(The following are the written notes/texts of four, three hour, online session presentations given in the months of February through May in A.D. 2018. A similar set of presentations was given to a previous group some years earlier. The group consisted of diaconal aspirants, spouses, and diocesan officials of the Diocese of Pueblo in Colorado, United States. The fifteen articles found here will include thirteen specific philosophical issues, covered in those four online sessions.)
Let us now turn to Issue #12, The Ego-Centric Predicament
When we see an apple, when we smell the scent of apple blossoms, when we hear music; it is true, that that of which we are aware are images of these things within our minds. Our awareness is of these mental image constructs. These images in our minds are due in part to electrical and chemical impulses in and through the sense organs, and within the brain.
Rene Descartes provided us the philosophical language to state and understand this truth.
Descartes also pointed out that such mental-images could be mistakes or illusory. His examples were mirages and dream images. Today, we know that near indistinguishable mental images can be formed by means of brain injury, brain damage, hallucinogenic drug use, interaction with advanced algorithmic based software systems.
We have become use to the real possibility that all the mental images of which we are aware exist only in our minds. Movies regularly invite us to consider the possibility that not only is synthetic experience preferable to real experience; they invite us to consider that all experience is actually, only neuro-electrico-chemical synthetic experience.
Monsignor Robert Sokolowski of The School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America refers to this in the following manner, “Consciousness is taken to be like a bubble or enclosed cabinet; the mind comes in a box. Impressions and concepts occur in this enclosed space, in this circle of ideas and experiences, and our awareness is directed toward them, not directly toward the things “outside”…we are not in any direct contact with them…we are caught in an ego-centric predicament. It seems unquestionable that everything cognitional must happen “inside the head,” and that all we could possibly be in touch with are our own brain states. I once heard a famous brain scientist say, almost tearfully, that after so many years of studying the brain, he still could not explain how “that avocado-colored organ inside our skulls” could get beyond itself and reach out into the world. I would venture to say that almost everyone who has gone to college and taken some courses in physiology, neurology, or psychology would have the same difficulty.”
If all individual awarenesses are of various brain states, we then do not sense a world outside our own brain states. We no longer have a world in common. Sokolowski continues, “If we do not have a world in common, then we do not enter into a life of reason, evidence, and truth. Each of us turns to our own private world…we do our own thing….the truth makes no demands on us. We know this relativism cannot be the final story…but philosophically and culturally we find it difficult to ratify our naive acceptance of a common world and our ability to discover and communicate what it is.”
If we do not have a world-in-common, if we are unable to discover and display realities outside of ourselves, we then begin to avoid dialogue. Dialogue is the use of speech to display truths.
Beginning in the mid A.D. 1800s, a growing realization of the ego-centric predicament and a response to the ego-centric predicament arose. This response to the ego-centric predicament is now known as phenomenology. The founder associated with phenomenology is an Edmund Husserl.
Because the ego-centric predicament had many moral, social, and political ramifications, phenomenology was adopted by many Christians, many Roman Catholics, and persons who became Roman Catholics. I wish to mention only three.
Edmund Husserl was a teacher of Edith Stein. Edith Stein earned her Ph.D. summa cum laude under the direction of Husserl in A.D. 1913. Stein was born a Jew, Later, she also became a Roman Catholic, being baptized in A.D. 1922. In A.D. 1933, Edith Stein entered a religious order and became known as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In A.D. 1942 she was executed at Auschwitz because she was a Jew. In A.D. 1987 she was beatified and in A.D. 1988 was canonized a Saint by Pope John Paul II.
Pope John Paul II, also a canonized saint, as the Polish priest Karol Woytyla, earned a Ph.D. in philosophy with an emphasis on phenomenology.
Robert Sokolowski, a professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., has the sobriquet of “the other Polish phenomenologist” in reference to the Polish phenomenologist Woytyla.
Phenomenology invites us to “get back to the thing itself”. Regardless of what we are considering, a thing such as gravity, or the person in our pastoral care who is suffering emotionally, or an event such as opioid addiction; phenomenology invites us to “get back to the thing itself”. Phenomenology invites us to discover and display in dialogue the essences of things.
Phenomenology refers to “getting back to the thing itself” as eidetic imaging. This eidetic imaging causes phenomenologists to realize that awareness ia always awareness of something; consciousness is always consciousness of something.
Essences and natures are always the ultimate route and source of all mental impressions. The discovery and display of the essences of things, persons, and events is what truth is. Dialogue is the means by which truth is displayed.
Catholic Philosophy and Theology 