Rediscovering the Transcendent Self with Philip H. Phenix

By: Campbell F. Scribner

Campbell F. Scribner is an associate professor of education at the University of Maryland, where he teaches courses on educational history, philosophy, and law. He is the author of several books, most recently A is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education (2023). He is now working on an intellectual biography of Philip H. Phenix.

I worry, in my darker moments, that my students lack a sense of interiority. Undergraduates stay after class to talk about personal struggles, but they describe them in medical, almost mechanical terms, as if the human condition were a symptomatic illness or a series of technical glitches. Graduate students are more likely to speak about “identity,” but they associate that word with categories of race, gender, and sexuality that (not necessarily, but almost always in practice) slip into essentialism and exogeneity. Both groups rely on emotivism, stating convictions that are no less certain for being almost wholly arbitrary.

If writers like Alasdair MacIntyre worry that modernity has left us wandering through ethical ruins, clutching at claims of right and wrong without the standards of judgment that make them meaningful, it sometimes seems that my students have fallen farther, into the wreckage of post-modernity, where subjective assumptions and therapeutic language eschew moral claims altogether, even as they drift away from their own theoretical premises. Indeed, for all the welcome discussion of “lived experience” in recent years, I worry that prevailing modes of thought deny students the means to truly experience their lives—by foreclosing the possibility of meaningful suffering, passing over questions of faith and doubt, rejecting the authority of reason, and simultaneously affirming and rejecting the possibility of authentic selfhood.

Proponents of “the good life” promise an antidote to this confusion. Drawing from the wisdom of the ancients and from various religious traditions, they point to a moral reality beyond the subjective, to sources of transcendence with which we can rightly align our thoughts and desires. I am very sympathetic with these perspectives, but sometimes they, too, move too quickly past interiority and a preexisting sense of self. Virtue is a process, to be sure, something that we must work to achieve and internalize, but the moral, introspective individual does not merely appear at the end. Rather, David Bentley Hart directs our attention to “the first dawn of wonder within us: that instant when the infinitely open question of everything posed itself to us all at once, but when it had not yet become a specific question about anything as such.” “Every attempt to know the truth of the world later in life,” he writes, “begins for all of us in an instant of naïve surprise before the mystery of being, an unanticipated experience of the sheer fortuity and givenness of the world, a sudden fleeting moment of limpid awareness when one knows simultaneously the utter strangeness of everything familiar and the utter contingency of everything presumed.” In short, flourishing begins in moments of ontological shock, and depends not only on ultimate aims but on individual volition and preliminary leaps of faith. In an educational context, discussions of the good life must attend to the sinner on the verge of repentance, the believer wrestling with uncertainty, and the novice for whom wisdom feels remote.

There is some danger in this posture toward the good life. Encouraging authenticity and introspection can easily lead to solipsism. Much of the dysfunction in education today can be attributed to a superficiality that traps young people in their own inchoate desires. Nevertheless, it is worth considering how initial states of being can set individuals on the path to the good life, and how partial and subjective perspectives can reveal enduring truths.

The writings of Philip H. Phenix, who taught at Teachers College, Columbia University from the 1950s to the 1970s, may be helpful in charting a course from existential awareness to transcendent meaning. Phenix understands education as a broadly religious endeavor.¹ Like Kierkegaard, he argues that maturation comes in moments of decision, when ethical commitment (including commitment to truth and learning) reveals the infinite depths of the soul. "Inwardness,” Phenix writes, “is participation in the source and ground of all being,” which “imparts a sense of infinite importance to personal existence.”² By these lights, irony, detachment, posturing, and other forms of externality leave the learner in a state of arrested development, cut off from the responsibility and action that affirm true selfhood.

Philip H. Phenix (1915-2002) while a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University (Columbia University).

Perhaps less obvious is that many forms of reason have the same effect. To align oneself wholly with science, political ideology, religious orthodoxy, or any other temporal source of knowledge would, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, “make some contingent and relative vitality into the unconditioned principle of meaning,” a form of bad faith that both Niebuhr and Phenix equate with idolatry.³ Instead, Phenix writes, “religious consciousness is manifest in the refusal to accord supreme worth to any and every realization of nature or humanity. Implicit in such refusal is commitment to an inexhaustible ideality that renders a judgment of partiality and insufficiency on whatever exists,” a “perennial protest of the prophetic conscience against the absolutizing of limited goods.”⁴ It is only by turning inward that human beings come to recognize their own irreducibility, their capacity for boundless creativity, and the weight of their ethical choices, through which they commune with the divine.⁵

Of course, education also requires a turn outward, a movement from the conscious self to the world beyond and (for our purposes) to the good life. For Phenix, the latter turn depends on what the theologian Paul Tillich describes as ontological reason or theonomy (the law of God): that “structure of the mind which enables it to grasp and to shape reality,” “the ‘infinite potentiality of being and meaning’ which pours into the rational structures of mind and reality.”⁶ While this is obviously a revelatory, mystical, or “ecstatic” way of knowing, it is not irrational.⁷ Rather, if heteronomy is law or authority imposed from outside, and autonomy is rational and self-given, this type of philosophical theonomy is the encompassing fabric of reality—beyond means and ends, beyond subjects and objects, “something that is not reason but which precedes reason and is manifest through it”—that transcends human will and allows us to approach the world with a spirit of both discernment and reverence. It is on this aspect of Tillich’s thought, which influenced Martin Luther King and others, that Phenix pivots to more traditional versions of natural law.⁸

In Phenix’s hands, theonomy offers several concrete lessons for students and professors.

First, applied to classroom relationships, theonomy forbids the crude generalizations that animate racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice. “If a person is a creative subject,” Phenix writes, “then the core of his selfhood can never be defined in terms of objective formative patterns that are common to a social group,” but must be seen in the quality of individuality. Unfortunately, this basic human demand has become increasingly difficult to achieve in recent years. The prevalence of reactionary slogans like “I don’t see color” or “All lives matter” should caution us against lazy forms of dismissal, erasure, and injustice, but so too should facile assumptions about the self as a purely social construction, the sort of warmed-over postmodernism heard in academic and activist circles.

The question of how we can disclose and affirm “whole selves” in the classroom depends on how we define the ultimate ends and eternal sources of selfhood. As Phenix puts it, “It makes a great difference whether the patterns of culture are regarded as essentially constitutive of the personality,” as much of the current discourse would have it, “or as resources for use by a personality whose springs of being lie at a deeper level than any social norm, that is to say, in transcendence.”⁹ Only an acknowledgment of the infinite worth of human beings—not as a platitude or a background assumption, but as a conscious choice—opens us “to fresh possibilities of insight and invention,” to “unique structures of existence,” and to the “engendering, gestating, expecting, and celebrating the moments of singular awareness and of inner illumination when each person comes into the consciousness of his inimitable personal being.”¹⁰

Like many virtue-based approaches, theonomy also demands a reunification of thought and feeling in our understanding of the world, a contemplative wholeness that Phenix associates with “vision.” “If theory is conceived as vision,” Phenix notes, “it is necessarily saturated with feeling, and if inspiration is conceived as the creative core of directed personal becoming, it is necessarily suffused with rationality.”¹¹ The cultivation of just sentiments resists the deadening facticity of modern education—the hoarding of facts or skills and the reduction of course material to its utility value—and instead orients students to objects worthy of their attention: those artifacts, performances, texts, or phenomena that reward ongoing inquiry and cultivate receptivity, respect, and deeper cultural awareness. Theonomy reminds us that knowledge “does not reside in the specific methods or contents of instruction, but in the presupposition of the primacy and the power of the elemental relation,” which Martin Buber describes as the “I-Thou” pairing. Being (in this existential sense) depends on a type of intersubjectivity that recognizes not only others but the world itself as an end rather than a means to achieve our purposes and desires, a perspective rooted in feelings of wholeness and wonder.¹²

Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City (Wikipedia)

For the same reason, theonomy offers a new perspective on disciplinary study. Higher education seems to alternate between interdisciplinary approaches (which often devolve into purely undisciplined lines of thought, oriented toward vocational rather than intellectual ends) and an understanding of disciplines as ends unto themselves (which tends to reduce them to mere technique, vehicles for “historical thinking” or “the scientific method.”) Drawing from Tillich, Phenix encourages us to follow “relative truths” beyond their particular fields of inquiry, to a higher unity in which “there is no reality, thing, or event which cannot become a bearer of the mystery of being and enter into a revelatory correlation.”¹³ Consider his description of history courses:

Historical activity is evidence of man's reaching for the eternal within the temporal. Human beings possess a sense that their deeds have a lasting significance and are not altogether finished in the doing. But in making good his commitment to the eternal, historical man is not content simply to affirm the spiritual or rational continuation of the human act….Rather, in reconstituting the past so that it may be experienced by concretely existing people in the present, he makes good the right of significant being to lastingness. History does not rest upon the idea of abstract immortality, but of concrete resurrection.¹⁴

Here, Phenix argues that the transcendent experience of time carries important ethical implications. Not only that historical study cultivates particular intellectual or moral virtues, but that it opens students to self-awareness, positioning them between the necessity of the past and the possibility of the future. By confronting “unique persons making particular decisions in singular situations”—never predetermined by natural or structural forces but imbued with “self-conscious purpose”—students come to recognize “the singularity of the human person, emphasizing the incomparable selfhood of each human being as an intrinsically interesting and inestimably valuable creative center.”¹⁵ Phenix also observes that we affirm present selfhood through the freely chosen preservation of the past, characterizing “lastingness” in the same terms that Hannah Arendt and Michael Oakeshott think of collective “action” and responsibility.

The same holds true for any academic discipline. As Phenix puts it, “The study of mathematics and chemistry, language and economics, music and religion, do not merely yield knowledge of number and molecules, words and prices, melody and God, but of mankind, one's associates, and oneself. Thus, through diversified liberal studies one may grow in the grace of true humanness, sincere neighborliness, and authentic selfhood.”¹⁶ Disciplined inquiry is ultimately a pursuit of what Alfred North Whitehead described as “the binding element in the universe,” “a dissatisfaction with the multifariousness of immediate actuality, leading to a search for a deeper ground of unity.”¹⁷

All this leads to a final point, which is the way that theonomy anchors the appropriate ends of life, individually and collectively. Phenix disapproves of much of the pragmatic thinking of his era and the implicit subjectivism of our own, in which “the highest good is independence, or autonomy…[and] the determining authority in human affairs is the desire of the people,” which results in an inordinate focus on skills-training and the identification of the self with prevailing social trends.¹⁸ Phenix contrasts this “democracy of desire” with a “democracy of worth,” oriented toward responsibility and more enduring sources of value.¹⁹ A democracy of worth cannot be rooted in human will, he argues, but only in “discoveries of antecedent possibilities” in the soul, “a law of truth and right which is found and given, not constructed by human decision.”²⁰ Again, we can discover this law through introspection and the disclosure of our individuality in shared spaces like classrooms, and we can do so only through a recognition of our inner depths, our infinitude, not through the immanent, overgeneralized language of “mental health” or “identity.” It is in this sense that we must demonstrate authenticity to our students and demand the same in return.

1. Philip H. Phenix, Religious Concerns in Contemporary Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1959), 12.

2. Phenix, Man and His Becoming (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964), 110.

3. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 178; Philip H. Phenix, Education and the Common Good: A Moral Philosophy of the Curriculum (New York: Harper & Row), 238.

4. Philip H. Phenix, “Transcendence and the Curriculum,” Teachers College Record 73, no. 1 (1971): 274.

5. Philip H. Phenix, “Educational Theory and Inspiration,” Educational Theory 13, no. 1 (1963): 3.

6. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 75-76.

7. Tillich, 112.

8. Tillich, 73-75, 79.

9. Phenix, “Transcendence,” 279.

10. Phenix, “Transcendence,” 279.

11. Phenix, “Inspiration,” 5.

12. Phenix, “Transcendence,” 277.

13. Tillich, 118.

14. Phenix, Man and His Becoming, 101-102.

15. Phenix, Man and His Becoming, 103-105.

16. Phenix, Man and His Becoming, 115.

17. Phenix, “Educational Theory and Inspiration,” 2.

18. Phenix, Education and the Common Good, 24.

19. Phenix, Education and the Common Good, 25.

20. Phenix, Education and the Common Good, 27, 248.