Aldo Vendemiati, In the First Person.

An Outline of General Ethics (extract)

http://www.clerus.org/clerus/dati/2006-10/20-13/G_Ethics.html

Why Study Philosophy

I presume I am engaged in a discourse that interests you very concretely, very closely. (…) What
man must do to be good, that is, worthy of his own humanity.” This approach is decidedly
exciting: to seek a meaning for human existence.

Perhaps, like me, upon leaving childhood behind, you had a certain “intuitive” sense of being an
unrepeatable subject. Certainly, the number of men and women is in the billions and billions –
but only you are “you.” It’s true that the lives of all these people follow the same rigid cliché:
we are born, we go to school, we work, we get married, we have children, we grow old, we die .
. . But is “your” existence obliged to submit to a cliché? Is your personal identity reducible to
that of everyone else? Don’t you feel the desire to take your own life in hand, to be the
protagonist of your own personal development, to realize your own desires? (p. 11)

To do philosophy means to embark on a rational investigation of man, the world, and God,
seeking to know the truth. Now, some truths discovered through reason serve to “prepare the
road” so that other truths, those revealed by God through Jesus Christ, can be better received.
Let us recall, for example, Plato’s great discovery that there must be a “supra-sensible” reality,
that is, something beyond the world grasped by the senses. This is a philosophical discovery –
rational – yet, very helpful to understanding and accepting God’s revealed message. Clearly,
knowing a single truth “opens the road” to knowing other truths. But it is equally clear that
error “blocks the road” to knowledge of the truth and leads inevitably to other errors. (p. 12)

What is a philosopher?

The philosopher is a thinker who seeks a rational basis for his judgements without making an
appeal to myth, faith, or majority opinion. As long as his judgements are founded on rational
arguments, his discourse is scientific. A philosopher does not have to bracket his faith (be it
Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or any other). The only thing required is that he not draw
arguments from the truth of faith, that is, that he keeps his discussion on a rigorously rational
plane. (p. 13)

How should we conduct our study in order to be true philosophers? First of all, we must
cultivate certain fundamental attitudes, specific “virtues,” which dispose us adequately toward
our work

Among the basic attitudes or virtues that allow us to dispose ourselves in a way consonant with
moral/philosophical work, three seem to me absolutely indispensable: wonder, reverence, and
desire. Let’s look at these in order.

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Wonder

Many Ancient Greek philosophers taught that philosophy is born from the experience of
wonder in front of being. Natural phenomena, with its explosive power, its sublime beauty, its
delicate tenderness, the order of the cosmos, the precision of the astral movements, the
miracle of life, the mystery of the heart of man . . . All this makes the mind marvel and gives
birth to the philosophical question: “Why is there something and not nothing?”

While the experience of wonder can be very exciting, it can also lead to excessive stress. To be
amazed means not being able to explain the why and how of certain phenomena. When it
comes to the universe, being, or man himself, I must confess that I cannot understand
everything about myself or my surroundings. This is rather frustrating! Not only frustrating – it
can produce a true and proper anguish. The unknown, the mysterious, attracts and frightens
me at the same time.

At this level, the greatest temptation is to try to “tame” our anguish by taking “mental
shortcuts,” that is, by reducing reality to something already known. “Mental shortcuts” are
preconstructed schemes on the basis of which we seek to explain everything, including what we
do not know. Following such a plan, we can avoid the always “hard” confrontation with reality.
We can side-step the sometimes disquieting path we must walk with the object we wish to
know. In so doing, we may escape anguish . . . but we would cease to do philosophy. Instead,
we would be devoting ourselves to that most dangerous of human mental activities: ideology.
If the philosophical question is born from wonder, its answer will not be found by fleeing or
denying wonder. On the contrary, we must continue in a state of wonder! (p. 14-15)

2. Reverence

For wonder to be possible, we must cultivate in ourselves the virtue of reverence for reality. We
must have a kind of “respect” for the objects of our thoughts, a respect that allows things to
manifest themselves in all their richness. Reverence implies the availability to listen thoroughly,
the effort to be quiet in order to understand (rather than prepare our own discourse while the
other is still trying to speak), and the renouncement of any attempt to imprison an object in
something already known.

The greatest enemy in this regard is represented by “the will to power,” to borrow a phrase
from the German thinker F. Nietzsche (1844-1900). Such an attitude aims at dominating reality
in order to enslave it to oneself.

In the Bible, we find a commandment on which there has been silence for centuries: “You shall
not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or
that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

It seems to me that it is possible to read this text in a philosophical key: You must not construct
for yourselves an image of reality that substitutes for reality, such that you would have the

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misfortune to connect, not with things, but with your own mental images, with your own
fantasies, with your own ideas. All this assumes an enormous gravity when it concerns not just
inanimate things, but human beings. As a profound contemporary novelist has said: “. . . it is a
sign of non-love to form a finished image of one’s neighbor or of any person, to say ‘You are
thus and thus, and that’s all there is to it.’” The philosopher must maintain himself in an
attitude of delicate and sensitive reverence for reality in itself. (p. 15)

3. Desire

The third virtue we must cultivate in philosophy is firmly joined to wonder and reverence:
loving desire. The Greeks spoke of philosophical eros. This expression probably sounds a bit
strong and scarcely comprehensible to our modern mentality. We are used to understanding
“eros” as a kind of longing for enjoyment. Clearly, this is not what we mean here, nor do we
take the word to indicate an intellectual concupiscence tending toward the “possession” of an
object. Such thinking would be opposed to wonder and respect! What is meant, rather, is a
“thirst” for truth, an interior “yearning” that could almost be described as “visceral,” toward
the mysterious message enclosed in reality. (p. 15)

Starting from Experience

So, wonder in front of reality, reverence for reality, and a loving desire for the truth constitute
the fundamental attitudes of philosophical inquiry. We must now ask ourselves what the point
of departure for our investigation should be. Where does philosophy “begin”? With
philosophers’ books? Should we start with the Pre-Socratics and then work our way up to our
own time to see how the problem of morality has been treated in the history of Western
thought? This is a legitimate kind of study. . . but we would then be doing the history of
philosophy and not philosophy!

Someone has said that philosophy does not dwell in books because it can’t fit into so tight a
space. Clearly, philosophy does not begin with books. Books themselves are the product of the
activity of human beings who have put their thoughts into writing. But these thoughts are not
born out of thin air; they are the result of a reflection on experience.

The point is this: Philosophy can proceed from no other place than what is “immediately given,
that is, from the data of experience.”

Each of us has life experience – in particular, moral experience – something personal and yet
common to others. From childhood, we have reflected on these experiences and formed
certain ideas concerning what is right and what is wrong, what is beautiful and what is ugly, on
good and evil, on man, the world, and God . . . Now, all this together constitutes that
“minimum-of-philosophy” which each human being more or less consciously carries within

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himself. It is from this “minimum” that we begin, reworking our experience to reach the
clarifications and the in-depth study proper to ethical/philosophical research.

But “no man is an island.” None of us can live in a truly human way if not inserted within a
social context: a family, a group of friends, a city . . . a web of relations and contacts with other
people like us. And these contacts are realized in dialogue. So, philosophical reflection on our
own life is enriched and enlivened thanks to dialogue with our neighbor, be it spoken or
written. (p. 15-16)

Awareness of Conditioning

Let’s reflect a moment. We have said that we should let ourselves be guided by wonder,
reverence, and loving desire; we have said that it is necessary to proceed from experience and
that we ought to re-work the “minimum-of-philosophy” that each of us has within himself. But
then, if we think about it, couldn’t this “minimum-of-philosophy” detract from our wonder,
transforming it into ideology? Couldn’t it lead us to lose respect for reality by imprisoning it in a
pre-conceived schema? Couldn’t this “minimum-of-philosophy” extinguish the love and desire
for truth?

In some cases, yes. But not necessarily.

It’s clear that we don’t begin our ethical/philosophical reflection as tabulae rasae or blank
sheets of paper on which nothing is yet written. In the shaping of that “minimum-of
philosophy,” each of us has been conditioned by his own cultural formation in a wide sense
according to the education he has received, the social models that have been proposed to him,
his religious tradition, the language he speaks, the economic situations in which he has lived,
etc.

In addition, such conditioning is the stronger for not being recognized. If someone deceives
himself into thinking that he is totally free, that he has a pure and virginal intelligence of things
as they are . . . well, then, he is inevitably destined to remain a slave to prejudices, ideologies,
and mythologies that he does not recognize but nonetheless work within him. Plato describes
the condition of such a man with the image of a prisoner chained in a cave who sees shadows
projected on the back wall and believes that the whole world is there before him

No prisoner can free himself if he does not first understand that he is a prisoner! If you want to
be free from conditioning, you first have to admit that you have been conditioned. You must
first of all recognize the traditions in which you have lived. I myself grew up in a context marked
by a western, neo-Latin, Italian mentality; I am a Catholic Christian and I live in a country that
declares itself to be Catholic in majority; I was brought up in a family where some behaviors
were applauded and others stigmatized; I attended certain schools, etc. What is required is a
critical examination of these traditions in their components, at times homogeneous, sometimes
contradictory, confronting the way in which they link certain elements to “the things
themselves,” to the objective reality of our experience.

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Proceeding in this way, we can attain an ever greater level of objectivity. Whoever is aware of
the risk of being conditioned is already potentially free from conditioning. (p.16-17)

The Obvious and The Evident

To free ourselves from conditioning, to be as objective as possible, we must distinguish

between two concepts that are very often confused and confusing: the obvious and the
evident.[19]

In every tradition, there are elements that are often taken “for granted,” the so-called
“obvious” notions commonly admitted in an uncritical way without reasoning about them,
without even asking if they are the fruit of knowledge, fantasy, or prejudice . . . For men who
lived before Copernicus, for example, it was “obvious” that the sun traveled around the earth.
Obvious for them but mistaken in itself! From the moral point of view, it’s easy to find past
examples of “obviousness” that are today repulsive to our thinking: the idea that there exist
superior or inferior human races, that women ought to be subject to men, that it is licit to hold
some human beings in a state of slavery, and so forth. All these “obvious truths” are recognized
now as “obviously false”! How many things are “obvious” to us today that people of the next
century will find repugnant?

Clearly, the fact that a certain position is held to be “obvious” is not alone sufficient
criteria for admitting that it is true. Knowing becomes worthy of the name when it abandons
“obviousness” and turns toward evidence.

Something is “evident” to me when it is present to my act of knowing. What I know, I

know in as much as it is present to me. I will explain: It is true that there are craters on the
moon, but this is not evident to me because I have never had the chance to see them. I “know”
that there are craters on the moon because I trust other men who have seen them. Therefore,
for me, the proposition:

1. “There are craters on the moon.”

This is not evident, since I do not know it in as much as the craters of the moon are
present to me, but as they are present to others in whom I trust. On the other hand, the same
proposition is evident to an astronomer because craters for him are “present to the act of
knowing” thanks to the telescopic observations he has made.

In the case of craters observed with the telescope, this concerns sensible evidence, as
in the case of the proposition:

2. “This page has printing on it.”

This is evident to your senses, to your vision. But there also exists evidence of an
intelligible kind, as for example the proposition:

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 3. “Every closed polygon of three sides necessarily has three angles.”
This is evident to your intellect.

Examples 2 and 3 are cases of immediate evidence, that is, of evidence gathered directly
from reality (sensible in the case of the printed page, intelligible in the case of the triangle).
There also exists, however, mediated evidence which is attainable thanks to the mediation of a
defined series of immediate evidence. To understand this, think of the theorems of
mathematics: you know that the sum of squares constructed on the sides of a right triangle is
equal to the square constructed on the hypotenuse. Is this evident? Certainly! Is it immediately
evident? Certainly not. It must be demonstrated. I can demonstrate a theorem because I
proceed from an immediately evident proposition from which other evidence is obtained, and
then other evidence . . . until I arrive at a conclusion. This conclusion at the end is also evident,
but thanks to the demonstration, that is to say, in a mediated way.

Thus, in philosophy, there are some kinds of evidence that are immediate, for example,
that moral values can be realized only by persons (can you imagine an honest brick or a prudent
salad?), and there are some kinds of evidence that are mediated, for example, that humility is a
virtue (it can be demonstrated, but some rather complex reasoning is required).

In synthesis, to embark on our moral/philosophical inquiry, we need to open ourselves

to wonder in front of being, respect reality, and have a loving desire for the truth. The point of
departure for our investigation can be nothing other than experience and that minimum-of
philosophy which each of us carries within himself. Nevertheless, so that our work be scientific,
we must be aware of the conditioning deriving from our culture and education. Hence, the task
of philosophy is that of dismantling the obvious to gain access to the evident. (p. 17-18)