[Question:]{.underline} Can one claim to be a phenomenologist and still be a Catholic?
[Answer:]{.underline} The term “phenomenology” is used to describe a twentieth century philosophy of personal experience developed by Husserl. In an effort to escape from all a priori presuppositions, it pretended that man could know nothing beyond the inaccessible realm of personal possible experience. It is consequently essentially subjective, based upon the Cartesian principle of universal doubt. It consequently denies the reality of anything beyond personal experience---that is, of objective reality, of essences or natures of things in themselves, as something beyond the observable, personally experienced phenomena. Thus “with all beliefs placed in abeyance as a matter of method, one can speak of ‘pure subjectivity,’ or of ‘pure experience.’ It is a ‘radical’ procedure because all natural and traditional assumptions whether metaphysical or theoretical have been suspended” (Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy, p. 293).
The logical conclusion of such a philosophy is obvious. It denies the natures of things, and ultimately the nature of God Himself, reduced to the level of a personal, subjective experience. It denies all theology, which uses natural human concepts on the natures of things to understand the content of divine revelation, e.g., nature, substance, accident. It denies also the very concept of a content of divine revelation that must be accepted because it is objectively true, without being experienced. It is, consequently, a philosophy fundamentally opposed to the Catholic Faith and unable to express it. Ultimately, and in its logical conclusions, it is incompatible with the Faith.
It is acknowledged that Pope John Paul II embraced the phenomenologist way of thinking in his 1967 book The Acting Person, although he has since attempted to reconcile this with the Thomist philosophical approach. This attempt to reunite all philosophies, provided that they do not degenerate into “widespread skepticism” in which “everything is reduced to opinion” (§5), is contained in his 1998 encyclical Fides et ratio. He there praises at length the historical contributions of St. Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy (§43 & 44) and accepts the scholastic principle that “philosophy verifies the human capacity to know the truth” (§82), namely objective truth. Furthermore, whilst not rejecting entirely pure phenomenology, he certainly points out its inherent weakness: “A radically phenomenalist or relativist philosophy would be ill-adapted to help in the deeper exploration of the riches found in the word of God” (§82).
In the same encyclical John Paul II further goes on to point out the necessity of a metaphysics, or a philosophy of being, denied as it is by phenomenology (§83). However, one has every right to wonder what he is talking about here. For he is certainly not speaking of the necessity of a realistic metaphysics, namely a philosophy of the nature of things, as is Thomism. He uses the term metaphysical in a much broader sense of transcending human experience rather than of attaining to objective reality, expressing “the need for a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range, capable, that is, of transcending empirical data in order to attain something absolute, ultimate, and foundational in its search for truth… Here I do not mean to speak of metaphysics in the sense of a specific school or a particular historical current of thought [i.e., Thomism].”
For John Paul II this metaphysics is essentially humanistic, and is related to the speculative perception of such absolute and transcendent values as the dignity of the human person, the rights of man and his freedom: “Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God… We cannot stop at experience alone; even if experience does reveal the human being’s interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it arises” (ibid.). The metaphysical for John Paul II is not being in itself, as it is for the Thomist, but the values that exist in the depth of man’s personal being (i.e., his interiority and spirituality), which values certainly are beyond the realm of sense experience (or pure phenomena) but are personal to man. The term “metaphysics” is consequently used to describe a spiritual humanism, which is why for John Paul II metaphysics is essential in the defense of human dignity (ibid., §102) and dialogue (§104).
Although John Paul II had a profoundly non-traditional view of metaphysics, and one imbued with the subjective thought process of the phenomenologist thinkers, so that values have taken the place of natures or essences, it cannot be considered to be in itself a denial of the Faith. It remains, nevertheless, very dangerous for the Faith on account of the practical denial of the importance of a philosophy of essences. It would be a very easy step from this to accept the modernist evolution of dogmas that is the foundation of the denial of the nature of grace, the sacraments, the real presence, and so many other Catholic doctrines.
How different was the approach of Pope Leo XIII in 1879 (Aeterni Patris) and St. Pius X who “prescribed” Thomistic PHILOSOPHY, for “the principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because they are the means of acquiring such a knowledge of creation as is most congruent with the Faith; of refuting all the errors of all the ages, and of enabling man to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone” (Doctoris Angelici).
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.