by Michael Berndt
For my wife.
The title of this essay is “The Child as a Common Good,” which would seem to be an unfortunate topic to defend, for at least two reasons. The first is that the notion of a common good requires a degree of universality that the child, as a particular subject, apparently fails to attain. The second reason follows from the principle that because a common good is more universal than a singular good, it is also more communicable. As Charles De Koninck has put it, the common good “reaches the singular more than the singular good: it is the greater good of the singular” (16). Now if the child as a good is held in common by anyone, then it is certainly by the child’s parents; but in practice it is perhaps rare to hear parents echoing De Koninck’s words with respect to their children. The reality, in fact, seems closer to the opposite: many parents would describe the relationship between their own singular goods and their children in sacrificial terms—and every sacrifice, however willing, must imply some opposition between goods. The child as a good, therefore, seems not to “reach the singular more than the singular good,” and so the child appears not to fit the definition of a common good for his or her parents.
Nevertheless, the statement that a child is a common good is precisely the position that this essay will defend, and this defense will yield two major conclusions. First, this essay will argue that the child does indeed have the aspect of a common good with respect to his or her parents. What this entails is that the child is a greater good for the mother and father than either of their singular goods, but in such a way that what is good for the individual parents is not destroyed; on the contrary, the child as a common good fulfills and perfects the individual goods of the parents. While this position is worth defending for its own sake, this essay will also use the consideration of the parent-child relationship as a kind of “case study” to illustrate that in fact any common good is per se the fulfillment of the singular goods for those who participate in it. There can be no opposition (at least in principle) between a common good and a singular good, because both are natural to man.
To approach the common good by way of the singular good, it is necessary to begin first with a description of that singular good, so that one may determine later whether or not such a good might be further perfected by a more universal good. Aristotle provides a particularly gentle introduction to the consideration of the human good in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he notes that the good of a thing consists primarily in its activity as determined by its nature or form—that is, in its “characteristic activity” (1097b). A pen, in other words, is called good if it writes well, an ear if it hears well, and a plant if it grows and reproduces successfully. Such statements appear to be mere platitudes, but it is worth looking more closely at the term “activity” as it is used here with reference to the singular good.
No definition for “activity” could be given, of course—the concept is too fundamental to be rooted in a prior notion—yet it is still possible to gain a more precise notion of the word through induction and comparison (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1048a35-1048b5). This process is especially appropriate when considering the characteristic activity of the human being, where the human can only properly be understood with reference to his or her position in the physical and bio-psychic cosmos. To understand the characteristic activity determined by human nature, one must also have in view the activities that belong to the infrahuman natures subsumed in humanity. Therefore the ethicist should first conduct a brief survey of the levels and types of activity that are found in the subhuman world, so as to develop an integrative vision of the activity that is characteristic of the human being.[1]
Activity in the fullest sense of the word is not apparent in the inanimate world, governed as it is by the Galilean principle of inertia which prohibits true agency on the part of matter. Nevertheless, activity in the inanimate may still be encountered as re-action. While the law of inertia implies complete passivity on the part of matter, Newton’s third law demands an equal response from matter in every force interaction[2]; and this, perhaps, is in large part what accounts for the success of the modern scientific method. According to the best estimation of empirical science, all matter, if not active, is at least reactive. And so, if one can speak intelligibly about what is good for a material being, this would seem to consist primarily in its reactivity through force relationships, whereby the material thing preserves its participation in a higher form.[3] For this reason normal forces resist substantial interpenetration, radioactive elements decay into energetically stabler particles, and hydrogen nuclei fuse into helium. This reactivity of material being grounds its potential relationality and enables it to enter the cosmos as such.
Such potential for reaction in matter demands a complementary action on the part of form; and this is provided for by the first emergence of life at the vegetative level. Where matter, as it were, appears only to “speak when spoken to,” one finds already in plants a primordial expressionism in the vegetative impulse toward growth and reproduction. This impulse defines the characteristic activity of plant life, which may be denominated more simply as “metabolism.” The clearest proof that metabolic activity differs qualitatively from material reactivity lies in the simple fact that plant life takes in material and changes it into its own substance, without itself being substantially changed. Plant life acts, in some sense, without being equally and oppositely acted upon. Such a phenomenon is impossible in the world of inertial matter, because the nature or identity of a material particle consists largely in its quantitative constitution, whereas a plant is a plant precisely by virtue of its metabolic activity. It is this unity in metabolism that most clearly displays the difference between the animate and the inanimate, because the unity of the plant is greater than any unity that could result from the sum of its material parts.
Aside from this important distinction between the animate and inanimate, the further observation should be made that the metabolic activity of plant life establishes a firm and real relationality between the plant and its immediate environment. This relationality results from the plant’s need for sovereignty over the matter it metabolizes, but at the same time implies the plant’s dependence upon that same matter. A plant’s relationality consists first in self- transcendence, insofar as it is only an “other” that can satisfy the plant’s impulsion toward growth and reproduction. This self-transcendence establishes the existence of exteriority for the plant, though it fails to give rise to an exterior spatial world, since what is “other” for the plant is strictly limited to the contiguous. Over and above this self-transcendence, however, a plant must also have a real (though rudimentary) interiority as a correlative to its exteriority. Interiority, of course, does not here mean any sort of principle that might give rise to consciousness. It simply refers to the fact that some kind of inward effect must occur in a plant if the satisfaction or frustration of its impulsions is to make a difference. Over and above the reactions of which inertial matter is capable, therefore, plant life has a characteristic activity toward growth and reproduction which can only be accomplished through the self-transcendence and unified agency of its interior being.[4]
The movement from plant life to animal life is similar to the leap from the inanimate to the animate. Perception, emotion, and motility are the characteristics which distinguish the animal from the plant, and the hierarchy within the animal kingdom is based entirely on the degree to which these three interconnected characteristics are developed within a particular species. The most primitive animals appear to have no sensation other than touch, but there is literally a world of difference between an animal with tactile perception alone and a plant; for where a plant is remarkable in its ability to take in matter while retaining its form, in sensation an animal is able to take on another accidental form without destroying or diminishing its own substantial form.[5] A primitive animal like a starfish or sea urchin may not receive other forms extensively, but the fact that this is possible at all is astonishing. Sensation, therefore, “transcends the order of matter in motion” (Augros 53); once again, the formal unity of the animal exceeds the unity that could result from the sum of its constituent parts.
Higher animals exhibit the superiority of their activity in a clearer way: with the development of smell, hearing, and sight comes the ability to receive forms at greater and greater distances from the subject, meaning that the world of the higher animal is no longer limited to its contiguous environment. That self-transcendence which enables the plant to interact materially with its immediate surroundings here develops into a formal interaction with potentially everything inside the sensory field. Together with the sensation of objects across spatial distance, of course, the animal must possess some means of interaction, so that motility and perception appear to develop simultaneously in the course of animal evolution. And because a spatially distant object is one that can be attained only in the future, appetite—in its most basic forms as attraction and repulsion—must develop in order to close the temporal gap between a motile perceiving subject and its spatially distant object.[6]
Where the characteristic activity of plant life, therefore, lies in a real relationship of material commerce between the plant and its contiguous environment, the activity of the animal opens into a whole spatio-temporal world of relationality. Without the ability to receive other forms and, therefore, without the awareness of unity and individual “others,” relation for a plant can only be between interior and exterior, between plant and not-plant. But with the advent of perception, the animal subject is thrust into a world of individual objects to which it can relate across various spatial and temporal distances, through any number of drives and impulses.
At this point, perhaps, a metaphysical induction might be drawn from the above observations. Rising through the ranks of being, one finds greater and greater degrees of activity. This activity, moreover, is not merely an abstract or purely immanent state, but is something that spills over into communicable action and reaction to establish real relationships between the being and its world. Higher modes of existence mean greater degrees of activity, and the more active a being is, the more relational it is. In the words of the Thomist metaphysician W. Norris Clarke, it would appear that “to be is to be substance-in-relation” (118-119).
Moving, therefore, from the characteristic activity of animal life to that of human life, one should expect human persons to be the most relational of all material beings; and so we are. Inanimate objects do not properly act, but react; the activity of plants is to take in matter while retaining their form, and animals take in accidental forms while preserving their own forms; but a human person can take on the substantial forms of other beings, while his or her own substantial form remains unchanged. Such activity belongs to the marvel of reason, and it is through this power that a person is held out in relation to all beings, whether sensed or unsensed, actual or possible. So great is the breadth of this activity—this cogitare—that Kant defines it not only as the condition of all experience, but also as the condition of “the whole of possible experience” (360). Only through the activity of reason is the “other” first understood in its alterity. Space and time alone create distance between an animal and its percept, so that for the non-rational animal, perception and reality are identical. But the human person intuitively grasps that perceived reality is not the whole of reality. Perception, therefore, along with space and time, mediates between the human knower and the thing known, so that while a person perceives, he or she also negates that perception as full reality, and thus establishes the true alterity of the object of experience. In a certain sense, then, the problem of Cartesian skepticism is solved by its own existence.
It is the human person, therefore, who is most fully relational. Relation underlies the life of the animal, but the life of the person—his or her characteristic activity—also includes the experience of relatedness. The distance implied in this human awareness of relation is also what provides the grounding for human freedom. Because we hold space, time, and matter at a distance, we are free to choose between the present and the absent, the now and the future, and even between the real and the ideal. No animal appetite could desire or fear what is not perceived, of course; and so human reason is accompanied by the will, which is directed toward or away from the essence of a thing, apart from any impression it may make on the senses.[7] The characteristic activity of the human person, therefore, consists in these two acts—knowledge and love—which relate and unify the subject to what is other, insofar as it is other. This outward orientation of being, which reaches a new degree of perfection in the human person, should ground every discussion of what is good for man as a natural, rational, ethical, and political creature.
Nevertheless, the good of a human person—or of anything for that matter—does not consist in his or her characteristic activity in general, but specifically in the activity of the highest faculty, about the highest things, and in the highest way, as Aristotle implies at the end of his Ethics (1177a10-20). The singular good should therefore consist in the act of knowing the highest things, and for this reason Aristotle considers happiness to consist in contemplation most of all. But the proper content of this contemplation is not immediately evident. What are the highest things that can be known by man? In light of the above survey of natural beings, the person itself would seem most worthy of contemplation, insofar as this refers to something both substantial and immaterial. Aquinas, therefore, remarks that “‘Person’ signifies what is most perfect in all nature” (I, Q. 29, art. 3); and Clarke, commenting on this line, writes that “[Person] is simply what being is when allowed to be at its fullest, freed from the constrictions of subintelligent matter” (211). A person or persons, then—assuming such persons to be truly good as determined by their nature—would seem to be the objects most worthy of the contemplation that can fulfill the singular human good.
This last statement, however, is problematic, because a person as such is not an object for contemplation, but a subject who contemplates. The problem here is similar to the one that Husserl faced regarding the apparent solipsism of his philosophy (cf. 89-90): “How can I know another I?” The source of this difficulty is that a person as such is an agent, and to know a person as an agent requires that one I experience another I’s agency. To study another person as one might study a microorganism is to make that person’s activity the object of one’s own agency, and thus the person as such remains unknown. One subject cannot truly know another, therefore, by acting upon the other. But neither can a person know another merely by being acted upon; for while one might recognize the existence of another agent by suffering his or her agency, such a person would not know the agent precisely in his or her agency, because the experience in this case would only be that of a patient.
Edith Stein, Max Scheler, and other phenomenologists have resolved this difficulty by drawing attention to empathy, sympathy, and love as primordial phenomena of co-agency.[8] Empathic and sympathetic experiences are instances of “co-feeling” in which one subject is led by another to experience the same feeling or emotion as the agent, even though the feeling proceeds from another I (Stein, 10-11). Experiencing an emotion empathically, therefore, allows a subject to retain his or her own agency while experiencing the activity of another. Nevertheless, because empathy and other kinds of “co-feeling” remain under the category of perception,[9] they cannot ultimately reveal a person as an individual substance of a rational nature, because they only disclose the here and now, while a person is held at a distance from space, time, and matter by virtue of his or her reason.
In this way love enters the picture as an act through which one subject may experience the human activity of another as known rather than felt, and as rational rather than perceptual. Love reveals another subject as such because love–especially in the full sense of φιλία–does not act upon another, nor does it consist solely in being acted upon. In love, writes Jean-Luc Marion, “the other appears only if I gratuitously give him the space in which to appear; and I have at my disposal no other space than my own; I must, then, ‘take what is mine,’ take from myself, in order to open the space where the other may appear” (166). Love in the full sense takes place as something shared between subjects, rather than as something located in one or the other alone. For this reason, perhaps, Aristotle is often quoted as saying that a friend is “one soul abiding in two bodies” (Diogenes Laertius, XI).
It is in love, therefore, that a person can truly know another subject as a subject, and so it is through love that the singular human good is most of all fulfilled. Reason may be the power which raises man above material being, but love is the activity that can raise man above himself. Reason perfects inferior objects of knowledge, and tarnishes superior forms; but love of superior beings perfects man, while love of inferior objects degrades him. For this reason, Aquinas writes that “the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof” (I, Q. 82, art. 3). The singular good, therefore, will be found primarily through loving, and any happiness that can be found in this life will consist most of all in the love of the best and greatest persons.
The stated intention of this essay was to study the common good as the natural fulfillment and perfection of the singular good, specifically through the consideration of the child as a common good of the parents. Already, by examining levels of characteristic activity as determined by nature, it would appear that singular goods are inherently ordered to common goods; for the hierarchy of being parallels a hierarchy of activities, and greater degrees of activity correspond to greater degrees of real relationality. An individual being, therefore, is intrinsically ordered to others according to its level of existence. As regards the human being in particular, it appears that the good of the individual consists most of all in knowing and loving other persons. This strongly suggests that the individual is naturally ordered to some kind of community, and that the individual good is therefore ordered to a common good; but how this might work out in detail has not yet been discussed.
There appear to be many ways in which a person may find happiness through love-as-gift. Most people who find fulfillment in their professions, for example, do so because their professions demand some level of self-gift. Nevertheless, the most common way to give oneself in love, and the way which seems most proportionate to human nature, is simply to “fall in love.” In fact this is the most common form of self-gift because it is the most proportionate to human nature; and it is the most proportionate to human nature because it involves activity on the part of matter (the body) and on the part of form (the soul). Falling in love is especially proportionate to the activity of the human soul because it involves the knowledge of another being who is joined to matter by nature. For these reasons, the second half of this essay will look in some detail at how the fullness of love between a man and a woman—i.e. married love—can contribute to human happiness.
Other subjects appear according to the space we give them. Most human relationships, therefore, involve some level of love, but such love is usually limited and conditional. We are willing to share the agency of another at certain times or in certain respects, but most relationships fall short of the complete gift of self; and this is right and just, because the human capacity for gift is strictly bound by the conditions of matter. Nevertheless, limited self-gift can only result in limited knowledge and unity with another subject. A person who desires unrestricted knowledge of another must give himself or herself unreservedly and unconditionally. Such a gift can only be given once, because in the total gift of self, even the right to rescind the gift is given.[10] This radical and completely unique act, of course, is what we call “married love.”
Because married love requires the total gift of self, it operates at every level of the human person. Spouses are given to each other physically, as is particularly evident in the sense of touch, which necessarily comprises both reception and self-revelation at once.[11] Spouses are also given to each other on the perceptual level, so that empathic and sympathetic feelings can lay the emotional groundwork for benevolence and deeper forms of love.[12] But the most radical gift of married love is the complete gift of the person as acting-center, because this is at the heart of the notion of “human subject.” A person is a subject not merely as an agent; for animals, too, are agents of their own actions. But in the human person, agency takes on a new dimension due to the self-reflective aspect of rationality. The plant, as noted above, goes out from itself in a material way, but there is no return, because the plant has no center. Animals are given back to themselves in the act of perception, but they are not aware of the return as return, so that the animal is in a kind of permanent ekstasis—an animal’s reality is identical with its perceived environment. The human person, however, is consciously distant from reality even in his or her own perception of it. Thus our own perceptions and actions can become objects of our activity, and the human subject becomes capable of self-reflection ad infinitum.
What this means is that human agency and human teleology are radically different from any other causality found in nature. In every action, the human person not only determines the thing acted upon, but also determines himself or herself as agent.[13] We are, in a sense, made from our own actions; and this self-determining aspect of human activity is really its most important dimension, because it is through this aspect that we exist as moral and responsible beings. We approach or fall short of our ultimate end not insofar as our actions determine the world, but rather insofar as our actions are self-determining. Persons are “acting-centers,” therefore, efficiently as well as teleologically. As centers of agent causality, we determine objects in the world as we simultaneously determine ourselves; and as centers of final causality, we choose external goods as we simultaneously choose ourselves as ends. It is the self-determining aspect of human agency that gives rise to a person’s auto-teleology.[14]
Understanding the person as acting-center is essential for understanding the love between a husband and wife, because the complete gift of self as acting-center is what separates married love from other forms of self-gift. It is not an uncommon event for a person to give his or her agency to another. We do this whenever we lend a helping hand or offer advice; but in these cases, human “agency” only refers to the ability to act on external objects. To give up one’s self-determining agency to another person is a different kind of act entirely because it accepts the other’s activity as self-constituting. Such a gift allows the other to form and develop one’s own person unconditionally, for better or for worse. A husband and wife are united as agents because they act together upon the world; but more importantly, a husband and wife are united because they are constituted together in their shared activity.
Beyond even this profound unity, however, two persons are also united in married love as ends. Just as the individual person turns toward himself or herself as an end in the act of self-determination, so the husband and wife are given to each other and accept each other as ends in their mutually self-determining activities. Thus a man and a woman not only desire, but also act for each other’s goods. This action occurs as exterior agency as well as self-constituting agency, so that, to paraphrase Karol Wojtyla, in turning toward other objects and ends, a husband and wife cannot help but simultaneously turn towards each other as the ends and primary objects of one another’s subjectivity (“The Person: Subject and Community” 282).[15] The command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” in other words, clearly reaches a new level of perfection in married love (Mk 12:31).
This mutual self-gift that occurs in married love must already be described as a common good, because a husband and wife consider each other’s goods to be identical with their own. Insofar as married love is one possible way to reach the perfection of the human characteristic activity, it would appear, therefore, that the singular good is naturally oriented to the common good; indeed, the singular good must be fulfilled in some kind of communion, if it is to be fulfilled at all. Nevertheless, while knowledge of another person as acting-center is true knowledge of that person, it is not necessarily knowledge of the highest dimension of the person. The person as acting-center is perfected by the gift of self as acting-center. This means that knowledge of a person as acting-center is further perfected by knowledge of the person as giver. Insofar as married persons receive the gift of the other without receiving the other as giver, they fall short of communion at the highest level of their activity.
But this is another paradox. For a husband to know his wife as a giver, he would somehow have to give her to himself; and a similarly impossible task would be required of the wife in order to know her husband. To put the difficulty in another way, if a man gives a woman to himself, then she is not the giver; but if the woman gives herself to the man, then the man knows only the gift, without the giver. One person cannot understand another as a giver either by giving or by being given, for the simple reason that a person is not an object. “To give” cannot be a transitive verb with respect to persons. But this difficulty of the person as giver is not so great, because it parallels the Husserlian problem of solipsism noted above, and the resolutions are similar. Two persons can understand one another as givers by giving with each other, just as by acting together two persons can understand each other as agents. This is a radical, but not altogether surprising phenomenon; for just as the individual person’s activity transcends the individual through love, so the mutual activity of a husband and wife transcends the relationship of the couple. The fulfillment of married love, once again, is outwardly oriented, and the fulfillment of the individual demands further generosity and transcendence.
The husband and wife, therefore, must “co-give” themselves to a further end that transcends their relationship. Just as there are numerous possible ways for an individual to fulfill himself or herself through love, so there may be numerous ways for a married couple to fulfill their relationship through the transcendental gift. The natural and common end, however—the natural reason for the gift—is the child. The biological aspect of a man and woman’s love for one another offers the possibility of the fulfillment and perfection of that love. The sexual act both unifies and generates because love is both unifying and generous. It is first of all in this act of mutual generosity, and even more so in every giving act that follows from it, that man and woman can begin to discover one another as givers, according to their highest dimension as persons.
While the sexual act itself, insofar as it is open to the life of the child, provides an initial opportunity for the man and woman to discover one another as givers, it is in the continuous act of rearing and educating the child that the parents’ gift can reach a habitual perfection. The husband and wife must give themselves profoundly to the child, even to the extent that they give themselves as acting persons; for it is only in co-giving themselves as acting-centers that a man and woman can understand each other as true givers. Nevertheless, while married persons give themselves as acting-centers both to one another and—through one another—to the child, these two gifts are not the same. Obviously, the gifts differ on account of loves that are different in kind—the child is perceived as a different kind of good than the spouse, and the child and the spouse are perceived as ends in different ways. But one of the most important differences between self-gift as spouse and self-gift as parent has to do with reciprocity.
Married love can only occur through mutual self-gift, but the gift of the parent to a child does not require reciprocation in the same way. A husband and wife give themselves as acting-centers to the child, but they do not receive the gift of the child as acting-center. Indeed, this would be impossible in the case of small children, because they are not yet acting-centers, but only potentially so. An infant cannot give herself, because she does not yet possess herself, and self-possession is a mark of the development of rationality. This structure of the parental self-gift is most evident in the education of children, especially where education is taken to mean primarily development in virtue. A child does not learn virtue by instruction, as Aristotle notes at the end of his Ethics, but rather by repeated action she forms the habit (1179b1-3). True human action, of course, is impossible for the young child who does not possess herself as acting-center; and a sign of this is that society does not consider children to be fully responsible for their actions. The acting principle that is missing in the child, however, is supplied by the parent, so that the child builds habits in imitation of or in obedience to the parent. Such a process is only possible through the gift of the parent as acting-center to the child, whereby the child participates in the parent’s external agency, as well as in his or her own self-constituting agency. In this way the acting-center of the parent constitutes the child’s person through repeated human action and habituation. Therefore, the parent is both efficient and exemplar cause of the child; and it is this exemplarism in particular that reveals the dignity of the child, and which demands that the parent educate, rather than dictate.
Parents, therefore, give themselves to the child as acting persons, and in so doing they have a hand not only in creating a human being, but in creating a good human being. This gift of the parent constitutes the child as a developing acting person, and opens up a whole new dimension of rich dynamism and life in the parent-child relationship. But apart from this, the co-giving parents reveal themselves to one another as giving persons. In and through the child, a man and a woman can discover one another in the highest dimension of their human nature, that is, in the activity of loving a greater good completely and unconditionally, so as to allow the other to appear in revelation.
The child, therefore, is truly a great good for the parents. The existence of the child enables the couple to perfect their own relationship, and in so doing, they reach a higher degree of perfection as individuals. Moreover, the child is a good for both the mother and the father, but in such a way that the mother’s relationship with the child does not take anything away from the father’s, and vice versa; on the contrary, one of the primary reasons that the child is such a great good for the individual parent is that he or she is also a good for the other parent. For it is only when both spouses give themselves together to the child that they discover one another to be givers. A child is thus a perfection and a final cause for the husband and wife, and he or she is a more universal good insofar as this goodness extends to both the man and the woman. But this universality does not make the child a greater good simply because it is the good of two, rather than one. The child is a greater good of the individual parent by virtue of the fact that his or her goodness is communicable to both parents together.
The child appears to the parents, therefore, as a perfection and final cause through his or her relative universality and communicability; yet these qualities are marks not only of a great good, but of a common good. Therefore it must be said that the child is a common good for the parents, just as married love itself is a common good for the spouses. But of these, the child is the greater insofar as he or she is a further perfection and a final cause of marriage.
This is an important conclusion to come to, because it has far-reaching implications. First, understanding the child as a common good manifests the true greatness and dignity of the child who, as a greater good, has a preeminence of right over his or her parents. The life and education of the child must be defended by and provided for by government, insofar as it is the guardian of the common good.
The notion of the child as a common good is also of great importance because of what it reveals about human nature and human purpose: that, just like the rest of material being, the end of man is not within himself. The interior life may be what separates the human from the animal, but interiority develops simultaneously with self-transcendence, and human purpose lies in this transcendence in the form of love and gift, as determined by nature.
Finally, the consideration of the child as a common good offers a clear, familiar, and concrete example of the relationship between singular and common goods. In particular, such a study reveals that the singular good in no way conflicts with the common good; on the contrary, the common good is the fulfillment of the singular good, and is the good of the individual by virtue of being common. Because the singular and common goods are thus reconciled within the family, and because the family is the element of society, one may infer that the individual and common goods ought never to be opposed in principle. Nature cannot contradict nature, and the political nature of man should perfect, rather than oppose, the individual’s quest for happiness. The consideration of the child as a common good, therefore, should serve to ground action in politics, politics in ethics, and ethics in nature.
Works Cited
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2008. Print.
Aristotle. De Anima. Trans. R. D. Hicks. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1991. Print.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Apostle, Hippocrates G. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Print.
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Augros, Robert, and George Stanciu. The New Biology. Boston: New Science Library, 1987. Print.
Clarke, W. Norris. Explorations in Metaphysics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Print.
De Koninck, Charles. “On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists.” The Aquinas Review (1997): 11-71. Print.
Diogenes Laertius. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Trans. C. D. Yonge. Peitho’s Web. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2017.
The Holy Bible. RSVCE. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1966. Print.
Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. 7th ed. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982. Print.
Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996. Print.
Marion, Jean-Luc. Prolegomena to Charity. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Print.
Scheler, Max. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Trans. Manfred S. Frings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009. Print.
Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. Waltraut Stein. 3rd ed. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989. Print.
Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility. Trans. H. T. Willetts. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Print.
Wojtyla, Karol. “The Person: Subject and Community.” The Review of Metaphysics 33.2 (1979): 273-308. JStor. Web. 02 Mar. 2017.
Notes
This paper was first read at the conference “The Common Good as a Common Project,” Nanovic Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame, March 26-28, 2017.
[1] My method of approaching some notion of the characteristic human activity here closely parallels Max Scheler’s method in The Human Place in the Cosmos, as well as that of Hans Jonas in The Phenomenon of Life.
[2] Whether or not this is true of all matter is perhaps an insoluble question, because it is through force interactions alone that we can detect the presence of material objects. What does seem to be evident from the consideration of matter, however, is that the “more” a material object exists, the more it interacts with others.
[3] Matter cannot preserve its existence as such, because matter in itself is only potential being and a principle of change. The unity of a being must therefore come from its form, though by participating in this form, matter can still be called “good.” Cf. Aristotle, Physics I.9.
[4] A number of these observations regarding the transcendence and interiority of plant life are based on The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas, especially pp. 83-86.
[5] Cf. Aristotle, De Anima, 424a-424b.
[6] Cf. Jonas, 99-107.
[7] Cf. Aquinas, S.T. I-II, Q. 27, art. 2, ad 2.
[8] Stein’s solution can be found in her doctoral dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy. Scheler proposes his solution to the problem in The Nature of Sympathy. Both Stein and Scheler use their proposed solutions to develop a phenomenology of love; but a treatment of love itself as the answer to the Husserlian difficulty can also be found in Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity.
[9] Cf. Stein 11.
[10] Hence divorce is rightly understood to be an ontological impossibility.
[11] See Jonas, especially pp. 140-143, for a phenomenological sketch of the sense of touch.
[12] Karol Wojtyla offers a detailed account of the physical and emotional preparation for married love in Love and Responsibility. See especially pp. 73-118.
[13] Wojtyla develops the idea that human agency has both transitive and intransitive aspects at length in “The Person: Subject and Community.” See especially pp. 281-284.
[14] Cf. Wojtyla, “The Person: Subject and Community,” 284-285.
[15] The actual text of Wojtyla here refers to an individual’s auto-teleology, but insofar as a husband and wife share their agency and teleology, it is appropriate to apply Wojtyla’s words to married love.