Etienne Gilson has restored the dignity of medieval thought for a world of philosophers numbed by the noise of directionless philosophy. For a good portion of the past couple of years, I have struggled with and even despaired over the disconnection between my philosophical and religious sympathies. I have never truly been too definitive about the relationship between these two as of recent, and my intellectual attractions have taken divergent paths in many cases.It is remarkable how philosophers can write off another viewpoint and steal our sympathies with no more than a few strokes of a pen. If we are not attentive enough, we can surrender our ideas for the mere attraction of another at the drop of a hat. It is also seemingly fitting that such a phenomenon occurs when a targeted philosopher is no longer alive and able to apply his system in the form of a defense against a certain critique. Within a few sentences Plato has dropped from his great heights and replaced by the empirical achievements of Aristotle.
In reflecting on the past achievements of philosophical theory, I am awed by the variety of contesting views which still have not, by any means, achieved conclusive victory today. We are still bickering, and sometimes managing to debate directly and intelligibly, over the same epistemological and ontological confusions. Scientists and theologians are both competing against each other to rob philosophy for themselves. Materialists emerge, pass away, and resurrect once more. Metaphysicians take their stand before another scientist arrives and accuses them of building “castles in thin air”, and we are back to the closed system of the Pre-Socratics. Materialism has its reign once more. When we forget history or grow numb to reflection, we are vulnerable to yet another destructive path. To look back at philosophical history, it’s an endless and tiresome cycle.
For this reason, I like to stick to the origins of thought (including myth) and remain faithful to the heritage which blooms from these thoughts. I don’t like getting caught up in the mess of forgetful, unreflective, and aimless deconstructions. They don’t often succeed at providing mankind with any ethical development or air to breathe after they’ve rushed in and out and completed their work. This is my concern with much skepticism. Of course, there is an ounce of skepticism which is fundamentally useful as there is an ounce of every philosophical method which is fundamentally useful. It’s when a useful method takes on the form of a school of thought that it destroys its own original and proper function. When the skeptic and the logician step outside their respective context and take on an “ism” for themselves, they achieve nothing more than biting their own tail.
What I appreciate about Thomas Aquinas was his endeavor to gather and synthesize all the great thoughts which survived up to his time. Nothing good and useful for the intellect was left out of his philosophy. All the distinct branches of academic thought are gathered and organized into their respective positions. He had an eye for everything and a mind that rejected nothing. He never intended to be a skeptic, an Aristotelian, a metaphysician, a “this” or a “that”, but a gatherer and a philosopher. He did not have the pretentiousness to pose as anything more than a man of common sense, and for that reason he was disposed to everything availably true.
The greatest struggle we have today is returning to this stability, and every thinker tries a hand at “making sense” of the world. This is nothing less than a backward motion, because you can’t begin by trying to “make sense”. You can only be sensible. The world becomes absurd when we try to “make” it. We can not make it into anything it’s not, and it is this attitude we must avoid when beginning to philosophize. The world of sense requires sensible people who do not clog any pathways of intuition. It’s the people who seek this or that route and surrender all the others at the expense of that one passage who grasp only a portion of the world and mistake that portion for the totality of the whole thing. They’re bound to whirl themselves into confusion.
Too many theologians, physicists, and poets begin as theologians, physicists, or poets, and forget to first be men, as Hume put it. This is why mass amounts of people have suffered at the hands of irresponsible thinkers. Hegel began and left us with nothing but absurdity. Sartre directed the off-tune choir of complainers. The positivists gave us nothing but deduction about nothing. Now, we are left to the whims of a few physicists who have understandably and unwittingly projected materialist theory as fact. They have kicked out every leg of the thinking chair except one and have told us that we must learn to balance ourselves on that one leg alone. Philosophy can’t be done this way.
