my theological development.” (p. 116)

[Note: In 2009, a reviewer for the National Catholic Reporter wrote: “Curran is unusual. Too many scholars serve narrow factional interests, be they national, political, economic or religious, all the while denying that social and political responsibility has anything to do with their pursuit of truth. … Curran, in contrast, takes all these responsibilities seriously.”]

• Monika Hellwig’s participation in a “multidimensional” community gave her an opportunity “to observe some very extraordinary Christians, as well as some of the great European scholars far beyond the small circle [she] met earlier at the Notre Dame Summer School of Theology.” (p.142) This allowed her to draw the conclusion: “When I reflect on what theology is for me now, I realize that first of all it is not a career I have chosen but a task that somehow landed in front of me to be done. Secondly, it is a task that is done primarily from the resources of my own life experience within a great tradition that I am very happy to have internalized, for which I have the deepest affection and respect, and for which I consider myself co-responsible. Beyond that it is a task in which intellectual endeavors are only the tip of the iceberg that shows. The reason I engage in it is mainly that it gives me great satisfaction and that it seems to meet a need as basic as those I set out to meet in Liverpool and had hoped to meet in India. In particular, it seems to me that there is great confusion, uncertainty, and a crisis not only of understanding but also of confidence among Catholics today. I do not think Catholicism is the only way to live. I believe I would have found the same kind of deep-rootedness had I been raised Jewish or Hindu, but of my own tradition I know unfailingly from the inside that it makes total sense. I want to draw on my experience to assure my fellow Catholics that the mandalas do not break.” (p. 145) As I understand her contribution to these essays, ultimately from a small circle of theologians through to a multidimensional religious experience she internalized a larger, but still particular Church.

{Note: Monika Hellwig died in Washington, DC in 2005, aged 75.]

• As an exception to the earlier contributors, Eulalio Baltazar’s piece does not end in a sense of particular community, church or otherwise. His experiences and reflections have brought him to appreciate a sense of transcendence appropriate to the human community. “My present state of philosophical and theological reflection is one of transition from process thought to poetic and mystical thinking. There is profound truth in the saying that a philosopher is a frustrated poet. Having been educated in the West, my thinking has been for the most part scientific, logical, and rational as opposed to the imaginative and poetic ways of Eastern thought. Process thought and philosophy are the products of conceptual, rational, and logical thinking. But reality is deeper than what can be grasped by rational, conceptual, and philosophical thinking. … But today, with the increasing interest in the occult, the mysterious, in the religions of the East, perhaps a theology based on the imagination and expressed in poetic form would be a more effective means of leading the modern mind to a communication with the Transcendent. We must insist here however that Transcendence is not found by an escape from the world, but through the world, and the world where the Transcendent is found is in the suffering, the sick, the oppressed, the exploited, the poor.” (p. 164) Like Baum’s perspective, anyone familiar with Leslie Dewart’s perspective on the philosophy of human consciousness will recognize parallels in his story.

• Andrew Greeley remarked that his accomplishments outlined in this essay are aliquid (something, but not very much) and the things in which he invested his selfhood “have all failed.” With respect to his contribution to religious life he concluded: “My life, as well as my thought, has been empirical, pragmatic, ad hoc. I have thought and lived playing it by ear. When faced with a new opportunity or a new idea or a new project, I have for the most part said, why not? And when it was a question of speaking out or holding my tongue, over the last ten years I have rarely done the latter.” (p. 204) With respect to serving the Church (blemishes and all) he wrote: “I became a sociologist to serve the Church, but it became apparent that I had acquired the skills mostly in vain. The choice was clear: I could go on being a sociologist and become more and more excluded from the Church, or I could give up sociology and come in out of the cold. I said to hell with them.” (p. 193)

[Note: Andrew Greeley died in 2013 at his home in Chicago.]

• Neither a reassessment, nor a deeper investigation into philosophical consciousness is the outcome of Anthony Padovano’s essay. His contemporary and future Church is characterized by poetry, not philosophy. In his acceptance of a poetic Church he does not explicitly deny the existence of a philosophical Church. He writes: “I wrote Free to Be Faithful as a symbol for those who needed symbols to sense their aliveness. In that book, I left forever the Ptolemaic universe and I ended my acceptance of Aristotle as the norm for my thinking. I had no regrets for the passage or the parting nor any remorse for the former association. But I required a freedom not from my past thinking but for my future work. … Fidelity to this task demanded the freedom to make symbols as the rational universe collapsed and to express hope as the Church I once knew died a long overdue death. It was time for the twentieth century to dawn and to enlighten a new Church with its grace. It was time for the Church to go on a journey, with meager means and provisional priorities. It was time to abandon rigidity and to make symbols in the pale light of a new age.” (p. 134) In hindsight and in light of one’s own experience Padovano’s optimism may be questioned as to if it was ever fully realized by a large number of the faithful.

• Gabriel Moran seems to have found a raison d’être outside the theology of institutional Christianity. He appears, in his thinking, not to be that far from the thinking of many 21^st Century Christians. “In conclusion of the first part of this essay I wish to note that all three of the [previously mentioned] communal influences come together in the feminist movement. Since the late 1960’s I have been acutely aware that the women’s movement is the key to both the deficiencies of Christian theology and the kind of imagery and language needed in future religious bodies. … In recent years my religious interest has continued to grow, but I am no longer able to call myself a Christian theologian. Not that I became some other kind of theologian or that I joined some other religion. I am a Roman Catholic to the marrow and even if I wished to ‘leave the Church’ (which I don’t) it would take decades of work to do so. Nonetheless, I consider the word theology to be etymologically and historically unsalvageable. I am interested these days in the metaphors, symbolism, imagery, and words that people use in trying to be religious. I find it neither necessary nor helpful to introduce the word theology into the discussion. Many people find my position arbitrary if not unintelligible, but I see no way to explore today’s religious questions within the restrictions of Christian theology.” (p. 244 & 253) Theologians of a certain age (and experience) may view his personal insight into contemporary issues as prophetic.

[Note: Gabriel Moran left the Brothers of the Christian Schools, (De La Salle Brothers) whom he joined in 1954, and was given a release from his religious vows in 1985 by the Holy See. In April 1986 he wed his colleague, Maria Harris, who had left the convent in 1973. They remained married until her death in 2005. In 2020 he was invited to re-join the Brothers as an affiliated member.]

• Interestingly, Richard P. McBrien sates: “I am reasonably certain that I would never have gone into theology had I not been ordained, from the earliest years of my conscious existence, to the Catholic priesthood.” (p. 256) He later explains, “Undoubtedly, my longstanding interest in politics and political philosophy has nourished and sustained my academic and pastoral concern for ecclesiastical reform. If I had an opportunity now to become something other than a theologian, I should probably choose to be a United States senator, a college president, a constitutional lawyer, and a nationally syndicated political columnist, roughly in that order — or any combination thereof.” (p. 269) His dissatisfaction with the ecclesiastical political order (particularly in Catholic universities) prompted him to see a possible solution, not in institutional reform directly, but in reform of the thinking of the theologian. That is, that theologians must think critically and not parrot popular trends in Catholic cultural experience. In conclusion, he writes: “What the theologian — and the systematic theologian in particular — requires is insight, judgment, and decisiveness. The sooner he or she is liberated from the sheer mechanisms of bibliographic exploration, the sooner he or she can do theology. For too long we have celebrated the mechanics (those with wide command of languages and even wider chunks of privacy and free time), and deplored our thinkers. … The systematic thinker, on the other hand, probes, criticizes, diagnoses, and prescribes. And the bureaucracy marginalizes him. … If this situation perdures, the Catholic Church will continue to forfeit the services of some of its most creative people.” (p. 270) 

[Note: Fr. Richard Peter McBrien died in 2015.]

Finally, I draw any future reader’s attention to the fact that these authors wrote at a time when two significant events had yet to take place in the Church which subsequently effected the world-wide presence of the Catholic Church. They are the Internet, as a digital cultural phenomenon, and the global media-disseminated sexual scandals of the clergy and religious within the Church. However, whether either of these events would have had an influence on the stories presented here must remain speculation.

WORLDCAT Link: (review form failure; 26 October, 2019)

This book is a final version of Dewart’s notes prepared for posthumous publication by Cajetan J. Menke (done very faithfully preserving the author’s style of writing as I read Dewart.) This work, to my mind, will be of interest to the seasoned and perhaps disaffected philosopher tired with the variations on a classical theme in Western philosophy. In short, the book is an attempt to be a prelude to a new approach within the Western philosophy of mind. “Representationism,” in which perception transfers the contents of reality into the mind, is rejected as an outdated legacy of ancient Greek philosophy. Rather, Dewart suggests that “the philosophers invented the institution of scholarship ab initio, by taking advantage of the characteristics of the human mind” (p. 91). Based on experience, this results in a contemporary understanding of philosophy to mean using the mind in a disciplined reasoned manner to arrive at a better explanation of human experience. To arrive at a better understanding first requires a probe into the failure of modern philosophy to understand the human mind, followed by an attempt to re-conceive, or re-interpret, contemporary experience without the aid of Greek metaphysics. Like all Dewart’s works, this book is not an easy read. However, perseverance will certainly reveal philosophical insights to the reader’s benefit. As Dewart admits: “Now, if this is true, it follows that, if modern philosophy should manage to re-orient itself, reject representationism, and develop a sound understanding of human nature and its cognitive powers, our culture might conceivably embrace secularity in a consistent and healthy manner and abandon the insanities and idiocies that have been fostered by its confusions about itself and its relationship to the world” (p.203). This investigation into the stagnation of Western philosophy, though not presented as a polished project by Dewart himself, is a valuable contribution within the historic development of Western philosophical thought.

WORLDCAT Link: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/957955542

The book consists of three revised lectures originally presented in 1934 which are “contemporary” to that era between the two world wars. An underlying presumption in Brock’s presentation of post-Hegelian German philosophy is that it is “the work of those who felt themselves bound to give the men of their age an interpretation of the world and an explanation of the principles of conduct, and who, for this double purpose, sought after truth” (p. xv). An overall question Brock addresses is whether or not philosophy is but one of the particular schools of thought or is it also universal. He begins by outlining the beginnings of contemporary German philosophy by acknowledging the separation of the sciences in contrast to the philosophy of German Humanism of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. This separation led to the insight of the limitation of the separate sciences and the deeper and specialized tasks of philosophy. There is a brief discussion by Brock of the significant contributions by Husserl, Dilthey and Weber to German philosophy at the inauguration of the age of autonomous science. The unique issue and danger of Husserl’s method is that the choice of philosophical problem rests entirely with the individual investigator. From Dilthey’s philosophical fragments he suggests that the self-knowledge of philosophy and all branches of learning are conditioned by historical human life having originated from it and having reacted to it. In the case of Weber, Brock believes a correct interpretation of his perspective is that science does not show the way to true values but offers clarity for choice in human decisions. In short, science can give “no dogmatic or authoritative advice” but it “offers ‘clarity’ in the universal sense that it awakens the feeling of responsibility and respect for the freedom of the individual” (p. 42). The second revised lecture consists of thoughts on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and their importance for German philosophy in promoting a new understanding of autonomy in the separate sciences. More or less influenced by Nietzsche, he notes the work of Simmel, Scheler, Spengler, and Klages as it reflected the meaning of a philosophy of life in their time. Kierkegaard reflected on the same, Brock maintains, but predominately from a Protestant Christian viewpoint. However, his importance to contemporary German philosophy is as an existential thinker as opposed to an abstract speculator; the abstract speculator neglecting philosophy due to the influence of autonomous science. The third lecture involves a brief investigation of the “philosophical and scholarly culture [that] has seriously declined among the younger generation, especially since 1925” (p. 87). Through the contributions of Jaspers and Heidegger, Brock outlines how they carried the question of the essence and tasks of philosophy a little further, although they do so by different approaches and methodologies. I consider “the forces which must be expected to determine human life in the future” (p. 118) to be playing themselves out in our 21^st century global culture. Brock lists them as technique which brings humanity in closer contact than ever before; economic processes which links humanity within a nation and within the world; the single State which internally has power over numberless human beings and externally possess power which cannot be foreseen or directed by any individual; and peoples outside Europe desiring to make their own civilizations effective and independent. Brock concludes that the question that remains unanswered is what will be the role of philosophy in the future. The book contains an annotated bibliography of all the philosophers mentioned in his essays.

WORLDCAT Link: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/908457

My review is from an unconventional perspective in that I do not critique the content of these lectures, but rather the philosophical framework that is presupposed, consciously or unconsciously, by Ignatieff in delivering these lectures which were subsequently published in print. There are five lectures in which he has told the (political) history of Canada since the 1960’s through the struggles of different groups of citizens (p. 112). However, to my mind he has actually undertaken a study of the “rights movement” within the State of Canada during that time. The lectures amount to an intellectual movement within the classical philosophical perspective of the West and are presented as if “rights talk” has ideally transformed all of us as to how we think about ourselves as citizens, as men and women, and as parents (p. 1). Ignatieff’s particular philosophical perspective is inadequate, to my mind, for a useful contemporary understanding of what he labels as a “revolution” in our thinking within our life time. One problem in appreciating his perspective is that he presents his ideas within printed lectures. Lectures are a discourse given to an audience, often in a classroom setting, and are intended “for the ear,” and not “for the eye.” That is, from a critical perspective they are to be heard and not read. Lectures, being heard, do not allow for an “on-the-spot” critical re-examination as is possible with a printed text. The interpretation of a lecture as it is being heard most likely will differ somewhat from a lecture as print being critically read. When read, the interpretation is better conducted phenomenologically than classically. I suggest that most readers, not being phenomenological philosophers, will interpret Ignatieff’s political position from the lectures in the perspective within which it was composed, that is, a classical Western philosophical perspective. My suggestion is that, should his political position be interpreted from a phenomenological or Continental perspective, this interpretation will throw a different intellectual light on his insights which may be realized more appropriately in our contemporary global situation. That will allow the reader to conduct a re-assessment of the “rights talk revolution” which occurred since the 1960’s without accepting Ignatieff’s classical conclusions which are in fact predictable in a classical context. Phenomenological conclusions are dynamic and on-going compared with classical conclusions which are static and thus are limited to a “fixed” ideological understanding. Interpreted phenomenologically these lectures afford more intellectual flexibility and novel value than understood from a classical perspective.

Another fact for the reader to understand is that these lectures were printed in the year 2000. (The actual date of the ideas that constitute these lectures must remain unknown.) This is significant because, as I write this review, twenty-one years of political development and human experience have taken place which are not, nor can be, acknowledged in these lectures. In short, the lectures are dated. Yet, they record much that remains pertinent to contemporary human experience and interpretation of political philosophy. A phenomenological philosophical interpretation can appropriately re-contextualize these examples of human experience to the present moment, and new existential insights may be revealed. There are many opportunities for such re-interpretation throughout these lectures but I mention a select few. In discussing the context of Native peoples, the word “Internet” is mentioned only once (unless I have misread the text) as a linkage element introduced by the labour of the secondary possessors of the land, thus giving them a fair claim to the land (p. 123). The significance of this observation of the Internet, to which must be added mass “social” media (in contrast to the “legacy” media) and techno-digital advancements, cannot be satisfactorily interpreted as presented in an inadequate classical garb. However, a phenomenological approach, not being classical, can interpret these developments more appropriately. Another example is that “rights” as a process of engagement is a phenomenological notion, and not an ideology, a classical concept, and is the better interpretive approach to my mind. “The idea of rights implies that my rights are equal to yours,” [p. 55] is a classical philosophical concept that holds little water in phenomenological interpretation, I maintain. The concept of “rights” is a fluid human intellectual construction upon which there is no universal agreement. A phenomenological philosopher reading these lectures will find many similar examples of a narrow, traditional and classical accounting in these lectures of Ignatieff’s “rights talk.” To my mind his concluding paragraph contains a good reason to adopt a phenomenological, as opposed to a classical interpretation, of his “rights talk.” He writes: “So the unity and coherence of a liberal society are not threatened because we come from a thousand different traditions, worship different gods, eat different foods, live in different sections of town, and speak different languages What is required of us is recognition, empathy, and if possible, reconciliation” (p. 141). These latter experiences require an existential philosophical interpretation. To my way of thinking, understanding these lectures traditionally is tantamount to attempting an aggiornamento of classical political values. An aggiornamento of classical values is not adequate to the contemporary task at hand. Rather, I suggest to the reader that nothing less than a ressourcement of the understanding of human nature is needed. Translated into phenomenological terms, this means that not a change in understanding political rights is needed, but a change in attitude in understanding nature of the human being who constructs its “rights talk” such as is not possible in classical understanding. As Leslie Dewart noted: “The phenomenological method is not the diametric opposite of the ontological; it is a more comprehensive one than the latter, whose merits it preserves and whose inadequacies it tries to remedy.”

WORLDCAT Link: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/237199009

Maude Petre’s opening words; “This is a pre-war book; finished and set in type in 1914” tells the reader its topic is free from the intellectual effects of a war-torn Europe. My review is a synopsis of some of the significant points of the Modernist movement in her day. This is the study of a cause or movement in theological thinking that appears to have gone underground as a subject of interest in the contemporary religious world. However, interest remains within some universities and its existential presence is discernable within existential religious practice. In Maude’s words Modernism “was out for the liberation of religious life from the exaggerated claims of religious forms” (p. ix).

Modernism was a movement in the Church, but not a Church movement. Nor was it confined to the Catholic Church. According to Petre the Church exists (politically) to serve religion; religion does not exist to serve the Church. Religion is universal to humanity; whereas the Church is particular to humanity. Modernist theologians sought to defend the Church by methods that did not demand a particular allegiance to traditional Catholic understanding, she concludes.

Charity and the Church’s pastoral concern for “the poor” and the unbeliever, according to Petre, impeded the development of the philosopher and historian within the Church. It thus became a learned movement within the theological schools. However, history shows that its concerns were common among the unlearned long before Modernism received its name. Maude, in her context, acknowledges the problem of the two learnings within Modernism; the secular learning of humanity and the learning of theology.

She selects some representatives of Modernism for consideration who discuss the consciousness of this crisis within particular ecclesiastical corporations as well as the general mass of the Christian faithful. Loisy’s main issue as a participant in the movement was personal in that he was asked to be untrue to his consciousness. George Tyrrell’s main issue as a participant was that he viewed the Church as a means, not an end, to the spiritual life. Modernism, as a movement within but not of the Church, tried to Christianize the emergence of democratic government. As an external political movement, Modernism attempted to advance social progress within society at large. Even though the gospel contains no formal declaration for or against the constitution of society then or in the future, in any case, the Church had to decide if the classic model of government was essential to her own existence, from Petre’s perspective.

Modernism was not a united effort of groups working in concert. It was not a cartel. Rather differing perspectives within the Modernist movement focused on the difficulties between science and the religious understanding of revelation. Church authority is the root problem of the whole modernist controversy in the opinion of Petre.

Modernism has not completely failed, Petre suggests. Rather, Tyrrell’s hope, which was that modernism was in tradition into something else, was showing some signs of life. What is needed, she suggests, is a sound philosophy of rightful authority not antagonistic to the intellectual and social condition of modern humanity. What will a philosophy of rightful authority look like? Maude answers: “Here a certain variety of opinion may prevail, while the actual issue will probably be different from all that has been guessed or predicted” (p. 205).

WORLDCAT Link: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/877734428

A Very Helpful Background

This book is a study, at the root, of authority in education and schooling understood in the broadest sense. It discusses issues in the context of Academia as arraigned before the forces of the State, domestically and internationally.

The book is composed of papers written in lecture style which makes for a non-stressful reading experience. Kersey covers the topics clearly and without unnecessary discussion prolonging the points made in presenting a “radical philosophy of education” (p. 23). Where necessary, an historical background is supplied to the issue under discussion in the (then) contemporary context and with an eye to future development.

There are many examples of legal case studies, national and international which are directly and indirectly, related to the tension between established university jurisdictions and a free enterprise philosophy.

After reading this selection of “writings on independent universities, non-traditional education and related matters” it becomes clear that the author is a polymath and his perspectives contain lessons that can be applied to other topics and contexts with similar fruitfulness.

“Education – so much more than mere training – is as much an article of individual faith as is religious belief; it is equally as worthy of treatment with sensitivity and an understanding of the complexity of the issues involved” (p. 104). This quote touching on the spiritual dimension of Kersey’s educational philosophy, finds support in another religious context in which faith and education are addressed. Readers of Maude Petre’s, “Modernism: Its Failures and Its Fruits” will recognize a similar philosophy at work.

My only quibble is with the technical presentation of the book. There is an amateurish look to the interior layout. This is due to what I see as a lack of attention to formatting and standardization of style. However, this does not take away from the insights offered. I have no hesitation in recommending the book to anyone of a libertarian mind.

Interior Notice: "This book is sold on the basis that the author and the University Press derive no monetary profit from it, and the price charged for it reflects solely that established by the publisher to cover the costs of its printing and supply."

Available online at Lulu Publishing

This is an unconventional review in that I relate what I have taken away, as a phenomenological philosopher, from an initial reading Strasser’s book. This review is not exhaustive of the contents of the book but highlights only those notions that struck me as particularly significant at this time. Others may discover different “take-aways” as I no doubt will in future readings.

As a discipline phenomenological philosophy treasures “science” in a pre-technological and pre-digital sense, even though the modern sciences, which are dominant in academia today, do not necessarily appreciate phenomenological philosophy. Pre-technological and pre-digital science does not characterize humanity in opposition to nature as some modern sciences do in desiring to overcome the limitations of nature. Phenomenological philosophy recognizes that contemporary philosophers studying human nature somehow change nature as they study it due to an appreciation of human values which determine their choices.

The subject of a phenomenological investigation is the individual who organizes the experience by selecting the data and subsequently participating in the inquiry. Objectivism is an attempt to eliminate the human perspective from what is an anthropological investigation. Objectivity, however, is the qualitative activity of human consciousness positing a transcendent “other” with respect to knowledge. Human consciousness does not simply acquire external ideas, which give facts but no interpretation. Further, interpretation of the facts suggests a secret desire for humanity to be like God therefore there is no need to seek something else beyond external being.

Human consciousness affords a choice for absolute creative freedom (which differs little from divine freedom). Humans intuitively recognize each other’s being, thus pre-dating conceptual thinking which cannot be derived from intuitive thinking. Conceptual thought is derived from reason. Intuitively, humans have a “vision” of the unique presence of the other which transcends the objective experience of their meeting.

Objectivity is a process of discovery by the intellect, whereas objectivism is an invention of the intellect. Objectivity, not objectivism, is necessary for humanity to heighten the development of consciousness and freedom. The process of objectivity, i.e., personally naming an experience, amounts to “a philosophical anthropology on a phenomenological basis” (p. 62). That is to say that one participates in the existence of the other, and shares in the being of the other. Objectivity also includes reflexive knowledge on one’s own being-a-subject. This is not possible except in human consciousness.

The process of human evolution has not yet reached its final term. Present day humanity lives an “ex-animal” life which dominates nature making it subservient to humanity. Humanity gives meaning to nature which is to say that “outside the meaning of being there is no meaning” (p. 213). God, then, has no meaning in a phenomenological philosophical sense since God is not a being.

The plurality of visions in phenomenological philosophy is inevitable. Thus, a single philosophical vision can never supply the norm to judge other visions in a definitive and universal manner. Only particular perspectives exist which account for the differing opinions among philosophers which potentially reveal horizons or visions of higher intelligibility to assist in interpreting the meaning of the human being in the world.

WORLDCAT Link: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/476934832

This is a difficult book upon which to write a review. It is a highly personal account of an individual’s faith offered to the public at large in the context of the religious spirit of the times. At the time Davis was a high-profile priest/theologian of the Catholic Church in England. His book is divided into three parts, 1) A Personal Decision, 2) Faith and the Church, and 3) Prospect for the Church. This review covers only issues that relate directly to Davis’ decisions of individual conscience.

“The purpose of this book is to take stock of my present position as a Christian,” he writes (p. 13). He maintains that he is right in deciding to leave the Church because he wanted to remain “faithful to certain positive values” (p. 17). The decision to leave the Church reflected the unhappiness he experienced in the Church. He made the radical decision, in conscience, as a free man. He does not suggest his decision applies to everyone in the Church.

Life in the Church impeded his desire to know, he tells us, since he experienced no intellectual growth there. He could no longer accept the Church’s authoritative profession of faith (p. 42). The issue of clerical celibacy played no direct part in his decision to leave. Faith, not reform, was at the heart of his decision to leave.

His objections to the Church are as a social structure, a visible entity through which the Roman Catholic Church makes its claims, particularly the claim to divine institution. (This perspective most likely accounts for Gregory Baum’s book “The Credibility of the Church Today: A Reply to Charles Davis.”) An eagerness for renewal, not doubt, became clear to him during the time he spent at the Second Vatican Council proceedings which shifted his appreciation of long-held traditional beliefs.

He thus committed himself to Christ as revealed, not as he or anyone else may have conceived him to be (p. 166). But this does not mean he need pay no attention to others in seeking the truth. “Certainly we need to be linked to areas of truth beyond what happens to be personally meaningful and personally liberating to ourselves” (p. 175). These areas of truth are expressed in a Church of renewal, not one of obstruction to the faith. In light of his experience, Davis concludes that “the faith lost by the average man was an imperfect faith, what might be called a cultural faith” (p. 186). This awareness requires a new self-understanding of the faith, both in its internal and external expression, which potentially could bring about a change in its social counterpart, the Church. His vision is yet to be realized from my perspective.

WORLDCAT Link: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12369335

“Essentially, the Council was a little more than a professional discussion between administrators of the Church, but popular imagination turned it into a spiritual rebirth of the Church,” writes Adolfs (p. 9).

The Council was an adaptation of the Church to the present, not to its future in the modern world, he maintains, which has yet to be achieved. (That is, the Council attempted to catch up with developments that had already taken place.) The Church viewed itself in the context of a secularism that rejected both myth and metaphysics. The difficulty really is to determine the mode of existence for the Church of the future in a world dominated by science and necessity.

The present social context is a product of revolutions which belong to the past. This present context might be better understood as a “growing estrangement from the traditional patterns of life and thought” (p. 45). Social revolutions belong to politics and science, not to philosophy and theology which evolve through a process of metanoia, that is, thinking differently.

Contemporary patters of life and thought are heavily scientific and technological and they attempt to develop a society in terms of the masses, rather than of individuals, who are in fact responsible for the course of history. The Church is, in fact, outside the forces that are determining the world of the future. Adolfs writes: “If the Church continues to be and to do what she is now and what she has done up till now, then she has no future. She will come more and more to perform functional duties within a social order which is essentially tied to an unchristian ideology. In this way, she will gradually dig her own grave, which will at the same time be the grave of God” (p 84). The movement of Christianity in history illustrates that it cannot be synchronized with secular developments of the future, he contends.

His critique remains legitimate, in light of the times, but one must realize that the book written before the present world-wide sexual scandals of the Church and the World Wide Web and the Internet. Their arrival must, no doubt, be taken into consideration when evaluating his conclusions today.

WORLDCAT Link: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/556829146

This book recalls to my mind Leslie Dewart’s remark, “The phenomenological method is not the diametric opposite of the ontological; it is a more comprehensive one than the latter, whose merits it preserves and whose inadequacies it tries to remedy.” To remedy classical literary interpretations is what Valdes is trying to accomplish. However, classical philosophers will find little, if anything, in this book supporting their position.

Valdes’ novel theory of literary criticism (based on Hispanic texts) reflects a new heuristic model of enquiry which allegedly establishes a new literary class and the need to locate it in literary history. He achieves his purpose through both a synchronic analysis and a diachronic analysis within heuristic models of enquiry into a structure of human action. This requires an understanding of history as phenomenologically interpreted. “Experienced reality concerns change and replacement of elements in time in a process we call history (a process that is only discernible from a considerable distance of generations if not of centuries because it is also hypothetical order.) Consequently, we seek to find rules of change concomitant with the assumption that there are constant elements involved [in a structure of action]” (p. 173). This is a thoroughly critical, but not definitive work of philosophy which philosophers of phenomenology will find most helpful. The endnotes provide a valuable wealth of additional information on the phenomenological method and Valdes’ thinking.

WORLDCAT Link: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/10020704

HUMAN NATURE

20^th Century Philosophy in a New Key

Author: Allan M Savage, D. Litt.

Created: 17 April, 2022

[approx. 5000 words]

“Very few of the observations and concepts I have used in this investigation are original, most are not even new. What I have tried to accomplish here – the sort of task that philosophy had always deemed among its chief responsibilities, though in the anglophone world as I gather no longer – is mainly to arrange a large number of tesserae that, if taken one by one, are very familiar, into the single mosaic of a fairly comprehensive and unconventional philosophical synthesis.” [1]

This essay is a précis (for which I take full responsibility) of Chapters One and Two of Leslie Dewart’s seminal book consisting of Nine Chapters. The perspective he presented here, to my mind, sets a fresh intellectual trajectory for philosophical contemplation. Written towards the end of the 20^th century the book is not an easy read, but since it introduces an alternative and refreshing philosophical interpretation, I offer this précis in the hope that it may inspire readers to read the entire book in the context of the 21^st Century experience. His “single mosaic” is not the unified intellectual fruit of classical Western philosophy, but rather is an insightful statement of the alternatives (described in the epilogue of the book) consciously available to the human species of the future. And unless otherwise noted, all italics are in Dewart’s original text.

Dewart immediately states that “the purpose of this inquiry is to develop a philosophic theory of the origin and the subsequent prehistoric development of the specifically human characteristics of human beings.” We could facilitate improving human conditions today if we could understand sufficiently well how human nature came into being. Undertaking a philosophical review illustrates that “the explanations of human evolution devised so far by science are neither as satisfactory nor as useful as they might be, and that philosophy might help remedy those defects.” However, in undertaking this task he also acknowledges that philosophy in exercising “its jurisdiction on the subject [has] likewise been wanting.”

Further, earlier philosophic explanations of human evolution often depended on some sort of “force” from within or “direction” from without. These theories are incompatible with the concept of Charles Darwin’s natural selection and have been justifiably dismissed by scientists, he observes. The process of natural selection allows an organism to survive until it reaches reproductive age. As survival characteristics accumulate “the species changes; a new form of life appears, embodying a particular way in which organisms can be adaptively related to their world.” In this process unfavourable characteristics are self-eliminating.

“If this, however, is how evolution comes about – if this interrelation [of survival characteristics] is the cause of the transformation of species – then the supposition of evolutionary forces is superfluous.” And since this is true of both natural and supernatural forces, the result is an innovative conception of causal explanation without the presumption of the notion of a necessitating force. Thus, the application of a simple extension of the theory of evolution to human beings without allowing for the peculiarities of human nature is questioned. “The conception of natural selection may be applied to human evolution only if it is first transposed into a human key.” This transposition is necessary because human life is more than the genetically conditioned physiology of the human organism which many non-critical thinkers mistakenly assume to be the cause of human life. A re-evaluation of the inherited idea of the nature of causality is required to overcome the inadequacies of this notion. To be re-evaluated is the idea that “according to the Greeks, a cause was a source of ‘necessity’ (anankē), that is, the exertion of a compelling force that brought about change, and without which no change could take place.”

Before the advent of Scholasticism, Christian philosophers had developed a system of natural forces recognized as a hierarchy composed of causes and effects rooted in the “all-necessitating power of a transcendent First Cause.” With the advent of Scholasticism, “in the theology of Aquinas, God creates by exercising his efficient causality so as to bring into being out of nothing, and to continue to maintain in being, an entity’s act of existing; the entity’s characteristics, including the way in which it operates and causes effects, are in turn the effect of its act of existing.” However, creaturely causes, according to Scholastic reasoning, can only bring about a re-configuration of what already exists since only God can be a creative cause. Dewart notes that “in time it would become clear that a world so conceived was not simply a deterministic system, but a closed one.” Even though modern science eventually emancipated itself from theology, common sense reasoning in Western philosophy maintained “that effects can be ‘nothing but’ what their causes have compelled them to be.” Eventually, modern scientific predictability was introduced into human affairs which questioned this presumption. That is, to understand the effects of natural causes is to understand what these phenomena really are, and what reality really is. [2]

Dewart then asks: “Why then, did the reductionistic concept of causality survive in science?” He answers his own question: “In considerable part for the same reason it was also preserved, albeit confusedly, in our secular culture’s common sense: because, although ideas have no measurable mass, they exhibit cultural inertia and acquire historical momentum.” In other words, the “force” of cultural inertia and of historical momentum can impede an evolutionary understanding of the advancement of human knowledge. Further, Dewart notes that it was a failure of the early scientists “that they did not always realize the religious origin of some of the concepts they took for granted as part of the conventional wisdom of their age.”

But is it true that things and events are nothing but the effects of their causes? Does human experience support this conclusion? Dewart thinks not. “The procedure that a strict and consistent empiricism prescribes is thus the opposite of what many scientists continue to assume. One should not expect to discover what a thing really is by ascertaining its causes; on the contrary, one should first ascertain what it really is, so that one can then reliably recognize the causes that explain it.” Thus, causes are made subordinate to the “explicandum” which “is the heart of the procedure that the jargon calls phenomenology.” Dewart gives two examples of phenomena that have not been sufficiently philosophically criticized and are readily accepted in common sense understanding. They are, in fact, examples of the failure on the part of biologists to determine the specificity of human life. “I refer in particular to the ideas of consciousness and human selfhood echoed upon occasion by science, such as the conception of thought that has enabled some scientists to believe that computers can think, and the conception of selfhood that has enabled others to conclude that chimpanzees have a self-concept comparable to that of human beings.” To correct this misunderstanding, Dewart maintains that contemporary philosophy’s primary task must be to develop a theory of evolution that determines the nature of an organism of the human kind. This particular theory of evolution will compensate for the scientific method which makes no provision for reflecting upon what human beings experience themselves to be.

Contemporary philosophers rightfully inquire into the nature of human specificity. And among Dewart’s conclusions is “that the essence of human life lies in its conscious quality; for being conscious is what we immediately experience ourselves to be.” Humans experience their own “otherness” to the world and its reality which allows for them to learn something of their own selfhood and act as agents of their own behaviour. In short: “The ability to experience reality as such and oneself as real is the essence of human conscious life.” But this does not mean that consciousness is the equivalent of the human biological process, but only its effect. Consciousness as an effect is not reducible to a physical cause. Further, human evolutionary adaptation differs from non-human evolutionary adaptations. Dewart writes: “Human adjustment differs from the animal kind in that man’s relations to his environment are mediated by a special kind of experience: the sort, as we have seen, that endows him with a sense of selfhood and a sense of reality.” This special kind of experience, or evolutionary adaptation, ultimately results in human society and culture.

Dewart’s examination of human consciousness addresses a series of propositions. One, to be human is to have conscious life and selfhood. Two, the entirety of human life is a consequence of consciousness. Three, consciousness characterizes the functioning of the human organism, which cannot be reduced to its functioning processes. Four, the capacity for becoming a self is acquired, rather than innate. Fifth, the ability to speak precedes the acquisition of consciousness and selfhood. As he informs his readers: “This investigation will thus be guided by the hypothesis that, through speaking, the individual human organism converts its inborn ability to experience into the acquired ability to experience consciously – though once the latter has been developed it is no longer necessary actually to speak in order to experience consciously.” All this is to maintain that consciousness comes into being as a direct effect of speech. He guides his hypothesis through three focal points; how speech originated out of infrahuman communication, how its emergence characterizes conscious human life “and how consciousness would have thereafter continued to evolve in accordance with the properties of speech, until human nature became what it is today.” That is to say that speech is communication of the assertive kind, determined by cultural causes of a specific sort, and particular to human beings. Communication is inborn, whereas the ability to speak is acquired socio-culturally.

Human consciousness has disclosed that an evolutionary mechanism has become apparent to the observer/philosopher. The human observer notes “that through the operation of nothing but natural selection, a specifically human evolutionary mechanism that was not reducible to the natural selection of genes may have emerged. … [Further,] what emerged was more than a new and higher form of communication: it was also a new form of reproduction.” Thus, conscious life reproduces itself in successive generations through the transmission of the uniquely human ability to speak. That is to say that speech changed the rules of natural selection when it came to the type of evolutionary adjustment to a human organism’s environment. “The interaction between adjustive characteristics and reproduction was no longer screened by the criterion of mere organic survival; evolution now selected for characteristics that contributed to the value that the conscious life of human beings had for them; evolution protected … the satisfaction of the individual and collective needs of human organisms insofar as they were selves.”

Dewart notes that art, law, politics, economics, science, religion, philosophy, etc., “have traditionally institutionalized the means to satisfy the requirements of the specifically human form of adjustment.” And the human means of adjustment can only be undertaken by some sort of self-interpretation and world-interpretation that renders the reality of the world and humans themselves meaningful. But rendering the reality of self and the world meaningful has both a positive and negative result. “For when evolution brought forth consciousness, it eventually produced not only the sort of organism that individually and in groups could achieve a life-promoting adjustment to self and world, but also the kind that could become dangerous to itself. … A theory of human evolution would be incomplete unless it explained the origin of some of the unhealthy, neurotic forms that human life has observably taken in the past, and continues to take, down to our own day.” Thus, I would add an engagement in war to the means whereby humans adjust to their environment.

The theory of evolution through natural selection is not a cause of the variety of the forms of life on the earth today. Rather, it is “an attempt to explain the outcome of the evolutionary process.” As Dewart elaborates: “Thus, from an analysis of human nature as we can observe it in ourselves, we should find it possible to determine the conditions that alone can explain how, given its infrahuman point of departure, it could have become what it now is.” Among my colleagues this comment has led some to conclude that, in the final analysis, Dewart was an atheist. I cannot agree in light of my understanding of his philosophical career. My perspective is that he did not see the need for God in his non-conventional philosophy. In the concluding words of Chapter One he writes: “In capsule form, then, the answer that will be proposed here in reply to the question of human evolution is: human nature originated through the interaction between the functions of experiencing and speaking, which created consciousness, and thereafter it continued to evolve – as it has to the present – as a result of the interaction between the properties of conscious experience and the properties of speech.”

In Chapter Two Dewart discuses eight topics concerning the nature of human consciousness. 1) The ontological and the phenomenological approaches to the study of human nature. 2) The human specificity. 3) The self-presence of consciousness. 4) The experiential base of consciousness. 5) The consequences of consciousness for the human mode of life. 6) The relationship between consciousness and the human organism. 7) The assertiveness of consciousness and 8) The potential of consciousness for self-misinterpretation. I offer a brief description of these salient points.

1. The ontological and the phenomenological approaches to the study of human nature.

Dewart notes that the inherited biological approach to the evolution of consciousness in insufficient, “but also that phenomenology – a procedure that philosophy has long used but which has been especially developed in the twentieth century – is essential to understanding human evolution.” The advantage of phenomenology, he suggests, is its willingness to take into account the presence of the observer to that which is observed. In the older pre-phenomenological philosophical tradition, ontology and objectivity describe the same methodological approach. Both approaches seek the nature of things in themselves. These methods pretend that the nature of things can be observed as if it were not being observed by an interpretive agent. [3] However, it is true that the presence of the observer to the observed is not that significant when the subject of philosophical consideration is not human nature. Reflection on human nature (i.e., on the “self”), however, changes the experience of the philosophical understanding of the self, allowing for self-consciousness. Thus, a philosophical interpretation of the self requires an alternative approach appropriate to addressing human self-consciousness. This is so because the human self-observer brings something unique to the interpretation of the experience of human nature that infrahuman experiencers do not bring to the experience of their nature.

The modern scientific presumption “of supposing that prejudice can be avoided through scrupulous observance of the canons of objectivity” is to be avoided in a philosophical (ontological) solution in the interpretation of human nature. In the phenomenological interpretation of human nature, the observer assigns meaning to the inherited culture and history in the interpretation of human nature. Thus, Dewart observes that “when an individual tries to understand man and world, it is too late for him to do what his ancestors did when they first became human: to begin at the beginning. For he has already been taught to think and inquire by a developing tradition that he did not create, but that on the contrary created him.” Dewart then reminds us that “anyone who should be disposed to study human nature as if it were alien to him, abstracting from the privileged information that he can as an insider obtain immediately about himself, would have in effect prejudicially assumed the reducibility of the human to the non-human; for he would have pre-supposed that the non-human, being what was first and best understood by him, provided the standard against which he could measure himself.” In fact, in a phenomenological approach the opposite occurs. Since humans have direct access to themselves, their self-understanding need not be mediated by their prior understanding of anything else. “In the study of human nature, thus, renouncing introspection is more than an unnecessary, self-decreed hobble: it is an impossibility.”

1. The human specificity.

“The characteristic that makes human beings human is the conscious quality of their experiential processes” which is never found in a disembodied state because the human organism is an essential part of human nature. Further, with respect to non-human animals, one must conclude that any similarity to human experience is by way of inference “since we have no immediate access to animal experience, we cannot answer of the basis of observed fact” as a methodological approach. “But the nature of human life must be understood from what it shows to itself about itself. That humans and animals differ in kind – or for that matter, that they do not – is rather a conclusion we may draw, if we can, from comparing what we know immediately about ourselves and what we can infer about animal life.”

Thus, the specifying feature of humanity is how humans actively process and interpret their experience. Events that are processed consciously do not have any independent reality from the processing subject. Conscious events are assigned a noumenal reality in the activity of processing by an agent. To think in terms of subject and predicate is a specifying human characteristic. “The observable fact, however, is that subjects are never found except in the state of undergoing the events that happen to them and of activating those events that make them happen.”

Further, Dewart holds that human consciousness, or subject/predicate activity is one of many processes that flow from human nature after it has acquired the capacity to speak. “We therefore seek for the explanation of consciousness in an antecedent human nature,” before speech as motivation for an unconventional philosophy.

1. The self-presence of consciousness.

An “invariable element of experiencing an object consciously consists in experiencing, moreover, that the object is being experienced.” However, humans often fail to be aware of the fact that they are aware simultaneously of experiencing an object and the act of experiencing it. That is, “in every conscious experience the act of experiencing is present to itself.” From this understanding Dewart concludes that non-conscious experience is not self-revealing, but conscious experience reveals something of the subject/agent. It is possible, however, for humans to wonder whether the object being experienced is real or not. But there can be no doubt about the act of conscious experiencing by a conscious subject either in the imagination or in sense experience.

“Consciousness qualifies experience.” Humans experience before they evaluate their experience through the use of different intellectual criteria and methodologies to qualify their experience. Infrahuman animals appear to the lack intellectual criteria and methodologies to qualify their experience. Further, “selfhood necessarily follows from the conscious quality of human experience and how it lies in the background of all consciousness once the organism develops selfhood.”

1. The experiential base of consciousness.

Experiential processes begin with sensation, that is, the reception of information. “By information I mean the effect wrought on sentient organisms by the efficient causality of objects of experience.” The conscious quality of human experience depends solely on how the information is processed. Thus, an adequate interpretation of consciousness depends on an adequate explanation of the causal process whereby an organism acquires information. However, in the active process of an organism being informed, under no circumstances is information, as some “thing,” transmitted from reality to the organism, and no “thing” is received by the organism.

Sensation involves a causal process. Within an archaic perspective, however, “most of us assume that it consists in the exercise of a ‘power’ that resides in causal agents, which they bring to bear upon a patient as ‘energy’ or ‘force’ so as to compel or ‘necessitate’ the effects.” Change or effects in things is not due to to any forceful agent but is due to the mutual spatio-temporal relations which constitute movement. That is, “to say that a thing has certain properties is rather to say that it can make a certain difference to other things.” In short, deterministic causality has been philosophically replaced by relativistic causality. The latter requires no force or necessitation.

The conscious human being has observed that adaptive evolution has given rise to an active self-determination in life. Which is to say that higher organisms also made use of information from the experience of others in addition to information from its own experience. Conscious organisms not only recognized what they needed from their environment, but also sought after it and selected it from their environment. In other words, conscious higher living organisms have a specific self-relating ability that lower living organisms lack. [4] As Dewart has noted: “For the organism now enjoyed not only the ability to participate in the events that determined its life, but also the ability to determine how to take part in such determination; it was responsible for the quality of its adaptive responses.”

1. The consequences of consciousness for the human mode of life.

There are three direct consequences of consciousness for human life according to Dewart. “First, the conscious experiencer is able to appreciate the reality of the real.” Second, one is able to experience one’s own reality as a self. “Third, appreciating both his reality and that of the world, he can give himself a positive identity by interpreting himself in relation to an interpreted world; this self-given identity I shall call the self-definition of the self.” All other manifestations of humanity follow from these three. That is to say that the consequences of human consciousness are the foundations of human culture, i.e., the institutionalization of experience by which individuals define themselves.

The self is originally devoid of all identity. “The conscious organism awakens to its own reality by experiencing itself merely as the ‘something else’ to which real objects are relative; the self is, to begin with, nothing but other-than-the-object.” The self acquires its identity negatively, that is, by not being the other that is experienced. “Thus, conscious organisms possess their own identity only because they construct it; they are persons only because they develop personhood.” The human person does not pre-exist its development. “Thus, selfhood is not the antecedent, but the consequent, of conscious experience; the only antecedent required by selfhood is an organism that can function consciously, though not yet a person.”

The succession of an organism’s experiences, as human, does not merely remain a series of biological and behavioural events. Rather: “Under the concept of reality they are organized as world.” This world is open to interpretation and re-interpretation and constitutes the human situation in which the organism lives as a self. As a further consequence of consciousness, how organisms make use of tools differentiates the human animal from the infrahuman animal. “Some animals may use tools, and a few may even learn to make tools; but for us the world itself – whatever is real – is a tool.” [5] Dewart continued to assert that the “world” is a tool and the peculiarly human environment, the non-natural, non-physical world that humans create for themselves is a consequence of their being conscious. Two of the more ancient idiosyncrasies of human consciousness are human society and human culture, both of which are artificial, and to which a contemporary third may be added, equally artificial, i.e., virtual reality. The human artificial environment is increasing in importance. “The fact that this environment is artificial, and that human beings manufacture it out of nothing more tangible than their experience of themselves and each other, makes it no less real than the natural, physical environment.” The human artificial environment offers a more serious challenge to the adjustive abilities of contemporary humans than the biological adjustive abilities shared with infrahuman life, according to Dewart.

The adjustive abilities of contemporary humans follow no predetermined pattern. In the 21^st Century not a determinist causality, but a relative causality, is recognized as effecting the human condition. Thus, the various dimensions of experience that make up 21^st Century, society, cultures and virtual reality must be re-imagined. That is to say humanity “must be imaginatively invented … not only individually, but above all socio-culturally, [humans] must create their identity for themselves.” A religious human identity, (i.e., its society, culture and virtual reality) in the broadest sense of identification, is one whose social institutions “embody the response of human beings to their own questions concerning the meaning of human life and death.”

1. The relationship between consciousness and the human organism.

The intellectual tradition from the ancient Hellenists to our day conceives individual humans and humanity collectively as a type of unity, usually expressed in the form of some sort of dualism. However, individual human beings are not reducible to either their organic experience or their conscious experience. Consciousness depends upon an organism but is not a function of an organism which is to say that “it can attach to any modality of inner or outer experience: we hear consciously, see consciously, imagine consciously, reason consciously, and so on.” Since the basis of consciousness is not organic according to Dewart, “we should look instead to the way in which the human organism, unlike the animal, can process whatever information it may receive from objects.” In short, he concludes that “consciousness is a quality that may colour the experiential functioning of the human organism.” Dewart’s ‘colouring’ of the experiential function of the human organism is an acquired function, not an inborn one. Further, the introspective activity of consciousness appears to introduce a contradiction into the functioning of being. “In other words, [the consciousness person] appears to itself simultaneously as having an organism and as being had by it, and it is difficult to imagine how that which possesses the organism can itself be the possession of the organism.”

Consciousness is not an independently existing conceptual object. It is a dynamic function with qualitative characteristics that require an appropriate organism in order to appear. Thus, consciousness, or the conscious person, is its own agent. “Consciousness has phenomenal autonomy; it is the quality of an organic function that needs no other function than itself, and no substratum other than the organism, in order to be present to itself. But this is not autonomy from the organism or its experiential functions; it is the self-sufficiency of those functions to become present to themselves.”

1. The assertiveness of consciousness.

“When the ability of consciousness to introduce opposition between itself and the object is thus envisioned, … it reveals that, whenever an object of consciousness is experienced, the object is thereby asserted as being itself and as being whatever it is. From this coign of vantage, then, consciousness is definable as assertive experience.” An assertive experience is the recognition of the real by the experiencer and it does not involve any transfer of data from the object to the experiencer’s consciousness. An assertive experience is an act on the part of a conscious individual and “is a result of the experiencer being informed by the fact that he has been informed by the object itself.” In short, the experiencer has become conscious of an object.

When humans speak, they assert their experience in and through the uttering of audible sounds (words) that communicate what they have experienced both constructively and destructively. As Dewart notes: “We must, therefore, determine not only how consciousness operates normally, but also why it can work defectively and how its defective functioning can interfere with human life.”

1. The potential of consciousness for self-misinterpretation.

Human understanding and reasoning are fallible as experience shows, but this cannot be the full explanation for misinterpretation. “For as we have seen, consciousness perceives itself immediately, prior to all reflexion and all reasoning; in this unique case, therefore, where the object to be understood is identical with the consciousness that understands it, understanding should be, if not infallible, at very least easily self-correcting.” Dewart thus accounts for self-misinterpretation by stating that “the self-presence of consciousness must be deemed to admit of variations in quality.” To overcome the deficiencies of self-misinterpretation one has to overcome the understanding of such dualism “that inclines us to misinterpret the duality as if it were constituted by (a) an object in reality, and (b) the same object, but in experience. That is, the act of experiencing is misconstrued as the creation of a mental equivalent of the original in reality, and consciousness is mistaken for the coincidence of two different contents: (a) the contents of reality in itself, which exist in reality, and (b) the contents of the experience, which exist in the mind as a repetition of reality.” From this perspective, Dewart philosophically rejects the repetition of reality in the mind, symbolically or in any other sense.

So ends this précis of Chapters One and Two of Leslie Dewart’s book. Chapter Three, “The nature of speech” leads into the section of his book entitled, “The Origin and Development of Human Nature.” There is an Epilogue, entitled “The evolutionary significance of the emergence of consciousness in variant forms” in which Dewart offers some interpretive conclusions to his unconventional philosophical investigations. My only comment is that they are significant for a 20^th Century interpretive context appropriate to his time. However, to my mind, his evaluative philosophical approach, leading up to his conclusions becomes significant for 21^st Century philosophers, making appropriate allowances and adaptations for the Internet, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. These latter social media platforms cannot be ignored today by any serious phenomenological philosopher contemplating human nature.

The ideas and notions presented here for discussion are, in fact, not new. They have been discussed for a very long time. They may appear “new to you” as a thinker exploring, for the first time, or continuing to explore, the philosophical relationships that give meaning to our life in the cosmos. Whatever “newness” there is in this book arises in the reader’s subjective awareness or consciousness of what the mind has come to apprehend in place of its previous understanding. The reader may find much that is familiar in this book but at the same time will be presented with a re-casting of the ideas that call for a new conception of those ideas and offer the possibility of a new interpretation of philosophical understanding.

The purpose of this little book is to view critically the dialectic between two disciplines: philosophy and theology. Dialectic is the art of discussion that involves the asking of questions and the giving of answers as first practiced by Socrates. This book presents a point of departure for reflection for the reader. A long tradition of human reflection records the dialectical relationship between philosophy and theology. By reflecting upon human life and experience in the context of a philosophical and theological relationship humanity has learned something of the divine.

Phenomenological theological inquiry interprets a present, pre- reflective human experience in a manner similar to the way in which poets and artists interpret experience. The style of theological interpretation adopted by the phenomenological method of apprehension reflects an existential, not an idealistic, approach to life. Sören Kierkegaard was among the first to initiate this style of inquiry into life’s experiences. Other philosophers have had similar thoughts. J. G. Fichte, W. J. Schelling, Martin Heidegger, G. W. F. Hegel, L. Feuerbach, K. Marx, and F. Nietzsche also adopted an existential approach in their philosophical inquiries.

The scholastic method of philosophy was common to both Roman Catholic and Anglican theology. Daniel Liderbach tells us that Modernists insisted upon the importance of apprehended phenomena as the starting point to describe and interpret the givenness of experience. [4] George Tyrrell (1861-1909) and Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) are significant representatives of Modernist theological thinking and their work consisted of an existential evaluation of the expressions of religious understanding appropriate to their day. Within the Anglican tradition, the Modernist theologians were known as “modern churchmen” and the most influential among them were H. D. A. Major and W. R. Inge. Cyril Garbett has noted that large numbers of the churchmen of the day regarded the claims of Christianity as inconsistent with modern ways of thought. Phrases like the Fatherhood of God, Salvation through Christ, and Life after Death seemed to them to have been meaningless platitudes. [5] New theological understandings based on a new philosophy needed to be constructed to prepare the way for the future of belief. In the future, and for some of us today, belief must take on the new form of an existential phenomenological eco-philosophy characterized by Leslie Dewart’s notion of de-Hellenization. [6]

Theological de-Hellenization reflects an apprehension of experience through a phenomenological activity that has replaced the scholastic method of interpretation. As such, de-Hellenization presents a new threshold of activity in theological interpretation. Unfortunately, philosophical de-Hellenization has been discounted and subsequently abandoned by many thinkers within Western philosophy. As a result, many of us have missed the opportunity to encounter a new threshold of theological inquiry typified by the Modernist movement. In scholastic thinking, theoretical questions and answers are formulated and governed by a Hellenized and fixed idea of nature and being. The approaches of the various philosophical schools of thought are culturally and historically identifiable. That is, schools of philosophical thought have evolved. They are a product of their times and environment. Philosophical terms change to reflect a new apprehension within the historical development in epistemology. By way of example, in phenomenological thought, existence, which is a classical term, is re- conceived in terms of becoming. Union, a classical term, is re-conceived as unity, a relational term; necessity, a classical term, is replaced by the phenomenological notion of freedom.

Theologians continually search for new and meaningful ways to understand religious experience. No hidden or ideal meanings are disclosed in phenomenological theological language which assists in the interpretation of experience. Notions come into form only in light of the subject’s intent. John Morreall concludes that appealing to hidden meaning in theological language is a negative undertaking since no hidden meanings exist. Our words are based on our intentions and if theological language is possible then theological intentions must also be possible. We should not spend our time trying to appeal to hidden meanings that do not exist in theological language. [7] Rather than attempt to identify hidden meanings, phenomenological theological thinking attributes religious meaning to phenomena. Phenomenological theology is thus freed from all allegorical limitations in its language. That the phenomenological method presents new thresholds for theological inquiry can be demonstrated to philosophers and theologians, but whether phenomenologists of religion have accurately grasped what is demanded by these methods is doubtful. [8]

Within contemporary thinking, a renaissance is in the making as phenomenological apprehension reveals new thresholds of understanding within Western culture. Thomas Ryba notes that many observers, both inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church, make the inference that the church's theology may be on the verge of another grand synthesis that might supplant Thomism. [9] This grand synthesis would be contingent upon the abandonment of traditional theoretical thinking, according to Anna-Teresa. Tymieniecka. [10] A way forward for contemporary interpretation, I suggest, is through a phenomenological understanding conceived as an eco- philosophical activity. In what follows, three phenomenological thresholds present an opportunity for the eco-philosophical activity or reflection.

2.3. An Eco-philosophical reflection: Scholastic interpretation shifts to phenomenological apprehension

According to Langdon Gilkey, in Western theological understanding, debate has moved from the question of the structure of religious language (an issue of scholastic interpretation) to the more radical question of a mode of meaningful discourse (an issue of phenomenological apprehension) in which the interpreter is part of the experience. [11] Scholastic theological understanding does not falsify the interpretive task. Rather, scholastic understanding is inadequate for the contemporary interpretive task. Phenomenological theologians continue to look to new apprehensions to replace scholastic ideology. Theological interpretation is undergoing an aggiornamento, an up-dating, or better, a ressourcement, a return to the sources, and becoming disengaged from a culture that no longer exists as it encounters new thresholds of interpretation. The environment to be interpreted is changing. A co-responsible and co-creative relationship is disclosed in a phenomenological apprehension of this environment. This is significant because persons now may accept themselves as co-responsible and co-creative agents with the divine life. In a scholastic ideology, this understanding of co-creatorship is not tenable. Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a criticism of the scholastic ideology in that Catholic critics wish for things to reveal a God-directed orientation of the world and wish for humanity, like things, to be nothing but a nature heading toward its perfection. [12]

In theology, no hermeneutic, no clear method, no set of rules secures a certainty of apprehension and understanding of religious experience. However, a relational approach suggests participatory activity within phenomenological philosophical apprehension. This participatory activity is the difference between scholastic interpretation and phenomenological apprehension. In phenomenological understanding, the Christian’s life- world provides the theologia crucis for the religious experience. The theologia crucis is an existential threshold for the phenomenological apprehension of experience. For most Western Christians, modernity is the context of the theologia crucis, and modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria from the models supplied by another epoch. It creates normativity out of itself. [13] According to Gordon Kaufman, in the phenomenological existential apprehension of the theologia crucis, theology becomes fundamentally an activity of construction and reconstruction, not one of theoretical description or exposition, as it has ordinarily been understood in scholastic theology. [14] 

2. 4 Eco-philosophical reflection: Dichotomous knowledge shifts to unitary knowledge

Another threshold of interpretation reveals a philosophical shift in epistemological thinking from a scholastic to a phenomenological way of thinking. Frederick Sontag suggests that when philosophy regains its rightful place, asking questions that no science can determine for it, it becomes less certain, but also more flexible--so that theology can once again utilize its support.[15] In the shift from static, scholastic knowledge to active, participatory knowledge certain terms are not to be confused. Subjectivism and objectivism are terms that denote specific doctrines or systems of knowledge, whereas subjectivity and objectivity are terms that connote a phenomenological and relational apprehension of the life-world or environment. In Western ideology, characteristics modeled after anthropomorphic concepts are predicated of that which is divine. Further, when applied to deity, these predicates are often interpreted as real in the collective mind and as constituting deity in se. That such divinity is believed to exist or to be Other, or is understood as an Other, does not reveal anything of the divine construction or even whether God, or gods, exist. In contrast to Western ideology, phenomenological thinking does not present a separate, but common, or detached but universal, objective reality. Scholastic philosophy/ideology posits that a true, absolute being, one who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and transcendent, personally exists over and above the temporal world, imparting knowledge to the knower. As a result, in scholastic philosophy absolute being lacks the potential for any development or evolution. This contrasts with phenomenological philosophy in which an evolutionary understanding of becoming as opposed to absolute being is disclosed and relationships are socially intended and constructed rather than imposed and determined by external theoretical categories.

A relational epistemology is an epistemology that discloses a phenomenological existential apprehension of those social and cultural symbols that have not lost their power to convince us, according to Paul Tillich. [16] Since phenomenological apprehension is socially constructed, Gordon Kaufman notes that we must see human existence in terms of these symbolical constructions that form a phenomenological unity, not dichotomous union. [17]

2.5. An eco-philosophical reflection: Idealistic language shifts to participatory language

I follow Willam F. Zuurdeeg’s interpretation that theological language is convictional language of a special type. [18] However, for Chris Botha, [19] theological language is not necessarily confessional language. I suggest that theological convictional language is unique due to its participatory, not merely descriptive, character. Further, theological language defies conventional semantics, according to Carl Raschke, and is self-consciously revelatory. [20] In identifying the field of participatory theology, Hans Küng tells us that it includes common, human, and ambiguous experiences. [21] Further, Gregory Baum observes that many Christians desire to speak about reality in continuity with ordinary experiences of their lives. [22] All this presents an opportunity for us to encounter in our daily lives new thresholds for theological apprehension from an eco-philosophical and phenomenological perspective, not an idealistic one. Charles E. Winquist suggests that apprehending existence through the word of God shifts our idealistic language to a participatory language. [23] Leslie Dewart suggests that the Berkeleyan view esse est percipi (being is perception) may be rendered esse est referri (being is relational) within our contemporary threshold of experience. [24] Esse est referri, as participatory language, is preferred to esse est percipi, which is idealistic language.

2.6 Summary

Scholastic philosophy is no longer the primary supporter of theology in its interpretation of the cosmos. A phenomenological eco-philosophical language is preferred by many to interpret their experiences. A phenomenological eco-philosophical inquiry concerns itself with the notion of becoming in the interpretation of experience. Theological de-Hellenization reflects an apprehension of experience through a phenomenological activity that has replaced the scholastic method of interpretation. As such, de- Hellenization presents a new threshold of activity in theological interpretation. Unfortunately, the activity of de-Hellenization has been discounted and subsequently abandoned by many thinkers within Western philosophy. As a result, many of us have missed the opportunity to encounter a new threshold of theological inquiry typified by the Modernist movement.

Scholastic theological understanding does not falsify the interpretive task. Rather, scholastic understanding is inadequate for the contemporary interpretive task. Phenomenological theologians continue to look to new understandings to replace scholastic ideology. Many Western-educated individuals understand themselves as faithful, co-responsible agents and seek new thresholds for theological inquiry that will express their participatory role in the religious interpretation of the life-world. In theology, no hermeneutic, no clear method, no set of rules secures a certainty of apprehension and understanding of religious experience. However, a relational approach suggests the assurance of participatory activity within a phenomenological philosophical understanding.

Scholastic philosophy/ideology posits that a true, absolute being, one who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and transcendent, personally exists over and above the temporal world, imparting knowledge to the knower. Thus, in scholastic philosophy, absolute being lacks the potential for any development or evolution. This contrasts with phenomenological philosophy, in which an evolutionary understanding of becoming, as opposed to absolute being, is disclosed and relationships are socially intended and constructed rather than imposed and determined by external theoretical categories.