“Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.” - Edith Stein
In my previous essay, I alluded to the importance of having a proper account of and paying sufficient attention to subjective realities. First, I would like to clarify what is meant by “subjective realities,” since people all too often dismiss such things with a phrase like “yeah, but that’s all subjective,” as if to say, “there’s no point in talking about that,” or even “that doesn’t really matter to our discussion/decision-making.” By the term “subjective realities” I do in fact mean those emotions and perceptions, both in accordance with right reason and not, which, properly speaking, only exist in the subject that experiences them. Dismissing these realities is a common overreaction to relativism, particularly from contemporary conservatives; in their zeal to affirm objective reality, they exclude the importance of everything else. This is not the Catholic way. If someone responds to an objective moral standard of “thou shalt (not) do x” with “but I feel such-and-such” or “x makes me feel bad in such-and-such way,” the charitable answer is not to simply reaffirm that maxim, or worse, retort by saying they are reprehensible for feeling that way. But this is often how such exchanges go. To choose a particularly timely example, simply reaffirming the factual and objective binary nature of human sexuality does not sufficiently deal with the subjective reality of the experiences of real gender-dysphoric individuals. Determining how we should in fact be interacting with such individuals would be a result of a full understanding of the subjective.
For some examples of how the subjective can and ought to be integrated with our account of the objective, one need look no further than the writings of Husserl, Stein and even Pope John Paul II. I’d like to focus on the concept of empathy from Stein (although exploring the phenomenology of Husserl and the theology of the body from John Paul II in a similar context would be a great topic for another essay.) Empathy is a subject’s perception of another as a subject. Simply firing off moral maxims, however true and binding, to people who do not live by them, is to treat them as objects, or even like roguish pieces in our solipsist worldview. Only by engaging with such people as subjects can any real discussion be had. This means empathizing with them, which is to acknowledge that they have perceptions and emotions that are intelligible, even if they might be flawed or unreasonable.
I want to acknowledge the unfortunate state of the term “empathy”, however. It is a term that has been hijacked and is now used as a slogan of radical ideologies of “tolerance” and “acceptance.” And we as Catholics have let this happen by largely ignoring the concept, and so left it open to theft and perversion. Empathy should not refer to an a priori acceptance (and possibly affirmation) of the actions of another subject as simply a matter of their radically free choice. This use of the term arises from a reduced understanding of the subject(s) that empathy is defined in reference to, namely, that a subject is merely a self-identifiable locus of unencumbered will. Empathy in this distorted sense would be exhibited perfectly by a person who, rather than talking a suicidal individual down from the ledge, so to speak, would instead rehearse back to that individual the reasons given for their decision and encourage them to make their own choice. Such “empathy” is clearly misguided. A proper account of empathy, coming from a revitalization of our account of subjects/subjective realities, is necessary to reclaim this critical piece of our tradition’s coherent account of the world, and we continue to ignore and neglect these topics at our further peril.
Leaving aside the evangelical necessity of attending properly to subjective realities, I think a more interesting discussion is to be had on the topic of whether that attention is necessary at the purely philosophical level. Insofar as subjective realities are real, it is obvious that they are an appropriate and necessary topic for philosophers to contend with. But a defender of, for example, Aristotle, might say that his account of human nature, the passions, powers of the soul, etc. is sufficient in this aspect. I would take an opposing view. I would venture to say that any philosophical account which does not have a robust conception of that empathy already discussed, is vulnerable to the error of solipsism. To not understand and articulate how other subjects are to be perceived is to remain open to the proposition that they are not to be perceived as subjects, that is, that the self is the only true subject.
Cogito ergo sum is blamed for the modern fascination with and tendency toward solipsism (just look at the mind-state of modern man, whose own nature seems to him as but an act of his own will/ideas), but this seems to me to show a misunderstanding of the fact that solipsism is as much a failure to articulate the status of others as subjects as it is an overestimation of one’s own status. One could say that classical epistemology protects us sufficiently from solipsism, since our understanding of who we are necessarily is rooted in a larger understanding of what it means to be human (postulating the existence of other humans). But this defense seems to me to beg the question. In the end, Descartes’ subjective turn did not open a new door for solipsism to enter the minds of the West, but rather directed our focus to the open door that already existed due to inadequate attention being paid to the subjective. We now need something more robust to lean on than what we previously had in order to confront the errors of modernity, which we now have from the recent developments of the Western tradition, spurred on by those same thinkers who are blamed for its downfall. And we ought to be grateful and proud to be the inheritors of such a tradition.