London Karl points us to this interview, some of which I reproduce here:
It would be silly, foolish, to object to the Church on the grounds that it is "traditionalist". The whole strength of the Church is that it is faithful to its tradition – otherwise, what is the Church for? If the Church is going to become a political party which merely adapts its beliefs to changing opinions, it can be safely dismissed altogether, because there are political parties doing such things. If the Church is there to sanctify and bless in advance every change in intellectual and moral fashion in our civilisation, then again – what is the Church for? The Church is strong because it has a traditional teaching, a spiritual kernel, which it considers its immutable essence. It cannot just yield to any pressure from people who think that whatever is in fashion at the present moment should immediately be adopted by the Church as its own teaching, whether in the field of political ideas or of daily life.
I think the Church is not only right in keeping its historically shaped, traditional identity. Its very role, its very mission on earth would become unclear if it did not do that. And so I would not be afraid at all, and I would not take it as an insult, that critics describe the Church as traditionalist or conservative.
There must be forces of conservatism in society, in spiritual life, by which I mean the forces of conservation. Without such forces, the entire fabric of society would fall apart.
[. . .]
In my view, there is no way in which Marxist teaching could be reconciled with Christianity. Marxism is anti-Christian, not contingently, not by accident, but in its very core. You cannot reconcile it.
There is no Christianity where no distinction is made between temporal and eternal values. There is no Christianity where [the word 'where' is wrong; should be UNLESS] one accepts that all earthly values, however important, however crucial to human life, are nevertheless secondary. What the Church is about essentially is the salvation of human souls, and the human soul is never reducible to social conditions.
There is an absolute value in the human person. The Church believes that the world – the social world, the physical world – is merely an expression of the divine, and as such it can only have instrumental or secondary value. Without this, there is no point in speaking about Christianity.
Kolakowski is absolutely right about this. His is an exceedingly penetrating mind. I recommend his work. See my Kolakowski category.
The encomia continue to pour in on the occasion of the passing of James Gandolfini. 'Tony Soprano' died young at 51, apparently of a heart attack, while vacationing in Italy. Given the subtlety of The Sopranos it would be unfair to say that Gandolfini wasted his talent portraying a scumbag and glorifying criminality, and leave it at that. But I wonder if people like him and De Niro and so many others give any thought to the proper use of their brief time on earth.
It's at least a question: if you have the talents of an actor or a novelist or a screen writer or a musician, should you have any moral scruples about playing to the basest sides of human nature? Are we so corrupted now that this is the only way to turn a buck in the arts?
Another great column by classicist and historian, Victor Davis Hanson. (HT: Bill Keezer)
The short answer is that, while we are running on fumes, they are rich and voluminous and long-lasting. It will take some time before they and we peter out. So there is still time to take action. Decline is not inevitable. But do we have the will?
So why is the United States not experiencing something like the rioting in Turkey or Brazil, or the murder of thousands in Mexico? How are we able to avoid the bloody chaos in Syria, the harsh dictatorships of Russia and China, the implosion of Egypt or the economic hopelessness now endemic in Southern Europe?
About half of America and many of its institutions operate as they always have. Caltech and MIT are still serious. Neither interjects race, class and gender studies into its engineering or physics curricula. Most in the IRS, unlike some of their bosses, are not corrupt. For the well driller, the power plant operator and the wheat farmer, the lies in Washington are still mostly an abstraction.
Get up at 5:30 a.m. and you'll see that most of the nation's urban freeways are jammed with hard-working commuters. Every day they go to work, support their families, pay their taxes and avoid arrest — so that millions of others do not have to do the same. The U.S. military still more closely resembles our heroes from World War II than the culture of the Kardashians.
[. . .]
If Rome quieted the people with public spectacles and cheap grain from the provinces, so too Americans of all classes keep glued to favorite video games and reality-TV shows. Fast food is both cheap and tasty. All that for now is preferable to rioting and revolt.
Like Rome, America apparently can coast for a long time on the fumes of its wonderful political heritage and economic dynamism — even if both are little understood or appreciated by most who still benefit from them.
These days I have been pinching myself a lot to see if I have been dreaming: such is the lunatic course of events in this country. Here are a couple of posts on the latest outburst of liberal-left race insanity. Perhaps later I'll throw in my two cents.
3. There are items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action.
Daniel K comments and I respond in blue:
First, as to your aporetic triad: I would like to reject (3) in one sense that I describe below, and reject (1) absolutely. Not sure where that leaves the triad. But I'd be interested in whether you think I've clarified or merely muddied the waters.
In one sense I think all knowledge is action guiding. In another sense I think it is not essentially action guiding. All pure water is drinkable (at the right temperature etc.), but drinkability is not an essential feature of water (I wonder if this works).
BV: I don't think it works. I should think that in every possible world in which there is water, it is potable by humans. Therefore, drinkability is an essential feature of water. (An essential property of x is a property x has in every possible world in which x exists.) Of course, there are worlds in which there is water but no human beings. In those worlds, none of the water is drunk by humans. But in those worlds too water is drinkable. Compare the temporal case. Before humans evolved, there was water on earth. That water, some of it anyway, was potable by humans even though there were no humans. Water did not become potable when the first humans arose.
Rejecting (3): The having of knowledge always contributes to how one acts. You give examples of a priori knowledge as counterexamples. My response: it seems to me a priori knowledge is "hinge" knowledge that opens the door for action and cannot possibly not inform action. In other words we won't find circumstances where such knowledge is not action guiding in the presuppositional sense. So, I disagree that we will find knowledge that doesn't inform action. A priori knowledge is presuppositionally necessary and occasionally practically useful (math for engineering). Empirical knowledge will be used when it is available. So, I don't think defending (3) is necessary to defend (2).
BV: Willard maintains that one can have propositional knowledge without belief, and that belief is essentially tied to action. The conjunction of these two claims suggests to me that there can be knowledge that is not essentially tied to action. And so I looked for examples of items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action, either by not being tied to action at all, or by not being essentially tied to action. If there are such items, then we can say that the difference between belief and knowledge is that every belief, by its very nature, can be acted upon, while it is not the case that every item of knowledge can be acted upon.
Much depends on what exactly is meant by 'acting upon a proposition,' and I confess to not having a really clear notion of this.
While I grant that much a priori knowledge is 'hinge' knowledge in your sense, consider the proposition that there is no transfinite cardinal lying between aleph-nought and 2 raised to the power, alepth-nought. Does that have any engineering application? (This is not a rhetorical question.)
Now consider philosophical knowledge (assuming there is some). If I know that there are no bare particulars (in Gustav Bergmann's sense), this is a piece of knowledge that would seem to have no behavioral consequences. The overt, nonlinguistic, behavior of a man who maintains a bundle-theoretic position with respect to ordinary partiulars will be no different from that of a man who maintains that ordinary particulars have bare particulars at their ontological cores. They could grow, handle, slice, and eat tomatoes in the very same way.
(Anecdote that I am pretty sure is not apocryphal: when Rudolf Carnap heard that fellow Vienna Circle member Gustav Bergmann had published a book under the title, The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, he refused to speak to Bergmann ever again.)
It seems we should say that some, though not all, philosophical knowledge (assuming there is philosophical knowledge) consists of propositions upon which we cannot act. Here is another example. Suppose I know that the properties of ordinary particulars are tropes. Thus I know that the redness of a tomato is not a universal but a particular. Is that knowledge action-guiding? How would it guide action differently than the knowledge that properties are universals? Is the difference in ontological views a difference that could show up at the level of overt, nonlinguistic, behavior?
Admittedly, some philosophical knowledge is action-guiding. If I know that the soul is immortal, then I will behave differently than one who lacks this knowledge.
Now consider the knowledge of insignificant contingent facts. I know from my journal that on 27 April 1977 I ate hummus. Is that item of knowledge action-guiding? I think not. Suppose you learn the boring fact and infer that I like hummus. You might then make me a present of some. But if I am the only one privy to the information, it is difficult to see how that item of knowledge could be action-guiding for me. Recall that by action I mean overt, nonlinguistic behavior.
There is also modal knowledge to consider. I might have been sleeping now. I might not have been alive now. I might never have existed at all. These are modal truths that, arguably, I know. Suppose I know them. How could I act upon them? I am not sleeping now, and nothing I do could bring it about that I am sleeping now. Some modal knowledge would seem to without behavioral consequences. Of course, some modal knowledge does have such consequences, e.g. the knowledge that it is possible to grow tomatoes in Arizona.
It seemed to me in your post that you took the truth of (2) as giving support to (3). If belief is essentially action guiding and knowledge is not essentially believing, then there should be knowledge that is not action guiding.
But again, I would like to affirm that in the sense you mean it in the post all knowledge is action guiding: either presuppositionally or consciously/empirically. For instance, the law of noncontradiction is action guiding in the sense that I cannot act if essential to that action is that the object has characteristic X, but I affirm that the object is both X and not-X. [. . .]
BV: Consider an example. I cannot eat a bananna unless it is peeled. My affirming that it is both peeled and unpeeled (at the same time, all over, and in the same sense of 'peeled') would not, however, seem to stand in the way of my performing the action. Clearly, I know that nothing is both peeled and unpeeled. It is not clear to me how one could act upon that proposition. If I want to eat the bananna, I can act upon the proposition that it is unpeeled by peeling the bananna. But how do I act upon the proposition that the bananna is either peeled or unpeeled? What do I do?
Rejecting (1): So, what if both knowledge and belief are in one sense "action guiding" (rejecting 3)? Does it imply that we have no reason to think that belief is not an essential component of knowledge (accepting 2 and rejecting 1)? I think we still do have a good reason for thinking belief is not essentially a component of knowledge. When Willard says that belief is not essential to knowledge I take him to be distinguishing between the irrelevance of being concerned with action in the act of knowing and the universal appeal of knowledge for action.
Forget the terms "knowledge" and "belief" for a moment. Distinguish between the following states:
One is in a state (intentional?) (Y) to object (X) iff one has a true representation of X that was achieved in an appropriate way (Willard's account of knowledge). Notice that there is nothing in the description that essentially involves a readiness to act. That is not a part of its intentional character or directedness of state (Y). It is directed purely at unity, period.
Alternatively, one is in an intentional state (Z) to object (X) iff one has a representation of reality that is essentially identified by its being a ground for action. Here, essential to (Z) is its providing a ground for action.
(Y) is not a state that essentially involves action guidance but (Z) is. So, the achievement of (Y) does not involve essentially the achievement of (Z). That is, the achievement of (Y) is the achievement of a kind of theoretical unity with (X) while the achievement of (Z) is the achievement of a motivator for acting in certain ways regarding (X). Response: but Daniel, you've already said that all knowledge is action guiding! Yes, but it is not an essential feature of the state of knowing. Analogy: all water is drinkable. But drinkability is not an essential feature of water.
I'm going to stop there. I'd appreciate any comments you have. That is my effort, thus far, to make sense of both Willard's suggestion and your aporetic triad.
BV: I do appreciate the comments and discussion. Let's see if I understand you. You reject (1), the orthodox view that knowledge entails belief. Your reason seems to be that, while belief is essentially action-guiding, knowledge is not essentially action-guiding, but only accidentally action-guiding. You deny what I maintain, namely, that some items of knowledge (some known propositions qua known) are not action-guiding. You maintain that all such items are action-guiding, but only accidentally so. Perhaps your argument is this:
4. Every believing-that-p is essentially action-guiding.
5. No knowing-that-p is essentially action-guiding.
Ergo
6. It is not the case that, necessarily, every knowing-that-p is a believing-that-p.
But (6) — the negation of (1) — doesn't follow from (4) and (5). (6) is equivalent to
6*. Possibly, some knowings-that-p are not believings-that-p.
What follows from (4) and (5) is
7. No knowing-that-p is a believing-that-p.
(7) is the thesis I am tentatively proposing.
This is a very difficult topic and we may be falling into de dicto/de re confusion.
Well, at least I am in the state that Plato says is characteristic of the philosopher: perplexity!
I would like to return to the practice of the religion of my youth, I really would. Nothing of the usual sort holds me back: not the sex monkey, not illicit loves or addictions, not worldly ambition or the demands of career, not the thoughtlessness of the worldling mesmerized by the play of transient phenomena, not the Luciferian pride of a Russell or a Sartre or a Hitchens, not the opposition of a wife: mine is a good old-fashioned Catholic girl who attends mass on Sundays, ministers to the sick, and embodies the old-time virtues.
Philosophical and theological questions and doubts are the main impediments to my return.
. . . in the Novus Ordo rite of Mass the Liturgy has been effeminized. There is a famous passage in Caesar’s De bello Gallico where he explains why the Belgae tribe were such good soldiers. He attributes this to their lack of contact with the centers of culture like the cities. Caesar believed that such contact contributes ad effeminandos animos, to the effeminizing of their spirits.
[. . .]
In its Novus Ordo form . . . the Liturgy has been devirilized. One must recall the meaning of the word, vir, in Latin. Both vir and homo mean “man”, but it is vir alone that has the connotation of the man-hero and is the word that is often used for “husband”. The Aeneid begins with the famous words: arma virumque cano. (“ I sing of arms and the man-hero.”) What Cardinal Heenan presciently and correctly saw in 1967 was the virtual elimination of the virile nature of the Liturgy, the replacement of masculine objectivity, necessary for the public worship of the Church, with softness, sentimentality and personalization centered on the motherly person of the priest.
But not only the Liturgy has been devirilized; the priests have been too. The priests of my youth were manly men. But this soon changed in ways that are well known.
There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.
Still, religion has its immanent life-enhancing role to play, whether true or false, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it will ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'
People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists. The church should be a liberal-free zone.
It's hot and dry in these parts this time of year, the candy-assed snowbirds have all flown back to their humid nests, and we desert rats like it plenty. That's why we live here. You Californians stay put in your gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing, People's Republic of Political Correctness.
Didn't we learn anything from Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan? Prudence dictates that we stay out of Syria, or at least that we look very carefully before we leap. Here is a balanced treatment of the pros and cons by Ron Radosh. And this guest post by William Polk at Robert Paul Wolff's place is well worth reading.
Here is a trio of propositions that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible:
1. Knowledge entails belief.
2. Belief is essentially tied to action.
3. There are items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action.
Clearly, any two of these propositions is logically inconsistent with the remaining one. Thus the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).
And yet each limb of the triad is very plausible, though perhaps not equally plausible.
(1) is part of the classical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, an analysis traceable to Plato's Theaetetus. (1) says that, necessarily, if a person S knows that p, then S believes that p. Knowledge logically includes belief. What one knows one believes, though not conversely. For example, if I know that my wife is sitting across from me, then I believe that she is sitting across from me. (At issue here is propositional knowledge, not know-how, or carnal knowledge, or knowledge by acquaintance.)
(2) is perhaps the least plausible of the three, but it is still plausible and accepted by (a minority of) distinguished thinkers. According to Dallas Willard,
Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as "justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.
[. . .] belief has an essential tie to action . . . .
Although I am not exactly sure what Willard's thesis is, he seems to be maintaining that the propositions one believes are precisely those one is prepared to act upon. S believes that p iff S is prepared to act upon p. Beliefs are manifested in actions, and actions are evidence of beliefs. To determine what a person really believes, we look to his actions, not to his words, although the words provide context for understanding the actions. If I want to get to the roof, and tell you that the ladder is stable, but refuse to ascend it, then that is very good evidence that I don't really believe that the ladder is stable. I don't believe it because I am not prepared to act upon it. So far, so good.
But if belief is essentially tied to action, as Willard maintains, then it is not possible that one believe a proposition one cannot act upon. Is this right? Consider the proposition *Everything is self-identical.* This is an item of knowledge. But is it also an item of belief? We can show that this item of knowledge is not an item of belief if we can show that one cannot act upon it. But what is it to act upon a proposition? I don't know precisely, but here's an idea:
A proposition p is such that it can be acted upon iff there is some subject S and some circumstances C such that S's acceptance of p in C makes a difference to S's overt, nonlinguistic behavior.
For example, *It is raining* can be acted upon because there are circumstances in which my acceptance of it versus my nonacceptance of it (either by rejecting it or just entertaining it) makes a difference to what I do such as going for a run. Accepting the proposition, and not wanting to get wet, I postpone the run. Rjecting the proposition, I go for the run as planned.
In the case of *Everything is self-identical,* is there any behavior that could count as a manifestation of an agent's acceptance/nonacceptance of the proposition in question? Suppose I come to know (occurrently) for the first time that everything is self-identical. Suppose I had never thought of this before, never 'realized it.' Would the realization or 'epiphany' make a difference to my overt, nonlingusitic behavior? It seems not. Would I do anything differently?
Consider characteristic truths of transfinite set theory. They are items of knowledge that have no bearing on any actual or possible action. For example, I know that, while the natural numbers and the reals are both infinite sets, the cardinality of the latter is strictly greater than that of the former. Can I take that to the streets?
(3) therefore seems true: there are items of knowledge that are not items of belief because not essentially tied to action.
I have shown that each limb of our inconsistent triad has some plausibility. So it is an interesting problem. How solve it? Reject one of the limbs! But which one? And how do you show that the rejection of one is more reasonable than the rejection of one of the other two? And why is it more reasonable to hold that the problem has a solution than to hold that it is insoluble and thus a genuine aporia?
Why not stick to one's stoa and cultivate one's specialist garden in peace and quiet, neither involving oneself in, nor forming opinions about, the wider world of politics and strife? Why risk one's ataraxia in the noxious arena of contention? Why not remain within the serene precincts of theoria? For those of us of a certain age the chances are good that death will arrive before the barbarians do.
So why bother one's head with the issues of the day? We will collapse before the culture that sustains us does. We enter the arena of contention because the gardens of tranquillity and the spaces of reason are worth defending, with blood and iron if need be, against the barbarians and their leftist enablers. Others have fought and bled so that we can live this life of beatitude. And so though we are not warriors of the body we can and should do our tiny bit as warriors of the mind to preserve for future generations this culture which allows us to pursue otium liberale in peace, quiet, and safety.
A fictional character can be believed by some to be real, known by others to be fictional, and an object of uncertainty to still others. Some young children believe Santa Claus to be real; adults know him to be purely fictional; and some children are unsure whether he is real or fictional. It seems to follow that such sentences as 'Santa Claus is jolly' need not be understood as prefixed by a story operator to be understood. A child who asserts 'Santa Claus is jolly' needn't be asserting 'In the Santa Claus legend, Santa Claus is jolly.' For the child might be unsure whether S. C. is real or fictional.
Does this reflection give aid and comfort to Meinongians?
I am tempted to excerpt parts of this longish piece by William Voegli, but, as they say, it's all good. In fact, it is the best thing I have read on this topic to date.
William Voegli claims that the phrase first entered the American vocabulary in 1991. I don't know about that, but I do know that the concept is much older: PC derives from the CP, as I explain in Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness.
I wrote an entry on the main sorts of motive that might lead one who takes religion seriously to take up the study of philosophy. I distinguished five main motives: the apologetic, the critical, the debunking, the transcensive, and the substitutional. But there is also the move away from philosophy to religion and its motives. One motive is the suspicion that philosophy is a snare and a delusion, a blind alley; there is the sense that it cannot be what its noble name suggests, namely, the love of wisdom, and that he who seeks wisdom must forsake Athens for Jerusalem. There is the sense that philosophy is, in truth, misosophy, the hatred of wisdom. An ancient theme, that of the irreconcilable antagonism between religion and philosophy, one traceable back to Tertullian at least. (See Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, Charles Scribners, 1938, Chapter One.)
Anthony Flood has been an off-and-on correspondent of mine since the early days of the blogosphere: I believe we first made contact in 2004. I admire him because he "studies everything" as per my masthead motto. As far as I can judge from my eremitic outpost, Tony is a genuine truth-seeker, a restless quester who has canvassed many, many positions with an open mind and a willingness to admit errors. (The man was at one time a research assistant for Herbert Aptheker!) Better a perpetual seeker than a premature finder. Here below we are ever on the way: in statu viae. Tony's views have changed over the years I have known him and it is his present attitude toward philosophy that I wish to examine here. In particular, I will evaluate his claim that philosophy is misosophy. Is this right? Or is it rather the case that religion when opposed to philosophy is misology, the hatred of reason? Is philosophy misosophy or is religion misology? That is a stark, if somewhat inaccurate, was of defining the problematic. I will quote liberally from Tony's position statement and then comment.
The position I've come to has been percolating in my mind for years. It intruded upon my thinking intermittently, but until recently I was unable to remove certain obstacles to my assent. [. . .] The critique of philosophy worked out by Gregory L. Bahnsen . . . however, has at last won my allegiance . . .
[. . .]
The gist of Bahnsen’s critique is that philosophy as it has been practiced is virtually at enmity with Christ, who is the Wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24). To the degree that it is op-posed to Christ, to that degree it is misosophy, the hatred rather than the love of wisdom. For the Christian, wisdom is not an abstract virtue, but a divine person. To pretend indifference to Christ is pretend indifference to the only Wisdom worth having; to hate Christ is to hate wisdom, that is, to hate him in whom all the treasures of wisdom are hid (Col 2:3); and to hate wisdom is to love death (Prov 8:36). Christians may continue to use “philosophy” and its cognates, but they reserve the right to qualify that usage. Between the philosopher and the misosopher, covenant keeper and covenant breaker, there is antithesis.
Tony hasn't given us the "gist" of Bahnsen's critique but the conclusion at which he arrives; the gist of the critique would have to contain a summary of the reasons for the conclusion. Setting that quibble aside, I move to a substantive point. While it is true that for a Christian Christ is the source of all wisdom and therefore, in a sense, wisdom itself, saying this is consistent with maintaining that philosophy is the love of wisdom. The philosopher qua philosopher seeks wisdom using his unaided reason, unaided, that is, by the data of revelation. It is not that the philosopher qua philosopher rejects the data of revelation or the very idea that there could be such a thing as divine revelation; it is rather that he makes no use of it qua philosopher. (To save keystrokes I won't keep repeating the qualification 'qua philosopher' but it remains in force.) To borrow a term from Husserl, the philosopher 'brackets' revelation. I see nothing in the nature of philosophy to prevent a philosopher from arriving at the conclusion that wisdom is ultimately a person. So my first question to Tony would be: Why must philosophy be opposed to wisdom when wisdom is taken to be a divine person?
Admittedly, philosophy cannot bring us to Wisdom in its fullness, especially if wisdom is a divine person, but it hardly follows that it cannot serve as a propadeutic to a participation in this Wisdom. Here is a crude analogy. The menu is not the meal. But the menu is not opposed to the meal. The menu provides access to the meal via verbal description, the very same meal that one goes on to eat. It is not as if there are two meals, the meal of the menu writer and the meal of the eater. There is exactly one meal accessed in two ways, the first obviously inferior to the second. If you don't get the analogy, forget it.
There is an important point of terminology that we need to discuss. Tony claims that Christians have the right to use 'philosophy' in their way as meaning the love of Christ. (After all, if wisdom is Christ, then the love of wisdom is the love of Christ.) I deny this right. 'Philosophy' means what it means and that is to be discerned from the practice of the great philosophers beginning with the ancient Greeks. To know what philosophy is one reads Plato, for starters, and not just for starters. Philosophy is what is done in those dialogues and what has arisen by way of commentary on and critique of what was done in those famous discussions. "Philosophy is Plato and Plato philosophy." (Emerson) I characterize philosophy here. The characterization begins with this sentence: "Philosophy is not fundamentally a set of views but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to know the truth, applies discursive reason to the data of life in an attempt to arrive at the ultimate truth about them."
The Christian, therefore, is not free to use 'philosophy' and cognates in an idiosyncratic way. Or rather he is free to do so but if he does he causes confusion and makes communication difficult if not impossible. 'Philosophy' does not and cannot mean 'love of Christ.' This is not to say that one cannot move beyond philosophy to Christian faith. One can, and perhaps one should. But nothing is to be gained by tampering with the established sense of 'philosophy.'
Tony writes, "Between the philosopher and the misosopher, covenant keeper and covenant breaker, there is antithesis." I object to this sentence because of the misuse of the word 'philosopher.' Tony has decided that the philosopher, in his sense, is a lover of Christ, and that a philosopher (in the proper sense) is a misosopher and thus a hater of Christ. But he has no right to hijack the terminology, nor, as regards the substantive question, has he shown that philosophy is opposed to Christian wisdom.
Autonomy versus Heteronomy/Theonomy
We now come to the crux of the matter: the tension between the autonomy of finite reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith. This is, in essence, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. Whether this tension is an opposition or contradiction, as Tertullian thought, and as Tony seems to think, remains to be seen, and cannot be assumed at the outset. (I set aside the tension between Athens and Benares, the discussion of which does not belong here, even though that too is a tension between philosophy and a kind of religion.) Finite reason, reason as we find it within ourselves, presumes to judge heaven and earth and everything in between; it would play "the spectator of all time and existence," to borrow a beautiful line from Plato's Republic. But it must be admitted that the results have been meager. Has even one substantive philosophical question been resolved to the satisfaction of all competent practioners in two and one half mllennia? No. What we have instead are endless controversies and the strife of systems. Magnificent in aspiration, philosophy is miserable in execution. Philosophy has proven impotent to provide us with the knowledge we seek, the knowledge of ultimates, and in particular salvific knowledge, knowledge that caters not merely to our theoretical needs but to our deepest existential ones as well, knowledge that does not merely inform us, but transforms us.
To make up for the infirmity of finite reason we must look elsewhere to a source of succor lying beyond the human horizon. And so reason, while remaining within the sphere of immanence and autonomy, raises the question of the possibility of revelation, the possibility of an irruption into the sphere of immanence from beyond the human-all-too-human. The possibility is entertained that the true nomos is theonomos, and that what at first appears as heteronomy is in reality theonomy. The possibility is entertained that the prideful intellect must fall silent and humbly submit to God's Word.
But at this juncture we encounter what Josiah Royce calls the religious paradox or
The Paradox of Revelation. Suppose someone claims to have received a divine communication regarding the divine will, the divine plan, the need for salvation, the way to salvation, or any related matter. This person can be asked, "By what marks do you personally distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?" (Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, 22-23) How is a putative revelation authenticated? By what marks or criteria do we recognize it as genuine? The identifying marks must be in the believer's mind prior to his acceptance of the revelation as valid. For it is by testing the putative revelation against these marks that the believer determines that it is genuine. One needs "a prior acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of the divine will." (p. 25) But how can a creature who needs saving lay claim to this prior acquaintance with the marks of genuine revelation?The paradox in a nutshell is that it seems that only revelation could provide one with what one needs to be able to authenticate a report as revelation. Royce:Faith, and the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant, and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty type of knowledge — that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of our least articulate intuitions are infallible?Surely here is a genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. (103)
Is it a genuine problem or not? Can the church's teaching authority be invoked to solve the problem? Suppose a point of doctrine regarding salvation and the means thereto is being articulated at a church council. The fathers in attendance debate among themselves, arrive at a result, and claim that it is inspired and certified by the Holy Spirit. But by what marks do they authenticate a putative deliverance of the Holy Spirit as a genuine deliverance? How do they know that the Holy Spirit is inspiring them and not something else such as their own subconscious desire for a certain result? This is exactly Royce's problem.
The problem, then, is this. Reason is weak and philosophy, whose engine is unaided reason, cannot deliver the goods. The salvific wisdom we seek it cannot supply. It remains an interminable and inconclusive seeking, but never a finding; it remains forever the (erothetic) love of wisdom, not its possession. So we look beyond philosophy to the data of revelation. But how do we authenticate such data? How do we distinguish pseudo-revelation from the genuine article? By what marks is it known? We are thrown back upon our infirm reasoning powers to sort this out.
So, while confessing in all humility the infirmity of reason, we have no option but to rely on it as we do when, by its means, we come to admit the infirmity of reason. Though weak, reason is strong enough to acquire a genuine insight into its own weakness and limitations and the need for supplementation ab extra. But this supplementation by revelation cannot go untested. Tony may be right that we need to "repent" and submit our wills to God's, but what that will is has to be discerned, and there is no way around the fact that it is up to us to do the discerning using the God-given equipment we possess, as infirm as it may be.
But let's hear what Flood has to say:
From 1969, when I first began to read philosophy (as it is commonly called), I had very rarely questioned the presumption of autonomy exhibited by my models in that field, whereby the human mind posits itself as the final judge of what is real, true, and good. I did not question that presumptive stance even when the provisional conclusions I arrived at were professedly Christian-theistic and therefore incompatible with it. The way I approached “God” did not ethically comport with wanting God. I played it safe, hedged my bets, looking for nothing more than a piece of metaphysical furniture to complete the interior design of my latest philosophical mansion. The irony of this discrepancy was lost on me, at least until recently.
What Tony seems to be saying here is that when we approach God via philosophy, i.e., via finite discursive reason, relying only on those evidences that can be validated from within the sphere of immanence, eschewing any such exogenic input as the data of revelation, what we arrive at is not the true God, but 'God,' a mere furnishing in the mansion of immanence, a mansion that is perhaps better compared to a doghouse. Tony thus seems to be sounding a very old theme, that of the opposition of the God of the philosophers to the the God of Sbraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I myself do not accept this opposition for reasons I supply in Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.
To revert to the crude analogy presented above, there are not two meals, the meal of the menu-writer and the meal of the eater. One and the same meal is 'accessed' in two different ways, via description and via 'ingestion.' What the menu-writer describes, assuming the accuracy of the description, is not something that exists only in his mind, a bit of mental furniture, but something that exists in reality. Similarly, when the philosopher speaks of God , he is not speaking of something that exists only in his mind, but of something that exists in reality. But let's hear some more from Tony:
As I now see it, that loss was not innocent and my present insight is wholly of grace. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10), however, not something tacked on at the end of one’s system. (Part V of Whitehead’s Process and Reality comes to mind. So does Chapter XIX of Lonergan’s Insight.)
Human beings, Christian and non-Christian alike, do know things. They do reason. They do calculate, induct, deduce, plan, accuse, exonerate, interpret. They do write histories, novels, and plays. They do compose symphonies and conduct experiments. They do creatively improvise on canvas, in the sculpture studio, and on the band stand. But their attempts to account for these facts apart from their dependence upon God have been marvelous failures, for they cannot secure the experience-transcending universal claims on which they rely when they engage in any of those activities. They ought to acknowledge the laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, moral absolutes as gifts of God. Unless God grants them the spirit of repentance, however, this they will not do, for it is offensive to their posture of autonomy. But they pay a price for this posture in the coin of rank foolishness.
Ironically, such a critique of philosophy is what one would predict professing Christian philosophers to produce, informed as they are by their awareness of the covenantal relationship they bear to God. Historically, however, what comes under the label “Christian philosophy” is compromised. Christian philosophers have generally given their blessing to pretenses of neutrality and autonomy, content to conjecture how far the human mind can go under its own steam before grabbing the supernatural rope to take them the rest of the way.
They can give that blessing, however, only by suppressing awareness (that they otherwise happily acknowledge) that the human being is a created, covenant-bound bearer of the image of God. That is, Christian philosophers join their enemies in “testing” the hypothesis that Christian theism is at least as “reasonable” as anything else on offer in the marketplace of ideas. As though any inference at all could be reasonable if Christian theism were not antecedently true. As though an impersonal matrix of possibility were Lord of all. I understand why Christianity’s opponents “load” the argument against Christian theism. But why do Christians follow them?
In this last paragraph, Tony raises a couple of fascinating questions. One is whether (to put it in my own way) the necessary truth of the laws of logic presupposes the existence of God. There are those who have argued such a thing, but, if Tony is right, why bother? If Jerusalem supplies all the needs of man, who needs Athens? If reason cannot be relied upon to bring us to any truth at all, then it cannot be relied upon to show that logic presupposes God. The other question concerns the relation between the modal framework, standardly artculated in terms of 'possible worlds,' and God. Analytic theists standardly maintain that God exists in all possible worlds. Does such talk subject God to the modal framework, thereby compromising the divine sovereignty? Is God lord of all, including the modal framework, or is God subject to the modal framework? Or neither?
These questions cannot be pursued here, but one comment is in order, and an obvious one it is: Tony seems merely to beg the question against his opponents. For example, he just assumes that Athens and Jerusalem are irreconcilably anatagonistic and that the whole truth resides in Jerusalem. He is free to make these assumptions of course. No one is compelled to remain within philosphy's smoky rooms. The door is unlocked and one is free to pass throught it. But then one should not attempt to explain or justify one's exit. For any such attempt will entangle on in the very thing one is trying to get away from.
There is of course more to be said — in subsequent posts.
