Return to Philosophy

Thomas Molnar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351292542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

From its earliest beginnings and through much of its history, the philosophical enterprise has rooted its intellectual procedures in common sense. Ordinary discourse is what the pre-Socratic thinkers did at the dawn of speculation. The same approach was characteristic of the medieval mystics, Pascal in the seventeenth century, and Gaston Bachelard in the twentieth century. However with the ascendency of the physical sciences, mathematics, and depth psychology as influences in contemporary thought, philosophical language and forms of expression became increasingly distant from ordinary language. This created estrangement and confusion in the learner's mind. In Return to Philosophy Thomas Molnar diagnoses the verbal derailment of philosophy and shows how it might be reconnected to the realities of human life.

While granting that philosophy must use a somewhat specialized language, Molnar attacks jargon-laden thought by tracing certain root assumptions that go deeper than the issue of language itself. He locates these assumptions in the work of philosophers who, espousing modernity, no longer trust the "reality of the real, " and are convinced that the world and our perception of it are elusive, offering no foundation except in the human mind which, however, is also the result of a "social contract, " a temporary consensus or transient network of meanings readily discardable. According to changing ideologies and social structures we use "signs" linguistic, psychological, hermeneutical, structuralist, existentialist not to express reality but to establish communication with others. Philosophy, then, shifts from the task of knowing reality to the task of communicating here and now.

Return to Philosophy is a unique endeavor. Molnar's book unmasks the modern derailment and shows that many leading philosophers do not so much philosophize, but merely elaborate verbal-technical instruments in what may be little more than trivial language games. This volume will be of interest to philosophers, cultural historians, and sociologists.

1

What does “Introduction to Philosophy” Mean?

It is a usual phenomenon in philosophy that an author’s main work bears the title “Introduction to Philosophy,” setting down the main definitions and the overall direction. We observe in this usage a difference with scientists whose crowning work presents the conclusion of a career of research; for the philosopher, the crowning study is often an introduction as if the end of the career were the beginning of wisdom or at least its overview. Medical or astronomical study, to take two illustrations, grows from an initial ignorance to a later knowledge. But philosophy proceeds differently, and the thinker realizes “at the end” that his entire speculative lifework must be seen from an overall perspective which at times may surprise him and strike him as a novelty. That is the moment when the task of writing an “introduction” becomes imperative. An engineer or a botanist builds his system on previously acquired data that he has critically evaluated; a philosopher needs to mature, and the move toward maturity cannot be accelerated. When he feels he has achieved this plus, he writes his introduction to philosophy or an equivalent treatise.

The areas of medicine, botany, and astronomy, disciplines we refer to as sciences, are relatively well circumscribed: one theory is built on another or at least takes it into account.¹ Philosophy is more personal. The philosopher does not only observe the milieu and the world around him, he searches out his own place: in society and the world, in the cosmos and in the I-you relationship, in the assumed foundation of existence. Art, literature, science, and religion are also elements of his thinking. The consequence is that for every philosopher the world is new and personal. Novelty is brought to him every morning with the newspaper, an interesting occurrence on which Hegel once made a prescient statement, that the newspaper is the citizen’s modern Bible. While the physician and the astronomer learn every day and systematically from a limited area of searching, the philosopher does not know on awakening to what extent he will have to modify his world-picture before he goes to bed that night.

What he proposes, in sum, is a highly personal view of things, a fragile thing too, the more so as other philosophers who are likewise personal in guarding their own treasure, reassure or invalidate his own investigations. He attempts, therefore, at the high noon or indeed at the twilight of his oeuvre, to write an “introduction” to philosophy where he gathers up courage to be personal—but at the same time to set down the main lines of wisdom intended to be final. The reason why he calls it, with apparent modesty, an “introduction,” is that he feels he was all his life locked up in a cave, and that only now, at maturity, is he free enough to open the gates, for himself and others. The philosopher should here be likened to the prophet or the mystic who also waits decades before announcing his awakening and begins to preach a long-matured truth.

The philosopher is, of course, somewhat more scientific than that. His introduction does not contain the recognized truths merely in the form of moral and spiritual discoveries, let alone in the form of lessons obtained from God like Moses and Mohammed. He has examined the physical world and the psychological dimension, the world of human ambitions and of intrahuman intercourse, the area of politics and artistic creation. Eventually most important, he has investigated the ways human beings acquire knowledge and the ways they convey knowledge in speech, in system-building, in attentiveness to new things. In other words, his introduction to philosophy becomes also a methodology, a key word because method is applicable not merely to scientific data, also to rules of conduct in life. All in all, his “introduction” is his philosophy in its mature shape, it may indeed be written at what the Greeks called acme, a thinker’s highest point of maturity and achievement.

* * *

The above passages describe elements of what should be called the relationship of the philosopher to time, signifying his inner time, his maturation through knowledge, experience, and the deepening of the self. When all elements are in place and he finally knows what philosophy is, the moment of equilibrium has arrived beyond which he will hardly venture. We have many testimonies of such matchless moments. Plato’s Seventh Letter where he announces his definitive turn away from the world to wisdom; Spinoza’s Ethics which appeared posthumously and sheds light on earlier intentions; Pascal’s fiery confession of faith, recovered, sewn in his blouse, after his death; Heidegger’s encounter with Hölderlin’s magic poetry; Nietzsche’s discovery of the “death of God.” The philosopher is not an apprentice learning a trade; he hits upon the essence of What Is (to estin) and in this light he proceeds to clarify what he has left behind, mostly the unexamined ideas, the unexamined life.

The Greeks knew this well, unlike we who have turned philosophy into a science. Studying Greek philosophers we often do not know whether their texts are written-out courses, or only notes by assiduous students. There is a strong possibility that the latter was the case, and that the teacher did not expose an intellectual content but rather a kind of lesson applicable to life, a therapy of the soul. In other words, a dispensation of wisdom to no longer young men, able to comprehend the lesson which sums up the experience of life. Let us bear in mind that teaching was first institutionalized—and depersonalized—in Roman rhetorical schools, then in the period of scholasticism, and again in “bourgeois” universities of nineteenth-century Germany and twentieth-century America. But Plotinus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pascal, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche were not university professors (the latter for only a few years), therefore the rhythm of their philosophy was more adapted to life, insights, and maturation. In short, an “Introduction to Philosophy” may be the fruit of a “moment’s insight, but such a moment has been preceded by a long maturation and meditation. Even Plato’s Socrates experienced such a high noon—or was it Plato’s own? The question then arises, what moment is the present one? What stands behind the title of this book, Return to Philosophy?

The answer is twofold. One is the perceived and experienced need to simplify the philosophical discourse by de-bureaucratizing and de-jargonizing it, peeling away its ultra-rationalistic garment, making it accessible to the well-intentioned and well-ordered mind. Usually, towards the end of an age, and representing that end, philosophy risks becoming a school-philosophy (a scholasticism). It is then surrounded not only with an excess personnel of epigones, but also with an excess of words, formulas, and abstractions. The consequence is an attitude of contempt, in philosophical circles, for other human faculties and their field of interest. These areas are declared unorthodox or meaningless, with the result that they cease nourishing the central quest and reason itself. When we read philosophical texts of our time, or those of any other age of discursive decline, we are stuck by the all-invading jargon, today mostly pseudoscientific or subjectivist, and by the grotesquely convoluted style: both approaches dry up the good will and the natural curiosity of the attentive intellect. The terms and references have meaning only in specialized groups of accomplices who wear the mask of serious scholarship, or among a vaster clientele (students, journalists, snobs) for whom the pretense of understanding and appreciation is a matter or professional automatism. Philosophy becomes in many instances a verbal game with no links to reality and to judiciously constructed sentences.

Simplification, in this case, means in fact complexification, that is the endeavor to widen the scope of the philosophical enterprise. The trend of the last two centuries has been, in philosophy too, toward a scientific structure and terminology. Physics has been crowned as the queen of sciences, and philosophical speculation has worked according to the principle that knowledge in any area must approach and finally reach the precision of physical and mathematical formulas. It has not been understood that “precision” is an objective differently applicable in the various branches of knowledge and that precision is not truly an ideal in most of them. Yet, the expression “human sciences” (or “historical sciences”) indicates an unlawful transfer of norms from one set of knowledge to another set. Yet philosophy succumbed, although not without some reticence, to the lure of science, when for example, Immanuel Kant embarked upon the systematization of his so-called reine Vernunft (pure mind, mental operations studied outside of any context that life presents). Dispassionately examined—and we shall do so in detail elsewhere—every endeavor of deepening knowledge about the external and internal universe is pure, including those efforts that turn away from the exact sciences and their scientific ideal. Behind the poet’s metaphors or the historian’s study of motives of action, there is a pure search into aspects of unlimited wealth of humanity. Or when some existentialists, like Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, speak of “limit situations” of the human condition, the awareness that there may be such limits opens new vistas, for example before the optimists of the Enlightenment (among them Kant) and their cult of human perfectibility.

The reine Vernunft suggests what ought to be itself an object of investigation, namely whether the mind is able to shed all the other channels of knowing, and study its own structure and function exclusive of other factors. Such a superknowledge may represent a spectacular demonstration in an age of machines that function “by themselves” (the computer is Kant’s grandchild), but other epochs go beyond the Kantian postulate. They then argue that since philosophy cannot penetrate the essence of things, let us exclude from it the talk about essences, that is metaphysics, and regard as knowledge what the mind, abstracted from reality, organizes inside itself as “knowledge.” But this is not reine Vernunft, it is an effort to squeeze the mind within such narrow limits that are, in reality, shackles around it.

Let us stop here for a moment. What happened with the infatuation in philosophy with “pure reason,” has also happened with painting and the other arts, including literature. Self-deprived of any transcendental reference, thus of the recognition of objects as real, painting became absorbed in the pursuit of pure form and pure color, music in pure sound, and poetry in pure verbalism. Believing, falsely, that the canvas must contain no reference to the outside world because that would be “insincere” and “dishonest,” the painter paints patches of color, floating shapes, lines, and geometric forms. A little later, these “pure” phenomena leap off the canvas and assemble on the floor or in the air in any arbitrary combination. Analogically in philosophy, in the name of pure reason, thought abstracted itself from the real world and chose a kind of second career among self-constructed notions. Heidegger explains what happened: the modern thinker is basically a scientist. Unlike the Greek who related himself to a full and multitudinous presence of the universe, the modern philosopher regards nature as a human construction and takes all kinds of liberties with it. The respect for, the submission to the real, is missing.

* * *

This is then what we mean by the need to reintroduce philosophy: the simplification of its discourse by stripping away the false problems and their abusive jargon, and the unmasking of the efforts aimed apparently at spectacular results. But these efforts are spectacular only in the sense that they impoverish our apprehension of the universe. What does one of the fashionable enterprises of contemporary philosophy achieve when it “deconstructs” texts of all sorts? It achieves the discrediting of great literature, as if the linguistic analysis of passages gave us the assimilation of the whole work through our whole being. Here is another illustration of philosophy qua science.

We read in scholarly books and magazines how the new telescopes penetrate ever farther into our galaxy, and hopefully into the even more remote recesses of what is called space. The resulting interest is further enhanced by intergalactic voyages, and yet further by science fiction, films about primeval monsters, and so on. These may or may not be legitimate uses of initially scientific discoveries and subsequent technologies, but it is undeniable that the users themselves, and even the educated fragment of the public, understand less and less of the latest concepts about the universe. It is a case of a diminishing return: the more we know, the less we understand. If we project this one example into the future, we can generalize it by saying that we obtain an ever- increasing amount of information about all things—while we keep losing the overall grasp and end up with no understanding. More knowledge but less comprehension of what we know of the data which obediently line up for our scrutiny.

Compare this situation with past situations. The old philosophical approach to astronomy (for example) was not an arbitrary enterprise, it was indeed a historically primary area of knowledge. Egyptians, Chaldeans, Indians, Greeks, pre-Columbian Americans investigated the skies, the movements of celestial and sublunar bodies. From these investigations they derived both astronomical and astrological data, the physical as well as spiritual foundations of what was to be known as philosophy, but also myths and prophecies, and a series of “superstitions” like necromancy, the prediction of a person’s death. Physics also derived from these observations, added to the phenomena observed on land and sea. There arose from this combined knowledge what Arpad Szabo calls Das geozentrische Weltbild, our (i.e., Western—if “West” includes ancient wisdom from many places) first comprehensive theories about the universe, its structure, ways of functioning, space-and- time image.²

The deeper-than-philosophical presuppositions on which the geocentric world-image rested for thousands of years may have been mathematically less precise than our own world-concept, although the latter rests on the former, in other words, Copernicus on Ptolemy. What philosophy has, however, lost in the switch from one foundation to the other, one world-image to the next, can be measured in terms of loss of comprehension. This Introduction does not suggest that “the clocks should be stopped”, that we return to earlier views. Yet we cannot help measuring the loss as the properly human requirement; the ability to orient ourselves in the cosmos (time, space, history, destiny, and onto- logical foundation) fades out from the philosophical perspective. Consider the traditional and universalist data as they were understood by centuries preceding the modernist ideology—then place them side by side with the presently formulated data. The latter ought to have increased our comprehension, but in fact have mostly obscured and confused it, and in the process have jettisoned reality in favor of constructing a scientific network with a sui generis language, notable only for its opacity.

Take movement as an illustration. In order to explain this intriguing phenomenon, in philosophy no less than in physics and astronomy, the premodern schools assumed that all objects occupy a, to them, natural place, their place of rest. An agency had to be found that dislodges the object in question, celestial or earthly, and causes it to move. A kind of hierarchy was thus believed to exist in order to accommodate the mind’s requirement. Accordingly, rest was believed to be superior to movement. A second hierarchy followed, ordering movements among themselves: the circular being superior to any other since it is more attuned to rest than, let us say, unilinear movement. Consequently, the circle was considered more noble than other geometrical figures, just as fire was more noble than earth, the right hand than the left, light than darkness.³

If philosophy means explaining the things that are and the things that are not, the universe as grasped by man within the limits of his intelligence and senses, the reality and its modes of apprehension and expression—then we should give its due to other than modernist perception also. It remains hard to decide which segment of historical mankind offered the better explanation, whether those civilizations that are more attuned to the human sense or those that construct a new language, a new grammar, a new meaning. One is nowadays reminded, in proportion as the scientific language dominates the rest, of the gnosticism of the first centuries which was bent on formulating one or several new religions, some more Hellenic, some more Judaic, some more Christian, Manichaean, hermetic. Like scholasticisms in general, these gnostic sects reached for religions all over the Mediterranean world and conceptualized their beliefs and gods no matter how artificial and abstruse. It was a veritable orgy of abstractions, there were new substances and powers debated every morning in the market place, as St. Iranaeus informs us in his work on heresies. The victory of Christianity was due in no small measure to the fact that it stood closest to reason and common sense.

* * *

As stated above, there is a second motive behind this Introduction. If simplification of the philosophical discourse is the main objective, the best method is the separation of this discourse from those that prevail in other, non-Western, civilizations. We do it prompted by the conviction that the West alone has developed philosophy; while the other speculative areas of importance: India, the Middle East, and Islam, elaborated theologies, materialist systems, or doctrines of salvation. These are rather closed teachings, hardly subject to change and growth, thus they do not run the risk of dried-up inspiration nor being subjected to a radical critique from within. Let us make no mistake about it: the three systems, generated in their respective culture-areas and shaping the latter, represent great spiritual and ethical peaks of wisdom. When I contend that they are not philosophies, this is not meant to be a deprecating judgment, in fact it may be understood as a lament over a Western loss: loss of spirituality, poetic and artistic sensitivity, loss of acquiescence to the permanence of things. Yet, they are not philosophies in the sense that their spiritual pressure is too heavy to reconcile permanence (a divine attribute) and change (the condition of man’s life). Having said it, we should not hesitate to acknowledge that one reason for a periodic decadence of Western philosophy is that it is not nourished, like its counterparts in the East and South, by extraspeculative motives of spirituality, poetic sensitivity, and cosmology. As Henry Corbin has noted about Islam, its relative and beneficent unaffectedness by every institutional and social movement within the community (umma) has made of Mohammed’s religion something stagnant; but why should religion not focus on the uplift of the soul, why should it participate in every tremor running through the nonreligious sectors of society, nation, market place, and empire? Allah is connected with the believing Muslim almost exclusi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. What does “Introduction to Philosophy” Mean?
• 2. The Rational and the Nonrational
• 3. Cosmological Considerations
• 4. Problems of Anthropology
• 5. Morality and Society
• 6. Religion
• 7. The Contemporary Trend
• 8. Can Philosophy Change the World?
• 9. Conclusion
• Index