There are many ways to break up history, different focal points we can take depending on our interests which will all add to the rich tapestry of our knowledge of the past. This is of course also true of the history of philosophy. Contemporary philosophical jargon, for instance, talks in terms of pre-modern, modern and post-modern. I’ll return to this matrix shortly, but for now I would like us to consider an alternative which is by no means controversial: that of ancient, medieval and modern. What may be more controversial, however, is the reason for delineating these boundaries. In essence, I believe that each period is characterized by a flowering of interest in philosophy, followed by a short but intense period in which the philosophical assumptions made at the outset are developed into grand worldviews, only to be beset at the end by scepticism as to those assumptions and finally scepticism as to the value of the philosophical enterprise as a whole.
The first of the three periods, the ancient, I take to begin with Thales in around 600BC and ending with Plotinus in the third century AD. Sadly we are limited in our knowledge of the period due to an incomplete historical record, and the majority of our knowledge of the pre-Socratics derives from Aristotle’s teaching notes. However, the essential question addressed throughout this period was, “what is the nature of the world around us?” With time, this developed into the issue of what was to become known as “the one and the many,” which was developed most elegantly by Parmenides and to a large degree the question that Plato sought to answer with his concept of the forms. Aristotle took Plato’s concepts and, one might say, brought them down to earth, embedding them in the objects themselves, rather than leaving them in a purely metaphysical realm available only to philosophers, but to little avail. Plato’s elitist concept of a Gnostic plane was more attractive to later philosophers, and it was this that Plotinus used to develop the most sophisticated Greek notion of God. However, in this development, Plotinus moved beyond pure philosophical speculation to mystical exploration, in which one sought to achieve communion with God through contemplation on higher and higher levels of the forms.
Shortly after Plotinus the classical world fell, and with it much of its learning, although not before (and, contra Gibbons, not because of) the institutionalizing of Christianity. This allowed time for the brilliance of Augustine to achieve something of a synthesis between Plato, Plotinus and Christianity. Between Plotinus and Augustine, then, it was broadly felt that the last word on philosophy had been given. The non-Christian philosopher would end in mystical speculation, while the Christian could enjoy the understanding of Plato derived through the illumination of God.
It was not for some 700 years that philosophy would again be seen as being of great use or interest in the western world. The revival was led largely by Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard in their realization of the application of Aristotelean logic to Christianity, but also a rediscovery of the question, “what is the nature of things,” and ultimately, “what does it mean to be?” Anselm took logic to develop proofs for the existence of God (which were not to be answered for another 700 years until Kant addressed them), while Abelard sought to construct an entire philosophy on the basis of logic alone. The crux, however, was that both accepted and worked from a foundation of Augustinian (that is, neo-Platonic) philosophy. As the discipline took a foothold in the monasteries and the newly-founded universities, so again these ideas were to flower after a number of years in the thirteenth century with the impressive minds of Bonaventure and Aquinas and, in the fourteenth, Duns Scotus. Although one would hardly refer to Aquinas as a little heard voice, to a large extent his unique take on philosophy was to go the same way as that of his inspiration, Aristotle, at least in philosophical circles. Hence he is remembered for his development of Christian doctrine but less so for his metaphysics. This was ultimately to remain in the hands of the neo-Platonists.
So it came about by the time of William of Ockham that the predominant metaphysical understanding, the answer to the question of “what is the nature of things,” was what it had been throughout the period thanks to the assumptions of its progenitors: the Platonic forms revealed through the illumination of God to man. It was not hard for a sceptically-minded Ockham then to reduce this to a matter of simple nominalism. That is to say, the forms don’t really exist, they are simply convenient names attributed to commonalities seen in nature. With this seemingly simple response, he was to affect the collapse of what Etienne Gilson has referred to as the “medieval experiment.” Scholasticism was seen as a waste of time, bent on pursuing a misunderstanding grounded in the way we use language. It was not long therefore, for a more hardened sceptic still to arise and proclaim philosophy useless and dead in the face of a true understanding of God, in whom was all the knowledge necessary to “live a worthwhile life.” That sceptic was of course Thomas a Kempis, from whom I quoted at the opening of this paper.
There followed again a period of stagnation, shorter this time, of 200 years before the mantle of philosophy was to be taken up by a new standard-bearer. This time the champion was to be Descartes, and his unique genius was to subtly change the question that was to be asked for the succeeding four hundred years, from “what is the nature of things” to “how can I know the nature of things?” Formerly the question of the knowledge of things had come after the establishment of what those things were. Now for the first time the knowledge became the fulcrum on which the nature of things was to turn. Secondly, the centre of focus was no longer the “thing” but the ego, the “I.” These two changes were to have profound implications.
The modernist experiment initiated by Descartes was to find its flowering in the work of Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century. Kant was to explain the growing philosophical discrepancy between the “I” (developed by the Rationalists such as Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza) and the “thing” (the focus of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume) by posing the existence of two realities: that perceived and that underlying the perception. This “critical realism” allowed for a world of ultimate reality which was beyond our perception, above which lay a world which was subject to our perceptions. The question which developed post-Kant was therefore centred around these two realities: that of perception (for after all, how can one know of, let alone study, a reality which is beyond perception?), which was to be followed by the Positivists and, later, linguistic philosophers of the early and mid-twentieth century; and that of the ultimate reality (for why waste one’s time considering that which is subjective and subject to change?) which was to be the realm of the Idealist philosophers.
It took the tragic insight of Nietzsche to realise that, either way, one was ultimately left with a perspectivalism which could never be transcended: when one begins with the ego one can never move beyond the ego. Similarly, if the foundation is to be abstract certain knowledge, without anything for that knowledge to be correlated against, then that foundation will remain elusive. It is in part response to Nietzsche that the twentieth century school of phenomenology developed, and in which the post-moderns Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and Habermas all sit, the essential conclusion being that it is all a matter of perspective and the pursuit of truth is at best vain, at worst arrogant folly.
It is for this reason that I see the philosophy of post-modernism as not the birth of something new and exciting, but the death rattle of moribund philosophical assumptions made four hundred years previously. It is also why, to return to a point made earlier, I dispute the attempt to reduce history to the “pre-modern,” “modern” and “post-modern.” Historically this compares periods of 2,000 years, 400 years and 20 years respectively as if they were of equal importance, and therefore highly (and in my opinion unjustifiably) over-values the importance of post-modernism; it continues to view the world in terms, ultimately, of modernism; and it sets post-modernism up to be a movement as distinct from modernism as Aristotelean realism, when in fact it is no more than the logical assumptions made at the outset of the modernist experiment.
So where does this leave us now? As regards the demise of the ancient period, it may be hard to draw many parallels, as this was in part affected by the physical fall of the Roman Empire. In the case of the ending of the medieval and modern experiments, however, there are some strong similarities. In both cases the assumptions made at the outset were brought to logical conclusions which rendered those assumptions to be either false, or philosophy irrelevant insofar as their conclusions were concerned. Generally it is the latter path that has been followed, and this leads to the second similarity: that the last word in both cases was the condemnation of philosophy as vain and empty. In the fifteenth century that led to the anti-intellectualism of a Kempis, while in the contemporary period we are seeing an increase in some highly-speculative works on Celtic Christianity and books popular in the emerging church culture such as Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. Don’t get me wrong. I love Miller’s work, just as I love a Kempis’. However, I am concerned that Christian thought is likely to get still more anti-intellectual in rebellion to what are perceived as specifically modernist systematic theologies, and in this I see a danger of divorcing ourselves from our past and hence failing to benefit from it, or even prevent ourselves from repeating its mistakes. In this regard, I can do no more than quote from Thomas Merton, although where Merton talks of “divinely revealed truth” as dogmatic theology, I would ask you to think of this as the proper end of philosophy also:
Contemplation, far from being opposed to theology, is in fact the normal perfection of theology. We must not separate intellectual study of divinely revealed truth and contemplative experience of that truth as if they could never have anything to do with one another. On the contrary, they are simply two aspects of the same thing. Dogmatic and mystical theology, or theology and "spirituality," are not to be set in mutually exclusive categories, as if mysticism were for saintly women and theological study were for practical but, alas, unsaintly men. This fallacious division perhaps explains much that is actually lacking in both theology and spirituality. But the two belong together. Unless they are united there is no fervour, no life and no spiritual value in theology; no substance, no meaning and no sure orientation in the contemplative life.
Latest comments