Reading in Exile

I've been reading Alice Von Hildebrand's biography of her husband Dietrich . In December 1933, after he had fled from Germany and was living in Vienna, Dietrich Von Hildebrand gave a number of talks in Belgium and France, some of them explicitly in opposition to National Socialism. While in Belgium, he visited Zita, the empress of Austria and Hungary who had been deposed after the fall of the Empire at the end of World War One. Dietrich at the time was working closely with Englebert Dollfuss , the Chancellor of Austria, and one who was trying hard to implement the Catholic social teaching and corporatist political vision of Pope Pius XI on a national scale, as well as oppose Nazism and Communism. The situation is instructive for conservatives today: [Zita] favored Dollfuss' political vision, but as an archmonarchist and a member of the deposed Habsburg dynasty, she could no share her visitor's enthusiasm for his leadership. It was a strange situation for Dietrich von ...

Since the beginning of my philosophical life, I have been interested in the the question of whether individuals are intelligible in and of themselves. You might think they aren't, and, if you thought this, you'd be in good company. You might think that when you get to know an individual, you know it only by considering it through various universal concepts--that is, concepts that apply to many things. You might think, for example, when you get to know another person, you come to know him not as intelligible in and of himself, as this unique individual, but inasmuch as he is kind, is intelligent, loves Indian food, is tall, is a reader of Jane Austen, etc. The uniqueness one sees in him is just the unique combination of these (potentially infinitely) many attributes. I don't think that view is right, but it's hard to articulate why. I've tried to do so in some of my professional writings, arguing, for example, that we see the unique intelligibility--where we unders...