Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Dietrich von Hildebrand

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Dietrich von Hildebrand

Dietrich von Hildebrand — a student of Husserl and Reinach, a companion of Scheler — is one of the most important representatives of realistic phenomenology. His philosophy of values, of reverence, and of love decisively shapes the book’s understanding of the Third Dimension of personhood.

Key Contribution

Hildebrand develops the doctrine of value-responses: the person is not merely a cognizing being, but a being that responds to values. When I see the beautiful, I respond with admiration; when I recognize the good, I respond with affirmation; when I encounter a person, I respond with reverence and love. These value-responses are not mere feelings, but spiritual acts that acknowledge the value of the other and do justice to it (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 242 ff.).

Central Ideas in the Book

Reverence as the Mother of All Virtues

Hildebrand calls reverence the “mother of all virtues”: it is the fundamental attitude that recognizes the other as something that surpasses me and over which I may not dispose. Reverence is the precondition for perceiving the person as a someone — not as an object I use, but as a being with its own value and its own dignity. Without reverence, the instrumentalization of the person looms.

Personal Love as an Archphenomenon

For Hildebrand, love is a archphenomenon — it cannot be reduced to anything else. In love, the person responds to the unique value of another person. The spousal love between man and woman is for Hildebrand the highest form of this value-response: a total self-gift that includes exclusivity, permanence, and openness to new life.

Value-Blindness and the Oblivion of the Person

Hildebrand analyzes value-blindness as an attitude in which the person becomes incapable of grasping values and responding to them appropriately. This value-blindness is closely connected with the oblivion of the person: whoever no longer sees the value of the person treats her as a thing. Concupiscence — the desirous regard of the other as an object — is for Hildebrand the opposite of reverence and the destruction of personal encounter.

Place in the Book

Hildebrand is drawn upon above all in Chapter 4: Personhood (German), especially in the unfolding of the Third Dimension — the moral perfection of the person through virtue, love, and self-transcendence. His theory of value complements the Thomistic ontology (Thomas Aquinas) with the phenomenological dimension: not only that the person has dignity, but how we ought to meet this dignity.

Tradition: Realistic phenomenology

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 242 ff. (Hildebrand’s doctrine of value-responses, reverence, and personal love in the Third Dimension of personhood).

Further sources:

  • Ethik (1973). Gesammelte Werke, vol. II. Regensburg: Habbel / Stuttgart: Kohlhammer (German version of the work first published in 1953 as Christian Ethics, New York: David McKay; material value ethics, value-response, and fundamental moral attitudes)
  • Das Wesen der Liebe (1971). Regensburg: Josef Habbel (Engl.: The Nature of Love, transl. J. F. Crosby with J. H. Crosby, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press 2009; personal love as an irreducible archphenomenon)
  • Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis (1922). In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung vol. V (ed. E. Husserl), pp. 462–602, Halle a. d. S.: Niemeyer (Engl.: Morality and Ethical Knowledge of Values; habilitation thesis; reverence and value-blindness as fundamental categories of ethics; separate book edition only Darmstadt: WBG 1969)

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