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.
Yep, that's what it all seems to boil down to, gore3000. It is a quite futile attempt at self-divinization....
One door away from Heaven, The Book of Counted Sorrows
We live each day and hour.
One day away from Heaven,
But it lies beyond our power
To open the door to Heaven
And enter when we choose.
One door away from Heaven,
And the key is ours to lose.
One day away from Heaven,
But, oh, the entry dues.
And just a "hi" to you, A-G.
The point is, people will not understand each other if they do not share a common experiential basis. We can't work together to "discover truth" if we can't even understand each other.
....reason-via-revelation only works if you a priori accept the validity and truth of revelation.
Voegelin is not saying that we have reason via revelation. The noetic structure of human existence is discovered by man via his experience of his position in the world and reflection on same. Aristotle had no access to revelation; intellect and reason were still fully functioning.
Hello logos!!! SO GOOD to see you. You've been really "scarce" around here lately. Hope all is well with you and yours.
Thank you so much for the lovely verses..."so very near, and yet ineluctably beyond the reach of our own unaided powers...."
WRT to above italics: You will probably not be surprised to learn that I expected the reaction to this post would tend to "prove" its premise. Speaking as a battle-scarred veteran of 'way too many Evo-Crevo threads, I had some suspicion that this might be the case....
Oh, I know exactly what the point is - you can't see what Voegelin sees unless you're predisposed to seeing it by sharing his fundamental worldview. Which is about three millimeters and one fig leaf away from saying that truth is subjective and dependent on perception - truth depends on perception, perception depends on experience, therefore truth depends on experience. No thanks. Putting a tie and jacket on relativism doesn't make it any more palatable to me.
Voegelin is not saying that we have reason via revelation.
Oh, come on - of course he is:
I have spoken of questioning knowledge and knowing question in order to characterize the experience that I have called noetic, for it is not the experience of some thing, but the experience of questioning rising from the knowledge that man's being has not its ground in itself. The knowledge that being is not grounded in itself implies the question of the origin, and in this question being is revealed as coming-to-be, albeit not as a coming-to-be in the world of existing things but a coming-to-be from the ground of being.- Anamensis
Divine reality is being revealed to man in two fundamental modes of experience: in the experience of divine creativity in the cosmos; and in the experience of divine ordering presence in the soul.
The two modes are always structures in man's consciousness of divine reality, but they are not always conscious in the form of reflected knowledge. The experience is the area of reality where the revelatory appeal from the divine side meets with the questing response from the human side, and reflective meditation on the response is preceded by millennia of less reflected response in the form of cosmological symbolization. Only late in history, when man becomes aware of himself, of his spirit and intellect, as an active partner in the cognition of divine reality, will the two modes be discerned and adequately symbolized. Only when the response becomes luminous to itself as a quest for the divine ground, and when the quest becomes an act of reflective questioning, will man find himself moving either in the direction of divine creativity toward a Beginning of things, or in the direction of the ordering presence within his soul toward a divine Beyond as its source.
- The Beginning and Beyond
Not the Christian revelation (although some long ago debated even that.) But how long has it been since I read the Nichomachean Ethics? Book six? And the phronimos who had wisdom? I don't have my copy here . . .
You ain't alone, kiddo! He's a workout for sure. Must have something to do with the fact that although he writes here in English (I don't think this essay is a translation), he thinks in German.... :^)
Both Aristotle and Plato were attune to a source that gets entirely lost in Kant. Nowadays its OK to call it intuition.
LOL - You're too much, BB. Anyone agreeing with Voegelin is evidence confirming his basic rightness, and anyone questioning Voegelin with a modicum of skepticism...is also evidence confirming his basic rightness. Heads you win, tails I lose. May I politely suggest that you've stacked the deck, consciously or unconsciously, in favor of continually reinforcing that which you already believe to be true? ;)
Okay. But does that intuition come from within or without? It seems pretty clear what Voegelin thinks about that ;)
True, cornelis -- but the Christian seems to be the type of revelation that general_re has in mind. (He lets us know he doesn't think much of it.) It seems that both Plato and Aristotle had a Source from which they were able to draw their most profound insights into the nature of man, the structure of consciousness, etc. This does have the quality of revelation, for they recognized this Source does not lie within the field of existent things....
A lot of people think that Aristotle, unlike Plato, was little interested in "divine things." Yet without the divine, there can be no wisdom, which is "higher" than mere knowledge such as can be known through the study of existent things. Nichomachean Ethics is replete with references to the divine....
No, no - I try not to limit myself like that. Any sort of revealed truth, Christian or otherwise, suffices for my purposes here.
He lets us know he doesn't think much of it.
True. Look, even if I accept the existence of revelation, upon what basis do I evaluate the truth of that which is revealed to me? Well, I'm not really supposed to do that - revelation is true by definition, rather conveniently. And then I'm supposed to go forth and reason, based on revealed truths that I have no rational basis for accepting as true, except for a definition that dances right on the edge of tautology.
Well, if that's the case, that reason is predicated on axioms that I am expected to accept as true without any proof that they are true (which it is, of course), how do I know that revealed truths are a better basis for reason than axioms I invent myself, and which I also have no rational basis for believing to be true? Oh, wait - I know that revealed truth is better than my own bootstrapped axioms because it's...revealed. Or something equally circular.
And there's the problem. It's great if you already believe as Voegelin believes, but if you don't, the best anyone can come up with is "just take my word for it". Which is more or less exactly what Voegelin was saying in the bit I quoted in my very first post, and what I object to. Either reality and truth are objective, and objectively accessible to all men regardless of their particulars, or it they aren't, in which case the whole question of what reality and truth are is meaningless from the start, other than giving us the trivially true answer that "opinions will vary"....
You may indeed, general_re. Thanks for the politesse; but I'm not "reinforcing" anything -- just trying to explain some very difficult material that I believe is timely and valuable to the understanding of current cultural and civilizational problems....
As to what I believe to be true -- I truthfully believe that I do not possess the truth. The truth is not an "object" to be "possessed." As long as the universe keeps rolling along, the truth continues to unfold....
And FWIW, I don't hold much truck with "doctrinal thinking" of any description. Such thinking "filters" reality in such a way as to cut it down to our own size, so to speak. Filters are designed to omit parts of reality. That is their purpose. And to the extent that we depend on them, we may only succeed in achieving a false sense of security, based on an illusionary sense of knowledged "possessed".
I'm sure you can think of examples of doctrines that have nothing to do with religion. The "school philosophers" specialize in their construction; the Darwinists have their doctrines. But you will not find doctrines in Plato or Aristotle -- or Voegelin, for that matter. These men are more interested in getting the questions right than in coming up with answers....
The "revealed truth" is neither "revealed" nor "true" for a person if it does not evoke an answering response in his or her spirit and mind. Revelation is an appeal to man; he doesn't have to respond. If it is God making the appeal to us, then it seems to me, well, prudent not to hold that appeal in contempt -- even if one cannot respond directly to the appeal oneself.
Perhaps. Perhaps the reason I don't follow along with Voegelin is because I think he's asking the wrong questions.
The "revealed truth" is neither "revealed" nor "true" for a person if it does not evoke an answering response in his or her spirit and mind.
In that case, Voegelin falls down and can't get up right at the beginning. From my perspective, and from the perspective of a great many others, there is no "revealed" truth. And how does Voegelin counter that? By telling me that if I believed in revelation...I'd believe in revelation. Not very helpful. ;)
In his eight-segment taped lecture on Maimonides Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith, Dennis Prager posits, "That the believer has to account for unjust suffering. The atheist has to account for everything else."
Best.
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