Hello everyone, my name is Bruno Cassara and my short paper today is
titled “Phenomenology: Faithfulness to Experience.” I’d like to begin with an
anecdote. One day, during my very first semester of teaching, my students and I
were discussing the first two books of Augustine’s Confessions. I made it a point to
stress, in that context, Augustine’s celebrated inquietum cor nostrum, the restless
heart that remains restless until it rests in God. A student immediately raised their
hand to respond. They were a first-semester freshman at that point, only just
beginning their college studies. They said something along the lines of, “Augustine
is never going to be happy that way. In psychology we learned that people with an
internal locus of reliance are happier than people with an external locus of
reliance.” I was taken aback. I asked the student to clarify for the rest of the class
what they meant, and they explained that it means that people who expect their
happiness to come from their own effort are, in fact, happier than people who look
for their happiness outside of themselves.
What struck me most about this was not the content of this claim, debatable
as it is, but rather the absolute confidence with which the claim was asserted. The
authority of this claim came not from the student, but from psychology class, from
a psychology textbook. It is no different, ultimately, from those articles that pop up
on social media with titles like “scientists say that people who swear a lot are
smarter” or “here are fifteen ways to convince people you’re right, according to
