Can Affectivity Be Morally Va-lued or Not?

Abstract

When we talk about philosophy we should talk about anthropology. In the same way, when we talk about anthropology we should also talk about affectivity. However, until today, I think that many philosophers have misunderstood affectivity in the human person since they have fallen into two reductionisms: one considers affectivity as an irrational component, this is the case of dualism; the other associates it with monism, as can be seen in sentimentality and psychologism. At the same time, those who remain in an intermediate position have also misunderstood it, as can be seen, for example, from the Aristote-lian- Thomist perspective. For these, affectivity is always pre-moral and must always be subordinate to reason and will. In this way, they have not understood that affectivity also has a spiritual realm and that, thus, it must often integrate reason and will, in order to guarantee the self-realization of the human person. In this sense, they have not seen that affectivity can be valued from a moral point of view either. Due above all to these errors that have been made in the philosophical field in relation to affectivity, I have seen that it would be good to rethink the notion of affectivity of the human person. Thus, among all the authors that I have met and studied, I have seen that Dietrich von Hildebrand's proposal in relation to affectivity could provide many answers and tools to be able to solve these philosophical concerns and to avoid reductionisms, providing more complete interpretations. The philosopher, phenomenologist-realist, Dietrich von Hildebrand has distin-guished himself in many areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics, gnoseology, ethics, anthropology, reli-gion, etc. "I almost want to say that the Adolf von Hildebrand's (artistic) genius has been inherited by his son (...) as a philosophical genius”. However, without a doubt, the main area, the one in which it has stood out most prominently, I believe was in the field of affectivity, thus giving contributions that until now had not been taken into consideration. The affective map in Hildebrand is very vast. For this reason, I have decided to directly present a single topic, that is, how affectivity is related to freedom and thus, in this sense, how it can be morally valued. To achieve this objective, I initially propose to analyze how Hildebrand understands and conceives affectivity in the human person. Later I will analyze human freedom and its relationship with mo-rality. Finally, I will relate the different types of freedom in the human person with affectivity, thus demon-strating at the same time how affectivity can be morally evaluated.