Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM REVISITED 233
– the very meaning of “responsibility” – suggests a fundamental
moral dimension in our dialogical relationships with God and
neighbor.
The fact of “having the word,” makes man free. Animals do
not speak and consequently do not possess reason with its capacity
for abstraction, for stepping back to a “distance of perspective,”
to make choices rather than respond to instinct. The
fact that man speaks, as Ebner makes clear, is the manifestation
of reason, of abstract thought, of perspective and of choice. Because
man chooses, man is free. In the word, Jesus Christ, the
Word made flesh, makes man free – a foundational condition of
moral life.
But man can hide from such freedom and retreat into a
world of monologue and ideas. Where there is fragmentation of
knowledge, as John Paul II notes, the sense that meaning can no
longer be sought or found may lead to, “a kind of ambiguous
thinking which leads it to an ever deepening introversion, locked
within the confines of its own immanence without reference of
any kind to the transcendent.” 70 In such a framework, there is no
longer a basis for “moral” decisions, which are replaced by institutional
or “pragmatic” considerations, by which the Holy Father
explains, “anthropology itself is severely compromised by a
one-dimensional vision of the human being, a vision which excludes
the great ethical dilemmas and the existential analyses of
the meaning of suffering and sacrifice, of life and death.” 71 The
result is a kind of solitary nihilism in which, “the neglect of being
inevitably leads to losing touch with objective truth and
therefore with the very ground of human dignity.” 72 This in turn
brings a loss of the sense that man and woman are made in the
image and likeness of God, and leads, “little by little either to a
destructive will to power or to a solitude without hope.” 73
This “solitude without hope” is the very “I-aloneness” of
which Ebner spoke, an “introversion” which hides from dialogue
and encounter, a “closure to the thou” which is the very
70 FR, 81.
71 FR, 89.
72 FR, 90.
73 FR, 90.