|
19) ESSAYS: PHILOSOPHICAL, POLITICAL, ECONOMIC.
New Series: 1) “Philosophy: Why What Is Useless Is the Best Thing About Us,” 2) “What Do Philosophers Know?” 3) “On the Paradoxical Place of Political Philosophy in the Structure of Reality,” 4) “Modernity: What Is It?” 5) “On the Problem of Philosophic Learning,” 6) “On the Academic Discipline of Political Science,” 7) “On the Measure and Conservation of Human Things,”8) “Why Is Political Philosophy Different?” 9) “Worship and Political Philosophy,” 10) “Fides et Ratio: Approaches to a Roman Catholic Political Philosophy.”
New Series:
1) Published in Vital Speeches, LXV (August 1, 1999), 628-32. It also appears in The Unseriousness of Human Affairs. Originally an Address at Department of Philosophy, University of Nebraska at Kearney.
PHILOSOPHY Why What Is Useless Is the Best Thing about Us
“Intelligence (phronēsis, prudentia) does not control wisdom or the better part of the soul, just as medical science does not control health. For it does not use health, but only aims to bring health into being; hence it prescribes for the sake of health but does not prescribe to health. Besides, saying that intelligence controls wisdom would be like saying that political science rules the gods because it prescribes about everything in the city.” – Aristotle, The Ethics, VI, 13, 1145a8-12.
“Dissipation: The mother of dissipation is not joy but joylessness.” -- Nietzsche, “Mixed Opinions and Maxims,” #77, 1879.
I.
Let me begin with a sentence found early in Cicero’s Dialogue De Senectute: “No praise, then, is too great for philosophy!” They are words that shall guide our reflections here. However, we shall mean by philosophy not just the moral philosophy that Cicero praised, nor merely political philosophy that wonders how to render the forceful politician benevolent to the truths of the theoretic life, but philosophy as such, the philosophy that includes metaphysics along with moral and political philosophy. And yes, I do say that philosophy as such is “useless”; yes, I do maintain it is the best thing about us, for it leads to the highest things, to things even perhaps beyond philosophy but not apart from its most perceptive inquiries. In short, there are things “worth doing for their own sakes,” as the Greeks taught us with surprising precision.
The choice of modern man, it is said in a famous book (After Virtue), is between Aristotle
and Nietzsche.
We are all, no doubt, most interested in both health and joy, though perhaps not for the same reasons. Even if we are not healthy, we certainly desire to be so. Even if we be joyless, we want to know joy; otherwise we would not suspect that we lacked it. Indeed, if we are dissipated, we probably, at some point, long for order in our lives. And suffering, which implies the lack of health and perhaps of joy, is not, in the ultimate order of things, totally without purpose. “Is it better to suffer evil or to do it?” is a very ancient and hardly indifferent question already found authoritatively answered in The Apology of Socrates. And if it is better to suffer evil than to do it, we still do not, on theoretic grounds, seek to encourage the existence of the evil just so we can suffer. Suffering evil, though we are reluctant to admit it, may indeed be evil’s ultimate remedy. Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” remains both mysterious and instructive in this light. “Man learns by suffering,” the Greek poet observed. And what does he learn? Surely he learns that just as the purpose of war is peace, so the purpose of suffering is health, even beatitude, the highest activity of health.
Aristotle’s rather enigmatic observation that medical science prescribes for the sake of health but not to health contains one of the most fertile insights in all of philosophy (1145a10). For it says nothing less than that when we have our health, “health produces health,” as he put it in another place (1144a5). That is, once a doctor has helped to cure us (ultimately, nature cures us), once we are healthy, the doctor’s task ends. Qua doctor, he can tell us no more. The question then arises, “now what?” What do we “do” when we are healthy, when we are no longer concerned about our health and how to recover it or preserve it? When we are not confined to a hospital, what is to occupy us? If we are made to be healthy, what is the activity of health? What is the life of “health” that “health” produces? It must be more than just keeping our health. For starters, St. Thomas points out in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics (#1075) that “proper adaptation to (human) affairs and people is more laborious and difficult than knowing remedies in which the whole art of medicine consists.”
When we are healthy, we do not notice the functioning of our various powers and capacities; we are outgoing, noticing what it is that fascinates or interests us. Does man, then, have a peculiar activity that sets him apart, something he delights in just doing? And if he does, would this delightful activity be a mere unintended accident? Is his given being complete without the activity that follows on what he is? “Do the carpenter and the leather-worker have their functions and actions, while a human being has none, and is by nature idle (in vain), without function?” Aristotle asks. “Or just as an eye, hand, foot and, in general, every bodily part apparently has a function, may we likewise ascribe to a human being some function besides all these?” (1097b28-33). And if there is such a function, is it best to be described as “necessary” or “useful”? Necessary always points to the un-necessary. The “useful” always points to what is beyond use. The part points to the whole. Our hand, the ultimate tool in the universe, that “part” by which our mind gets outside of mind to change things, is not a hand if it is not attached to us, as Aristotle also remarked.
The “Little Prince” said that it is the time that we “waste” with our friends that really counts. Is the world so occupied that we have no time to waste? Why do we like to play and to watch others playing? Plato said that human life is not “serious.” Man is the “plaything” of the gods (803c). In saying this, he was not denigrating us, but praising our lives for what they are. It is not “necessary” that we exist. Yet, we do exist. We exist for a reason not rooted in determinism. The fact that we exist but need not exist expresses the most profound thing about us. It implies that we exist because of a choice, a love, a freedom, grounded in what is beyond necessity. It implies that our lives should reflect this non-necessity, this freedom to be what we are not of ourselves.
Aristotle told us not to listen to those who tell us, being human, to devote our lives to human things (1177b32-78a2). Such “human” things are political things, economic things, things that seem to take all of our time, things that have their place in the order of reality yet do not describe what we are really about. It is all right to spend much time on political and economic things, for it is permitted to be what we are, finite, mortal beings. It takes a lot of trouble to keep us going. But Aristotle added, if man were the highest being in the universe, these human and political things would constitute the highest science (1141a20-22). But man is not the highest being in the universe. Thus political science does not “rule the gods,” as our introductory citation reminds us. Yet, Aristotle tells us, to spend as much time as we can on the highest things, even if what we acquire is little by comparison. To be human we must be more than human, a truth that we are often loathe to accept. Aristotle called our capacity to contemplate the highest things precisely “divine,” even while he was sure we are not gods and do not want to become gods. Thinking about friendship, we do not want to cease to be what we are. We don’t want our friend to become a king or a god (1159a5-11). But still we could be tempted to be gods, to make political science the highest science, to claim that the whole order of things, especially human things, falls under the power of our deliberative choice. If we are to have an activity that is called “divine,” it always remains under the light of what we are. The highest things are given to us; we do not make them to be what they are, including ourselves.
II.
Though we are sometimes told, sometimes tell ourselves, that joy will result from dissipation, it never quite does. Even Nietzsche warns us. We can take the truth of this observation about dissipation on faith, on the testimony of others, or we can test it ourselves, as I believe the young Augustine did. The results are the same. “Do not envy those who do evil,” one of the Psalms cautions us. We find that the rather cynical but perceptive Nietzsche is quite right. How could a mere philosopher like him know so much? By listening to other philosophers much less logical than he, we suspect. Plato talked of a kind of “divine madness,” as if to say that our senses and our minds are not given solely for their own exercise but to hear and see, to be wholly absorbed by, what is not ourselves, to hear and see what is. Nietzsche’s word, “joylessness,” is one I find to be remarkably provocative, as he intended it to be. “You will not find what you are looking for,” he implies, “if you look for it in dissipation.” He too is here on the side of the gods. “What are we looking for?” we cannot but ask ourselves. We do look and seek, even if we deny that we do.
In this regard, I am fond of citing a passage from a lecture Eric Voegelin gave in Montreal in 1980, probably in a context not too different from this one. “I find students are frequently flabbergasted, especially those who are agnostics,” he tells us,
when I tell them that they all act, whether agnostic or not, as if they were immortal. Only
under the assumption of immortality, of fulfillment beyond this life, is the seriousness of
action intelligible which they actually put into their work and which has a fulfillment
nowhere in this life however long they may live. They all act as if their lives made sense
immortally, even if they deny immortality, deny the existence of a psyche, deny the
existence of a Divinity – in brief, if they are just the sort of fairly corrupt average agnostics
that you find among college students today. One shouldn’t take their agnosticism too
seriously, because they act as if in fact they weren’t agnostics.
Basic principles operate in us even when we deny their existence. It is safer to watch what someone does rather than what he says.
Refusal to observe the commandments or to practice the virtues, declaring our absolute liberty, may often seem positively “romantic.” We delight in being “rebels” with or, even without, a cause. Be it noted, however, it is not the clergy who are here alerting us to these moral dangers. It is not even Aristotle. It is the man who told us that “God is dead, and we have killed him.” On this basis, on our voluntarily killing God in our souls, Nietzsche tells us to be free, or better, perhaps, he tells us that we are condemned to be free. But in our absolute freedom, we still know dissipation, a rather dull, repetitive life, in fact, as St. Thomas implied in a famous passage (I-II, 91, 6). If, contrary to Nietzsche’s prophet, however, God is not dead, is it still possible to hope that joy is open to us even when we discover that our ways do not produce it, when we discover in fact that we ourselves do the evils that cause others to suffer, that lead them to the joylessness of dissipation?
We can at least conceive the divinity in terms of mercy and not merely justice. Justice, the terrible virtue, as I call it, may not be the last word in the universe. Perhaps the world is not created in justice, as St. Thomas implied it wasn’t (I, 21, 4). Knowing ourselves, we could well hope that it isn’t. But if God is indeed dead, while dissipation still leads to joylessness, little is left to us but despair. Nietzsche tells the truth, in his own way. For many moderns, his testimony is more credible than that of God Himself. Ironically, God too promised joylessness to be the result of dissipation. Nietzsche’s biting aphorisms often inadvertently, or, I sometimes think, intentionally, rediscover, point to a lost Christianity. Nietzsche’s main complaint about the Last Christian, the one who died on the Cross, was that His followers, judging by their actions, did not believe in Him. About a century after the death of Nietzsche, when the Pope visited St. Louis, American media was fond of ferreting out famous and ordinary Catholics who affirmed before the world that they “disagreed” with the Pope about how to live. They would have confirmed Nietzsche in his estimate about the weakness of faith. Modernity, if I can put it that way, is nothing other than inventing a replacement for what is not believed. The content of what is originally believed might well be better than anything that we might concoct for ourselves. This is the judgment under which modernity lives.
III.
Josef Pieper once remarked that “joy is a by-product.” He meant by this curious observation that we cannot make joy an object of our choice or even of our intellect. It is not another “thing,” nor is it, like health, something a medical practitioner can restore. We can perhaps recognize it when we have it, but we cannot buy it, demand it, claim a right for it. It seems to belong to that category of things that must be “given” to us. We must be the sort of people capable of receiving gifts. Contrary to our Declaration, but in agreement with C. S. Lewis, we do not have a “right” to happiness, or even its pursuit. Who would enforce the right? Is our happiness “due” to us in justice, or does it come from some other, higher source? Who would develop a public policy to obtain this happiness? Who would define it? What would we be pursuing? We can only deliberate, as Aristotle says, about what we might bring about by our own purposeful actions (1112a20-32). We are quite sure that we want to be happy, that we do all we do to be happy. Likewise, we want to be joyful. We even know that we are made for joy, but we know that joy is not a direct object of our choosing. Joy is rather the result of something else. Happiness is an activity; joy is a kind of receptivity. The second follows from the first, and the first depends on our doing what is virtuous, what is right.
Pieper’s beautiful words on joy as something that arrives as a result of something else are worth our pondering together:
Man can (and wants to) rejoice only when there is a reason for joy. And this reason,
therefore, is primary, the joy itself secondary. But are there not countless reasons for joy?
Yes. But they can all be reduced to a common denominator: our receiving or possessing
something we love – even though this receiving or possession may only be hoped for as a
future good or remembered as something already past. Consequently, one who loves
nothing and no one cannot rejoice, no matter how desperately he wishes to....
Joy is the receiving and possessing of what we love; it is not something that we command or demand. We may never possess what we love and thus we may not be full of joy. But if we love nothing, no joy is possible.
John Paul II made an unexpected remark in Fides et Ratio when he said that, in truth, everyone is a philosopher (#30). I presume he did not intend to denigrate philosophy departments, let alone the diligent philosopher who goes it alone, as all must at some point. That it is possible for everyone to know and know the truth is a very Aristotelian remark, in a way. The Philosopher himself recognized, that since we are all in immediate contact with being, with what is, it is possible for ordinary folks just to see the truth of things, even if they may not exactly be able to explain what they see in complicated or technical language (1180b17-20). I conclude from this reflection that joy and happiness are not to be conceived merely as something open to a few, to the philosophers. Likewise, I am rather sure that it was not the philosophers who made us most aware that what is is open to everyone.
Yet, I am here to praise the philosopher. After all, it was Aristotle, the Philosopher, who remarked, in a touching passage, that “we can do fine actions even if we do not rule earth and sea; for even from moderate resources we can do actions expressing virtue. This is evident to see, since many private citizens seem to do decent actions no less than people in power do – even more, in fact. ... The life of someone whose activity expresses virtue will be happy” (1179a4-9). In a declining, corrupt but prosperous civil society, this may well be our only charter of freedom, our only avenue to both joy and happiness. The initial battles, I think, are not fought in the public forum or in the wars of the world, but in the hearts of men, especially in the hearts and minds of the dons, the intellectual and clerical dons. We all need enough philosophy to give us a chance to estimate erring intellectuals.
IV.
Charlie Brown is lying on his back with his head propped on a stone for a pillow. Lucy is
looking at him in this prone position, but with some confusion. Charlie says to her, “If I tell you
something, Lucy, will you promise not to laugh?” Naturally she replies, “I promise.” In the next
scene, Charlie, still on his back, tells her earnestly that “this is very personal, and I don’t want you
to laugh.” “You have my solemn promise,” she assures him. In the third frame, Charlie explains
his concern, “Sometimes, I lie awake at night listening for a voice that will cry, ‘We like you,
Charlie Brown!’” In the fourth scene, all we see is Charlie flipped over on his head, while Lucy,
with not a thought of her solemn promises, screams in utter delight at the absurdity of this nightly
voice, “Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!”
Aristotle discovered in us human beings, besides the fact that we are rational and political animals, that we are also homines risibiles. We are the beings who laugh -- and perhaps, recalling Lucy and Charlie Brown, the beings who are laughed at. This same Aristotle had reminded us that there is a time and place for laughter. The buffoon who laughs at everything and everybody is not a charming character, nor is the somber man who laughs at nothing (1128a34-b5). Aristotle also noticed that the ability to laugh is a sign of metaphysical intelligence. Why would he think this? It is because he realized that our laughter results from our ability to see the relationship or lack of it among things? And the ability to see relations is the first requirement of the metaphysician and the essence of our ability to laugh. Laughter means that we see that what is put to side-by-side does not go together, or that what is not in proximity ought to be joined. And we cannot help but thinking that this capacity for laughter is connected to our joy, which is a by-product.
Chesterton’s profound remark, that the one thing that the Son of God did not show us while
He was on earth was His “mirth,” did not presume that the Lord did not know mirth.
Philosophy, as I have intimated in my subtitle, suggests that what is best about us is what is “useless.” Let us see if we can imagine something that is indeed useless. We throw away useless things and yet here I am suggesting that the highest things are useless, are things we do not use or use up. To us, at first, it sounds wrenching to argue that what is best in us is useless and this “what is best” is, indeed, philosophy. Philosophy, we know, means that we love and seek wisdom, the order and content of the highest things. Philosophy is not merely a knowledge but a way of life, a commitment to what is true. We have heard man described as homo viator, man the traveler. That is, he never seems to have a home, even though home is what he seeks to have, the place in which he is born and in which he dies. Socrates told us likewise that philosophy is a preparation for death. He chided his young followers in his cell on his last day for weeping. Socrates admonished them because their weeping was a sign that they did not understand what he had been trying to teach them all along. Yet, we cannot but sympathize with these potential philosophers who wept at his death.
V.
What is best in us is “useless.” I want to approach this enigmatic proposition by way of pleasure. To say that what is best in us is “useless” does not mean that what is best in us does not have its own proper pleasure. Samuel Johnson, I think, had it right. On the 15th of April, 1778, Boswell records a remark of Johnson concerning the famous thesis of de Mandeville that it is our vices that cause our wealth. Echoing Aristotle, Johnson remarks that “pleasure itself isn’t a vice. Having a garden, which we all know to be perfectly innocent, is a great pleasure. At the same time, in this state of being there are many pleasures (that are) vices, which however are so immediately agreeable that we can hardly abstain from them. The happiness of Heaven will be, that pleasure and virtue will be perfectly consistent” (II, 221). Heaven is not a place in which pleasures are lacking, but a place in which their true reality is seen in the acts for which they are intended.
Aristotle made the same point in another way. He acknowledged that for every activity there is a proper pleasure so that if a pleasure is wrong, it is not because it is pleasure but because the activity in which it exists as a “bloom” or perfection of the activity is wrong. Then he added that there are many activities that we would “be eager for even if they brought no pleasure, e.g. seeing, remembering, knowledge, having the virtues” (1174a4-5). And Aristotle will say later on that having the virtues is itself necessary for knowing reality as it is, otherwise we end up using our knowledge to pursue ends that are not the highest (1178a16-20). But notice that knowledge is among the things that Aristotle mentioned we would want even if there were no proper pleasure attached to it. The point I want to stress here, however, is that there is a proper pleasure attached to knowledge, a pleasure that makes the activity even more what it is, even more delightful, even more absorbing.
I wish to keep our attention on the idea that pleasure varies according to the act. If we do not experience the highest pleasures, it is quite likely that we will lapse into what are called lower ones, that is, into activities that are disordered and that separate their purpose and the pleasure connected with them. Aristotle is quite remarkably certain that those who experience the highest things are not usually those with great wealth or political power. “For virtue and understanding, the sources of excellent activities, do not depend on holding supreme power,” he wrote. “Further, these powerful people have had no taste of pure and civilized pleasure, and so they resort to bodily pleasures” (1176b19-21). Politicians, those “holding supreme power,” resort to bodily pleasures not because they are busy about political things, but because their souls have no taste for “pure and civilized pleasure.” It is difficult for a politician to have a contemplative life, but without it, he is in danger of undermining even the political life. This idea is also found in The Republic’s Myth of Er. “Self-sufficiency and action do not depend on excess,” Aristotle tells us (1179a3). Aristotle was not one to denigrate the political life. But he was quite aware that it stood in a very precarious moral position. It could not fill our souls by its own pleasures, by the honor due to it. A confusion about the relative importance of the political life, the highest of the practical sciences but not the highest life as such, could well leave empty the soul that lacked the taste for the higher things, that lacked philosophy.
Aristotle frequently speaks of things that are worth doing “for their own sakes.” Not everything can be done “in order to” do something else. Ultimately, there must be something that is just worth doing, something that is at the same time ours and that takes us outside of ourselves. Notice that Aristotle said that the politicians who lacked a “taste for pure and civilized pleasure” not only have no inner resources whereby they might see the limitations of power, but they, lacking this higher pleasure, lapse into what Aristotle calls “bodily pleasures.” They are less than complete. The highest things have the highest pleasures. If we do not know them, we do not know their pleasures. We blind ourselves.
This passage about those in power recalls Plato’s discussion of the tyrant, especially Alcibiades or Callicles, both of whom are pictured as attractive, shrewd, and powerful politicians. The tyrant for Plato and Aristotle charmed the people. The tyrant knew citizens’ souls and feared only those with inner virtue. The tyrant paid close attention to the people’s wants, whatever they wanted. What is also characteristic of both Alcibiades and Callicles, of tyrants in general, is that they have no inner soul, no order of virtue. Callicles said that he studied philosophy in college but gave it up as dangerous because it got in his way in politics. Machiavelli was later to say substantially the same things. Alcibiades ends up betraying Athens and seeks, unsuccessfully, to subvert Socrates, the philosopher, himself. He senses that this latter is even a worse betrayal than his betrayal of his polity. Both Alcibiades and Callicles admit that they come first, that they take their norms not from inner principles of what is, but from what the people want. But this very shifting criterion of the wants of a people with souls of disordered liberty, meant that the tyrant knew how to use the people for his own ends. These ends were never contemplative or self-sufficient, never the kind of pure and civilized pleasure that indicates a soul aware of the attraction of the highest things.
VI.
To make this point in another way, let me recount the first letter in the Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy, a book which a friend kindly gave me for Christmas. The letter is dated May Day, 1948, from Foote to Percy. Foote is talking about writing, learning to write, what is involved. To learn to write, Foote tells Percy, anyone has to be an apprentice for five or more years. He has to write, rewrite, tear up, write again. He adds,
but the most heart-breaking thing about (writing) is (this): the better you get, the harder you
will have to work – because your standards will rise with your ability. I mentioned ‘work’
– it is the wrong word: because if you’re serious, the whole creative process is attended with
pleasure, in a form which very few people ever know. Putting two words together in a
sequence that pleases you, really pleases you, brings a satisfaction which must be kin to
what a businessman feels when he manages a sharp transaction – something like that but
on a higher plane because the businessman must know that soon he will have spent the
dollars he made, but these two words which the writer set together have produced an effect
which will never die as long as men can read with understanding.
The human creative process has its own pleasure that resides in the work that almost ceases to be work and passes into contemplation itself, into the “effect which will never die as long as men can read with understanding.”
Aristotle had distinguished between recreation, work, play, and leisure. The purpose of recreation was that we could go back to work. It was a recognition of the limits of our bodily powers. Work meant constructing the world, the houses, ploughing the fields, the world of making that at its highest activities passes over into the fine arts, into painting, music, sculpture. The normal Greek word for business, however necessary, implied a lack of leisure. The word for leisure, skole, the word from which we get our word school, meant the activities of the highest intellectual virtues, to seek the truth, contemplate the beautiful, do the good. Business meant askolia, the lack of leisure. Play or sport, however, Aristotle maintained, was the nearest thing most of us come to contemplation, as it too was something “for its own sake.” Perhaps it was not so serious, yet it could give us a taste of contemplation, of something that absorbed all of our attention, an experience we all need.
The Washington Post, in its columns in preparation for the Superbowl (January 29, 1999), featured a long article on Bill Romanowski, the Denver Broncos’ tough and controversial linebacker. Romanowski, in his eagerness to play, is pictured as a kind of a throwback to a man who liked to play all the time, offense and defense, to play hard, not to count the injuries, “a throwback to the days when football players considered blood stains on their jerseys and a mouth full of cracked teeth to be a badge of honor.” He then added, in a line that I want to reflect on here in the context of doing things for their own sakes, “I’m a guy who plays every play like its his last.... They say if you love what you do, you don’t have to work a day in your life.” This wonderful remark gets close to what we mean by leisure and contemplation, to philosophy, to the best thing in us as precisely useless, to things we enjoy doing for their own sakes, even with blood on our jerseys.
Our real subject is, of course, the contemplative life. We do not have to rule land and sea
to lead it; indeed, that might be an impediment. It has its own pleasure, pure and civilized, without
which we lapse into other pleasures not so innocent or so riveting. In Mel Lazrus’ cartoon, “Miss
Peach,” we are in a kindergarten. We see a very precocious Francine talking with a much slower
Arthur. He asks her, “what are you doing?” “Thinking,” she replies. This confuses Arthur,
“Thinking?” “Yes,” Francine explains pertly, “I’m getting ideas.” “Ideas are wonderful,” she
effuses. “Ideas? What are ideas?” Arthur persists. “You’re kidding. Ideas are, well, ‘thoughts’.”
“Thoughts?” Arthur repeats confusedly, as if thoughts are new to him. “Yes, things that come into
your mind.” With this explanation, Arthur is pictured with a question mark over his head. He
doesn’t get it. “They come into your head,” she explains. “What do they look like?” he wants to
know. Francine patiently responds, “Arthur, ideas are intangible. They don’t look like anything
in particular.” Arthur still bears the question mark; they make no sense to him. “Ideas! Ideas!!
Haven’t you ever had any, Arthur? Wispy things that sort of float in and out of your mind at odd
moments?” Francine awaits light in Arthur’s eyes, but Arthur continues uncomprehendingly to
stare at her. Finally, in the last scene, to a thoroughly disgusted Francine, Arthur brightly replies,
“Oh, yes! I’ve had those! Funny, I’ve always assumed they were Unidentified Flying Objects..!”
Such amusing kindergarten reflections on precisely “thinking” still remind us that “thinking” is indeed what we are about, however successfully we deal with these “intangible,” “wispy” things that come into our heads seemingly in some Cartesian sense ungrounded in reality. And thinking is what sets us apart, not just thinking but thinking about reality, about what is. Our minds are precisely capax omnium, capable of knowing the truth of all things. What fascinates us, what makes us lose track of time and place is precisely the reality that is before us, that reality we are not. Our minds are given to us so that what is not ourselves can become what we are after the manner of our knowing. It is not sufficient that we simply exist. We exist having now within us what is not ourselves, what is the truth. It is all right for us rational beings to exist because in our existing as limited and finite mortals, we have access to all that is not ourselves. This includes in some sense the awareness that reality itself has its own grounding that we did not give it but about which we are curious, about which we want to know the truth.
“Philosophy strives for knowledge of the whole,” Leo Strauss wrote in a famous essay.
Plato, in his Laws, asked what it is that we should be about when all things are done? How should we spend our lives? What is beyond use and why is it the best thing about us? We should spend our lives, he said, “singing, sacrificing, and dancing” (803e). We are not the measure but the measured. Therefore, we can have joy, can rejoice in what is. Of the highest things, we can “do” nothing further but celebrate them. In hearing this advice, Megillus inquires whether it is not denigrating human things, important things, useful things? “Oh,” the Stranger replied, “Don’t be amazed, Megillus, but forgive me! For I was looking away toward the god and speaking under the influence of that experience, when I said what I did just now. So let our race be something that is not lowly then, if that is what you cherish, but worthy of a certain seriousness” (804b). Though we are worthy of a “certain seriousness,” only God is serious, worthy of all attention. The effect of this recognition of our real status in the universe is exhilarating, freeing us to respond to what we are not. The highest things are useless. They are the best things in us.
VII.
Let me conclude by recalling the sub-title of what is to me the most remarkable book
written in recent years. It is called “the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.”
Pickstock’s thesis, if I might be so bold as to state it in my own words, is that philosophy does lead us, especially through Plato, in the right direction, but it needs an ending that philosophy itself cannot give, though it can intimate. The recovery of Plato is essential to our philosophic souls. But notice that she uses the word “consummation”; philosophy itself becomes absorbed in what is beyond itself, in what is already in Plato “useless” because it arouses in us what is more than mere praise. It brings us to what Aristotle himself called “celebration” (1101b30-35).
If I can go back to Nietzsche, to conclude, the history of modern ideology is the history of a false celebration of reality, a reality that only corresponded to what we ourselves could make for ourselves or impose on our kind. But the celebration of the reality beyond philosophy, or better to which philosophy points us, is not something merely left to us. If we are inadequate to form it solely by ourselves, we cannot exclude the possibility that it is given to us. Philosophy, at its best, leads us to certain questions that it does not by itself answer, but they are genuine questions rooted in the authenticity of philosophy itself.
Aristotle, to take one example, in his treatise on friendship, remarked that it seemed odd that God was lonely, that He lacked what is the highest perfection of human life. The liturgical consummation of philosophy would follow from the revelational possibility that God is not alone, that within the divinity there is a completion that includes otherness. The human race or the cosmos itself need not exist in order to alleviate the loneliness of God. And if this is so, we can “do” nothing for God; that is, we are ourselves unnecessary, and ultimately “useless,” and this is the best thing about us because we can pursue the highest things, the knowledge of the whole, spending our lives “singing, sacrificing, and dancing.” Philosophy, our pursuit of truth, is relieved of the burden of our attempting to make the world after our own images. Joy is a by-product because we are not so serious, but we exist because what is indeed serious is given to us who are capaces omnium. Joylessness is not our destiny. Joy is the receiving of what we love, even in the highest things. The highest things absorb us, and this is our pleasure; this is why we are at all.
“How do we know that we are philosophers?” we might finally ask. I will point to a famous reflection of Cicero, which gives us, I think, the ultimate sign: “Publius Cornelius Scipio, the first of that family to be called Africanus, used to remark that he was never less idle than when he had nothing to do, and never less lonely than when he was by himself” (On Duties, I). Cicero does not deny that philosophy leads us also to friends and to truth, but he does imply that friends and truth will never be secure if we do not ourselves possess an interior, contemplative life, a life devoted to philosophy.
2) James V. Schall, S. J., Georgetown University, A Lecture to the John Caroll Society.
WHAT DO PHILOSOPHERS KNOW?
“Reason must realize that human knowledge is a journey which allows no rest....” – John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, #18.
“All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness, they are loved for themselves; and above all others is the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all of the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.” – Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, Chapter 1, 980a23-28.
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” – Pascal, (✝1662), Pensées, #863.
I.
What do philosophers do? In general, they try to reduce the disparate facts and principles found or observed in any walk of life or discipline to order. They see that contradictory principles cannot both be true. This mention of contradiction implies a reflective “examination” of the mind on itself about itself. We realize that we cannot “prove” the principle of contradiction, namely, that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. It is where we begin if we are to begin at all. We cannot prove it from something “clearer,” for nothing is more evident than the principle itself. We must assume the validity of the principle itself when we try to reject it. We cannot reject it without affirming it. The first exercise of intellectual freedom is the conscious effort to deny the principle of contradiction to realize actively in our own intellects that it cannot be denied. If it were true that contradictories could both be true in all circumstances, then anything can be true, including exact opposites. Likewise, the same things that are true would also, on the same grounds, be false. Thus, the principle of contradiction holds in its very denial or else the denial could not be valid. The mind presupposes this principle that comes into operative existence the moment we try to affirm or deny anything once we know that something other than our mind exists. Indeed, we first know our own minds when we affirm or deny something that is not our mind. Our only alternative to examining or employing this principle, as Aristotle maintained, is to keep silence, to allow nothing to be examined or even spoken. But this “silence” would remove any rational being from any intercourse with other rational beings at any level. He would reduce himself to a vegetative state. We should, as Aristotle said in his Rhetoric be more read to defend ourselves with our words than with our arms.
Robert Sokolowski, in a seminal essay in The Review of Metaphysics, observed that what philosophers do is “make distinctions.” That is to say, they try to understand, to separate one thing from another, to relate things, to see what can and cannot go together. This very effort to make such distinctions is itself a delight, a fascination with things and our relation to them. Plato remarked in The Republic that the philosopher’s function is to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. Notice that the philosopher affirms and denies, as if we need to make such a statement one way or another about the things that are. Indeed, making such statements is principally what the mind is for, its contemplative activity. This is what we mean by truth, the truth of things, which we desire to have even when we do not have it, even when we say it is “impossible,” for that too, ironically, would be a “truth.” We want to know whether what we affirm or deny in our minds does or does not conform with the way things are outside the mind.
Plato also tells us of the famous case of the Thracian maidens, who exemplify the ordinary person’s view of the philosopher. Evidently, two famous philosophers were soberly walking down the road one day in Athens, speaking to each other of the things above, when one of them, not noticing a rather large pothole in the road, ignominiously fell in it. On witnessing this, to them, absurd, scene, these charming, normal young ladies are said to have “giggled.” And this giggle has become immortal, for it suggests that philosophers, for all their hauteur, are highly impractical beings who can barely tie their shoe strings or notice holes in the road. What, after all, is the “use” of such impractical types that we have to lead around holes in the road so that they do not fall in them?
II.
What do philosophers “do?” At bottom, they do nothing “useful.” What they do is precisely, as Aristotle implied, “useless.” However, nothing pejorative is intended when we observe the uselessness of the philosopher, provided we also understand that philosophers have been known to call truth “folly,” as we read in St. Paul. Nothing prevents a philosopher from being a corrupt man whose intellectual system is not designed to know the truth but rather to protect his actions and deeds from any examination against the norms or standards of what is. Man, as Aristotle said, can be worse than the beasts, which comment, I have always thought, is a slander on the poor animals. In principle, those who are called to the highest of vocations are the same ones who can fall to the lowest. The examples of Lucifer in Scripture and of the tyrant in the classic authors are cases in point. Lucifer was the brightest of the angels. We can find little difference of raw talent between the philosopher-king and the worst tyrant, except in what each chooses, in what each calls his end, his “truth.” Once the end, good or bad, is chosen, all prudence is designed to achieve it.
Pascal held that we must love the truth even to “know” it. Aristotle began his most rigorous book almost lightheartedly by telling us to delight in the things we see about us so that we could “make distinctions,” which, if we think about it, we love to do. We love to know how things are alike and how they are different, and thus what they are, that they are. And philosophers can be lonely people. They can find themselves, as Daniel Mahoney pointed in is new book on Solzhenitsyn, in gulags with everything taken away from them and asked, in order to be “free,” to affirm only one thing, namely, “a lie.” Plato said the same thing. He told us that the worst thing we could have is a “lie” in our souls about the most important things. But surely he knew that a culture could also be filled with folks with such lies in their souls, not wanting to know and hence not choosing to follow the highest things.
What does a philosopher “know”? John Paul II, following a famous phrase in St. Augustine about our “restless hearts,” told us that we are on a journey in the pursuit of knowledge that “allows us no rest.” I love that phrase -- “a journey that allows us no rest.” The Pope is, of course, right. Some would have this comment mean that there is no “rest” ever. But this alternative, were it true, would just mean, as Aristotle also said, that we were the one being in the universe who is, as such, “in vain,” to no purpose. Both reason and revelation exist in order that we know that our being, and with it the being of the cosmos, does not exist “in vain.”
Still, what do philosophers know? Above all, they are supposed to “know themselves.” However, to know oneself, we quickly realize, we must first know something that is not ourselves. To know ourselves, we must actually be knowing something not ourselves so that we are engaged in an act of knowing, an act the structure of which we do not give to ourselves but find it already there along with our being in which it exists. We can, on knowing something not ourselves, then reflect back on ourselves. We see that “what” is knowing what is not ourselves is indeed something we identify with the who and what we are.
But is it not rather dull, even vain, to know ourselves? Of course, we soon discover that we are unlike any other being in the universe. We ought to know this uniqueness about ourselves, as it corresponds to the truth of our being. The peculiar thing about our knowing is that we begin with an empty slate, as Aristotle put it. If we know nothing or everything, we have the same mind, the same capacity to know. In one case it is, as it were, filled, in the other case, it is empty. It is not a perfection of the mind to know nothing. And since we are not gods, since we are finite, we know after our own manner of knowing, though we really do know some things.
Yet, even when we know and know that we know something, we remain “restless.” Is this a bad thing? It is a bad thing only if we do not first delight in what is, in what is not ourselves that is out there, as it were, for us to know. Our minds are in fact capax omnium, capable of knowing all things. The fact that we do not yet know all things is merely the other side of the journey on which we are engaged by our very living and, indeed, dying. Some, I know, despair because they do not yet know everything. But this not-yet-knowing is not a cause of despair. Again the regulating principle is that of Aristotle, of delighting not merely in seeing, but also in knowing, knowing anything, but especially in knowing the order of things. And to know the order of things, we must make distinctions, to say that this is, but this is not that.
III.
What do philosophers know? One of the things they know, perhaps the most important thing they know, is that they have questions that are not answered, even when some questions are answered. They assume that their answers will also come from philosophy, but this is an assumption, though not an entirely wrong one. Yet, if they do not have the questions of our being properly formulated, they will not know whether answers are proposed to their questions as asked. Nothing requires that answers be given to people who ask no questions, or who ask improperly formulated questions.
Should we worry that philosophers do not see answers? Should we worry that some philosophers are corrupt as philosophers, that is, that they refuse to go in one or another direction because they see, at least darkly, where reality might lead them but they do not want to go there, do not want to change their lives? Indeed, we should worry about these things. Philosophers know that they must ask “why there is something, not nothing?” “Why is this thing not that thing?” They know that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same respect. They know they have intellectual tools. They know that their philosophical knowledge, as such, does not change the world, but it does change them. They are more when they know that what is, is, and what is not, is not.
What do philosophers know? This is my last comment. Philosophers know the delight of knowing what is not themselves. This is what they speak to their friends about, what they want to do above all. Philosophy, when done well, when done rightly, leaves us in a state of expectancy, of wanting no rest, not because we are tired, but because there is so much yet to see, yes so much to see again and again. We did not make reality; it is given to us. This too is a truth of philosophy.
In the end, the “private” lives and the public events both cause us to wonder. Wondering about such common events, the things that need order, as Aristotle implied, is still the beginning of philosophy. But the end of philosophy is the knowing, the delight in affirming of what is that it is, and of what is not, that it is now.
3) James V. Schall, S. J., Georgetown University Published in Perspectives on Political Science, 29 (Fall, 2000), 219-24.
ON THE PARADOXICAL PLACE OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE STRUCTURE OF REALITY
“Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself.” – Leo Strauss, The City and Man.
“I will argue that genuine subjectivity is to be attained through the redemptive return of doxological dispossession, thus ensuring that the subject is neither autonomously self-present, nor passively controlled from without (the pendulum of ‘choice’ available to the citizen of our immanentist city). – Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.
“For these sophists desire that demonstrative arguments should be given for all things; for it is obvious that they wanted to take some starting point that would be for them a kind of rule whereby they could distinguish between those who are healthy and those who are ill, and between those who are awake and those who are asleep.... Still, they are not deceived in their own minds so that they believe the judgments of one who is asleep and the judgment of one who is awake to be equally true. And this is clear from their acts....” – Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Bk. IV, C. 15, #709.
I.
Philosophic discussions sometimes lend themselves to non-philosophic beginnings. It
seems proper to start with a tract that ended in the last days of the XXth Century. The scene at the
theater is the “Tenth Annual Tiny Tots’ Concert.” Present are Marcie, Peppermint Patty, Charlie
Brown’s little sister Sally, and a diminutive girl with long hair, wearing a head-band. Peppermint
Patty tells us right off that she “hates” such “Tiny Tot Concerts.” Sally in turn complains, “Every
time we come to one of these concerts, they play ‘Peter and the Wolf.’” In the next scene she
continues, ‘They must think we don’t understand anything else.” The little girl with the head-band,
sitting to Sally’s left, asks her, “Don’t you like ‘Peter and the Wolf’?” Sally replies, “I don’t know
... I’ve never understood it.”
That is to say, as the passage from St. Thomas that I cited in the beginning affirms, we
possess the first principle of being and knowledge without our having formally to elaborate it;
namely, a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. We cannot deny the principle without
implicitly affirming it. Our acts often make our thoughts clear when we do not admit their clarity
even to ourselves. Even when we would be skeptics, we reveal something that is not skeptical.
Our very rational power is given to us. As Samuel Johnson put it in a letter to James Boswell, on
February 9, 1776, “Providence gives the power, of which reason teaches the use.”
In a conversation at the University of Leyden in Holland, on May 20, 1975, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was asked by Professor H. Phillipse: “Is philosophy a diversion for you, as it was for Pascal?” To this question, Levinas enigmatically responded, in a phrase to which I shall return later, “if the undivertable can be a diversion, and if a diversion can be undivertable.” Phillipse next inquired, “Is the philosophical attitude – which is in essence a skeptical attitude - not in contradiction with the attitude of faith?” Levinas distinguished the meaning of “skeptical,” a point with which I am beginning these considerations on political philosophy. “‘Skeptical’ only means the fact of examining things,” Levinas affirmed,
the fact of posing questions. I do not at all think that a question – or, at least, the original
questioning – is only a deficiency of answers. Functional and even scientific questions –
and many philosophic ones – await only answers. Questioning qua original attitude is a
relation to that to which no response can contain, to the “uncontainable”; it becomes
responsibility. Every response contains a “beside the point” and appeals to an un-said (dé-dit).
The fact is, there are questions to which there are answers, even when we realize that every answer arises out of a reality that is “uncontainable” by our own minds. This questioning is not skepticism but a manifestation of what Socrates called intellectual “eros,” an awareness and pursuit of the revelatory nature of what is.
II.
“Examining things” is what we do when we philosophize. We would not bother to do this examining if we thought a priori that we could know nothing of what we examine. The burden of knowing what political philosophy might be involves the effort to distinguish and identify what it is not. This may be a skeptical enterprise, if you will, but it has the prime purpose of knowing about things as such. It seeks to identify where and how political things fit into the order of reality. “Philosophy is the intellectual activity that works with distinctions,” Robert Sokolowski has written. Philosophy explains by distinguishing. This does not mean that philosophy just asserts
distinctions and lets it go at that; rather, it works with distinctions, it brings them out and
dwells on them, dwells with them, showing how and why the things it has distinguished
must be distinguished from one another.... The activity of making distinctions always has
something contemplative about it. Whenever we make a distinction, we become somewhat
disconnected from whatever practical or rhetorical activity we may be engaged in.
That is to say, the effort to distinguish things at one level simply means that we want to know what they are independently of our wanting to know what to do with them or make of them. In this sense, there is an unavoidable philosophical aspect to our reflecting on political things, even though politics is what Aristotle called a “practical” science, one directly ordered to doing, to acting, not making or contemplating.
The “place” of any philosophy is, properly speaking, within the human mind while it actively thinks about what is, about what is not the human mind itself or anything in it. Our “consciousness” depends initially on the fact that we have a mind that comes to be in act, that is, that comes to know something. Thus, consciousness also depends on what is other than mind. What is not mind is not itself necessarily conscious even though it has some intelligibility to it, something not of its own making. The human mind, that power that is capax omnium, only knows itself indirectly, in knowing what is not itself. In this sense, it is not a divine mind that knows all in knowing itself. It remains a limited, finite mind, yet, still mind, still open to all things, to what is. Therefore, it is capable of receiving what it is not.
This capacity of knowing all things is why finite beings can be content not to be themselves
gods. To talk of philosophy, moreover, is to talk of the knowledge of the whole, to seek this whole.
To talk of precisely “political” philosophy, on the other hand, is to talk of certain conditions that
allow us to continue this enterprise of thinking, of seeking to know, to love the whole. Political
philosophy addresses first the politician to convince him to let philosophy itself be. Political
philosophy in this sense always remains under the shadow of Socrates and Christ, both non-writers
of books, both killed by the best states of their time.
Among the things that are, we find human cities. Indeed, it is worthy of note in the beginning that the description of the whole, as in Plato, the Stoics, and Augustine, is after the manner of a “city” – “The Republic,” the “Cosmopolis,” the “City of God.” Human cities as such are not, properly speaking, “things,” though there are things, primarily human things, within them. Existing human beings are the substantial realities that ground the ontological status of cities. As we see in ruins everywhere, minus human beings, minus cities. Human cities, while not totally or metaphysically “unreal,” do not fall into the category of substance, however un-Hegelian but downright Aristotelian this observation might sound. Human cities do not exist without human beings, without human beings acting for some purpose, some end. Cities fall in the category of “ad aliud,” of “relation.” They indicate the order of actions existing among rational beings acting practically to achieve their chosen ends, ends themselves revealed again and again by their chosen goals, as Aristotle described it so well in the first book of his Ethics.
And human beings themselves do not exist of their own making. Political science does not make man to be man but taking him from nature as already man, causes him to be good man – to summarize the words of Aristotle (1100a30-32; 1102a8-10; 1258a21-23). What it is to be man is not itself an idea concocted from nothing or originally formulated by man. Rather it is something learned by reflecting on some already present order of being and action within him, already within a world, a cosmos. We find ourselves to be, and to be human beings, not turtles or trees or torrents of rain. Human beings want to know the truth of things, including the truth of what their cities are, together with the truth about their own status in reality.
“The experiences of reason and spirit agree on the point that man experiences himself as a being who does not exist from himself,” Eric Voegelin wrote in his second German lecture on “The Development of Diagnostic Tools.”
He exists in an already given world. The world itself exists by reason of a mystery, and the
name for the mystery, for the cause of this being of the world, of which man is a
component, is referred to as “God.” So dependence of existence (Dasein) on the divine
causation of existence (Existenz) has remained the basic question of philosophy up until
today. This was formulated by Leibniz in the classic proposition that metaphysics has to
deal with two questions: Why is there something, why not nothing? And one second
question, Why is this something as it is? These why questions place at the beginning of
all reflections on man, what we can call, with classical philosophical expression, the
etiological problem of the existence of man and the world.
Voegelin insists that at our own beginning, we cannot but know that what we are is not caused by any efficacious action or thought of our own. We can, perhaps, deny that we have this wonderment about ourselves in our fragile being, but this denial again puts us back at the skeptical question. We affirm something in our very denying of it. Moreover, Voegelin’s second question, “Why is this something as it is?” – the question of form – involves in the case of man the Aristotelian affirmation that man is by nature a political animal, a city-living being, again not something of his own making..
III.
Years ago in Spokane, I heard a lecture of the great historian of philosophy, Etienne Gilson. His lecture concerned itself with the starting point of philosophizing. This starting point, I recall him vigorously affirming, was the certainty of the evident propositions that 1) “there are things,” and 2) “I know them.” To doubt this starting point makes it impossible ever to begin. He reminded us that there is nothing clearer than this experience and affirmation. Even the denial of things or knowing them involves things and knowing. Even if we be Descartes himself, we cannot find something clearer from which we might “prove” that there are things or that we know them. Starting points are not known by prior “proofs,” as Aristotle reminded us in the sixth book of his Ethics. The habit of first principles means that some things are known of themselves, per se nota, self-evident truths, as they came to be called. They are known in the first act of knowing anything else, hence their firstness. The attempt to prove all proof is an infinite regression that results in knowing nothing.
Gilson at a certain point in his lecture took a glass of water that was on the podium. He held it in front of us. We wondered what he was about. He placed the glass of water in his hand and showed it to us. “If I said that what I have in my hand was a block of wood,” he provocatively told us, “you would all sit up and pay attention. You would be curious. But if I said that it is a glass of water, you would say, ‘so what.’” Gilson let this account sink in a bit. No one |
