Alasdair MacIntyre’s First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues was the Aquinas lecture in 1990 at Marquette University. This is related to his argument in After Virtue that modern philosophy has very literally lost its way, and the problems it faces are insoluble. The difficulties are twofold, and stem from the Cartesian turn to the self in the XVith century. Modern philosophy cannot reestablish contact with the outside world when our starting point is self-knowledge, and modern philosophy also cannot accept that any principle could be ‘first’ in any absolute sense of the word, because final causality has been rejected.
MacIntyre rightly claims that Thomism does not suffer these defects, but he cautions against a premature victory, because Thomism has been decisively rejected by modern philosophy and modern science, so that there is no chance of effective dialogue between Thomism and other traditions. The very vocabulary of Thomism is a stumbling block. However, modern philosophy has not been able to completely eliminate the Aristotelian roots of all philosophy and science, and so keeps returning to themes that it cannot adequately address.
Thus MacIntyre proposes to use the tools of modern philosophies, such as the genealogical narrative, to help reconnect modern philosophy and Thomism. A historical approach might make the rejection, and the reasons for it, evident, and allow fruitful dialogue by allowing for the fruits of modern philosophy to be discussed in a context that will allow them to finally flourish. Essentially, the goal is to enable contemporary philosophy to become more itself by freeing it from the tension created by the premises that cast doubt upon the philosophical enterprise.
Philosophy did lose its way, but so did everything else we endeavor intellectually. It is the context and the terms of the contemporary conversation that make it null and barren. The dialogue cannot happen if it is one-sided, if it assumes that Thomism is no longer relevant or stimualting, that it is foreign to the mind. If the intellectual mind-set is to be expanded, first of all the science / religion dichotomy should be collapsed. This is, of course, very difficult to accomplish. Second, the dialogue can be enriched only if certain terms are re-introduced on their own ground – meaning Thomism / Catholic thinking / authentically humanistic philosophy. Language shapes our thinking – without presence of terms and their proper content, thinking culture cannot be influenced. In other words, before making Thomism ‘user friendly,’ it should be realized that it is our modern ethos that needs an upgrade.
A general course on philosophical Post-modernism through Holy Apostles (in addition to the current course on Catholic modernism) would be an excellent way to foster some serious discussion for those not versed in this challenging subject. For if the legitimacy of Thomistic thinking (the basis for our Catholic world view) is not resurrected, there is only one way that this endeavor can go as articulated in the following quote from David Schultenover’s “A View from Rome”:
“This last…injunction suggests that his [Pius X's] overriding concern, like Leo XIII’s, was the tranquility of order; for…the implications of modernism are profound, far-reaching, and devastating for religion and the churches as well as for the state whose social bond depends on them. This concern rested on the argument that modernism, because it originates from individual sentiment and internal authority, necessarily denies external [transcendent] authority and therefore must end, on the one hand, in atheism and the destruction of all religion and, on the other, in anarchism and the destruction of all society.”
However, there is one way to stave off anarchism: despotism. So if the post-modern malaise is not effectively challenged and corrected, you can take your pick between the two. At present, I think I will go with the latter.
Is it any wonder that the Popes said time and time again, stay with St. Thomas, stay with St. Thomas, stay with St. Thomas….?
Mortimer Adler’s Ten Philosophical Mistakes doesan excellent job of laying out the roots and the subsequent errors that have led modern philosophy into its dilemma.
Ten Philosophical Mistakes was the textbook for the very first philosophy course I ever took! I suppose that explains a lot. =)
The trick, I think, is to reconcile the inner experience with the outer. To imagine the inner world as vast as what we view when we look up at the night sky. And in agreeing with Kinga, we lose our way when we lose touch with the progenitors of our philosophical tradition. I think if we read Aquinas, we need also read Aristotle; if we Aristotle then Plato; if Plato then Homer, etc.,. Once we lose touch with The Tradition, we cut ourselves off from the larger “Us” both human and beyond.
“When you look inside yourself, you see the universe and all its stars in infinity. The result is an infinite mystery within yourself as great as the one without.” ~ CG Jung
The context of mystery is what Religion sustains in us. Once we reduce being to mechanisms, we blind ourselves to that mystery that lies within and without ourselves.
DH
“In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” — Mortimer Adler