Value-Feeling and Moral Education: Pedagogical Remarks on Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Phenomenology

The paper orbits around the pedagogical relevance of value-feeling in Dietrich von Hildebrand’s ethical perspective. In particular, his early works—namely, his PhD Thesis and Habilitationsschrift, entitled Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung and Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis respectively—will be considered insofar as they include an account of the intentional act of value-feeling (Wertfühlen). This recalls the main claims on emotions shared by the members of the Munich and Gottingen Circle: i.e., the stratification of emotional life, the intentionality of emotion and feeling, and, most of all, their moral dimension. After briefly portraying von Hildebrand’s early life, his debt toward Edmund Husserl’s ethics will be depicted with the purpose of defining possible links among feeling, ethical experience, and moral education. Namely, as Husserl and some of his disciples showed, our first relationship to value is emotional and, therefore, involves a pre-theoretical apprehension that von Hildebrand calls indeed value-feeling. The paper also aims at highlighting how such account entails the seminal personalism to be found in his later works as well as an implicit theory of education.