“Not enough for what?” To philosophize aright. I swiped this post’s title from a collection of essays by critics of the philosophical school of linguistic analysis that dominated 20th-century academic philosophy.[1] Standard encyclopedia definitions, however, have a different emphasis. Wikipedia’s article on “philosophy,” for example, reads in part:
Philosophy is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions.
But is philosophy simply a systematic study? Etymologically, philosophy is the love (philia) of wisdom (sophia). How far may a self-identifying philosopher responsibly stray from that root? As Brand Blanshard, a contributor to the above-referenced anthology, wrote in his entry for the 1967 The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, wisdom
may be accompanied by a broad range of knowledge, by intellectual acuteness, and by speculative depth, but it is not to be identified with any of these and may appear in their absence. It involves intellectual grasp or insight, but it is concerned not so much with the ascertainment of fact or the elaboration of theories as with the means and ends of practical life.[2]
Yet in his 1961 essay “The Philosophic Enterprise,” Blanshard did not list the pursuit of those means and ends as constituting philosophy even in part. Within that essay he provided a provocative quintipartite definition. Philosophy, he said:
(1) deals with the infrareds and the ultraviolets of science, continuous with the central band but more delicate and difficult of discernment;
(2) comes before science . . . in the sense of taking for examination the main concepts and assumptions with which scientists begin their work;
(3) does not merely put a bit of filigree on the mansion of science; it provides its foundation stones;
(4) is the interdepartmental conciliation agency, the National Labor Relations Board, or if you prefer, the World Court, of the intellectual community; and
(5) is an attempt to carry understanding to its furthest possible limits. It brings into the picture the foundations on which science builds and the arches and vaultings that hold its structures together. Philosophy is at once the criticism and the completion of science.[3]
But where is the pursuit of wisdom? Philosophy distinguishes itself by its questions, characteristically those of the greatest generality; relating possible answers to them systematically demands clear expression, the definition of terms, logical rigor, and so forth. We can, however, find that quality of mind prized in many other professions, the law, for example, or medicine, or engineering. What makes an inquiry philosophical is its service to the conduct of a good life.
One of my favorite philosophical writers, Susanne Langer, concluded her
article “The Treadmill of Systematic Doubt” this way: “[T]he pursuit of meaning is philosophy.”[4] Again, though, what happened to the pursuit of the good life crowned by wisdom? One thinker whom she greatly admired (and the feeling was mutual) was the great metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead.[5] Here’s his outline of the philosophical project as essayed in his Process and Reality:
Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of ‘interpretation’ I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here ‘applicable’ means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and ‘adequate’ means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation.
‘Coherence,’ as here employed, means that the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless. . . . It is the ideal of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from each other. . . . [I]t is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.[6]
He goes on to elaborate his terms, but the point is made: Whitehead’s goal for the philosopher is to mount the Olympian throne as did Hegel to render all of reality subject to his categorical schema—except the modernist, subjectivist declension from Hegel is explicitly acknowledged: speculative philosophy settles for a speculatio or “vista” about, not absolutely everything, but rather “everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought.” In other words, what Whitehead’s net can’t catch ain’t fish.
So, speculative philosophy is the endeavor to conceive and then dialectically “test” what for mere mortals can ever only be a grandiose hypothesis, and the “testing” can go on without resolution for decades (as it has for almost a century since Process and Reality was published). What a conceit to think that anyone, alone or in league with others, can carry this out! And yet Whitehead presupposed that it was not a fool’s errand.
This conceit ensnared me for at least a decade—years I would reclaim if I could. My mind’s roadkill from that period litters my old site, comparable to what Thomas came to regard as the “straw” on which cows munch and upon which they move their bowels—I say this without meaning to imply that my essays are culturally comparable in worth to (or even as interesting as) Thomas’ Summae.
As in Lonergan’s Insight, the idea of God surfaces at in the terminal fifth part of Whitehead’s Process. But fear of the Lord is the beginning (תְּחִלָּה, tekhillat) of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). Whitehead already tacitly knew, in his heart of hearts, what his Anglican clergyman father must have at least verbally reinforced, namely, that God’s decree to create was not a crapshoot, but a meticulously conceived plan that more than satisfied the theoretical (“speculative”) ideal of Alfred’s adulthood. It was therefore left to him—as it is to us—to mine what God has revealed about what He has decreed. But by 1897-1898, he had had enough of all that: suppressing (κατεχόντων katechontōn) what he knew (Romans 1:18), he sold his theological library, and embraced agnosticism.
The epistemologically self-conscious Christian philosopher’s questions—ethical, metaphysical, epistemological—are occasioned by his study of Scripture, and they flow out of his God-fueled ambition to be well-pleasing to Him (2 Corinthians 5:9). They can be of the greatest generality; even their provisional resolution may require the finest of distinctions and aim at the achievement of all of Blanshard’s (and Whitehead’s) criteria. Their justification, however, is not to be found in any promise of intellectual satisfaction. They are philosophical only if they are oriented toward what Christ has identified as a life worth living for a created image-bearer, for on this subject, as on every other, He is the sole authority. (Do you have another authority in mind? Please let me know.)
To one who would philosophize after Him, Christ has much to say about the origin, nature, and goal of human living; elaborating upon that proposition is worth at least a book.[7] Many books. As Jesus is the Logos of God, the Word made flesh (John 1:14), seeking wisdom is about more than “getting the words right,” whether a la J. L. Austin or Ernest Hemingway.[8]
The very wisdom of God identified Himself as the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). It is for us to take Him at His Word, and to think and act accordingly.
Notes
[1] Clarity Is Not Enough: Essays in Criticism of Linguistic Philosophy. H.D. Lewis, editor. George Allen & Unwin, 1963.
[2] The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, Editor in Chief. New York: Macmillan, 1967, Vol. 8, 322-24. (Emphasis added.) This entry’s text may be read on my old site: Blanshard on Wisdom. To Clarity Is Not Enough referenced in the first note, Blanshard contributed the third chapter, “The Philosophy of Analysis,” 76-109.
[3] Brand Blanshard, “The Philosophic Enterprise, in The Owl of Minerva, Charles J. Bontempo, S. Jack Odell, eds. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975, 163-177. The essay is a revision of a Mahlon Powell Lecture delivered at the University of Indiana in 1961. Its text may be read on my old site: The Philosophic Enterprise. The explicit enumeration of aspects is my doing, not Blanshard’s.
[4] Susanne K. Langer, “The Treadmill of Systematic Doubt,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 14, July 4, 1929, 384. The article’s text may be read on my old site: The Treadmill of Systematic Doubt.
[5] In a prefatory note to Langer’s The Practice of Philosophy (Henry Holt and
Company, 1930), Whitehead wrote:
This book contains an admirable short exposition of the aims, methods, and actual achievements of philosophy. Each chapter takes the form of a discussion of some question which must—or, at least, should—be in the mind of any student entering upon a course of philosophical reasoning. Some of the conclusions may be controversial, but the book is admirably clear, and those who disagree can form an exact estimate of the reasons for their dissent. Thus the book serves the purpose of a philosophical introduction and of an exercise in philosophical thought. I have read the book with great interest.
She dedicated her 1941 Philosophy in a New Key to him, “my great teacher and friend,” under whom she had studied at Harvard in the mid-1920s.
[6] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. Corrected edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Macmillan Free Press, 1978, 3. See the Whitehead page on my old site.
[7] For instance, Anthony Flood, Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. Self-published, 2022; preceded, of course, by thousands of other attempts to articulate at length and Christianly what makes for a life worth living.
[8] Michael Kelly, “Ernest Hemingway on getting the words right,” Michael Kelly [blog], October 14, 2021. Hemingway used those words in a 1956 interview.