Philosophy for the Many

The truth is that philosophy is not the apanage of the few. All may be equipped with the science of living, and one cannot be so equipped without a right, if inadequate, knowledge of the nature of things—at least, that is, of their nature as affecting human conduct. One who knows the ten commandments and understands their practical application to the details of his dealings with himself, with other men and with things, has a sound if rudimentary philosophic science. He has right notions of God, of himself and of law. Understanding, for instance, the function of property, by the seventh commandment, he has seized something of the ultimate nature of property. The Saviour understood and valued philosophy as no other person ever did and he saw the light of it glowing through the eyes of frank and fearless childhood. God is the supreme philosopher. He has made all things. He knows their ultimate causes. To see the world through God’s eyes is to have a true philosophy. The strength of that vision is the Treasure of the greatness of the philosophy. To the Lord it was obvious that the candour of “grace-ful” innocence looked out on the world as God looks at it. There is coincidence in the line of vision, in its term, and in the practical attitude that results from the vision, between the great God and the tiny “grace-ful” child. Is this exaggeration? The Lord’s words are weighed, and yet He said: “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.” There cannot be divergence of vision between what is in harmonious adjustment to God’s Kingdom and the Lord of that Kingdom. The child was pitted by the Lord against the great apostles and the latter suffered by the contrast. Put the child against all the remarkable (the adjective “great” must be denied) philosophers of the past twenty centuries, excepting those only who were truly Christian, and the tiny child dwarfs all these so-called giants of intelligence. The Christian child sees truly, and Kant does not, nor does Fichte, nor Hegel, nor Descartes, nor Marx nor the rest. To see with distinctness of vision, and to adapt oneself to reality in accordance with that clear discernment, that is to be philosophic.

There have been in all ages men who have devoted their lives to the art of thinking and to the endeavour to reach final conclusions as to what man is, and what the universe about him is, and how he should deal with that universe of things in the exercise of a moral life. Strangely enough the pre-Christian philosophers reached some great truths, though these great truths are embedded in much error. But since the beginning of the Christian era nothing but error, or scarcely anything but error, has been the fruit of philosophic speculation. It would be easy to assign a reason for this, but it is not the place here to treat of it. Great progress there has been in the positive sciences. But all the labours in this field yield merely the knowledge of facts and relations of facts. No laws have been revealed although the term “law” is applied to the conclusions in which scientific investigation terminates. The laws spoken of in the sciences are but formulae expressing uniform sequences. No new truth revealing man still further to himself has been brought to light. The treasure bequeathed by the pagans, instead of being augmented, has been dissipated in intellectual debauchery by prodigal humanity during all these centuries of “progress.” In the civilised world the intellect is starved and reduced to feeding itself on the husks of swine. These husks are the shallow sophistries, the illogicalities, the catch-cries, the illusions and all the other “idols of the tribe, of the den and the market-place.” The abstruse speculations of these erring philosophers, and the errors which are begotten of these speculations, are not confined within the covers of heavy tomes and hidden away in the gloom of libraries. By a thousand rills these errors filter down to the minds of the multitude of men. These poisonous waters come to them through newspaper articles, lectures, talks on the radio, cinema pictures, cheap books and the rest.

There is a vast amount of “philosophy in solution” in almost every work of a literary kind, or of a kind that has a remote relationship with literature. There is an outlook on life, a certain view of the universe suggested in every textbook edited for the use of schools, in every serious history written, in every commentary made on the ancient or modern classics. The student insensibly imbibes into his mind this philosophy in solution in all the books to which he applies his mind. He is learning philosophy of a kind, though he would be very astonished if he were told so. The unfortunate thing is that the philosophy he absorbs has neither unity nor truth. It is a parti-coloured thing of shreds and patches. He is becoming something of a Romantic, something of a Rousseauist, something of a Kantian. The utilitarian ideas of Mill seep into his mind if he touches on social and economic questions in his study of history. The outlines of literature which are placed in his hands insinuate an element of Naturalism.

The outlook on life he owes to his religion is an antidote to all these poisonous infiltrations; but in the perpetual anti-toxin war, that outlook undergoes a steady obscuration. This is but the connatural result of our unmapped, uncharted, unpolarized system of secondary studies. The different subjects of the ordinary course are jumbled together as the tiny pieces of a child’s Meccano set. They cling to one another in patternless, uncouth, and purposeless cohesion. There is nothing in the system to reduce them to an ordered pattern. When the student proceeds to the university, things from the intellectual point of view, instead of improving, becomes worse. The indeliberate hygiene of the mind that is supplied by the atmosphere of scholastic life lived within the walls of a Catholic College is no longer available. The departmental tendency of the secondary courses becomes more pronounced. Each subject or group of subjects is cultivated on its own account. It bears no relation to any other, and it never even occurs to the mind of undergraduate or graduate that it should. The want of unity remarked in the secondary school is intensified in the university lecture hall. Studies in arts and science can never be a factor in education, as it has been defined above, unless they are coordinated, unified, and organized by the discipline of philosophy. If this is not done, there can be no other result than a divorce between the faith that is clung to and the Weltanschauung (or Lebensanschauung) that immediately determines the appreciation of values, instinctive judgements, emotional reactions and practical approach to the problems of the forum and the market-place. This divorce is not so observable in the persons of average mental calibre as in those who are more highly gifted in imagination and intelligence. The very keenness and vivacity of the minds of these latter make them more responsive to what comes to them clothed with warm and emotional appeal than to what comes in the austere formulae of the faith.

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This essay is a chapter from Christian Education. Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “First Steps, after Millet” (1890), by Vincent van Gogh, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.