okay so keep uh moving on from there I'm still on 87. according to Shaler on the other hand this Perfection moral value itself is neither the center of exemplariness and imitation nor itself an end of willing it is experienced only upon the occasion of the process of imitation which therefore in shaler's view is not essentially but only indirectly productive of moral value the significance of the model and ideals primarily psychological and only indirectly ethical to complete this picture I should add that in addition to positive models Shaler also distinguishes negative models the imitation of which
is associated with the production of negative moral value the development of evil in us and finally God is not really an object of imitation God accompanies the process of imitation and the acceptance of personal values to the extent that in the light of of the idea of God as the highest personal Spirit there develops in all in us all that determines our personality and thus a kind of resemblance to God a kind of theomorphism obviously Shaler would not agree with Saint Thomas's view of exemplariness Okay so again here's a good way of seeing the uh
the difference so now let's uh let's try to finish this up here so I'm gonna move quickly through these last quotes that I have marked out for you uh let's go to page 90 at the top uh what is a good for Shaler this is a central question isn't it roughly speaking one could say that it is an object that in some way contains a source of value phenomenology however allows us to speak only of a hierarchy of values and not a hierarchy of goods so we see the metaphysical issue here right uh now let's
go to the bottom for Saint Thomas the moral life consists in attaining the truth and all our action and behavior and activity by nature always aims at some good consequently the essence of the moral life is the lived experience of the truth of the good realize in action and the realization in that action of the goods subjected to the Criterion of reason and thus placed in the light of that truth this is not ethical intellectualism in the platonic sense rather it is a belief that the positing of norms enters into the essence and structure of
all conscious and free human acts which always have objective moral value now that I think reminds me of uh what we talked about in the video on Von Hildebrand and Crosby so showing how Saint Thomas is different from the Plato uh the platonic or Socratic intellect intellectualization of the good or of the good life but uh but we see how all these things come together properly in Saint Thomas so it seems like I guess maybe the best critique would be to say that Plato picks up on uh something true about the moral life in its
necessary relation to reason uh whereas Shaler also picks up on something in relation to the heart and the experience of value from this kind of phenomenological perspective but it seems like both of them are only getting a piece of the picture but it's in Saint Thomas at all of these different things uh will find their resolution together okay so uh let's keep going from there on 91 this is the bottom half of 91. Shaler on the other hand has a different view of the moral life for him the moral life consists in the emotional experience
of moral value moral value in turn arises spontaneously upon the occasion of our emotional involvement in some world of values or other and becomes the object and content of a separate exist experience precisely because this emotional involvement in our world of values is connected with the experience of a certain hierarchy of those values this was already discussed above in this view the essence of the moral life or uh taken singly the singly the essence of a particular moral experience is not the positing of norms that is the lived experience of the truth of the good
of our action but the lived experience of value alone and herein lies the basic difference between the two views okay so this is important the lived experience of value has one could say eliminated the lived experience of the truth of the good thus a real element has disappeared from the schillarian views or a chalarian view of the moral life the element of positing norms understood as the lived experience of the truth of the good and this seems incompatible with experience and incompatible with reality the essence of the moral life is not just the lived experience
of value or even the good but precisely the lived experience of the truth of the good that is an object of action and that is realized in this action okay there we go so that's that's the key Point that's the crucial distinction that's what takes us back to Saint Thomas and that's what would allow us as long as we keep that principle in mind uh how the good is ordered under the understanding of Truth or according to our understanding of the true uh that's the crucial feature and um this is what would allow us then
to make sense out of what we've been saying with let's say the the personalist or phenomenological uh descriptions of happiness and the will with respect to the good and the moral life but um this is this is our Solid Ground how this is necessarily connected with the truth but also an encounter with the truth itself that's what's missing and that's what needs to be recovered to ground this and and uh to make it work all right so last paragraph and we'll we'll end with this thought so on 93 obviously there is a difference between positing
a norm and positing a value still they both have as a basic constituent the element of the truth of the good and in this sense to positive value is already somehow to posit a norm although not in the full sense of the term in the full sense of the term to posit a norm does not just mean to determine the truth of the goodness of a human action but also to direct to that action in keeping with this truth so uh again I think this ties us back nicely with these first principles of of Ethics
um especially like I mentioned before that first principle of natural law uh do good and avoid evil so this is an experience in an encounter with the truth and you know this I think also ties well with what we were reading with uh our introduction to whose Earl and this necessarily realist element that you can get with phenomenology in so far as you can't separate truth and reality from intentionality and uh experience properly understood and so this is I think how um can put all those pieces together to take what's of value from Shaler which
again I think what we read um we can say here are positive things that we can say then about Shaler from uh voitiwa's take we can say that we have a common enemy with Kant and a hyper moralism and uh the modern restructuring of ethics uh and this lead back to the pre-modern so Shaler gives us a good critique of Kant and he also gives us a good way back from the perspective of modern thought back into the pre-modern so uh like crucial okay so I think that's good that's that's a strong positive and then
another one is that in the way that he describes this kind of phenomenology of love and value um and let's say the speaking of the heart um this like I said is is reminiscent to me of of uh John Henry Newman so there is a a way that you can um you can understand this in line with let's say this more modern Catholic understanding uh so all these things can be reconciled but again there is nevertheless that encounter with truth in that real uh ontological basis that's missing from chaler that you're not going to get
from them from the personalists uh without that domestic basis but this shows you the the necessity of tomism to fill out that picture because otherwise um you're only left with something that's incomplete and uh something that's out of step with our full experience of the moral life so uh that's I think you know a good kind of ending point for uh how to understand Shaler From boitiwa's perspective and how the temistic personalist will let's say enrich uh and bring out the good that's there with phenomenology and personalism with who's Earl and chaler um placing these
things on on firm ground and filling out the aspects that uh were lacking without losing though the good contributions that we brought up right so I think that's that's the the key thing here to see how these two things enrich one another um so I think this time what we did is you know we've been talking before about how personalism and phenomenology can enrich tomism but now we're kind of seeing it from the other angle right we're seeing what's missing or what is potentially missing from phenomenology and personalism and how tomeism is necessary to fill
these things out and I think that these things have also been coming out in our discussions especially thinking about uh you know making sense out of um tying in love with the highest good uh how can we merge these two things in a way that doesn't betray uh necessary truths that we have through um let's say theological metaphysics really so both of these things together in our tradition in that respect so all right so I know that uh this week we had we had a bit more I mean I had to lecture a little bit
more this week because uh I think that this is a really important topic and it takes time to go through this stuff but I think that it was worth it I hope that you found it worthwhile as well but um but I think that this is uh this is a really important point that brings a lot of these different aspects together because now we're seeing um I think what's exciting about this is that we're seeing in practice really how all of the different aspects of philosophy come together because we're not only talking about the speculative
you know we're bringing in metaphysics and and even a bit of the theological but we're also talking of course about ethics and and the moral life so how all of these things merge together in this integral way I think um that to me is really exciting that to me is is what philosophy should be you know how all of these things are understood uh together to paint the whole picture as opposed to you know focusing on a niche in a way that um you know falls into like a tunnel vision where you lose sight of
the forest around you so anyway I hope that uh I hope this wasn't too long for you um I hope it wasn't too complicated so again I tried to you know do my best to uh spend a greater amount of time on this so that it you know to maybe break it down a little bit more so um I hope that it's that this was clear and uh as always you know ask me any questions uh and uh I'll look forward to seeing what you say this week in the discussions God bless
