I was scrolling through Instagram yesterday morning (nothing new here folks), when I stopped on a clearly staged photo of steaming french press coffee being poured into a porcelain mug. The caption was described a hectic busy lifestyle and the need to slow down and enjoy the little things. To summarize: self-care. 

My immediate reaction: aw-girl there is no way I can just take a day off to drink coffee and enjoy the quietness from my home. My to-do list would run into the ground. What you call self-care, I call self-destruction. 

How I long for a day off. 

But that simply isn’t possible. I started the semester off and got myself involved with just about everything. Senior spring is kicking my butt. If it weren’t for my faithful passion planner nothing would ever be accomplished and I would for sure be in tears in some odd corner of the library. 

Reflecting on the Instagram post, perhaps I do need to start practicing some self care. Is a slow morning with coffee what I need to recharge? In a moment to moment scheduled life, how do I find the time? 

Am I living for steaming cups of black gold? There has to be something better than coffee. Was not the human person made for more? 

Being the philosophy student that I am, my natural instinct is to turn to where I spend a majority of my time - books. Not just any books, but the books of the philosophers who have shaped how I think, live, and act. Namely, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Edith Stein.  Both are personalists. That is to say, focus their writings, on the value of the human person. You probably already know this if you’ve been reading Truth from the Heart. What do these great thinkers say about “recharging”?


One of the single most important “discoveries” in my opinion is the heart. The heart is more than the anatomical center of man pumping blood through his veins. Analogously, the heart for Dietrich, is the center of man were we respond to values. In our response to value we learn how to be human.. Not that we weren’t before, but we live our capacity to its fullest potential and discover cavities of ourselves we didn’t know existed. 

In one place Dietrich talks about the transformation that comes through value saying, “The soul grows wings--that is, the deepest inner transformation takes place--only if there is a real penetration of values and a real self-forgetfulness is achieved” (3). 

I don’t need to learn self-care. I need to learn how to respond to values. 

In drinking a fresh cup of coffee am I responding to value? Strictly speaking, no. Coffee I enjoy for it’s effect on my brain, the comfort of holding it in my hands, and for that sweet bitter taste. Some of you might not like coffee. While on a personal level I abhor you for this, there is actually nothing wrong with that. Coffee is subjectively satisfying and is a good because of that. Outside of your subjective pleasure, coffee has no concrete value. 

If not coffee, what about sleep? Maybe if I indulged in my time asleep I would be responding to value? This also isn’t exactly what Dietrich has in mind either. Sleep is only good in certain proportions. It is good for each of us, but only has goodness when done at the right time and is not over done. 

Although sleep and coffee are both goods, they don’t adequately encapsulate the values which cause the soul to grow wings. Values are goods in and of themselves. Although they have no need of our response, values offer us so much when we open ourselves up to them with reverence and allow them to impact our lives. An encountering value and responding to it appropriately moves us from lower human desires (i.e. coffee and sleep) and move us to transcendent spiritual desires fitting of our human faculties.


Our attitude towards value needs to be one of receptivity and reverence. Receptivity can only be achieved when we allow ourselves the silence and space to encounter values. How am I going to notice the value of the thousands of students I walk past everyday if I’m lost in my own thoughts hastily going through a to-do list? I won’t. 

In some sense it seems that we need the silence of self-care as a prerequisite to encounter the world of values. The silence itself is not what provides the wholeness for which we are looking. It disposes us to better encounter them with reverence. 

Do not stay on the level of the subjectively satisfying. Don’t stay with self care. To stay on that level is to stay on the level of a man who is heedless and thoughtless. Dive into values and feel your soul grow wings. 



---
1. Image one 
2. Image two 
3. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality, pg. 6
4. Image three 
5. Image four 
6. Image five 
7. Image six 
8. Image seven 

I was walking to class and a friend came to me and said, “you look really good today.”  I was a little defensive. I didn’t like the thought of being valued for merely how I look especially by a guy. As the day went on I thought about my reaction. Why didn’t I like what he said to me?

I had uncertainty in my beauty as a woman, and I discovered I had a question. Was the source of my beauty in its effect on other people or a quality I possess? When a friend tells me I look good, I say to myself, “my beauty exists!” but I immediately feel the limitation of receiving knowledge of my beauty’s existence from the outside without an internal correspondence. My reaction to the complement show me that I am not satisfied with my beauty being merely an effect on another.

 “There is unfortunately a widespread prejudice with regard to all values; one says that they are not qualities of an object, but only feelings or effects that an object evokes in us” explains Dietrich Von Hildebrand in Aesthetics (1). Beauty may evoke a feeling, joy may intensify as I drive and all the sudden see the mountains and the sun rising above them, but the beauty does not originate in my joy. It originates in the mountain. Beauty is a quality of the mountain.

This is the difference between objective and subjective beauty. Let’s look at more examples from Von Hildebrand (2). He talks about colors. We do not usually say that colors are beautiful for me, but that colors are beautiful. The importance of the color does not find its origin in its pleasant effects on me. The importance of the color is in itself. It is not limited to its effect on me. The color yellow is important in itself even if I have some unique repulsion to it. The same is true of a woman’s beauty. Her beauty is important in itself. It is not dependent, nor should it be reduced to the pleasurable effects it has on another person.

This is liberating for women. Our beauty is objective. It is a quality we possess and is not dependent upon its pleasurable effects on others. This means my beauty cannot be detracted based on me having a less pleasurable effect on a person. It may be detracted by choices I make against my beauty, but it cannot be detracted merely because I am having an unpleasable affect on a person.

We can see the effects of subjectifying women’s beauty in our culture. Women constantly changing based on pleasing others with no objective criteria. I’ll act this way to be pleasurable here, I’ll talk this way to be pleasurable here, and soon we’ve wasted weeks or months making judgements in preservation of a reduced beauty. Seeking it from an outside source, unaware that it is a quality we already posses, and we possess it in every aspect of our person.

I concluded that what I had separated, my physical appearance and my heart, my friend saw as a totality. This is Emma and she, Emma, looks good today. I moved from defensive to excited. Someone was seeing me as a whole person. I am everything I am and this includes my physical appearance. My beauty is a quality of who I am, and it penetrates every aspect of me from my physical to spiritual nature. This compliment was given as a response to the effect my beauty had on my friend, but with an understanding of my objective beauty I am able to receive it without anger. The compliment doesn’t get me excited because my beauty is finally coming into existence. It gets me excited that someone is able to respond to my value. I am objectively beautiful.

I am not the only one who holds this objective characteristic, nor do I hold it to the highest degree, but in any event I am beautiful. What it means that I am beautiful goes beyond how I look on a particular day, but it encompasses all of me. It also isn’t something I could’ve created, even if I did put together a nice outfit. There is something deeper about my beauty that is not created by me. This beauty is brought to light when I say yes to an opportunity for patience, and emphasized it with a little mascara. Most of us agree women are beautiful, but not all of us agree that the depth of this beauty is uncreated.  



“You look good today” was the compliment I received from a friend who knew me well. This moved me to reconcile the question, “Am I beautiful?” I was not content to limit my beauty’s existence to his affective response. Thanks to this Fellowship I’ve begun to grasp it is a quality I possess.

I am objectively beautiful, and particularly as a woman, I believe this is so. 

----------------------------------------------------------
(1) Dietrich Von Hildebrand, Aesthetics, 17.
(2) Ibid, 16.
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3

Christmas time. The most wonderful time of the year. Somehow it also seems to bring out the radical consumerism that has become one of the hallmarks of American culture. In my family, the wish lists have all been neatly organized on Amazon with links to make sure there are no mistakes. My sister wants a titanium steel apple watch series 2… 42mm, please don’t bother with 38mm.. with a saddle brown leather band. With all the specifications, and expectations preset it’s a borderline disaster when she opens it Christmas morning and someone accidentally purchased the exact watch in rose gold.

Much like the consumer society of Christmas, we’ve begun to turn our romantic relationships into an itemized checklist. I’m all about the gingers, and a sense of humor is key. I want someone with a sense of adventure and some muscle tone; although, if he spray tans and goes to body building shows he’s not for me. I could go on, but the point being, we try relationships on to see if they fit based on a preassigned set of qualities. Similarly to how it usually turns out when I’m shopping, the latest clothing fads don’t actually look that good on my non-model body. Yet somehow we’ve allowed ourselves to idealize love, and have begun to base our desires off of what mainstream culture tells us we need. Turning the beloved into a product who satisfies our needs and expectations predefined by Cosmopolitan magazine has removed from him or her the value of their individuality. What happens when they no longer make us look good? Or when our desires shift? Do we throw them away and move onto the next relationship?

It’s time for the revival of love. A love which sees the broken aspects of a person and continues to love them anyway. Discovery of the imperfections of the other is not the moment to walk away, but an opportunity to enter into fuller deeper, truer, love. Love cannot become a checklist. A person will never fit into a box that way.


This is not to suggest that a consumerist approach to love is something new in the 21st century. It has been a wound in the side of man throughout history. As individual beings we naturally seek the perfection of ourselves, and desire our own happiness. If something were to jeopardize the happiness we seek, it is left behind. This is not an act of love but an act of nature. When approaching love we fall into the pitfall of using it as a means to achieve this happiness we seek. Hildebrand says,

“There is no more basic misunderstanding of love than the idea that it involves the surrender of oneself to another person in order to achieve happiness.” (3)

It is this notion I often fall into as well. In pursuit of my own happiness I look at what will make me happy and then set out in pursuit of finding a partner who will satisfy those desires. If this sounds familiar, I would not be surprised. It is a mindset perpetuated by our culture. However, it reveals our lack of understanding of love’s true essence.



 “Happiness does not come from union with another because of the love I bear him. Happiness is love’s outcome, never its motive… It is therefore love’s essence, wherever it is found, that the loved one seem precious, beautiful, and worthy of love.” (5)

It seems then that I could still search out one who possesses qualities that I view as precious, beautiful, and worthy of love. I think that there is some truth in that. There may be a specific kind of person with whom I would be better suited to see their beauty, preciousness, and worth. This does not mean I can condense these qualities into an all-inclusive list. The human person is irreducible. Capable of being understood, they cannot be comprehended. There is a unique unrepeatability within each person and an infinite depth. Hildebrand discusses this in the language of value,

“This has to do with something central, a datum of worth, which is actually supplied by many vital, spiritual and moral values. This datum can never be reduced to such values, nor ever be formulated as they can. But this is because a person’s overall beauty cannot be classified.” (6)

Woah I almost lost myself in some of the philosophical language, but please bear with me and let me explain. Each individual is in possession of unique set of values based in their individuality, but their worth as a person cannot be reduced to these virtues alone.
Applying that to love, we love when we see the preciousness, beauty, and worth of the beloved. I'm not in love with a mop of ginger hair. I’m not in love with a sense of humor.  I’m in love with a person. I perceive and respond appropriately. Not as a means to my own happiness, although that is an effect of the love.

Perhaps this blog post did not convince you to throw out the list of qualities you desire in a significant other, but I’m not sure if I intended you to either. However, I hope you and I together can continue to cultivate an awareness for the value of fellow human persons. Perhaps we can open our options to appreciate values that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, and to learn this Christmas Season what it is to love another for their own sake.



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Image one 
(2) Image two 
(3) Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man, Woman, and the Meaning of Love pg. 11 
(4) Image three 
(5) Hildebrand, pg. 11
(6) Hildebrand, pg. 13 
(7) Image four 

1. Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living p. 4
2. Ibid. p. 5

Image 3