L’Etre et l’Essence by Etienne Gilson (review)

104 BOOK REVIEWS L'Etre et l'Essence. By ETIENNE GILSoN, Paris: J. Vrin, 1948. Pp. 328. 500 fr. What is required of a good historian of philosophy? If he is to report past ideas, like a telescope describing the stars, it would seem that he must leave his own philosophy aside in order to achieve objectivity, and the ideal would be that he have no philosophy at all so that each of the passing philosophers could be drawn to an impartial scale. The result is a series of thumbnail sketches which a beginner in philosophy might be required to read and be tempted to memorize. The more initiated would prefer to get their facts more completely from a first-hand study of sources since the historian yields them no original ideas; he only saves their time. Moreover, such pure photography of the past makes for dry reading. It does not relate by-gone thinkers very profoundly to each other, except to bury them in the same cemetery; it fails to detect those larger themes that make the whole history of philosophy something meaningful for the present, prompting the living to digest the truths of their predecessors and to profit from their failures. In philosophy, even error should not die in vain. Another way of writing the history of thought is to have a philosophy in one's own right, fastening one's mind on the ultimate peak of reality and describing the struggles of other systems to ascend it. Such an historian, being a philosopher, can make sense out of past systems as different approaches to a single subject, that which is. As a philosopher, he will detect those general relations which make philosophy itself what it is, apprehending , so to speak, the unity or " essence " of philosophy which a pure historicism of thought cannot pierce. As a realist in philosophy, and only a realist can make sense here as elsewhere, he will make the past fruitful for the present by showing its trials and its triumphs, its rewards and its punishments. Such a philosophical historian of philosophy will attend not only to what a man meant to say but to what he said really ineant. He will thus probe the principles of other thinkers while he is searching the principles of reality for a yardstick. The comparison between the two will not only make the past a meaningful network of what other men have thought; it will help the present to know what it too should think, as it scans experience for the ultimates. Etienne Gilson writes the history of philosophy in this second and more philosophical fashion. He has long recognized, to recall the title of an earlier work, that there is a unity in philosophical experience. In the present book, which may well rank as his greatest contribution, he defines more fully what that unity is. From Parmenides to Kierkegaard, the history of philosophy is here unrolled out as a series of approaches to being, that which is. Carrying out the implications of each philosopher who has had a :BOOK REVIEWS 105 seminal influence, this modern de Ente et Essentia reaches two goals: it presents a panorama of the whole of western philosophy with the simplicity that only greatness can bring to this task, and it likewise develops the doctrine on being, essence, and existence not only as an historical probl~m but as a metahistorical answer. Gilson believes that the greatest danger in philosophy is the temptation to conceptualize. Unfortunately, he does not develop very deeply what he means by the term " concept," but it would seem that he has in mind the Pythagorean mistake of turning a transcendental into a category. Parmenides , the originator of ontology in the literal sense of the word, identified being with thought. His mistake was continued in a more subtle way when Plato hypostasized Ideas. Even Aristotle, though he recognized the reality of substance and to that extent asserted the primacy ~Jf the existing, never quite struggled away from the Platonic doctrine of essences as the intelligible components of things; as Ross points out, r[ wn in Aristotle and ro·B£ ,-~ never quite got together. Greek philosophy thus sums...