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5. Intellect, will, and feelings in the process of fulfillment

The adequate assimilation of values depends above all on the intellect and the will. Let us resort here again to a parallel with how the body works. Just as the feet must be fit for walking (and need exercise to do so), and the eyes for seeing, and the mouth or the stomach for feeding - and if they are not healthy or adequate, a person will suffer in his physical life - so the intellect and will need to be exercised and developed in a way consistent with their purpose. Otherwise they may not develop; they may end up in a warped condition and with an altered operation whose effect is to hinder rather than favor a person's fulfillment. The person who tries to feed his body with anything and everything can die of poisoning, or at least become chronically undernourished as a result of an inadequate diet. So too, the real development of the spiritual faculties requires healthy and proper nourishment.

A person has to exercise, develop, and mature the mind and the will. They need to be fed with their own distinctive sustenance, and be safeguarded against what can undermine or damage their proper operation and the psychic health of the person. Truth is the nourishment of the mind; goodness, that of the will. These are fundamental principles which we will briefly try to justify and illustrate. Their full understanding and acceptance can only come about as a result of further reading, and above all of further personal reflection on the part of the reader.

Working from the basic principles enunciated, let us outline what is involved in this need to form and develop intellect and will.

The food of the mind is truth, a food which it naturally seeks. All relativisms and skepticisms notwithstanding, it is practically speaking almost impossible to deny this principle. Everyone considers - and uses - the mind as an instrument for pursuing and reaching the truth, at least in certain concrete areas of study: mathematics, physical sciences, etc. In fact, to discriminate between truth and falsehood is the recognized function of the intellect. Truth is the value that the mind looks for.

Man is constantly seeking truth. Scientifically established truths are a condition of progress in all areas of applied technology. The everyday existence of the individual depends on a grasp of many elementary physical and experiential truths (an electric cable can take a person's life; so, each in its own way, can contaminated water or thin ice). Truth in communication is a condition of any social life with a minimum of mutual trust or confidence - which can only exist to the extent that one is convinced that people in general do not lie, or that newspapers do not deliberately spread false news. All of these can be described as "truths of life", at times even as truths of survival.

We are used to applying a "true or false" criterion as a means of testing or improving people's knowledge of mathematics, physics, geography, history, civics, etc. Those who cannot distinguish true from false are poorly qualified to protect and develop their own life, and utterly unqualified to guide others - if that is also their mission. This is particularly evident in the directly physical field. Serious harm can be done by the parent or teacher who does not know that electricity is dangerous or that exhaust fumes can kill. These are objective principles or true laws not just of physical growth but of survival that, if known, protect the life of the body. People, especially young people, do not normally know these truths by instinct and so need to be taught.

How far can one apply the true/false criterion to values, especially to values in behavior? Are there psychic or moral laws or principles that should guide the process of self-fulfillment, fostering the health of our spirit or even safeguarding what is necessary for its "survival"? "Selfishness narrows our mind and sympathies"; "Jealousy stifles our response to values"; "Racist propaganda breeds intolerance"; "Pornography can lead to obsession and an inability to love". Are such principles valid? Are they important? Are they true? Should they be taught? Can they simply be dismissed as pertaining to the ethical or moral order, and therefore not to the field of anthropology? Or should they too not be regarded as valid anthropological guidelines for the achievement of true human fulfillment? We do not intend to debate these questions here. We leave them among other points to be pondered by the reader [1].

Formation of the mind; recognizing the truth in a value

Since values are our focal point of interest, we hold that the mind should be formed so that it is an effective faculty for discovering genuine or true values: distinguishing between those which are worth more and those which, being inferior, are worth less (as noted earlier, one needs to have a scale of values, because not all values are of equal "value"), spotting and being able to resolve possible conflicts between certain values, discerning, when necessary, what is a true value from that which, perhaps despite appearances, is not [2]. All of this enters into the process of forming the intellectual faculty; and to the extent that it is accomplished, the man or woman "of criterion" emerges.

The power of the intellect varies greatly from person to person. Some minds are quick, others slow; some deep, others superficial. The speculative mind can be distinguished from the practical. Some minds seem more suited for a particular field: mathematics, business ... Intellectual qualities combine in the most varied ways. A person with a slow mind can have the ability to reason deeply (if he works at it), while another may have a quick understanding that remains on the surface of things. In any case, the simple fact of being very intelligent is not enough to guarantee a person's fulfillment. A first-class intelligence can be used by a criminal to plan a robbery, a murder or an act of terrorism ...

The mind has its enemies: lies or deception from without, by which a person of little intellectual perception is convinced by a wrong (although perhaps cleverly presented) argument, to embrace false theoretical or practical principles in life (racial intolerance, social discrimination ...); lies from inside or self-deception by which a person, out of selfishness or pride, "re-makes" or models a "truth of one's own" that is easier to assimilate.

In the last chapter we said that there has to be a capacity for digesting truth, even truth that is unpleasant. With relation to "unpleasant" truths, there also has to be a willingness to digest them, and if necessary a determination to do so.

One can spit out such a truth at the first taste of unpleasantness, refusing even to consider if it is nourishment for the mind. One can begin to discover its unpleasantness after having swallowed it, and then refuse to assimilate it [3]. But an undigested or half-digested truth of this nature does not easily pass out of the intellectual system. It remains; and, even with renewed rejection, it tends to remain - with little or no interior profit; just an uncomfortable feeling of something not properly assimilated.

Nevertheless, its continuing presence inside justifies some hope that the person may one day make up his mind to accept and absorb it, along with its demanding but beneficial consequences.

There is also skepticism or intellectual distrust which leads a person to an attitude of habitual doubt or uncertainty toward everything - producing a paralysis of thought that is a manifest handicap for life.

Truth attracts the mind; however, it never makes a forced entrance. The way in needs to be open - not blocked by bias or inertia. And there must be a positive disposition to welcome truth. It is necessary to be on special guard against prejudice, which becomes operative whenever an already formed judgment is allowed to determine in advance the consideration of a question, in such a way that this pre-judgment effectively excludes any alternative proposition from gaining access to the central tribunal of the mind.

Formation of the will; choosing the goodness of a value

The function of the intellect is to allow us to discover the truth: i.e the real essence (and not the first impression or the mere appearance) of things and ideas. Thus we can acquire information in order first to distinguish and so to be in a better position to choose: "this is good; that other option is not so good, or perhaps is actually bad". This is what is meant by having criterion.

Acting calls for choosing. Now, our existential choices are seldom the simple result of a detached intellectual appraisal (whereby we understand that a proposal is clever, or that a way of acting is not honest); our decisions tend to correspond even more to subjective and interested motivations. This job suits me better than the other; I prefer to go out with X rather than Y because I like him or her more.

So, we normally choose on the basis not merely of the truth ascertained but as much, or perhaps even more, of the goodness seen (or thought to be seen, or wanted to be seen) in the object proposed for a possible choice. The election or final choice depends on the will, whose tendency is to adhere to what presents itself as good. If the nourishment of the mind is truth, that of the will is goodness: nourishment that the will also seeks in a natural way.

In human choice the action of the will is of course not by any means just of attraction or acceptance. It is also of rejection. This is so in the elementary sense already noted, that each concrete choice involves the rejection of all the alternative choices present at least at that moment. But it may also be so in the much more important sense that the will can quite deliberately reject a possible choice, even though the person is strongly attracted towards it.

Human fulfillment, then, appears as an intellectual-volitive process in which the discerning mind penetrates to the truth of values, and the upright will is drawn to the goodness they contain.

The matter would be straightforward and uncomplicated if the mind always distinguished the truth of situations and values with accuracy, and the will were always unfailingly drawn by the real goodness that is discovered there. Unfortunately, experience teaches us that things are by no means so simple in reality. On the one hand, our mind is often slow to recognize the truth. But, even more importantly, at times it goes astray in its reasoning and takes to be true what is in fact false, or as right what is in fact wrong.

These errors of the mind have an effect on the will. A likely consequence is that the will is mistakenly drawn to prefer some inferior good or value to one that is greater. But the complexity of the matter does not rest there. The fact is that even though the mind may be quite clear and certain in its judgment of what is a true and right value, the will can nevertheless choose in contradiction to the mind, making a wrong choice - wrong, that is, from the standpoint of truth. In other words, the will can take over or "hijack" the mind somewhere along the process of discerning what is true and good. There is something here that merits closer scrutiny.

Interrelation between mind and will

Existential decisions - the choices that shape a life - ought to proceed from the intellect, committed to its task of discerning the positive or negative value that every reality or possibility offers; and from the will, freely attracted by the good that is presented to it. Reasonably enough, then, one can ask whether the mind and the will carry the same weight in each decision, or whether one of the two is predominant.

It is often maintained that the mind plays the principal role in the elective process. This view tends to describe the will as a blind faculty which necessarily chooses what the intellect sets before it as a value or a good. This may be an over-simplification, which fails to correspond to the complexity of the human operation. Each human decision is after all to be attributed ultimately not to the faculties - intellect or will - but to the person who thinks and wants. The mind influences the will; but the opposite is also true. And perhaps more attention needs to be paid to the decisive role which the will can play in the evaluations made by the intellect.

The process of fulfillment is not mainly intellectual in character; it is also voluntary. In fact the will's response is probably the more critical aspect of the process. One cannot love what one does not know; but one may not know what one ought to love. One can even want not to know what one ought to love.

"Easy" and "difficult" truths

An underlying point needs to be considered here, and perhaps it could be best expressed as follows. There exist "easy" truths - so elementary and obvious that the rudest mind can grasp them immediately; and perhaps also so pleasant to learn (the young girl who discovers that boys think her pretty) that there is no resistance to their acceptance. There also exist "difficult" truths; and this too in various ways. The difficulty can be no more than the jolt given to vanity, as when a girl's pleasant self-image is upset by hearing that someone else is considered particularly attractive. The point is made with quiet humor by Margaret Schlegel, protagonist of Howards End: "You know - at least, I know in my own case - when a man has said to me, 'So-and-so's a pretty girl', I am seized with a momentary sourness against So-and-so, and long to tweak her ear. It's a tiresome feeling, but not an important one, and one easily manages it" [4].

The difficulty, which is not always so easy to manage, may have nothing to do with the emotions but be of an exclusively intellectual nature - in the sense that a special effort of the mind and perhaps special intellectual penetration are required if the truth of a matter is to be discovered or understood. The solution to the difficulty may seem important to the person (say, as a step necessary to progress in scientific research); or may be of little real interest to him or her (finding the right answer to a crossword puzzle, for example).

But there are other "difficult truths" whose peculiar difficulty presents itself not to the intellect but to the will. This can occur when the truths in question - if faced up to and acknowledged - involve practical consequences which the will may be reluctant to accept.

Truth always moves man. It does not however always move him to pleasure, because some truths are unpleasant. Then it is easy not to want to face them [5]. There is no great change of perspective in adding that "difficult goods" equally exist: "goods" that contain some deep values which also attract the will but whose attainment requires no small effort; for instance, because it demands resisting a strong impulse. Our will needs to be vigorous because it must often not only choose good but also reject evil, above all attractive evil.

In the world today there are many people who, it seems, sincerely consider that abortion injures no one, and is indeed a human right. How do they not see that the being in the womb is a new individual, belonging to the human species? Without wishing to make general judgments, it is hard to avoid positing as explanation that, at least in some cases and maybe unconsciously, they do not want to see it; or, perhaps more exactly, they want not to see it. The scientific-biological demonstration of the separate human life of the fetus is beyond question. But what most probably happens is that when these scientific reasons are about to come up for intellectual consideration, it is the will which shifts attention in another direction. It is the will - the "persona volens" - which does not permit continued reflection along a way that could lead to unwelcome and therefore unwanted conclusions.

Normal sexual-conjugal intimacy is a physical good and also a human and ethical good. There is no difficulty in explaining the physical good - in its human sense of giving privileged expression to the uniqueness of matrimonial love - and in justifying the choice of this good by an act of the will; always provided the ethical good is respected. An extra-conjugal sexual relationship can present itself in the guise of a physical good, but not of an ethical good. As a consequence the tendency - the temptation - can arise to look for "reasons" to make the relationship ethical; and to let oneself be convinced by these reasons. Here enter questions of the disinterestedness, sincerity and truthfulness of the "intellectual look" [6].

This is why the relationship between "mind and truth" cannot be considered without reference to the intimately connected relationship between "will and good". Whoever does not want to see the truth will never see it.

No analysis of the calculations and choices that enter into human decisions can neglect two powerful factors which easily make their presence felt: the pride of the intellect, capable of disfiguring the good it presents to the will; and the selfishness of the will, capable of preventing the mind from recognizing the truth.

Here we must add that it is not possible to refuse to adhere to truth-goodness without compromising one's own integrity and very identity. The inherent power and intimate authority of the truth send a powerful call for acceptance to all that is best and most honest in man. To withhold one's adhesion is to shake one's values to their foundation.

In the end, each becomes what he has chosen; in this sense, man forms himself. But to form ourselves truly (and not to deform ourselves), there is need for coherence: i.e. conformity between values and behavior. Lack of coherence occurs when "a person's encounter with truth is weak, because it does not go far enough to inspire his conduct" [7]. This will inevitably happen to people who grow accustomed to examining matters in a superficial way, without wanting to reach a deeper judgment about the value of things and events. It will happen just as much to whoever thinks of "assimilation" of values as a merely mental process. The greatest values will not enrich us unless we let them shape and - where necessary - change our behavior as well as our outlook.

These considerations confirm that fulfillment is fundamentally more an interior than an exterior matter; it must be appraised with reference to the personal inner life of each one. It is according to one's response to values that the question of whether one has found fulfillment in life or not must be resolved.

This could naturally lead us to consider the subject of virtue. However, as we have said, our purpose is to raise questions rather than to offer answers; this is especially so in the field of ethics. So we will just note here that virtue implies orderly growth in effective capacity for values: capacity to know truth and to choose or do good. The moral dimension of choices or actions matters, because without an ethically positive response to values a person ceases to grow [8].

Affectivity in the process of personal growth

Personal life would never be fully human if it were exclusively intellectual and voluntary. The development-fulfillment of the person does not depend only on the mind and the will, and their healthy interaction. Another factor sways or influences our choices; that is "heart" or, more precisely, feelings. Man is not pure intellect or pure will; he is also made up of emotions and passions. In many situations, the first movement towards acting that a person undergoes, even before any intellectual evaluation of the action itself or any freely willed choice in its regard, may be one of fear or pity or anger.

"Affectivity" - that emotional reaction which involves body and soul together - needs to find its proper place in personal growth, for it forms an integral part of the dynamism by which the human person develops.

Kant, at one extreme, and Hegel at the other, considered feelings a weakness. Today we are more aware of their importance; yet the rehabilitation of the emotions also runs the risk of failing to grasp the necessary synthesis and integration of the principal elements conforming the human "psyche".

It is certainly true that neither the mind alone nor the will alone can achieve human fulfillment. But neither can affectivity-feeling on its own. The three should go together; in proper order and interrelation. Affectivity is not higher or more trustworthy than the mind or the will. Nor is it (despite some psychological theories) a third faculty in its own right, on the same level as the intellect and will. It is true that both mind and will can be in an unhealthy state; and then a person's affectivity might seem to remain the only resource or support. But it is a deceptive and precarious resource: "because if the intellect has failed, if the will has failed, how can one expect affectivity to succeed? Isolated affectivity is to be trusted very much less than the two human faculties just mentioned; it is more a passivity than a type of power ... What happens quickly when one tries to live on the basis of feelings, is that these recoil on coming into contact with the rigidness of reality, and the result is total disorder. Paradoxically, in an elaborate world of instrumental organization, the affective person goes adrift and dissolves" [9].

Pure rationalism can be cold: farsighted perhaps, but incapable of the necessary practical sacrifice to motivate itself and to inspire others. Voluntarism too can be merciless: deciding and executing without principle or respect for the rights of others. Pure emotionalism can leave a person at the mercy of feelings and of the ability of skilled practitioners to take advantage of these feelings (modern publicity thrives on the predominant cultural sentimentalism). Paradoxically, too, it limits one's capacity to appreciate other people and to respond to their values or needs. It is good to feel with others in their sufferings, and thus to be moved by compassion. Today, however, it is not infrequent to come across people with a great capacity for compassion, but without the will-power and persevering generosity to turn momentary compassion into any enduring help to others.

To go wherever your heart leads you, is in the end to be led this way or that by passing moods of sympathy or antipathy. Those who make this their philosophy easily fool themselves into a comforting conviction of being warm-hearted, while in fact they are circling more and more tightly around themselves, becoming less capable of any lasting loyalty or service to others and equally powerless to explain the ultimate loneliness into which their life leads them. The perceptive reader will discover in Susanna Tamaro's Follow Your Heart [10] an attractively drawn portrait of this type of self-deceiving and fundamentally unattractive character.

Affectivity is healthy when it responds adequately - in its own proper way - to the values present in every person and situation. Its response will be inadequate if it is not the result of a mature intellectual judgment; and will be inconstant if it is not sustained by the generous determination of the will. So, even allowing for the special importance of affectivity, it will only play its due place in human development under the guidance of a properly formed mind and a soundly oriented will [11].

Apathy, as we have noted, is a powerful enemy of personal development. But the remedy to an apathetic approach - say, to a person's marriage, family or job - does not lie in seeking an accession of feeling or sympathy or enthusiasm - which in all likelihood will not come. An effective remedy will depend on a decision of the will based on the conscious discovery of new motives. A person is at the end of his tether not if he lacks enthusiasm for life, but if he can find no motive for living.

It is nevertheless true that, in many cases today, affectivity may prove decisive for the rediscovery of the way of fulfillment. When a person has set out on a wrong road, the sense of being blind and the feeling of being lost increase as the road is pursued, also because it leads into darkness and isolation. Then it is most probably the dissatisfaction of the heart which can turn a person back in search of light and the warm companionship of shared values.

No proof that a person is lost is likely to be of any effect so long as he is happy to be so. But such happiness is too strange a thing to last. One's own life is too serious and immediate a matter for anyone to remain indefinitely unaware of or unconcerned about being lost in it.

Notes
[1] One particular consideration may be helpful. We readily enough accept that a person's awareness of the material world may be defective and that this is a handicap capable of causing him serious harm, as in the case of the child who ignores that a live electric wire can kill. But the defect of perception may be the fruit not of simple ignorance but of a deranged mind. Only a crazy person thinks that he can stand in the way of an oncoming express train and stop it, or that he can pass through a blast furnace unscathed. An unbalanced mind easily "gets things wrong". If this can happen with regard to material realities, are there any solid grounds for holding that it cannot happen with regard to "values"? May there not be universal rules of survival in the realm of the spirit also, or is it a matter of indifference if one turns aside from any quest for objective truths or norms regarding conduct and concludes that all forms of behavior are equally valid for genuine human fulfillment?
[2] To love is a value. So is fidelity to a commitment freely taken. If a person has committed his or her existence in a love which should be faithful and exclusive (like that of marriage), then the possibility of an alternative love becomes a threat to that fidelity.
[3] The failure to assimilate a truth that one has "swallowed" can of course be unintentional, as often happens in the case of rote learning.
[4] E. M. Forster: Howards End, Ch. 19.
[5] "People can even run from the truth as soon as they glimpse it because they are afraid of its demands" (John Paul II: Fides et Ratio (1998), no. 28).
[6] "To love is to contemplate [something inasmuch as it is beautiful]. There is a great difference between the act of loving and the act of the will which a man adopts towards something which he considers useful or instrumental; this latter act is one of interest. It can be defined as the desire to have something as a means to another. The interested look contemplates things not as they are in themselves, but as a means towards other ends. The interested look, if it is not at the same time benevolent, tends to instrumentalize the object sought and to subordinate it to the ends of one's own activity extrinsic to the object. Interest in this sense implies an instrumentalizing look, a look, in other words, lacking in love": R. Yepes: Fundamentos de Antropologia ..., pp. 202-203.
[7] R. Yepes: op. cit. 147.
[8] cf. L. Polo: Presente y Futuro del Hombre, p. 200.
[9] L. Polo: op. cit. p. 79.
[10] Va' dove ti porta il cuore, Milan, 1990.
[11] "Emotional intelligence", as often used today, can be a misleading term. One thing is to advocate a proper understanding of emotions; another is to hold that a person "thinks" with the emotions, or that feelings are an alternative to (and perhaps more important than) intelligence.