The Vitality of the West
I am strongly drawn to the Straussian thesis that the vitality of the West is due to the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, between philosophy and the Bible. Correspondingly, the inanition of the Islamic world stems at least in part from the lack of such a trenchant but fruitful tension.
William F. Buckley once remarked that what the Islamic world lacked was a Second Vatican Council. Quite an understatement, that. What the Islamic world lacked was an Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, as embodied in its greatest figures such as Immanuel Kant, was Athens resurgent, Athens assertive against the excesses of religion. Did it go too far? Perhaps. But institutionalized religion had gone too far and was in dire need of a check.
Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Wednesday October 25, 2006 at 9:01pm
What were the excesses of religion that Kant was asserting himself against? Kant wrote at the end of the 18th century. The usual crimes people associate with religion – the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Church’s difficulty with Galileo – were ancient history by then. Whatever check institutional religion needed it seems to have gotten long before Kant got into the game. The most visible excesses in Kant’s time – those of the French Revolution – were due to secular fanatics, not religious ones.
I would argue that the Enlightenment was not really Athens resurgent. Athens as traditionally understood could have a conversation with Jerusalem because both Athens and Jerusalem agreed there was something to talk about – to wit, the true nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Athens claimed to know those things through reason, Jerusalem through revelation. Kant’s contribution to the conversation was to dismiss most of what both Athens and Jerusalem had said as a waste of time because the conversation up to that time was based on an illusory “metaphysics.” Kant ended that conversation and started a new one. The new conversation would be restricted to the humanly knowable, as defined by a critique that would define those limits. The substance of the conversation would change. Instead of a search for the true nature of the good, the true and the beautiful, the conversation would be about how we manage to live in a world where we can never truly know those things.
I happen to have Will Durant’s “Story of Philosophy” at hand. I know this is far from a definitive history of philosophy and may generate nothing but chuckles here, but its contents are revealing and typical. Pages 1 through 95 consider philosophy from Plato until Francis Bacon. Then pages 96 to 528 are philosophy from that point on. Herbert Spencer gets more space than Aristotle. Like most modern surveys of philosophy, ancient philosophy is treated as a necessary formality that must be gone through, if only to say that it existed, before “real” philosophy begins with the moderns. That was the same attitude I found in the university philosophy courses I took. Plato and Aristotle were mentioned only as a painful preliminary, out of respect I suppose, and quickly dismissed as “naïve” when Descartes and Kant were brought in to end the boring metaphysical squabbling, the old gents never to be heard from again. That is the essence of Enlightenment self-consciously adopted by Kant and his successors: Enlightenment is not a continuation of the same old fruitless conversation but a breaking out of that conversation into a new one that can succeed by being limited.
The lack of vitality in the contemporary university that is regularly noted on this blog is, I think, a result of the fact that the conversation held in the university is no longer the conversation on which universities were originally founded. A young man goes to the university, full of energy, hope and desire to be initiated into the mysteries of the true nature of friendship, love, justice, the soul and, maybe, being itself. If the student is fortunate enough to find himself at the University of Paris, circa 1275, he will find teachers who share his desire and hope. If he is unfortunate enough to find himself in a Western university in 2006, the first thing that will happen is that his desire and hope will be beaten out of him as a naïve dream that was “debunked” three hundred years ago. Then he will either give up his hope and become a student ticket-puncher like everyone else, or if he is lucky, discover the wisdom of ancient philosophy on his own.
The Islamic world experienced an Athens-resurgent renaissance/critique of excessive dogma centuries before the Christian West.
-Sam
Right on!
Of excessive dogmas, yes, certainly so, but what of ideological and philosophical dogmas which, in part, Kant himself can be seen as having inaugurated, regardless of any intentions or motives?
Thanks for the detailed comments. "Kant’s contribution to the conversation was to dismiss most of what both Athens and Jerusalem had said as a waste of time because the conversation up to that time was based on an illusory “metaphysics.”
I would not rely on Durant or a hack like Ayn Rand for your understanding of Kant, a great philosopher on the level of Plato. It is also a mistake to think that later excesses can be blamed on Kant.
To refute what you say in detail, I would have to dip into Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, and The Conflict of the Faculties, subject-matter for future posts. Read K's Lectures on Philosophical Theology and then see if you want to stand by the above quotation.
I'm not relying on Durant, who would, like you, disagree with everything I wrote in my last post... in fact, I'm in the middle of re-reading the Critique of Pure Reason, a work that holds a strange fascination for me. I quite agree that Kant was a great philosopher on the level of Plato. Kant himself certainly thought so, which is why he would vigorously disagree with your thesis that he was merely a resurgence of the tradition of Athenian philosophy. Kant was quite insistent that what he was doing was radically new, in fact, revolutionary. The "Copernican Revolution in philosophy" and all that.
I think your quote from my first post is amply supported by the preface to either the first or second editions of The Critique of Pure Reason. This is from the preface to the second edition:
Metaphysics - a wholly isolated speculative cognition of reason that elevates itself entirely above all instruction from experience... For in it reason continuously gets stuck, even when it claims a priori insight (as it pretends) into those laws confirmed by commonest experience...Hence there is no doubt that up to now the procedure of metaphysics has been a mere groping, and what is worst, a groping among mere concepts.
Here, as in many other places, Kant makes clear that he is not merely continuing the philosophical tradition in the debate between Athens and Jerusalem. The thrust of his philosophy is to show why that debate hasn't gotten anywhere, and to move beyond that tired debate through a critique of reason itself. It was a bold, ambitious project, in fact the rebuilding of philosophy itself from the ground up. I think we do an injustice to Kant if we don't admit the deeply radical nature of his project.
I've read Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone. The title itself indicates Kant's project - not to continue the same old debate, but to recast the debate in terms of reason as it is known through his critique.
The Enlightenment political revolutionaries were not content to take one side or other in this debate. Their goal was to blow up the debate entirely, to revolutionize political life, by founding political authority on the people, from the bottom-up, rather than from King or God. The Enlightenment was not about defending Athens against Jerusalem, but about founding the City of Man (in the words of Pierre Manent), which would put an end to the political authority of both Athens (the King) and Jerusalem (the Church).
Similarly, the Enlightenment philosophers were not content to take one side or the other in the philosophical debate between Athens and Jerusalem. They were self-conscious philosophical revolutionaries, struggling to free man from the dead weight of both philosophical tradition (Athens) and religious tradition (Jerusalem.) Kant freed man from the hopeless metaphyics of traditonal philosophy in his Critique. Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone is, at least, an attempt to free man from the dead weight of religious authority (in other words, Jerusalem). This is Kant's view of religious authority in that work:
The one true religion comprises nothing but laws, that is, those practical principles of whose unconditioned necessity we can become aware, and which we therefore recognize as revealed through pure reason (not empirically). Only for the sake of a church, of which there can be different forms, all equally good, can there be statutes, i.e., ordinances held to be divine, which are arbitrary and contingent as viewed by our pure moral judgment. To deem this statutory faith (which in any case is restricted to one people and cannot comprise the universal world-religion) as essential to the service of God generally, and to make it the highest condition of the divine approval of man, is religious illusion* whose consequence is pseudo-service, that is, pretended honoring of God through which we work directly counter to the service demanded by God Himself.
At the risk of trying your patience, I can't resist one more post.
I think Strauss is right about the West up until the Enlightenment. Since the Enlightenment, however, the driving energy in the West has not been based on the Athens-Jerusalem tension, but on the revolutionary energy that was unleashed in the Enlightenment and blew-up the old tension. The great movements of the modern era - the American and French Revolutions, the European revolutions of 1848, the rise and fall of Communism and Fascism - cannot be understood in the old Athens-Jerusalem paradigm but only on the new revolutionary understanding.
In my opinion, the revolutionary energy from the Enlightenment in the West has been fagged out, just as Kant saw that the energy in the Athens-Jerusalem tension was fagged out in 18th century Europe. The Islamic fanatics, like the barbarians before Rome in the 4th century, sense this weakness and lack of energy in the West and are attempting to exploit it.
Where did I say that? What you are not understanding is that 'Athens' stands for philosophy, not for ancient Greek philosophy, and 'Jerusalem' stands for religion, or at least the Abrahamic religions.
Let me ask a basic question. What is philosophy? And what is the nature of philosophy such that Aquinas and Kant can both be said to have done it?
It is my understanding that the philosophers in the tradition of Plato understood philosophy to be the love of wisdom, with wisdom understood to be knowledge of the first principles and causes of all things (Metaphysics I, also ST I-II, Q.57, Art II).
Now my understanding is that Kant taught that the knowledge of the first principles and causes of all things is impossible for us. In fact, knowledge of the first principles and causes of anything at all is impossible since we are restricted to the phenomenal and have no knowledge of the noumenal. Philosophy, then, as understood by Plato and Aquinas, is simply impossible.
And, in fact, in Ch. III of the Doctrine of Method in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes his understanding of philosophy from the ancient understanding:
Thus the metaphysics of nature as well as morals, but above all the preparatory (propaedeutic) critique of reason that dares to fly with its own wings, alone constitute that which we call philosophy in a genuine sense. This relates everything to wisdom, but through the path of science, the only one which, once cleared, is never overgrown, and never leads to error. [emphasis mine]
Kant's view of philosophy as understood by Aquinas is as a groping among mere concepts, and therefore not really philosophy at all. Philosophy can only truly begin with an a priori critique of reason itself, and since Kant was the first one to perform such a critique, philosophy only really begins with Kant. Basically, for Kant, philosophy from Plato to Aquinas is sophistry.
The modern world, and the modern university, takes Kant seriously, which is why philosophy from Plato to Aquinas is essentially a dead letter nowadays. It's also why any student coming to the university with the same hope as Aquinas, to come to a knowledge of the first principles and causes of all things, is quickly disabused of the notion. Kant was indeed a great philosopher, but this result is exactly as he would have it.
On being told that he resided in the same town called Philosophy (Athens) as Aristole, I think Kant would respond like the sherriff in the old West: This town ain't big enough for the two of us.
I would be very interested to know if someone has a definition of philosophy that would be acceptable to both Aquinas and Kant... in my view, there isn't one.
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4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.