"cor ad cor loquitur" ("heart speaks unto heart"): Von Hildebrand is concerned with rehabilitating the affective life of the human person. He thinks that for too long philosophers have held it in suspicion and thought of it as embedded in the body and hence as being much inferior to intellect and will. In reality, he argues, the heart, the center of affectivity, has many different levels, including an eminently personal level; at this level affectivity is just as important a form of personal life as intellect and will. Von Hildebrand develops the idea that properly personal affectivity, far from tending away from an objective relation to being, is in fact one major way in which we transcend ourselves and give being its due. Von Hildebrand also developed the important idea that the heart "in many respects is more the real self of the person than his intellect or will." Yet when people are being heartless pharisees to your face, or subterraneanly cruel behind your back, they are obviously alienated selves, persons pathologically divided within themselves. Read von Hildebrand and understand the joy available to a pure and loving heart, the joy for which the human person was created by God.
