The Review of Metaphysics

In a newly released collection of essays, Hildebrand explores what happens to a civilization when truth is dethroned. Writing from a perspective of personal experience, Hildebrand denounces the ideological "dethronement" of objective truth espoused by the Nazi regime. In the first chapter, whose title is the name of the book, Hildebrand outlines how it is that even previous philosophical skepticisms hinted at the existence of objective truth, whereas in Nazism and communism there occurred an "intimate link between the dethronement of truth and terrorism." This is his prominent and propelling thesis, clearly fueled by his personal outrage over the cruelty he had witnessed in his own lifetime.

Hildebrand explores this "intimate link" in various ways. Beginning on page twenty-one, he outlines the causes of this dethronement. He warns against a certain historicism and then adds a critique of an overly psychological explanation for why people hold the views they do. At the end of this section, he admits that the fundamental cause of the dethronement is creaturely sinfulness: "The attitude of non serviam (I will not serve) … the rebellion against God, is the ultimate root of the dethronement of truth." He concludes that truth is dethroned when fallen [End Page 835] human beings rebel against it, rejecting its existence and instead asserting their corrupt lust for domination, power, and control in all ideological regimes, most proximately manifested to him in the terrifying regimes of Hitler and Stalin.

Hildebrand identifies two enemies to the proper approach to truth; one is expected, the other unexpected. The first is no new story: He roundly critiques Kant for his epistemological constructivism, that is, the claim that one constructs the object of knowledge; instead, he insists on an account of knowing as reception of a given intelligible essence in experience. The second impropriety he mentions is unexpected but equally as valid, by my judgment. He warns against a rigid systemization of philosophy, a "false, fossilized rationalism" evident in some strands of Thomistic thought. He subtly cautions those overly dogmatic philosophers in the school of St. Thomas not simply to repeat the formulaic answers to scholastic disputes. To do so would be to lose that phenomenological posture of receiving the manifestation of truths in an attitude of reverence for the magnitude of this disclosure. In this exhortation, Hildebrand shows his characteristic epistemological optimism for the knowledge of objective truths in intellectual apprehension of given intelligible unities.

Ultimately, his exhortation is not merely addressed to Kantians and certain Thomists. In true phenomenological fashion, Hildebrand exhorts all philosophers to enter once again into direct spiritual contact with being through the cultivation of an interior disposition of "listening to reality." In another text, Liturgy and Personality, he describes in detail what this disposition looks like, namely, a "silent, contemplative disposition toward being" in which "the world begins to disclose itself in its entire depth, differentiation, and plenitude." Always, he reminds us that "a true philosopher struggles to delve deeper into the inexhaustible plentitude of being." A good philosopher is in tune with the disclosures of things and cultivates an attitude of responsiveness to objective reality as it is given in experience. He reminds us to cultivate an "intentional partaking of the very nature of being."

Although he might not have self-identified as a Thomistic philosopher, Hildebrand's persistent insistence on the objectivity and givenness of the objects of cognition is a recovered tenet of Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology. In this area, at least, Hildebrand is an admirable practitioner of philosophia perennis and ought to be lauded for his articulation of ancient truths in a fresh engagement with modern interlocutors. Moreover, in this book especially, he shows the staggering sociopolitical ramifications of philosophical errors. These essays are an affirmation of the truth that theoretical ideas do indeed have consequences for communal life: When truth is dethroned, ideology pervades. Hildebrand himself practices what he preaches by receiving and speaking truths ever-ancient and ever-new. This collection of essays succinctly displays the school of Hildebrandian phenomenology as learning to live with...