A letter to a dear friend, who turned away from God many years ago, aided an impoverished study of “philosophy.”
Dear
I have never understood what happened to your study of philosophy. As I recall, you were an undergraduate major in philosophy at the University of Utah back in the early to mid 1960’s. Somehow, for some reason, you left off the study of philosophy, and turned to linguistics. Granted, the study of language has its own interests and values. But it is not philosophy. To mistake the part for the whole is one of the foremost intellectual errors. Philosophy wants to see the whole, not merely a part.
Philosophy means “the love of wisdom.” A student of philosophy, if he or she is indeed studying philosophy, seeks the truth about the whole of reality, and only secondly, knowledge of particular parts. Or in other words, one desiring to be a philosopher has to see all of reality, and every study of reality, in light of the whole. Anything less than a noetic vision of the whole could not satisfy one on the philosophical journey. Along the way, one will have to study words, and physical reality, and history, and of course divinity. But one must not get derailed into an endless quest for endless information, and lose the perspective of seeing the whole, and seeing it wholly.
Yes, philosophy must include within it a search for God. Plato made this crystal clear in his dialogues, from the Republic and Phaedrus to the Laws. Recall his words: "Philosophy is the love of wisdom. The god alone is truly wise. Philosophy is the love of God.” That insight is found in the Phaedrus, and I do not know of any of the leading philosophers who did not share that understanding until a pre-Enlightenment thinker, and a leading modern philodoxer, to use Plato’s coined word: John Locke. This shallow mind had some thoughts on “God,” but he did not connect his conception of God with concrete reality. Locke is what came to be called “a deist,” which as one can see, was a kind of latent atheism without the courage to take the final step: “God” is irrelevant to life, and to the life of the mind. And this leads us into the even more superficial waters of the French Enlightenment, and its offshoots in 19th century and twentieth century ideologies.
The best example I know of a man with a powerful intellect and philosophical background, who had the courage to push his rebellion against reality’s ultimate nature and source, was Nietzsche. His attack on “God,” on religious faith (especially Christian) was powerful, at times highly insightful, but also led to its natural consequences in his personal life. Nietzsche had the courage and consistency to accept the consequences of atheism: Nothing is good, nothing is true, nothing is real. How did Nietzsche handle such a major divine breaking into history as the Apostle Paul’s vision of the Resurrected Christ? How did he treat that vision? No, Nietzsche was too honest to ignore it. He labeled it “an hallucination.” Nietzsche set the pattern for psychologizing spiritual experience (already prefigured in Fuerbach). But Nietzsche was not a mere game-player. Rather, he lived his rebellion against reality, and accepted the consequences for it. And so he spent the final decade of his life in a total spiritual abyss that was as hellish as anything I know. He believed what he wrote, whereas the clever sophists of the Enlightenment—the self-styled “philosophes”—played with atheism as a child’s toy, get “rich and famous” for their witty assaults on stupidities of the Church, and taught others that “God is dead.” And they laughed, whereas Nietzsche suffered in miserable silence. Nothingness lived.
Philosophy seeks to know the nature of reality, and especially, the ultimate cause of all that is. To dismiss the search for the “first cause” is not only non-philosophical, but in truth irrational. Ideologies—including atheism and scientism, by the way—begin by forbidden asking the ultimate questions. That is the precondition for modern ideology. On this point, I refer to Karl Marx’s Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1846 (as I recall the title). Marx explicitly forbids questioning reality about its ultimate cause, and he was sufficiently trained in the history of philosophy to know what this meant: Do not speak of God in any form. As Marx writes, “Do not think. Do not question.” He explicitly forbids “socialist man” to ask any questions that lead towards God, towards the ultimate source of reality. Instead, Marx makes the utterly nonsensical claim that “socialist man creates himself by his own labor.” The sophistry here is transparent, but it surely has duped millions of so-called “intellectuals.” Many are not even “Marxists,” but they are his intellectual descendants, none the less, as they do exactly what Marx inculcated: fear of reason; refusal to ask genuine, existential questions.
To dismiss the search for the ultimate cause as “Catholic professionalism,” or “religious belief,” may appear to be witty or clever, but until one realizes—if one ever will—that doing so would dismiss Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle as being “Catholic professionals” too, long before Christ appeared. The use of the symbol “God,” Theos, as signifying the first cause (Aristotle’s prote arche) is neither Catholic nor Christian, but deeply rooted in the tradition of philosophy itself. If you deny this, I can easily sight many passages from Heraclitus to Aristotle that link divinity with reality, with being, with the ultimate good, with truth, and with wisdom. Of course the Hellenic philosophers had to conduct their search for truth in a two-fold battle, in effect: from mythological beliefs that did not give adequate scope for reason (“religious beliefs,” not unlike creedal Christianity, or Islam); and from the learned “experts” of their day, the “sophists,” the professors. As an example of genuine philosophy’s openness to God, I quote the famous final words of the Apology of Socrates, by the young Plato. Condemned to die for denying the gods of the city, for introducing a “foreign divinity” (his voice), and for “corrupting the youth of Athens,” Socrates speaks his final word to his so-called “judges:” "Now it is time to go—I to die, you to live. Which of us has the better fate is unknown to anyone, except to the God.”
Words such as these have stirred many young minds to enter into the philosophical life. It is a genuine search for God. What has happened?
The abiding puzzle for me is how a student of philosophy may possibly have learned to break from a literalistic understanding of religious mythos (story), but then fell into the far worse pit of sophistical intellectuals with their “acid of modernity,” to borrow Nietzsche’s apt phrase. This acid bath does not lead one to the search for the divine light, but blinds one to it. What ever happened to so many “students of philosophy”? What blinded them to the light of reason, whose ultimate nature and source is what is called “God”? What prevented so many young persons from opening up to genuine spiritual experience, and exploring these experiences with the assistance of reason? What has happened?
Of course, even a would-be atheist can use reason in the instrumental sense to solve mathematical equations, to argue logic, or to study physical reality, but as soon as one wonders, "Why do I exist?”, either one’s reason is open to transcendent experiences, or one is not. As for atheism in our culture: It takes the form of endless entertainment, rarely in the form of careful arguments that the ultimate source of reality does not exist. The atheistic claim is philosophically empty, so it is held as a mask, in Nietzsche’s sense. It is a pretense, an excuse, to stop seeking for that which simply is beyond space-time. In our culture, “agnosticism” or “atheism” is an excuse for intellectual laziness of a high degree.
What a student of philosophy recently called “the closing of the American mind” is demonstrated repeatedly in American education. It is not Socrates with his “obedience to the god” that has corrupted our youth; it is book-clever intellectuals, more “bright” than right, who are guilty of contributing disastrously, ruinously, to the closing of the minds of so many young people. We have done this. Every teacher—myself included—must keep asking, “How have I closed off the minds of students to genuine inquiry? Have I fostered an atmosphere of the search for truth, of boldness to ask the really large questions of life, or I have helped to blind the students in my care? Have I told them, as did Marx, “Do not think. Do not question,”when it comes to questions such as “Who or what created the world?” Have I called their real, personal questions, “Scheinprobleme”—mere appearance-problems, false questions. We have much to answer for.
The major pain in my life is to see how we in this culture are destroying young minds—and not only young ones, but older ones as well. The American culture is not just “a culture of death,” but a culture of mental-spiritual closure. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Snowing people under mountains of facts cannot substitute for genuine inquiry: Why do I exist? What is the purpose of human life? What is the meaning of life? What is reality, and what is its cause? And who is this God that brings forth all that we experience out of nothing? The quest for God is the life of the spirit. The quest for divine order in the world, in creation, in history, is the life of reason. Not to enter this quest is highly praised by degreed professors. Its effects are all around us in the breakdown of order, in so many mental and spiritual illnesses, in a culture of hiding from reality by popping pills and using mental or physical drugs.
America has gone so far down the path of spiritual blindness, of willful unbelief, of closure to God, that I am not at all convinced that we can still be turned around. And yet, the rescue of some by God working through the light of reason is ever possible. There will always be a Solzhenitsyn, it seems, who in the midst of the Soviet closure to divine truth opened up his heart and mind to genuine faith, and showed the way to a renewal for Russia. I myself still hold out for a young Saint Francis, or Saint Clare, who will moved many by their profound, childlike trust in God, filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit, motivated by love of every human being they meet. I do not want to underestimate the power of the Almighty to recreate a decadent culture—if and only if we cooperate. And that takes work, trust, humility, to know the truth of Delphi: “Know that you are a human being and not a god.”
Dear
I have never understood what happened to your study of philosophy. As I recall, you were an undergraduate major in philosophy at the University of Utah back in the early to mid 1960’s. Somehow, for some reason, you left off the study of philosophy, and turned to linguistics. Granted, the study of language has its own interests and values. But it is not philosophy. To mistake the part for the whole is one of the foremost intellectual errors. Philosophy wants to see the whole, not merely a part.
Philosophy means “the love of wisdom.” A student of philosophy, if he or she is indeed studying philosophy, seeks the truth about the whole of reality, and only secondly, knowledge of particular parts. Or in other words, one desiring to be a philosopher has to see all of reality, and every study of reality, in light of the whole. Anything less than a noetic vision of the whole could not satisfy one on the philosophical journey. Along the way, one will have to study words, and physical reality, and history, and of course divinity. But one must not get derailed into an endless quest for endless information, and lose the perspective of seeing the whole, and seeing it wholly.
Yes, philosophy must include within it a search for God. Plato made this crystal clear in his dialogues, from the Republic and Phaedrus to the Laws. Recall his words: "Philosophy is the love of wisdom. The god alone is truly wise. Philosophy is the love of God.” That insight is found in the Phaedrus, and I do not know of any of the leading philosophers who did not share that understanding until a pre-Enlightenment thinker, and a leading modern philodoxer, to use Plato’s coined word: John Locke. This shallow mind had some thoughts on “God,” but he did not connect his conception of God with concrete reality. Locke is what came to be called “a deist,” which as one can see, was a kind of latent atheism without the courage to take the final step: “God” is irrelevant to life, and to the life of the mind. And this leads us into the even more superficial waters of the French Enlightenment, and its offshoots in 19th century and twentieth century ideologies.
The best example I know of a man with a powerful intellect and philosophical background, who had the courage to push his rebellion against reality’s ultimate nature and source, was Nietzsche. His attack on “God,” on religious faith (especially Christian) was powerful, at times highly insightful, but also led to its natural consequences in his personal life. Nietzsche had the courage and consistency to accept the consequences of atheism: Nothing is good, nothing is true, nothing is real. How did Nietzsche handle such a major divine breaking into history as the Apostle Paul’s vision of the Resurrected Christ? How did he treat that vision? No, Nietzsche was too honest to ignore it. He labeled it “an hallucination.” Nietzsche set the pattern for psychologizing spiritual experience (already prefigured in Fuerbach). But Nietzsche was not a mere game-player. Rather, he lived his rebellion against reality, and accepted the consequences for it. And so he spent the final decade of his life in a total spiritual abyss that was as hellish as anything I know. He believed what he wrote, whereas the clever sophists of the Enlightenment—the self-styled “philosophes”—played with atheism as a child’s toy, get “rich and famous” for their witty assaults on stupidities of the Church, and taught others that “God is dead.” And they laughed, whereas Nietzsche suffered in miserable silence. Nothingness lived.
Philosophy seeks to know the nature of reality, and especially, the ultimate cause of all that is. To dismiss the search for the “first cause” is not only non-philosophical, but in truth irrational. Ideologies—including atheism and scientism, by the way—begin by forbidden asking the ultimate questions. That is the precondition for modern ideology. On this point, I refer to Karl Marx’s Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1846 (as I recall the title). Marx explicitly forbids questioning reality about its ultimate cause, and he was sufficiently trained in the history of philosophy to know what this meant: Do not speak of God in any form. As Marx writes, “Do not think. Do not question.” He explicitly forbids “socialist man” to ask any questions that lead towards God, towards the ultimate source of reality. Instead, Marx makes the utterly nonsensical claim that “socialist man creates himself by his own labor.” The sophistry here is transparent, but it surely has duped millions of so-called “intellectuals.” Many are not even “Marxists,” but they are his intellectual descendants, none the less, as they do exactly what Marx inculcated: fear of reason; refusal to ask genuine, existential questions.
To dismiss the search for the ultimate cause as “Catholic professionalism,” or “religious belief,” may appear to be witty or clever, but until one realizes—if one ever will—that doing so would dismiss Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle as being “Catholic professionals” too, long before Christ appeared. The use of the symbol “God,” Theos, as signifying the first cause (Aristotle’s prote arche) is neither Catholic nor Christian, but deeply rooted in the tradition of philosophy itself. If you deny this, I can easily sight many passages from Heraclitus to Aristotle that link divinity with reality, with being, with the ultimate good, with truth, and with wisdom. Of course the Hellenic philosophers had to conduct their search for truth in a two-fold battle, in effect: from mythological beliefs that did not give adequate scope for reason (“religious beliefs,” not unlike creedal Christianity, or Islam); and from the learned “experts” of their day, the “sophists,” the professors. As an example of genuine philosophy’s openness to God, I quote the famous final words of the Apology of Socrates, by the young Plato. Condemned to die for denying the gods of the city, for introducing a “foreign divinity” (his voice), and for “corrupting the youth of Athens,” Socrates speaks his final word to his so-called “judges:” "Now it is time to go—I to die, you to live. Which of us has the better fate is unknown to anyone, except to the God.”
Words such as these have stirred many young minds to enter into the philosophical life. It is a genuine search for God. What has happened?
The abiding puzzle for me is how a student of philosophy may possibly have learned to break from a literalistic understanding of religious mythos (story), but then fell into the far worse pit of sophistical intellectuals with their “acid of modernity,” to borrow Nietzsche’s apt phrase. This acid bath does not lead one to the search for the divine light, but blinds one to it. What ever happened to so many “students of philosophy”? What blinded them to the light of reason, whose ultimate nature and source is what is called “God”? What prevented so many young persons from opening up to genuine spiritual experience, and exploring these experiences with the assistance of reason? What has happened?
Of course, even a would-be atheist can use reason in the instrumental sense to solve mathematical equations, to argue logic, or to study physical reality, but as soon as one wonders, "Why do I exist?”, either one’s reason is open to transcendent experiences, or one is not. As for atheism in our culture: It takes the form of endless entertainment, rarely in the form of careful arguments that the ultimate source of reality does not exist. The atheistic claim is philosophically empty, so it is held as a mask, in Nietzsche’s sense. It is a pretense, an excuse, to stop seeking for that which simply is beyond space-time. In our culture, “agnosticism” or “atheism” is an excuse for intellectual laziness of a high degree.
What a student of philosophy recently called “the closing of the American mind” is demonstrated repeatedly in American education. It is not Socrates with his “obedience to the god” that has corrupted our youth; it is book-clever intellectuals, more “bright” than right, who are guilty of contributing disastrously, ruinously, to the closing of the minds of so many young people. We have done this. Every teacher—myself included—must keep asking, “How have I closed off the minds of students to genuine inquiry? Have I fostered an atmosphere of the search for truth, of boldness to ask the really large questions of life, or I have helped to blind the students in my care? Have I told them, as did Marx, “Do not think. Do not question,”when it comes to questions such as “Who or what created the world?” Have I called their real, personal questions, “Scheinprobleme”—mere appearance-problems, false questions. We have much to answer for.
The major pain in my life is to see how we in this culture are destroying young minds—and not only young ones, but older ones as well. The American culture is not just “a culture of death,” but a culture of mental-spiritual closure. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Snowing people under mountains of facts cannot substitute for genuine inquiry: Why do I exist? What is the purpose of human life? What is the meaning of life? What is reality, and what is its cause? And who is this God that brings forth all that we experience out of nothing? The quest for God is the life of the spirit. The quest for divine order in the world, in creation, in history, is the life of reason. Not to enter this quest is highly praised by degreed professors. Its effects are all around us in the breakdown of order, in so many mental and spiritual illnesses, in a culture of hiding from reality by popping pills and using mental or physical drugs.
America has gone so far down the path of spiritual blindness, of willful unbelief, of closure to God, that I am not at all convinced that we can still be turned around. And yet, the rescue of some by God working through the light of reason is ever possible. There will always be a Solzhenitsyn, it seems, who in the midst of the Soviet closure to divine truth opened up his heart and mind to genuine faith, and showed the way to a renewal for Russia. I myself still hold out for a young Saint Francis, or Saint Clare, who will moved many by their profound, childlike trust in God, filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit, motivated by love of every human being they meet. I do not want to underestimate the power of the Almighty to recreate a decadent culture—if and only if we cooperate. And that takes work, trust, humility, to know the truth of Delphi: “Know that you are a human being and not a god.”
