The Sherpa and the Sage: Neville on the Determinate and the Possible

Scaling the Heights

Robert Neville deserves congratulations on the completion of his magnum opus and obviously on the life of study and reflection that led to it. We meet at the foot of Pike’s Peak, looking up at over 14,000 feet of solid stuff. Perhaps Neville created a Pike’s Peak of words, but more importantly, he scaled a much greater Everest of thought. His new, three-volume effort delivers the results of that climbing more than the full arguments. The full arguments are to be found in the many “journals” Neville kept during his regular climbs in various ranges of human thought. All of that effort and exploration, recorded in over twenty previous books, led to this most magnificent climb called Philosophical Theology.

Neville is among the few philosophers of his generation who was not tempted to slide onto the easy path of mere criticism, or to rest at the halfway point of original scholarship. Leaving these comfortable plateaus aside, he pressed upward to the rarified atmosphere of original philosophical thought, seeking to converse, firsthand, with the immortals, from Master Kung and Socrates to Heidegger and Whitehead. One could get a serious case of edema at that height, and it is a long way to fall if you lose your grip. Your cherished system could plummet into a chasm so obscure that no one would ever see it again.

Thus, in an age of professionalization, when successful careers were found in the foothills (or even the valleys and swamps) of human intellectual endeavor, Robert Neville looked up instead of down, as if to ask: “Did we not have sufficient climbers through the ages who showed the way up the face? Did we not have fine analogues to the Sherpa people among the best scholars, scholars who visit the peaks and deliver descriptions of the view to those below, and who serve as guides to those daring enough to climb? If so, then why shouldn’t we, too, scale the rugged face of creative thinking?” Yes, indeed, we do have scholarly climbers and other guides. But I think Neville has always wanted to live up there near the summit, to chat with the immortals, even to correct them on some important points, to be visited by the wisdom seekers and to reward the scholarly Sherpas he sees most often, sending messages down to the mortals in the valleys and swamps by means of them (messages largely unheard, sadly).

I believe myself to be a sort of Sherpa, as a scholar, although I am better suited to deliver messages from Royce and Whitehead than from Neville. Still, I believe Robert Neville to be a sage.¹ I do not think scholar-Sherpas ever become sages. To become a sage you must devote yourself to the pure questions themselves. This is not just curiosity, and indeed, it has no curiosity in it, if curiosity, as a mark of das Man, is properly distinguished from its thaumatic existentiale.² Unmixed wonder makes the sage, I believe. It does not ask “what do others expect me to know?” It asks only “what makes these wonderful and wondrous things to be as they are?” The sage is neither curious nor astonished nor amazed. Wherever someone else has genuine insight into that matter, the wonder and the wondrous, the sage listens. But where the question is asked from simple curiosity, the sage may decide to teach, but he or she will not be likely to learn anything.

Scholar-Sherpas, on the other hand, may know something about wonder, but their calling is to lead others toward the summit, to know the right paths, to become familiar with the view, to become good at describing the view to those who don’t have the natural constitution to climb for themselves, but to take them as high as they can go and assure them that what they can see from where they are has a constructive relationship with what they might see from a perch above, but also they tell tales around the campfire, tales about the...