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4. On the Things That Depend on Philosophy
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4. On the Things That Depend on Philosophy Thus it is not unusual to meet people who think that not to believe in any truth, or not to adhere firmly to any assertion as unshakeably true in itself, is a primary condition required of democratic citizens in order to be tolerant of one another and to live in peace with one another. May I say that these people are in fact the most intolerant people, for if perchance they were to believe in something as unshakeably true, they would feel compelled, by the same stroke, to impose by force and coercion their own belief on their co-citizens. The only remedy they have found to get rid of their abiding tendency to fanaticism is to cut themselves off from truth. Jacques Maritain Some dogmas, we are told, were credible in the twelfth century, but are not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age. G. K. Chesterton I • What can it mean to suggest that things can “depend” on philosophy? And what things might these be? Philosophy, after all, is “for its own sake.” Philosophers, moreover, even in classical times, were considered to be rather odd or eccentric. To “depend” on them was, to say the 33 A version of this chapter appeared in Motions, Univ. of San Diego. Epigraphs are from J. Maritain, Heroic Democracy, ed. J. P. Kelly III (The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 188; G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Doubleday Image, 1959 [1908]), 74–75. 34 Something or Other least, to be quite rash. Even St. Paul associated philosophy with “foolishness ,” and in Athens, it was said to be difficult to distinguish the philosopher from the fool. To the normal man, both philosopher and fool seemed to be distinctly peculiar. Yet, this same “normal man,” who might greet the professional philosopher as suspicious, must also himself be conceived to be a philosopher, to be interested in philosophic things. John Paul II, in Fides et Ratio, put it well, The truths of philosophy ... are not restricted only to the sometimes ephemeral teachings of professional philosophers. All men and women ... are in some sense philosophers and have their own philosophical conceptions with which they direct their lives. In one way or another, they shape a comprehensive vision and an answer to the question of life’s meaning, and in the light of this they interpret their own life’s course and regulate their behavior. (#30) We suspect that the whole world, including philosophers trained and untrained residing within it, might rise or fall on whether the truth is known and upheld. Everything, in some sense, depends on it. The very definition of philosophy is the love of wisdom, the highest form of philosophy. The philosopher was not a god. He did not, like the gods, “have” wisdom. He could only “seek” it. He was a man characterized by a quest, a quest not just for the seeking, but for the finding of what he sought, the truth. There was a time in our culture when we spoke of a familiar figure known as a “gentleman doctor,” or a “gentleman lawyer,” or a “gentleman farmer.” The American Founding Fathers, indeed, were usually both gentlemen lawyers and gentlemen farmers, if not all gentlemen doctors like Benjamin Rush, who, in fact, started out to be a lawyer. The noble notion of “gentleman” or “gentlewoman,” notions we so much associate with Burke, Newman, and Samuel Johnson, have become less intelligible to us. In an egalitarian age, everyone is a gentleman . It sometimes seems that everyone likewise is becoming a lawyer. Josef Pieper, however, wrote, In Plato, there is a concept of slavery which no social changes, no emancipation of the slaves, can wipe off the face of the earth. This conception is root- [44.204.94.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:03 GMT) Philosophy 35 ed in the belief that what is truly human is never the average...