The Grey Man
το φως εν τη σκοτια φαινει
I'm back, though I might not stay for long. Looking at the Forum with fresh eyes, one thing jumps out at me:
Even something as innocuous as the rationale for the division of the forum into subsections (punctuated by a smiley face!) betrays the pernicious and characteristically modern assumption that philosophy and religion, or reason and faith, are somehow separate and opposed. On the contrary, I have long believed that they are reconcilable and that, if it is to be insisted that they are opposites, then it is because they are not adversaries, but complements to each other.
A cursory look at the recent posts on this sub-forum shows @onesteptwostep using one of my favourite quotes of mine from St. Augustine, later adopted by St. Anselm: "I believe so that I may understand." Most Forumites will find St. Anselm old-fashioned, let alone St. Augustine, but I have come to believe that truth does not have an expiration date, but any truth, if indeed it is a truth, must be as true today as it was yesterday, nor will it be less true tomorrow. Since Augustine and Anselm spoke of faith and knowledge and not, say, the grand strategy of the PRC, the value of their contributions must be estimated not by its practical relevance to our times, but by its theoretical adequation to eternal realities.
If you are as skeptical as you were when I left, you will probably prefer that saying of Abelard: "By doubting we come to questioning and by questioning we come to the truth." Fair enough, but uncertainty of an Abelard (or a Descartes) is a certainty in itself, for to doubt that one's beliefs are true is to wonder whether they are not an adequate representation of some independent reality, which is not itself doubted, but assumed as an indubitable postulate. The skeptic may therefore deny the possibility of absolute truth and infallible knowledge if he wants, but he must do so absolutely and with the pretense of infallibility. The absurdity and folly of such question-begging Cartesian 'epistemology' was already recognized by Kant and even by Plato and Aristotle, but this has not prevented certain 'philosophers' of the 20th century from formulating relativistic doctrines that claim truth and knowledge to be parasitic on history, culture, language, etc., which is all the more reason not to judge the worth of a philosophical doctrine by its novelty.
Even skeptics, then, must believe so that they may understand, for the simple reason that, as Aristotle showed, principles are unprovable: a provable principle would not be a true principle, since every proof depends on a principle that is logically anterior and therefore prior to what is proved. Like the mathematician, the philosopher has the freedom to choose his own axioms, with the proviso that their consequences will not necessarily be compatible, as Socrates demonstrated to the consternation of his fellow Athenians (not to mention the falsifying experiments of Galileo and Michelson). And this duality, this complementarity between antecedent and consequence, between principle and application, is precisely that between faith and reason.
Only Philosophy. No faith or religious arguments here. Keep those to the Faith forum subsection. Here we argue about philosophy.
Even something as innocuous as the rationale for the division of the forum into subsections (punctuated by a smiley face!) betrays the pernicious and characteristically modern assumption that philosophy and religion, or reason and faith, are somehow separate and opposed. On the contrary, I have long believed that they are reconcilable and that, if it is to be insisted that they are opposites, then it is because they are not adversaries, but complements to each other.
A cursory look at the recent posts on this sub-forum shows @onesteptwostep using one of my favourite quotes of mine from St. Augustine, later adopted by St. Anselm: "I believe so that I may understand." Most Forumites will find St. Anselm old-fashioned, let alone St. Augustine, but I have come to believe that truth does not have an expiration date, but any truth, if indeed it is a truth, must be as true today as it was yesterday, nor will it be less true tomorrow. Since Augustine and Anselm spoke of faith and knowledge and not, say, the grand strategy of the PRC, the value of their contributions must be estimated not by its practical relevance to our times, but by its theoretical adequation to eternal realities.
If you are as skeptical as you were when I left, you will probably prefer that saying of Abelard: "By doubting we come to questioning and by questioning we come to the truth." Fair enough, but uncertainty of an Abelard (or a Descartes) is a certainty in itself, for to doubt that one's beliefs are true is to wonder whether they are not an adequate representation of some independent reality, which is not itself doubted, but assumed as an indubitable postulate. The skeptic may therefore deny the possibility of absolute truth and infallible knowledge if he wants, but he must do so absolutely and with the pretense of infallibility. The absurdity and folly of such question-begging Cartesian 'epistemology' was already recognized by Kant and even by Plato and Aristotle, but this has not prevented certain 'philosophers' of the 20th century from formulating relativistic doctrines that claim truth and knowledge to be parasitic on history, culture, language, etc., which is all the more reason not to judge the worth of a philosophical doctrine by its novelty.
Even skeptics, then, must believe so that they may understand, for the simple reason that, as Aristotle showed, principles are unprovable: a provable principle would not be a true principle, since every proof depends on a principle that is logically anterior and therefore prior to what is proved. Like the mathematician, the philosopher has the freedom to choose his own axioms, with the proviso that their consequences will not necessarily be compatible, as Socrates demonstrated to the consternation of his fellow Athenians (not to mention the falsifying experiments of Galileo and Michelson). And this duality, this complementarity between antecedent and consequence, between principle and application, is precisely that between faith and reason.
