Conversation with Vittorio Hsle // Advanced Study // University of Notre Dame

18/04/13 2:25 PM

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Advanced Study Conversation with Vittorio Hsle

Q: What do you see as the greatest challenge of academia in the twenty-first century? A: As much as specialization is indispensable and even crucial for progress in our intellectual quests, we need a counterforce to this tendency. Many issues simply cannot be divided up as neatly as we would like they are essentially interconnected. The web of being does not do us the favor of mirroring the sharp divisions between university departments. We need transdisciplinary competences beyond disciplinary ones, people who are educated to ask the great questions that inevitably bridge different departments.

Q: What is your one specialty? A: I understand my own work as an attempt to reach across the disciplines with intelligence, based on a trust in the unity of being. Needless to say, anyone engaged in such an attempt must exhibit competence in one or more specific disciplines I myself have disciplinary expertise in philosophy, political theory, and the study of various ancient and modern languages and literatures.

Q: Is philosophy the core of your activities? A: Certainly, for I am a philosopher by training. However, the continental philosophical tradition in which I was brought up is quite different from the analytical one dominant in the United States. The three main differences I see are: First, in the continental understanding, philosophy must be built on a thorough knowledge of the history of philosophy. Philosophical theories of the past are never valid only because they come from the past; but we run the risk of falling under the level of past insights, if we ignore what already has been achieved. If there is any progress in philosophy, it must have a very different structure from progress in the sciences, and as such it recognizes that earlier positions are still worthy of study. Second, in the older continental tradition philosophy has been interpreted as the metadiscipline warranting that the various disciplines formed a coherent whole. The disconnection of the various philosophical sub-disciplines from each other is even more disadvantageous than the separation of the non-philosophical disciplines; for philosophy is a unity, and it is impossible to study, for example, epistemology and ignore metaphysics or ethics. Our ethical convictions are a very important sub-class of what we know, and our act of knowledge clearly has its place within the structure of being. Third, in the past philosophy has always inspired other disciplines. Why? Well, one of the traditional tasks of philosophy was concept formation, and
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Conversation with Vittorio Hsle // Advanced Study // University of Notre Dame

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since every discipline presupposes an array of concepts, every discipline could be inspired by philosophy. It does not fit well with the idea of philosophy when philosophers are no longer able to communicate ideas that are meaningful for other disciplines.

Q: Do you see any value in the analytic tradition or any weaknesses in the continental tradition? A: Analytical philosophy has taught us standards of precision that should never be given up, however, often at the expense of the relevance of its contents. A large part of contemporary continental philosophy (not of the masters of the past) falls short of these standards and is sometimes even hardly intelligible.

Q: What is your philosophical starting-point? A: The philosophy that I am elaborating is a form of objective idealism.

Q: What do you mean by that? A: Objective idealism is a type of philosophy that was first proposed by Plato, but it has recurred through all the ages; German idealism was its last great elaboration. It is opposed to naturalism: It recognizes an independent realm of ideal entities, subsisting, perhaps, in a divine mind but not in ours, since the latter is itself a result of natural evolution. At the same time, objective idealism avoids the problems of subjective idealism, which tends to deny an independent existence of the natural world and insists on subjective (or social) constructions. Objective idealism entails moral realism: The web of concepts exists independently of the human mind; the ideas of the good and the beautiful, for example, are not our constructions. They are instantiated in the physical and social world; and the human mind can in principle understand them. One of the main tasks of philosophy is to unfold the conceptual web that underlies the world.

Q: Objective idealism seems an old philosophy. Why are you trying to revive it? A: My first book on Truth and History (German original 1984, Italian translation 1998) dealt with the various philosophies of the history of philosophy and rejected the nave assumption that there is a continuous progress in the history of philosophy. It showed how certain types of philosophical thought realism, skepticism, objective idealism recur regularly. It offered a detailed philosophical interpretation of the development from Parmenides to Plato through the intermediate stages of the naturalist post-eleatic philosophies, the skeptical challenge by the Sophists, and the Socratic moral revolution. It then generalizes the law of development found and applies it to the
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Conversation with Vittorio Hsle // Advanced Study // University of Notre Dame

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later cycles of philosophical thought. I later interpreted the rise of Brandoms and McDowells new versions of objective idealism, after the skeptical challenge from Richard Rorty, as a validation of the implicit predictions of the theory.

Q: If I wanted to understand objective idealism or understand better the reasons for your elevation of it, where might I begin? A: A good introduction can be found in Objective Idealism, Ethics, and Politics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

Q: What do you regard as your most important books? A: Among my later works, the three most ambitious are Hegels System (German 1987, Portuguese 2007, Korean 2007, Italian 2011), Morals and Politics (German 1997, English 2004, Korean forthcoming), and The Philosophical Dialogue (German 2006, English and Korean forthcoming). The first one is one of the most detailed accounts and evaluations of Hegels system, in which I take a particular interest, since Hegels Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is the last grand attempt of developing the basic conceptual structures of our world. My book on Morals and Politics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004: http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P00915) offers an objective idealist practical philosophy an ethics, philosophical anthropology, theory of power, philosophy of history, philosophy of law and political philosophy. The last book starts with a conceptual framework for the various literary genres used in the history of philosophy and is dedicated to the various techniques present in the literary genre of the philosophical dialogue. It deals with texts by more than thirty different authors, but it focuses on Plato, Cicero, Augustine, Hume, and Diderot as the most innovative masters of the genre.

Q: Have you yourself written philosophical dialogues? A: Yes, occasionally. My best is Encephalius: A Conversation on the Body-Mind-Problem (see essay from Mind and Matter, mind_matter_article.pdf, attached with permission). Philosophical dialogues are, of course, fictional conversations. A real conversation with a young girl is contained in The Dead Philosophers Caf: http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P00644, translated into 14 languages.

Q: You have also worked in the philosophy of biology. What are your central ideas in this field? A: I defend the compatibility of Darwinism, even of some sociobiological insights, with objective
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idealism. Natural selection for me is a mechanism to achieve a slow realization of ideas such as that of the good and the beautiful that cannot be given a naturalistic account. (See my essay in Darwinism and Philosophy: http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P01011).

Q: You have published much on the philosophy of religion. What is your distinctive approach? A: My approach is rationalist: Religious ideas have to be justified by reason. At the same time I do believe that there are strong philosophical arguments in favor of a religious interpretation of the world the value dimension of the world as well as the connections between the physical and the mental realm point to a mental principle of the world that is the source of normativity. My forthcoming volume, God As Reason (University of Notre Dame Press), unfolds this philosophy of religion.

Q: What do you see as the task of a Catholic university? A: As a university, it must be committed to truth at all costs: There can be no limits whatsoever to academic freedom. But not all true propositions are equally relevant. A Catholic university is well advised to focus on those issues that are relevant for normative reasons.

Q: Can you give an example? A: The ecological issue is of paramount importance for the survival of humankind, and it is at the same time a question that can be solved only with the cooperation of the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. The respect that future generations will have for us will depend on whether and how well we transform the value system of our society that partly induces environmental destruction. Clearly, part of the problem is to elaborate a new concept of nature, while avoiding falling into naturalism, which can never ground moral obligations. I tried this in my Philosophy of the Ecological Crisis (German original 1991, Russian 1992, Italian 1993, Croatian 1996, Korean 1997, French 2009/2011).

Q: Do the arts have a special role at a Catholic university, or do you see a special connection between Catholicism and the arts? A: The liturgical tradition of Catholicism has again and again inspired the arts. However, aesthetic modernism and the Catholic tradition have had enormous difficulties finding common ground. One of my interests in the last years has been to see how the Biblical tradition has been appropriated in some of the greatest literary works of the 19thcentury (Goethe article,
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article_from_religion_and_literature.pdf: reprint permission granted by the University of Notre Dame, Religion & Literature, Issue 38.4 [Winter 2006]).

Q: What do you see as the main task of the new Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study? A: First-class research inspired by a normative dimension and aiming at bridging the gaps between the various academic disciplines.

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