The Importance of Knowing Reality

By Joseph R. Wood In the last few months, "thought leaders" in many domains, from elite universities to athletics to airline CEOs to politics (just a few of my complaints), seem to have departed from contact with reality in new and sharper ways. As this departure has gathered steam, it has given rise to calls for a return to prudence. Josef Pieper describes prudence as the "foremost of the virtues" and the "'measure' of justice, of fortitude, of temperance." Prudence '"informs' the other virtues; it confers upon them the form of their inner essence." Prudence is both an awareness of reality, of the order of "what is," and the ability to act based on the reality of things. By contrast, the chief DEI officer of Delta Airlines just announced (during a summer in which Delta's dismal performance left untold numbers of passengers stranded or disappointed) that the airline would no longer use the terms "ladies" and "gentlemen" in gate announcements. Such terms are now thought insufficiently inclusive of gender. Those sleeping somewhere other than their flight reservations had led them to expect, however, might regard such an announcement as evidence of imprudence - or departure from reality on several levels (not just departure time). "Prudence, then, is the mold and mother of all virtues, the circumspect and resolute shaping power of our minds which transforms knowledge of reality into realization of the good." (Pieper) To act prudently, and thus to have the possibility of acting with justice, fortitude, and temperance, we need to know reality. Modern philosophy has been skeptical of our capacity to know objective reality outside of our heads and the ideas we carry around between our ears. This cramps our ability to be prudent in the way that Pieper (and the classical and Catholic tradition) considers essential to a virtuous or excellent life. Phenomenology is a school of philosophy originating in the early 20th century that seeks to restore confidence in our ability to know objective reality. Its practitioners included Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger (who left Catholicism and joined the Nazi Party), and two saints of the Church: St. Edith Stein or Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (a Jewish convert whose feast we recently celebrated on the anniversary of her martyrdom in Auschwitz) and St. John Paul II. A diverse group, but all brilliant. Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Husserl and has taught courses on his work for 60 years, published a wonderfully accessible Introduction to Phenomenology, which explains phenomenology's understanding of how we know what is. One aspect of this understanding involves the age-old problem of how parts and wholes fit together. (Philosophy, old and new, often pushes the bounds of our logos, or reasoned speech, so some definitions are essential.) Wholes have parts. If a part can exist independently of its whole, it's a piece of the whole. If a part cannot exist independently of its whole, it's a moment of its whole. So, look at a red car and its parts or features. A tire is a piece of the car that can also exist when you take the tire off and separate it from its whole. But the redness of the car cannot exist independently of the car; it's a moment of the red car. The redness of the car can't be detached. This distinction has several implications, but at the grandest level, it brings our minds back to the reality of things. It resolves the separation of the mind from the world that modern philosophy tried to enforce. Sokolowski writes that the "mind should never be separated from reality from the beginning. Mind and being are moments to each other; they are not pieces that can be segmented out of the whole to which they belong." Our minds depend on reality, and in some way, reality depends on our minds. We are distinct parts of reality, and our being depends on the whole of reality. Moreover, we are agents of truth built to know the whole of the reality of which we're ...