Posted on 12/08/2002 12:25:26 PM PST by betty boop
In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists – whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence – with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate their lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.
Corollary: The difficulties of debate concern the fundamentals of existence. Debate with ideologists is quite possible in the areas of the natural sciences and of logic. The possibility of debate in these areas, which are peripheral to the sphere of the person, however, must not be taken as presaging the possibility in the future that areas central to the person…will also move into the zone of debate…. While such a possibility should not be flatly denied, it also should be realized that there is no empirical evidence on which such an expectation could be based….
The Second Realities which cause the breakdown of rational discourse are a comparatively recent phenomenon. They have grown during the modern centuries, roughly since 1500, until they have reached, in our own time, the proportions of a social and political force which in more gloomy moments may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization – unless, your course, you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality. In order to distinguish the nature of the new growth, as well as to understand its consequences, we must go a little further back in time, to a period in which the universe of rational discourse was still intact because the first reality of existence was yet unquestioned. Only if we know, for the purpose of comparison, what the conditions of rational discourse are, shall we find our bearings in the contemporary clash with Second Realities. The best point of departure for the comparative analysis of the problem will be St. Thomas’ Summa contra Gentiles. The work was written as an exposition and defense of the truth of Christianity against the pagans, in particular against the Mohammedans. It was written in a period of intellectual turmoil through the contacts with Islam and Aristotelian philosophy, comparable in many respects to our own, with the important difference that a rational debate with the opponent was still possible or – we should say more cautiously – seemed still possible to Aquinas….
Truth about the constitution of being, of which human existence is a part, is not achieved in an intellectual vacuum, but in the permanent struggle with preanalytical notions of existence, as well as with erroneous analytical conceptions. The situation of debate thus is understood as an essential dimension of the existence that we recognize as ours; to one part, the quest for truth is the perpetual task if disengaging it from error, of refining its expression in contest with the inexhaustible ingenuity of error. Philosophy, as a consequence, is not a solitary but a social enterprise….
Aquinas, following Aristotle, considers it the task of the philosopher to consider the highest causes of all being…. There is talk about a first mover of the universe – who must be assumed to be an intellect – from whom emanates somehow an order of being that is at the same time an order of truth. Why should we be concerned with a prime mover and his properties? – you will ask. And does the matter really improve when Aquinas identifies the prime mover as a demonstration of the existence of God? At the risk of arousing the indignation of convinced Aristotelians and Thomists I must say that I consider such questions quite pertinent. The questions must be raised, for we do no longer live, as did Aristotle and Aquinas, at the center of a cosmos…. We can no longer express the truth of existence in the language of men who believed in such a cosmos, moved with all its content by a prime mover, with a chain of aitia, of causes, extending from existent to existent down to the most lowly ones. The symbolism of the closed cosmos, which informs the fundamental concepts of classic and scholastic metaphysics, has been superseded by the universe of modern physics and astronomy.
Nevertheless, if we admit all this, does it follow that Aristotelian and Thomist metaphysics must be thrown on the scrap heap of symbolisms that once had their moment of truth but now have become useless?
You will have anticipated that the answer will be negative. To be sure, a large part of the symbolism has become obsolete, but there is a solid core of truth in it that can be, and must be, salvaged by means of some surgery….
[I]f we remove…everything that smacks of cosmological symbolism, there remains as a piece de resistance the argument that a universe which contains intelligent beings cannot originate with a prima causa [first cause, prime mover] that is less than intelligent]….
The second operation must extend to the prime mover itself. We must distinguish between the symbolic construction and the reality to which it refers; and we must be aware of the curious relations between the firmness of conviction that such a reality exists and the credibility of the construct. If the motivating experiences are known to the reader and shared by him, the construct will appear satisfactory and credible; if the experiences are not shared…the construct will become incredible…. Aristotle could indulge in his construction with assurance because the experiences which motivate the symbolism were taken for granted by everybody without close scrutiny; and Aquinas, in addition to living in the same uncritical safety of experience, could as a Christian theologian blend the truth of the prime mover into the truth of revelation. Today the validity of the symbol, and with its validity the reality to which it refers, is in doubt, because the experiences which motivated its creation for their adequate expression have slipped from the public consciousness….
The immediate experiences presupposed in Aristotelian metaphysics are not difficult to find in the classic sources…. [W]e find ourselves referred back to nothing more formidable than the experiences of finiteness and creatureliness in our existence, of being creatures of a day as the poets call man, of being born and bound to die, of dissatisfaction with a state experienced as imperfect, of apprehension of a perfection that is not of this world but is the privilege of the gods, of possible fulfillment in a state beyond this world…. [W]e can see philosophy emerging from the immediate experiences as an attempt to illuminate existence….
Human existence, it appears, is not opaque to itself, but illuminated by intellect (Aquinas) or nous (Aristotle). This intellect is as much part of human existence as it is the instrument of its interpretation. In the exegesis of existence intellect discovers itself in the structure of existence; ontologically speaking, human existence has noetic structure. The intellect discovers itself, furthermore, as a force transcending its own existence; by virtue of the intellect, existence not only is not opaque, but actually reaches out beyond itself in various directions in search of knowledge. Aristotle opens his Metaphysics with the sentence: “All men by nature desire to know.”…
With regard to things, the desire to know raises the questions of their origin, both with regard to their existence…and their essence [nature]. In both respects, Aristotle’s etiological demonstration arrives ultimately at the eternal, immaterial prima causa as the origin of existing things. If we now shift the accent back from the construct of doubtful validity to the experiences that motivated its construction, and search for a modern terminology of greater adequacy, we find it offering itself in the two great metaphysical questions formulated by Leibnitz in his Principes de la nature et de la grace, in the questions: (1) Why is there something, why not nothing? and (2) Why is something as it is, and not different? These two questions are, in my opinion, the core of true experience which motivates metaphysical constructions of the Aristotelian and Thomist type. However, since obviously no answer to these questions will be capable of verification or falsification, the philosopher will be less interested in this or that symbolism pretending to furnish the “true” answer than in the questions themselves. For the questions arise authentically when reason is applied to the experiential confrontation of man with existent things in this world; and it is the questions that the philosopher must keep alive in order to guard the truth of his own existence and well as that of his fellowmen against the construction of a Second Reality which disregards this fundamental structure of existence and pretends that the questions are illegitimate or illusionary….
Man discovers his existence as illuminated from with by Intellect or Nous. Intellect is the instrument of self-interpretation as much as it is part of the structure interpreted. It furthermore turned out that Intellect can transcend existence in various directions in search of knowledge…. By virtue of the noetic structure of his existence…man discovers himself as being not a world unto himself, but an existent among others; he experiences a field of existents of which he is a part. Moreover, in discovering himself in his limitation as part in a field of existents, he discovers himself as not being the maker of this field of existents or any part of it. Experience acquires its poignant meaning through the experience of not being self-generated but having its origin outside itself. Through illumination and transcendence, understood as properties of the Intellect…human existence thus finds itself in the situation from which the questions concerning origin and end of existence will arise….
But where is the origin and end of existence to be found? As a preliminary to the answer we must interpret the phenomenon of questioning itself; and for this purpose we must add to illumination and transcendence two further properties of the Intellect,…ideation and reasoning. Through illumination and transcendence existence has come into view as an existent thing in a field of existent things. Through the ideational property of the Intellect it is possible to generalize the discovered characteristics of existence into a nature of existence, to create an idea of existence, and to arrive at a proposition that origin and end of existence are to be found in one existent thing no more than in another. To be not the origin and end of itself is generically the nature of existent things. With this proposition we have reached the experiential basis for extensive demonstrations of both Aristotle and Aquinas that the infinite regress in search of an origin can have no valid result; the postulate of the peras, of the limit, is the symbolism by which both thinkers acknowledge the truth that origin and end of existence is not to be found by ranging indefinitely over the field of existent things. But if it is not to be found in the field of existent things, where is it to be found? To this question, Intellect, by virtue of its reasoning power, will answer that it is to be found in something beyond the field of existent things, in something to which the predicate of existence is applied by courtesy of analogy.…
To what purpose should an understanding of existence be expanded into the symbolic forms of metaphysics of the Aristotelian or Thomist type? What purpose could be served by the prime mover, converted by Aquinas into proofs for the existence of God, especially since they prove nothing that is not known before the proof is undertaken? I have tried to show that the knowledge of the something that “exists” beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence. And this result is confirmed by Aristotelian and Thomist demonstrations in which the postulate of the peras, whenever it is formulated, is richly studded with the suspicious adverbial expressions of evidently, obviously, clearly, which indicate that the premise of the argument is not derived from any demonstration, but that the prime mover which emerges from the demonstration has in fact been smuggled in with the unproven premise…. [T]here seems to suggest itself the possiblity that demonstrations of this type are a myth of the Logos offered by the Intellect as a gift of veneration to the constitution of being….
I have…used the expression truth of existence. We can now define it as the awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it as the conditio humana [human condition]. Correspondingly we shall define untruth of existence as a revolt against the conditio humana and the attempt to overlay its reality by the construction of a Second Reality….
We have traced the problem of truth in reality as it appears in the strange-sounding formulations of Aquinas and Aristotle to its origin in the noetic structure of existence. We shall now resume the problem of debate as it presented itself to Aquinas.
The Summa contra Gentiles defends the truth of faith against the pagans. But how can one do that, if the prospective partner to the debate will not accept the argument from Scripture?… It is difficult to argue the truth of faith against the Gentiles, [Aquinas] admits, because they do not agree with us in accepting the authority of any Scripture by whiich they may be convinced of their error. And then he continues: “Thus, against the Jews we were able to argue by means of the Old Testament, while against heretics we are able to argue by means of the New Testament. But the Mohammedans and pagans accept neither the one nor the other. We must, therefore, have recourse to natural reason, to which all men are forced to give their assent.”…
The passage formulates succinctly the problem of debate in the thirteenth century and, together with it, by implication the profound difference which characterizes the situation of debate in our own time. For every debate concerning the truth of specific propositions presupposes a background of unquestioned topoi held in common by the partners to debate…. In a debate with the Jews the unquestioned topoi are furnished by the Old Testament; in a debate with heretics, by the New Testament. But where do we find them in a debate with the Gentiles? It seems to me no accident when in the answer to this question Aquinas shifts from the earlier language of Intellect to the language of Reason, without further explaining the shift…. If Aquinas believes that he can rely on the power of Reason to force the assent of the Gentiles, he tacitly assumes that the reasoning of the Gentiles will operate within the same noetic structure of existence as his own – a quite justified assumption in view of the fact that the Mohammedan thinkers were the very transmitters of Aristotle to the Westerners. For obviously – that is, obviously to us – the logical operations of Intellect qua Reason will arrive at widely different results, if Reason has cut loose from the condicio humana. The unquestioned topoi which Thomas has in common with the Gentiles of his time, to whom he addresses his argument, so unquestioned that he does not even formulate them but can just take them for granted, are the topoi of existence. He can justly assume that his opponents are just as much interested as he is in the why and how of existence, in the questions of the nature of man, of divine nature, of the orientation of man towards his end, of just order in the actions of man and society, and so forth.
These however are precisely the assumptions that we can no longer make in the situation of debate in our time. Going over again the list of Aquinas, we must say that we cannot argue by the Old Testament, nor by the New Testament, nor by Reason. Not even by Reason, because rational argument presupposes the community of true existence; we are forced one step further down to cope with the opponent (even the word debate is difficult to apply) on the level of existential truth. The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth; they are useless in a meeting with edifices of reason erected on a different experiential basis. Nevertheless, we cannot withdraw into these edifices and let the world go by, for in that case we would be remiss in our duty of “debate.” The “debate” has, therefore, to assume the forms of (1) a careful analysis of the noetic structure of existence and (2) an analysis of Second Realities with regard to both their constructs and the motivating structure of existence in untruth. “Debate” in this form is hardly a matter of reasoning (though it remains one of the Intellect), but rather of the analysis of existence preceding rational constructions; it is medical in character in that it has to diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence and by their noetic structure to initiate, if possible, a healing process.
Suffice it to say that calling Voegelin a "nihilist" caused my reaction. Voegelin may be many things, but a nihilist is certainly not one of them. Neither is he a sophist. As for learning about him, BB can do much better than I on that score. The New Science of Politics is considered his most influential work.
Anyhoot, FWIW, jumping in:
1. Voegelin states that it is difficult, if not impossible, to “debate” with “ideologists” when the subject matter pertains to the “sphere of the person” – that is, to aspects of human existence that do not lie within the purview of the natural sciences or logic.
2. The “ideologist” in this context can be defined as a thinker who -- “preanalytically” -- assumes that only those aspects of reality that are susceptible to the critical model of the scientific method are “real”; all other aspects of reality are either illusionary or of no importance. The assumption rules out consideration of vast sectors of human experience that cannot be made to fit this model – unless first restated in terms of what the scientific method can purportedly validate or falsify. For instance, “mind” becomes “brain” – for mind is inaccessible to scientific technique in a way that brain is not. For Voegelin, such a maneuver is a shift away from the “truth of existence” to untruth. It is a reduction of the person for the purpose of fitting him to a model that is inherently materialistic or phenomenalistic in character. The “sphere of the person” is severely whittled down to fit the preanalytical notion-become-premise.
3. In particular, the sphere of the person is so whittled down that there is no way to consider generic problems of the human condition, which typically express as key, perennial questions regarding human existence and the nature of man and his place in the universe, his relations with his fellow human beings and with God. The questions are “perennial” in the sense that human beings down the ages have always asked precisely these questions. Categorically, they are the type of questions that the scientific method cannot address. Science, simply put, does not speak this language at all.
4. This is precisely the type of questions that the great classical and Christian thinkers have engaged. Voegelin’s “On Debate and Existence” examines the classical and Christian view of this subject matter in the great culminations (provisionally) achieved by Aristotle and Aquinas – who do speak this language, and sublimely.
5. Yet as Voegelin notes, starting roughly around the sixteenth century, with the stunning breakthroughs in the physical sciences, this older body of thought about things human has been increasingly, effectively eclipsed. On the surface of things, this is entirely understandable; because for Aristotle – and Aquinas after him – the model of the universe was the “closed cosmos” – a spherical cosmos surrounded by the starry firmament with “our world” at its very center, ordered by a First Cause or Prime Mover who moved every aspect of the hierarchy of being, from least to greatest, throughout time. Obviously, the amazing strides of the physical sciences utterly have exploded the basis for such “cosmological symbolism.” We know our universe truly is not like what it appeared to be to the ancient Greek, or to the thirteenth-century scholastic doctor.
6. But when new discoveries seem to challenge these older “symbols,” Voegelin insists that doesn’t mean we have to ditch the symbol, and start all over from scratch. Instead, he urges us to consider the experiential basis that gave rise to the articulation of the symbol in the first place. For such symbols are an attempt to describe human lived reality. In the case of the Aristotelian and Thomist symbologies, Voegelin insists “there is a solid core of truth” in them – for they are works of the human intellect and spirit meditatively expressing the lived experience of human beings. In short, they are works concerning the human condition which, arguably, has not changed much over time. (Arguably, the only thing about man that really changes is the tools he uses….)
7. Certainly, what has not changed about the human condition are the items on Voegelin’s list: “…experiences of finiteness and creatureliness in our existence, of being creatures of a day as the poets call man, of being born and bound to die, of dissatisfaction with a state experienced as imperfect, of apprehension of a perfection that is not of this world,… of possible fulfillment in a state beyond this world…. [W]e can see philosophy emerging from the immediate experiences as an attempt to illuminate existence….”
8. Voegelin says we must discover the solid core of truth in these symbols by a surgical process that seeks to remove all their cosmological elements. When we do that, we are left with the irreducible insight that a universe that contains intelligent beings cannot originate from a cause or source that is less than intelligent itself. The intellect, having “discovered itself,” recognizes that it does not have the character of an “accident” or a culmination of random events, nor did it “create” itself. Further, it recognizes itself as a “force transcending its own existence” – that is, the intellect is capable of reaching out and engaging objects of knowledge that are outside or “beyond” itself – the things of the natural world among them – and of forming concepts about them (Voegelin calls this “ideation”), and then of testing the concepts analytically and experientially (reason).
But essentially, all this relies on the “preanalytical notion” (the unproven premise) that the world is intelligible -- because its order arises from an intelligent cause. And thus, Aristotle’s “prime mover” has indeed been “smuggled [back] in with the unproven premise,” through the back door as it were. Yet this appears to be unavoidable; for once we recognize that the universe is “ordered,” we cannot reasonably entertain the proposition that order has an accidental or random cause, so it must be the product of intelligence. And perhaps reasoning by analogy to our own self-aware intelligence, we therefore conclude that the first cause or prime mover of the universe is also a self-aware Intelligence.
Or as Voegelin puts it, “…knowledge of the something that “exists” beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence.” It is “preanalytical” in precisely this sense. It seems to have something to do with the structure of noetic consciousness (i.e., intelligence) itself.
9. And so we get to Leibnitz’s two seminal questions: Why is there something, why not nothing? And why are things the way they are, and not some other way? These questions are substantively motivated from the same experiential and rational basis that moved Aristotle to speculate on the prime mover and the chain of causation.
Voegelin reminds us, however, that these questions are utterly incapable of either verification or falsification – that is, they are not properly “scientific questions.” Yet these pesky questions inevitably seem to “arise authentically when reason is applied to the experiential confrontation of man with existent things in this world.” We might say it is human nature to ask them.
10. Thus was the universal basis of rational discourse understood, up til the modern centuries, and the emergence of the builders of Second Realities. Typically, denizens of Second Reality refuse to engage any and all questions whose answers cannot be validated by the scientific method. They don’t seem to mind in the least that this is a “surgical procedure” that makes it impossible to consider the human condition (“the sphere of the person”) as such. Further, it renders human intellectual history irrelevant. It even forbids the asking of questions whose rational answers would tend to undercut the supremacy of its “preanalytical notions.”
Voegelin quotes an amusing little line from the chapter headings of Elias Canetti’s Auto da fe that neatly summarizes the thought process of the ideologue of Second Reality: “A Head Without a World – Headless World – The World In One’s Head.”
There is no common ground of rational discourse with the thinker of Second Reality, for he has lost his capacity or will for self-transcendence, such that he can engage the world “outside his head.” In obviating the world “outside his head,” he moots all questions regarding its ordering cause. (“God is dead.”) Therefore, “the world is only what I think it is – it is the world inside my head.”
This is a willful, absolute flight from reality, an absolute refusal to apperceive what sane human beings have been thinking about for millennia. How does one “debate” with a person like this? What common ground can be found on which a debate could reasonably be based?
Ah, yes, bb - the denial of self which one must embrace to be a materialist. Thoughts, ideas, ideated concepts, the mind itself, all are the prime movers of transcendent reality, but not only of transcendent reality - for without the transcendent self we could not appercieve the material world at all. It takes a mind forming thoughts to make sense (slight pun intended) of all that we see, touch, hear, taste and smell, for all these sensations are routed through our nerve endings to our brains where, finally, they are noticed transcendentally - or not at all. Or perhaps more succinctly, if a tree falls in the forest without someone to hear it, is there sound? There are sound waves, of course, but if there is no mind to translate the signals of the nerve endings (and the brain is a giant nerve, let's not forget), then effectively, there is no "sound".
In short, were it not for the immaterial, the materialist would not be aware of his own existence.
Great insight, logos. The materialist denies the ground upon which his entire existence rests and depends. Strikes me as being some kind of weird form of suicide.
Or maybe an exercise in "self-lobotomy?" If so, for what purpose?
logos, I think this is such an excellent elaboration of what Voegelin means by transcendance in this essay -- one of the modes of his model of noetic consciousness, Intellect-Transcendence-Ideation-Reason. Thank you so very much!
I think I like this guy.
There is no common ground of rational discourse with the thinker of Second Reality, for he has lost his capacity or will for self-transcendence, such that he can engage the world “outside his head.” In obviating the world “outside his head,” he moots all questions regarding its ordering cause. (“God is dead.”) Therefore, “the world is only what I think it is – it is the world inside my head.”
This is a willful, absolute flight from reality, an absolute refusal to apperceive what sane human beings have been thinking about for millennia. How does one “debate” with a person like this? What common ground can be found on which a debate could reasonably be based?
Which is very ironic because modernists claim to be "realists." In my experience, they have a lot in common with little children who cover their ears and scream when confronted with uncomfortable realities.
Despite all the protestations to the contrary, the modernist rejection of God has more to do with a desire to hold onto a particular sinful habit than anything else. Peter Kreeft argues convincingly that it's all about sin, particularly sexual sin. He cites Augustine's Confessions in this regard. Sinful modernists, postmodernists or whatevers are content with a state of perpetual doubt and moral relativism. Anything to keep the ball of doubt in play. And so, sadly, they remain slaves to their sins in the name of "freedom." Hopefully they will soon learn that slavery to sin is a false freedom, and that only the truth can set you free.
Holding onto a sinful habit.
If I were an atheist, I think I would save my money to buy a plane ticket to Italy to see whether the blood of Saint Januarius really did liquefy and congeal miraculously, as it is supposed to do annually. I would go to Medjugorge. I would study all published interviews of any of the seventy thousand who saw the miracle of the sun at Fatima. I would ransack hospital records for documented "impossible", miraculous cures. Yet, strangely, almost all atheists argue against miracles philosophically rather than historically. They are convinced a priori, by argument, that miracles can't happen. So they don't waste their time or money on such an empirical investigation. Those who do soon cease to be atheists—like the sceptical scientists who investigated the Shroud of Turin, or like Frank Morrison, who investigated the evidence for the "myth" of Christ's Resurrection with the careful scientific eye of the historian-and became a believer. (His book Who Moved the Stone? is still a classic and still in print after more than sixty years.)Argument from History
by Peter Kreeft
How many atheists or agnostics dare to click on these links? Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano. Our Lady of Guadalupe. Stigmata.
But if they are used for such a noble purpose, will they go to Hell? Possibly an unmined strategy for saving souls.
Thank you so much, Aquinasfan, for your replies, and for the great links! I read the article from Peter Kreeft on the sexual basis of sin that was posted here a few months back, and thought it was an excellent analysis. I gather from the Confessions that St. Augustine had a bit of a "wild oats" problem himself, that caused him to postpone receiving the sacrament of baptism until he was in his forties (or something like that), which delay was a source of great anxiety to Monica, his mother. In the end, however, he became a saint and doctor of the Church. So certainly there is hope for sinners who sincerely repent. It has been said that every saint was a sinner once....
Thanks again, Aquinasfan, for writing.
Hey, tpaine! It wasn't my suggestion.... :^) I don't think it's noble to "use" people. I think WT is pulling our legs with this business about tricking atheists into a noble purpose, which might save them from Hell.
The action of God, the Lord of history, and the co-responsibility of man in the drama of his creative freedom, are the two pillars upon which human history is built.
From the Fatima link you gave us, Aquinasfan. Thank you!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.