Chapter Two: Philosophy and Tradition

The ambivalence of the concept of tradition resides in the fact that ideas and attitudes are both praised and blamed for being traditional. In the favorable sense, the traditional connotes the hard-won, time-tested achievements handed on from one generation to another. The pejorative sense of the term traditional suggests the pat, accepted, unexamined ballast from the past. Both of these senses have their traditions and this, like barber-shop mirrors, invites the mind to the vertiginous realization that there is a hard-won, time-tested way of regarding tradition as the pat, accepted unquestioned ballast from the past, on the one hand, and, on the other, a pat, accepted, unquestioned way of regarding the traditional as hard-won, time-tested, etc. In short, there are conflicting traditions about the concept of tradition, traditional ways of regarding tradition. here we want to break the chain and subject both of them to analysis; in doing so, we expect to find some validity in each view. Men are seldom wholly wrong on fundamental issues. And tradition is fundamental to human existence.

Language as Tradition

If we think initially of tradition as the weight of the past upon the present and future, it is difficult to imagine anyone uninfluenced by tradition. The attitudes toward this fact come later and give rise to the conflicting assessments of it we mentioned at the outset. Some choose to accept and praise the fact; others to lament it and to strive to overcome its influence. So regarded, tradition is antecedent to anything like philosophizing. Any human born of parents and thereby introduced into the human community is subject to his elders' influence. Without it he would not survive to the point where he might pass a judgment on the value of the fact. For, in myriad ways, our elders educate us; no man is born human. He becomes so, to the degree that he does, in society. Who can imagine Adam prior to Eve's creation? The easiest thing to forget is our origins and this seems particularly true with those philosophers who seek an absolute, presuppositionless starting point for thought. And yet the only thing more difficult than forgetting we were children is trying to remember it, to reconstruct from an adult vantage point what it was like, what it entailed. Sometimes it seems that nothing increases the distance and sharpens the difficulty so much as being a parent. But as parents there is no keener delight, perhaps, than that felt when our children begin to speak. It is a fact of language, of the mother tongue, that we want to isolate from the process of becoming human because language above all reveals itself as the vehicle of tradition.

    The Greek definition of man can be construed to read that man is the speaking animal and, Genesis aside, it is difficult to imagine anyone, any individual, inventing language. A social product, language is what first of all brings us out of our vegetable isolation into the world of men. Language is antecedent to each of us, not as something substantive and thing-like, but as an activity of our elders. I have never seen a satisfactory description of how a child learns to speak, perhaps none could be given, but surely any remotely adequate description would have to lean heavily on the notion of imitation. We become like those around us, like our parents, like our siblings, by learning to speak. In some sense of the phrase, language is handed on to us and we must learn to conform to it if we are to be initiated into the world of men.

    In order to become what we are, we have to have things handed to us; in order to become a rational animal, an animal who speaks, we have to accept a tradition of communication, of usage, of talk. So far, at least, to be human is to be traditional. A trivial point, to be sure, hardly more than a truism, but the reminder of something this basic must have its ramifications when we turn to less immediate cultural products, particularly when, as is the case with philosophy, language is its proper vehicle. To react against a philosophical tradition, we must employ a language that has been handed down. The language of men is not, of course, what is principally at issue in the conflicting traditions concerning traditions in philosophy but, again, that conflict may not be as separable from this inevitable concession to tradition as the anti-tradionalist might wish.

    The instance of tradition we have been looking at is incontestable in its pervasiveness but may seem impertinent to our subject. If we must depend upon our elders in order to learn our mother tongue, it is not speech in general that is involved but talk about various and particular things. Together with our early training, we accept from our elders a vast number of judgments about the way things are and the way they ought to be. These judgments are a kind of a patrimony, a handing on at one term of the relation and, at the other, an acceptance, a receiving. And isn't our reception of that patrimony initially unquestioning? Long before we are aware of doing so, we trust our parents; we take their word for things. Certain ways of looking at the world and ourselves become so familiar they seem merely the expression on the world's face, indeed, part of the furniture of the world. If we say we acquire a weltanschauung in childhood, as we do, this cannot mean that we are presented with some sort of axiomatic system of ideas. The whole business is by way of being a seamless garment and to look for its beginning would be as fruitless as trying to locate with accuracy the commencement of the "age of reason" in the moral sense. If then we begin speaking of tradition in terms of the formation of the child's mind, we find ourselves referring to an englobing, familiar, acquired-in-the-family network of attitudes. And it is all something we accept almost unconsciously. But what has this to do with philosophy?

    Well, it can be argued that it has a great deal to do with it, at least when we want to speak about the absolute beginning of philosophy, historically considered. It has long been a commonplace that philosophy began with the Greeks and with them arose out of a background of myth. Myth is a difficult concept to lay hold of, to be sure, and there is a tendency to speak of it condescendingly as a phenomenon accompanying the childhood of the race.^{1} Perhaps it had its origin in ritual, in the verbalization that accompanied ritual, and then grew into attempts to rationalize primitive rites until it metamorphosed into those familiar tales of gods and divine forces that in some way accounted for cosmic and human events. All this weighed on the minds of those Greeks we call the first philosophers, much as the handed-on judgments and appraisals accepted in childhood weigh on the adult. However gradually it was done, the argument goes, philosophy began when some Greeks began to question the myths, to regard them critically, to withdraw from the earlier acceptance of them. The analogy is clear. A man begins to philosophize, not by accepting what has been handed down, but rather in some sense reacting against the traditional. Thus, although an attitude of acquiescence to and acceptance of the traditional may be chronologically prior, the philosophical attitude begins there where the mind turns on the traditional and regards it not as an unquestioned deposit of accumulated truths but as a menacing and narrowing threat from the past. Surely something like this is contained in the development of the man who gave philosophy one of its earliest charters: the unexamined life is not worth living.

    It is only fitting that we look to Socrates for some clarification of our problem. What do we learn from Socrates in the Platonic dialogues concerning the relation between present and past philosophy, between philosophy and tradition? Did Socrates have a teacher? Was the activity in which Socrates engaged a modification of a going concern or an absolute commencement? It is not uninstructive that we want to answer both yes and no to those last two questions. In the Phaedo,  Socrates tells us that, as a young man, he applied for instruction to the natural philosophers; he speaks of the influence on him of Anaxagoras' teaching that reason governed the world. It was something he accepted even though he came to feel that Anaxagoras had not put his doctrine to much specific use. If he goes on to speak of his growing dissatisfaction with that early instruction and of his eventual turning away from cosmos to polis, Socrates adds the balancing note that makes him even more evidently the very type of the philosopher. At one time he subjected himself to a philosophical tradition; later he modified what he had accepted to the point where he could say that he had repudiated his philosophical origins. There is a pattern here which shows up again and again in the great philosophers and, in however modest a way, in the philosophical growth of each of us. Let us look into the elements of the pattern.

    We want to examine the process of initiation into philosophy, the process of learning philosophy. Before looking at the reality, however, something must be said of a myth that is often introduced at this point. It used to be said, and rightly, I think, that philosophy begins with wonder, with questions that surge into the mind against the background of our experience of the world. We are assailed by facts that we do not understand so we wonder about them and this wonder can only be assuaged by getting at the reasons for those facts, what is responsible for them, their causes. The points just made become the pigments of which the picture of an individual confronting the world is painted. he poses questions, wordlessly perhaps; at any rate, if he speaks, it is to himself. He solves one question and moves on to another. And so forth. It is possible to become enthralled by this depiction of the solitary, isolated thinker grappling with his problems. But I am calling this picture a myth. I do so because I would hazard the generalization that no one since Pythagoras, perhaps, has ever gone about philosophizing in just that way. What is missing from the picture is an essential ingredient: what that man's predecessors have had to say, the questions they formulated, the answers they proposed. This appeal to one's predecessors has, from almost the beginning of what we call the history of philosophy, been one of the essential ingredients of doing philosophy. It is part and parcel of what I want to call learning philosophy.^{2}

    The men who figure in the history of philosophy have, most of them, called themselves philosophers and, by accepting or laying claim to that title, they are unavoidably comparing themselves and what they are up to with previous men and what they had done. At least with regard to the word "philosophy" they relate themselves to the past, they become part of a tradition. This is not to say that the picture described above depicts nothing in the history of philosophy; as a matter of fact, it tells us something very important about the possibility of progress in philosophy. My point is simply that it is a bad picture of the way any philosopher began doing philosophy. The way he began was as a learner, by putting himself into relation to the past.

    The point I am trying to make was made by Aquinas when he distinguished between two ways of coming to know, one of which he called discovery (inventio), the other of which he called learning (disciplina).^{3} In some ultimate sense, the latter depends upon the former, but for every historical philosopher, the former, discovery, has followed upon a period of learning. I want now to go into the meaning of these two kinds of coming to know, their inter-relations and, particularly, the way in which tradition figures in what is called learning.

On Learning Philosophy

Kant summed up the range of philosophy in the following questions: What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?^{4} What is missing from the picture of the solitary thinker recalled above is the manner in which we are assisted by others, usually our elders, both in the formulation of questions and in the acceptance of certain answers to them. Questions as well as answers are traditional, are handed down. I take this to be factual enough and the fact raises what is, perhaps, the real issue with respect to the role of tradition. That issue has to do with the relationship between tradition and authority. When we become suspicious of tradition, it is because we sense that it induces an unquestioning acceptance of what is said, an acceptance of it simply because it is said. Traditional questions and traditional answers come to us out of a past that we instinctively revere or at least do not at the outset have the temerity to criticize.The reason for our acceptance does not seem to be relevant to the substance of what we are accepting, but to englobe and suffuse it so that it becomes almost awe-inspiring. Throughout our lives we can be made to pause by remarks that begin with, "It is well known...." or "Everybody knows...." or even the less committal, "It is said...." Just as there is honor among thieves, so the most revolutionary and iconoclastic types often defer to their fellows in an uncritical fashion. In all its generality, this lack of "the critical spirit" does not seem destined for any ultimate extinction from the world of men. Mutual trust will doubtless remain the very glue of society, its sine qua non; the man who insists on clarity and distinction and certitude partout will be boring when he is not a menace, not the embodiment of the human ideal but a standing negation of the human situation. And what has this to do with the learning of philosophy?

    Is the role of tradition in learning philosophy a blind acceptance of authority? Aristotle said, in the Latin version, oportet addiscentem credere: a student must trust his teacher. It was a remark the medievals liked to quote, but Augustine said we do not send our children to school to learn what the teacher knows. It is important to see that they are both right, that the trust and belief Aristotle advocates must not only give way, but is teleologically ordered to, the autonomous seeing Augustine demands. Pieper has put it in this way: "All tradition is something preliminary and provisional. Tradition in an absolute sense, tradition that can never be replaced through the progress of science cannot be imagined unless it be assumed that there are tradita which by their very nature cannot be tested by experience and argument, cannot be verified."^{5} Teaching, as Aquinas speaks of it, is a discourse which may for a time be accepted out of trust in the teacher but should be so presented that that kind of extraneous reason for accepting it is easily replaced. What enables us to overcome the authoritative basis for acceptance is acquaintance with, advertence to, the things spoken of as well as recourse to what we know prior to subjecting ourselves to instruction. However social our existence, Aquinas observes that each of us comes instinctively to know certain things about the world and about ourselves, things which it would be irrational to doubt and impossible to reject. For him, as for the plain man, the so-called principle of contradiction is not in the first instance a rule of logic but a fact about whatever is. Such truths, however tricky-sounding their verbal formulation, however difficult their analysis, however complex their defense -- all of which comes later -- provide criteria for the learning which make him wary of any remark which violates those truths. Nothing can be deduced from them, but they are a test of the acceptability of statements which also claim to be about the things that are. Aquinas' reference to such immediate, self-evident truths, which stand for any man's awareness of inescapably obvious features of reality, makes it clear that there is built into the very process whereby we listen to what others have to say a principle of critical acceptance or rejection. One who accepts only because it has been said, because it is traditional, is accepting on authority, on someone's say-so, and if that attitude is terminal, he is short-circuiting the process of learning.

    We have pointed out that Aquinas distinguished two ways of coming to know, being taught and discovering by oneself. Of the two, it is the second that is the sign of a stronger mind; if we had to choose between the original thinker, the man who alights for the first time on a truth we find compelling, and the man who knows everything that his predecessor knew, we would no doubt select the first. But, in doing so, we would be wrong to think that the learned man lacks intellectual autonomy. This he cannot do if, as we have said, he has learned what his predecessors knew. For, if he has learned, he no longer accepts because it was held by his predecessors but rather because he has come to see that such-and-such is so. Tradition as authority fulfills its role by a flourish and exit.

    We must now make an effort to ward off a misunderstanding our discussion of the learning of philosophy may encourage. The reader could easily think that the situation we have been describing when we spoke of learning philosophy is best exemplified, even solely exemplified, by someone sitting in a philosophy classroom or curled up with the first book he has ever drawn from the philosoophy shelf of his father's library. In academic discussions over the years there is a remark I have heard again and again from teachers of philosophy when they are describing the difficulties of their craft. The college student, they will say, has had some prior introduction to history and mathematics and science, to nearly every other curricular offering, but philosophy is for him something wholly new. That remark, it seems to me, could scarcely be more wrong, and it is symptomatic of what has happened to philosophy in these last days. Surely it makes a good deal more sense to say that of any course a student could possibly take none connects more surely with his spontaneous thinking, his pre- and extra-academic thinking, than does -- or should -- his first course in philosophy. Recall those questions Kant said summed up the task of the philosopher and try to think of them as marking off the domain of an expert, some esoteric technician whose ways and words are hopelessly removed from the common world of men. Kant's questions are human questions, questions most men most likely have posed themselves, in some form or another, and have had posed for them in one form or another, from the dawn of their recognizably human lives. Wouldn't it be better and more salutary to regard philosophy as the attempt to do well what we can scarcely help doing one way or the other if we are men at all? Mortimer Adler has made this point recently and forcibly by reminding us of those first-order questions which are the professional philosopher's link with that plain man he loves to appeal to in argument, the plain man he was himself and, it is devoutly to be wished, basically remains.^{6} When philosophy loses that nexus with its origin in the inquiry of any mind awake to reality it becomes fantastic and a menace, fully deserving of a swift kick from the Johnsonian boot. There is no doubt, of course, that in the process of trying to do well what each man will-nilly does, the professional philosopher is forced to ask Adler's second-order questions, that even in his elaboration of first-order, spontaneous questions, his attempts at solution could boggle the plain man. But whenever a philosopher coaxes us to hang on to the brush because he is taking away the ladder which leads back to common experience, the gravity we may be induced momentarily to feel will certainly and ignominiously ground us.

    What I am suggesting is that we begin the study of philosophy long before we begin "the study of philosophy." We know all kinds of things for sure before we commence that formal study and, besides, our minds are chock full of opinions, theories, arguments we have taken on from that bountiful parent, tradition. There is no single inventory of the furniture of a mind which comes to the formal study of philosophy, in a classroom or by reading a book, but whatever the particular inventory there will likely always be two main classifications of it: what is really known, reasons that truly found what is held, reasonable opinions, on the one hand, and, on the other, all kinds of beliefs whose only warrant is familiarity, their repetition by ourselves and others. The latter may be the common assumptions of a given time, elements of a zeitgeist, the myths of an age as, in our own time, Toulmin suggests, science is our controlling myth.^{7} What we would expect from the formal study of philosophy is a progressive separation of these two kinds of mental furniture, a questioning of the previously unquestioned, a testing of what we think are reasoned beliefs. There is no one way to do this, of course, and the variety of methods is not an unequivocal blessing. Perhaps the least safe guides at this point are philosophers who glory in the appellation "critical," who suggest that the criterion for this sifting is not something brought to philosophy and constantly alluded to in its critical progression, but an asset to be gained from philosophy, to be acquired. There are legitimate senses of an intra-philosophical starting point but in the most basic of senses the starting point of formal philosophy is brought to it. The study of philosophy may create a new awareness of what one already knew before beginning that study but when it pretends to confer the beginnings of thought something has gone radically wrong.

    The foregoing looks like an appeal to common sense and, in a sense, it is. The trouble with common sense is not, as Descartes said, that everyone is cocksure he has an adequate supply, but rather that, as a phrase, it smudges the difference between what we really know without the aid of others or have with the aid of others come to know and, what is quite different, the merely customary, familiar, and accepted. The proponents of common sense would like it to be made up only of the former; its opponents suggest it consists only of the latter. If it comprises both, the critique of common sense will be the questioning of the merely familiar by appeal to what is really known. How in practice can we tell which is which? The answer to that could be phrased in terms of a basic belief in the capacity of the human mind. But that sounds rather exalted. Perhaps it would be better to suggest the following rule of thumb. Some of the things we maintain simply because they are familiar have only to be articulated to exhibit the fact that we have no good reason for maintaining them; other beliefs of the same sort may resist being nudged for reasons, but if we consider what it would be like if they were not so, our view of the world may seem at first surprisingly altered but still inhabitable. For example, the suggestion that we know a lot of things about the world for sure, both facts and reasoned facts, without appeal to the scientific method, may seem shocking at first.^{8} But when we reflect that we really haven't the least idea yet what the scientific method is, or indeed any reason to suppose it is some one procedure, the shock can give way to the recognition that it was ridiculous to think otherwise, however, implicitly. We may have become so responsive to "scientific" as an adjective which commends and commands that we have made of it a mantle to cover whatever nudity. Needless to say, a lifetime could be spent in this critical appraisal of the furniture of our mind and there would still be a good deal left untouched. Furthermore, though there are times in our life, and in the history of philosophy, when the impulse is felt to send packing any belief which does not have absolute and incontestable grounding in what is evident and irreproachable, we come eventually to see that such beliefs have a way of returning from exile, that we cannot do without them, that -- and here is the dark night of the rationalistic soul -- by far the majority of our notions have only varying degrees of a garden variety of probability to commend them.

    However nostalgic we may sometimes feel for a rationalistic paradise where thoughts form a vast concatenation presided over by certitude and clarity and distinction, we learn, if learn we must, that that mathematical ideal is largely irrelevant to human knowledge, perhaps even to mathematics itself. Not everything can be proved or, perhaps, we come to see that the proof of more than pudding is in the eating. Gustate et videte, then, and de gustibus non disputandum est. There are lots of things in heaven and earth and philosophy can be made commodious enough not to deserve Hamlet's shushing of Horatio.

The Advantages of Tradition

We began our discussion of tradition by citing the instance of language; if the learning of our mother tongue is the acceptance of something handed down and if to be a man is to be an animal who speaks, tradition is essential to human existence. That seemed to load the case in favor of tradition, indeed it became unclear that there was any alternative to it, until we moved on to speak specifically of learning philosophy. Recalling Socrates, we introduced the notion that philosophy involves a critical note insofar as it sees its function as questioning the traditional, the familiar, what everybody knows. This suggestion has the merit of describing philosophical activity in its social context, as a man's response not only to the world but to what men have had to say about the world. While emphasis must be given to this critical function of philosophy, insofar as it can be described as a critique of common sense we found it advisable to distinguish among the contents of common sense. Furthermore, we suggested that in learning philosophy from another there are positive advantages. It is this suggestion we want now to explore.

    Learning as the acceptance of what is handed on, coming to know with the aid of a teacher, is an instance of tradition that need involve only two generations, at least for purposes of discussion. We will turn later to tradition as involving a plurality of generations, even a whole civilization or culture.

    I suppose that anyone who speaks of one man's being instructed by another, whether this be in a formal or informal sense, will want to describe and even justify this ineluctable part of being human by saying that the instructed is a recipient, that there are advantages in his situation which are mere particularizations of the advantages of living in the society of his fellows. We have already suggested that we are led by our elders to ask certain questions, about the world and about ourselves, and that in most cases a solution comes hard upon the formulation of a question. If we should approach this situation by imagining, first of all, how we could lament its existence, it will be easier later to show its advantages. When people wax eloquent about the task of the "educator" (a term which may seem abstract enough but, in the escalation of the jargon, soon cedes to "educationist"), they speak of molding young minds, forming the young, leaving their impress on the supposedly malleable mind of youth, etc. What if it were objected that this is tyrannical, that the fault Augustine cited is not merely an adventitious result, but the intended and predictable result of one man's presuming to teach another? The teacher, the objection would run, is simply imposing his ideas on his victim, making another mind over in the image of his own, training, directing, limiting. I am trying so to express this possible objection that it is clear that teaching is regarded as an assault on the freedom of the taught. The word that sums this up is, of course, indoctrination. One could easily conclude from the considerations that would accompany an expanded form of the objection I am sketching that any positive content of teaching, any effort to solve the questions raised in this relation between generations, is an imposition of one set of personal views on another man who has the right to form his own equally personal views. It may be all right to lead others to ask questions, but we must avoid like sin the impulse to give answers. What the objection would do with the suggestion that conveying certain questions rather that others is in its own kind of limitation, I don't know.

    It would be easy to lampoon the objection, so easy in fact that one might seriously doubt that anyone had ever lodged it. But men have held the view involved in this objection and while I shall not document this, I am certain I am addressing a real position. Even if it were not currently represented, however, it could be regarded as a meaningful possibility hinted at by Augustine. It is meaningful because it is not utterly absurd. Consider the implication of Augustine's curt remark: we do not send our sons to school to learn what the teacher knows. Surely he is right in saying that the point of learning is not that one mind might discover what another mind thinks, just as such. There are all kinds of situations where we listen to another simply to hear what he (or, more likely, she) has to say, what she thinks, how she regards this or that^{9} But generally speaking, we would want to distinguish learning in the strong sense from such situations. In certain polar instances of it, we might want to say that the person of the teacher is a vanishing element in the process of learning; at the opposite pole, the teacher as this person assumes a far greater importance. But through the spectrum, whatever the degree of personal importance the teacher may have, insofar as one is learning he is not simply learning what another thinks just insofar as it is what another thinks.The objection we have mentioned above may seem to suggest that someone might say to us that snow is green and we react by recording Snodgrass thinks that snow is green. But normally, of course, we would want to know why he thinks so. Say we asked and he begins with trembling voice to speak of an unhappy childhood when every impulse was stifled, every instance of independent thought repressed. We may begin to feel, as we edge toward an exit, that we have gained some understanding of why he made the statement, but the reasons in play could hardly be said to have anything intrinsic to do with what the statement, snow is green, means. I am trying to arrive at the truism that the learning process is best considered in terms of the following paradigm. We are told that the intrinsic angles of a plane triangle are equal to two right angles and then are shown, in terms of what is being talked about, reasons for accepting the statement. Now, afterward, we might of course résumé the whole business by saying that Professor Snodgrass thinks that the intrinsic angles of a plane triangle are equal to two right angles because of this and that. We could then be asked, "Yes, but what do you think?" There is a whole range of possible answers. "I don't know if I would want to say that." "I'm not sure." "I couldn't care less." "I think the opposite is true." "Sometimes but not always." Often enough if our reply is of a certain kind, we will be asked reasons for maintaining what we maintain, reasons that can be grasped and appraised by one who knows what we are talking about. Say we give our reason and are told, "But that is Snodgrass's reason." Wouldn't we want to say that it is and is not his, just as it is and is not ours? If no one held the reasons in question, they would of course belong to no one, but if they are held they are not held as personal views in some private sense but as judgments borne out by what we are talking of.

    It is embarrassing to be dwelling on points as obvious as these, but they do connect with our problem and there is some advantage in recalling the indisputable when one engages in dispute. The suite of truisms just mentioned enables us to add some more. When we learn from another, in the sense of learning which interests us here, the sense which connects with the formal study of philosophy, our instructor draws out attention, not to himself, but to what he is talking about. Moreover, we have independent access to what he is talking about. It may well be that what he says is the occasion for our attending to what he is talking about, but there is no strong sense in which he could be said to confer awareness of what we are then aware of. Further, what he then goes on to say about the objects to which we are attending has as its measure and criterion those objects -- and not merely what we, in some private sense, think of those objects. This has as its corollary the suggestion that, in principle at least, we could, by attending to those objects independently of the help of others, come to see what, thanks to instruction, we are being led to see. That is why Aquinas speaks of the teacher as an artist who imitates nature; that is, the teacher tries to get us to perform under his guidance the steps we might have performed without it. It will be appreciated why Aquinas held that learning and discovery bear on the same matter. We are now in a position to list rather summarily the advantages which have been ascribed to learning, to the acceptance of what is handed down by the teacher.

    In principle, whatever one man knows about a range of objects is knowable by others. What may have been come upon in a hit-or-miss manner can be conveyed economically to others; we can come to see rather rapidly what it may have taken our elders a very long time to discover. There is a good deal of talk nowadays about the logic of discovery since this has once more been freed from the logic of codification, systematization, doctrine.^{10} The original optimism of a Descartes or Leibniz that men could be taught the art of discovery has given way to the realization that discovery, as it has historically occurred (although even the facts of discovery do not yield themselves easily and unambiguously to investigation), is not some one thing. There is no formula for it and its students fall inevitably back on words like genius and insight and creativity, words which point but do not explain. The foregoing should indicate that, while the learning process involves an eventual seeing on the part of the learner which is independent of historical statements about Professor Snodgrass and his alma mater, this process is best kept distinct from discovery in the strong sense. Now the advantages of learning from another are usually expressed in terms of more than two generations, say Snodgrass and spiritual fils. So, too, tradition is usually reserved to speak of a handing down involving many generations. One can see the picture that will be drawn. Over many generations there is an accumulation of knowledge; what is known is passed on, new discoveries are made and add to the deposit of of knowledge and together with what has been received is passed on to the next crop of learners. And so on. In terms of this picture, the thought of someone beginning from scratch and attempting to do in the brief span of his lifetime a significant portion of what preceding generations have done can only be depressing. All honor to discovery, the proponents of intellectual tradition would say, but thank God each man is not held to discover everything. Just as we would think it odd to provide children with a fourth- or fourteenth-century map of the world and let them find out for themselves its inadequacy, so generally with learning we ought to hand on whatever has been gained, the present state of this discipline or that. Against the background of tradition, true as opposed to apparent and repetitious discoveries can be made which will contribute to the advance of human knowledge. We are reminded that a schoolboy today may, thanks to being taught, rank higher than a genius of bygone days, and we are induced to feel humility by imagining the learning of some child a thousand years hence.

    The picture is undeniably an attractive one, but of what is it a picture? In our own times, it is only in the realm of the sciences, and with some diffidence even there, that this picture of a steady advance of human knowledge is involved. What possible application can it have to art or to human behavior or, and here for us is the rub, to philosophy? Is there progress and cooperation in philosophy anywhere near comparable to that in science which can justify the application of the following to philosophy? "The master-pupil relation is but an instance and a facet of a wider set of institutions, providing for mutual reliance and mutual discipline among scientists, by which the practice of discovery is ordered and the premises of science are fostered and developed."^{11} If there is any such accumulation of philosophical truths which are generally recognized to be such and which function as the springboard of present inquiry, it is clear that few philosophers have heard of it. What we find over and over again in the history of philosophy is a valiant effort on an individual's part to begin the process, to lay the first foundations for such progress. With the advent of what we call science, the problem has become particularly aggravated, for philosophers could look to the progress of science as to a model of their own aspirations for the future of philosophy. as recently as Husserl, as recently as the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, efforts were made to put philosophy, for the first time, on firm foundations, to make of it a science in the strict sense.{12) It is not the aspiration that is new; it is as old as philosophy. It is not the sense that one has managed to bring it off that is novel; that, too, is as old as philosophy. What is striking is the inability on the part of philosophers to convince their fellows that they have managed to come up with something which is firm, which will stand the ravages of time and compel assent from those who follow the argument. In short, the history of philosophy, when it is approached with the picture of an ever-increasing body of commonly held doctrine, must appear incredibly messy, a story of thwarted hopes, of both mild and gigantic delusions, a catalogue of mistakes and errors.

    If that assessment of the history of philosophy were true, what possible justification could there be for commending the learning of philosophy? Presumably there is nothing positive to learn. We could, to be sure, fall back on the negative benefit of not beginning ab ovo: it is possible to learn to avoid past errors. Philosophical documents could still function as warnings and caveats. There is another suggestion, more dire still, and that is that we have surpassed the time when what was called philosophy is justifiable. What if we are living in a post-philosophical age? In the title of a vastly entertaining little book, the question is formulated Pourquoi des philosophes?^{13} If philosophy has never succeeded in coming to be hitherto, is there really any need for it now? The suggestion is, in a word, that our realization of the past unsuccess of philosophy should prompt us, not to try to do well what our predecessors failed to do at all, but to resist the temptation to do philosophy. One thing at least is certain; in our own day the regnant views concerning the nature of philosophy have little in common with older views: furthermore, the influential types of philosophy are quite clearly defined in terms of the pervasive and undeniable reality of the sciences. If it is to be justified at all, philosophy must stake out its claim in such a way that it clearly takes into account the achievements of science. In its way, that is the very mark of philosophy since Descartes, but today it has come to be accepted without question that philosophy must define itself as over against the sciences. Given the fact of the sciences, what is the nature of, or even the need for philosophy; what could the objects and method of philosophy possibly be? To view the matter in any other way is an anachronism that cannot command serious attention.

Philosophers and Philosophy

We began with the intention of discussing the relation between philosophy and tradition and the way was fairly smooth so long as we restricted talk of tradition to rather common features of man's social existence; when we shifted to the level of learning, of being taught, the discussion could once more proceed and it was possible to indicate the advantages of being taught, at least so long as our examples were mathematical. The moment we attempted to apply the description of the cumulative nature of knowledge and the way the learning benefits from this to philosophy and the learning of philosophy the roof fell in. Right now, we seem to have reached a point where we must say that, however, inevitable and advantageous tradition may be in the life of man, and even in his intellectual life when we think of the sciences, there can be no meaningful talk of a tradition in philosophy. Indeed, we seem to have to take seriously the suggestion that any cogent excuse for indulging in philosophy is presently absent, that philosophy is a feature of more primitive times and that it has therefore been surpassed.

    Further progress can nonetheless be made in our discussion if only we will make a somewhat shocking assumption. Mention has been made of the fact that nowadays philosophers must perforce justify what they are doing in the light of the success of the sciences. If there is a cumulative tradition of knowledge anywhere, it would appear to be in the sciences and philosophers, envious and respectful of this fact, have studied the nature of science to find the clue to that success. Some have been enthralled by pure mathematics and have longed for a mathesis universalis, a common method at present exemplified only in mathematics which might be isolated and described and then applied to non-mathematical questions in the hope that they, like mathematical ones, can be brought to a definitive solution. Others look to physical science for the base from which they can proceed to formulate the general method. The dream is of philosophy as a strict science. It could be objected that there are many philosophers who look to science, not as a model, but as the limiting other-than-philosophy, that which philosophy is not and whose methods and devices are inappropriate to philosophy. This is true. But where these two attitudes coalesce is in their conviction that philosophy must be understood as over and against science. It is not merely that philosophy is more than science or less than science but that science is not philosophy But why should we assume that this is so? Why should we regard philosophy as a mode of thought whose territory has been progressively invaded and occupied by something alien called science? When we make that assumption we are inexorably led, if we want to save philosophy, to search for a distinctive area for philosophy, some territory not yet or perhaps in principle incapable of being occupied by science. Further, we seek some peculiar and distinctive method which will set philosophy off from science. What has led to the making of this familiar -- I am tempted to say, traditional -- assumption?

    It need not be cynical to suggest that career motives have been somewhat responsible for the quest outlined in the preceding paragraph. Mortimer Adler, in the book already referred to, goes to great pains to distinguish the method of philosophy from those of science and history. Why? He wants to make philosophers respectable in present-day society. Who are the objects of his concern? When we see that he is concerned for those who occupy positions as professors of philosophy (or as researchers in philosophical institutes), we need not regard his book as a kind of Luddite gesture on behalf of job security. Rather, we should ask why academic divisions of labor should be accepted in an unquestioning way. We must ask how it has come about that a small portion of academe, members of a department in one college, have come to be distinguished from their fellows by their insistence on the title, philosopher. Rather than say that the sciences have usurped a goodly amount of the traditional territory of philosophy, we could perhaps more correctly say that a small group of those who are engaged in the pursuit of knowledge have usurped the title philosopher and in the process shrunk the territory originally assigned to philosophy.

    This suggestion could be greeted with the objection that, to follow it through, would entail appeal to some Pickwickian sense of "philosophy" and "philosopher," but the obvious countercharge is that, viewed in a broad perspective, it is the contemporary philosopher who is wont to use these terms in odd ways. What precisely happened when physics ceased to be called the philosophy of nature? What precisely happened when the academic degree of those engaged in the study of nature became Doctor of Science rather than the traditional doctor of Philosophy? Was this a verbal move and, if not, what exactly was it? I want to suggest that a good deal of the malaise and mystery will begin to lift from philosophers' reflection on their task when they admit that it is not the territory of philosophy that has shrunk with the success of science; all that has shrunk is the agreed-upon range of the term, philosophy, and what is left has been increasingly described in ways which are silly, pompous, imperial, or fruitless. What would be lost by saying that, with respect to our knowledge of nature, questions which were once asked and not very successfully answered by men who called themselves philosophers are now being asked, even though formulated differently, by men we have chosen not to call philosophers? One could retort by asking what would be gained by the admission. What would clearly be gained, I think, is a cessation of esoteric attempts to define philosophy as something at all costs different from and other than science. Rather than having won a verbal victory, we would be spared the continuation of basically verbal battles. We would be spared the quest for odd objects for philosophical inquiry and stranger descriptions of the method of approach to those objects. Retention of the broad notion of philosophy maintained by Plato and Aristotle would enable us to see that the knowledge one in quest of wisdom wants includes what is now called science; given the importance and interest of science for the seeker of wisdom, there is no good reason to deny the epithet "philosophical" to science. The quest for wisdom may involve asking questions the sciences do not ask, it may involve reflecting on the sciences, but this does not require us to deny that the sciences are components of philosophy. Literary criticism, reflection on art, does not require a special expertise unavailable in Departments of English; reflection on the nature of and method of science does not require appeal to members of the Department of Philosophy. Philosophy is simply not some specialty over and against the other specialties in the modern university. By aspiration at least philosophy is what binds together the various knowledges and and methods scattered throughout the university. Etymologically, philosophy connotes a teleological ordering of all available knowledge to the asking of ultimate questions about the world and man. These ultimate questions are not distinct from but in continuity with the questions which constitute the various activities in academe. Viewed in this way, it becomes clear that the fruitful asking of ultimate questions cannot be the work of those who are in ignorance of what is being done throughout the university, the intellectual community. If philosophy aims at going beyond science to wisdom, it ought to be quite clear that one cannot go beyond what he does not know.

    I am suggesting that philosophy be taken to be a name which covers all academic pursuits insofar as these are regarded as prerequisite for dealing with ultimate questions. No one can handle ultimate questions who is not well grounded in the various academic disciplines; therefore, these must be regarded as constituents of philosophy and not merely propaedeutic to it. What the various disciplines, regarded as constituents of philosophy, are propaedeuctic to is the sapiential view, the culminating questions. The effort to treat the natural and social sciences, aesthetics, and so forth as other than philosophy has led to the identification of philosophy with a methodological activity, a meta-discipline, or as exclusively an ontology or metaphysics. The first understanding of its nature dictates that philosophy has no subject matter, at least no first-order subject matter; in the second, it has a subject matter so esoteric and incommunicable that efforts to describe it in isolation from its dependence on the sciences lead to obfustcating and and icantatory claims. Much better, I am suggesting, to realize that most philosophical questions are treated nowadays by men we have chanced not to call philosopher and that those who do claim to be philosophers must recognize this fact and proceed to "save" philosophy by once more extending its scope even though this has the paradoxical look of saying that most of philosophy is "non-philosophy." For what finally have we gained by ceasing to regard, as Plato and Aristotle did, mathematics and natural science as parts of philosophy? Surely we have nothing to lose by reclaiming that ancient view. The more commodious outlook is infinitely preferable to attempts that can be liked to speaking of a train in abstraction from all cars other than the engine -- or the caboose.

    Should it need emphasizing, the new -- or older -- usage I am recommending would not have as its purpose or effect any flattering of the sciences; its purpose is to induce a becoming modesty in those of us who still lay claim to the title of philosopher. Its advantages for our present purposes is that we are prevented from asking what the method of philosophy is, what philosophy as something utterly other than science would be. When we recognize that there is much more to philosophy than is done in Departments of Philosophy, questions about the teaching and learning of philosophy can never be as simple as they may initially appear. However, with respect to the question of a cumulative tradition in knowledge, we could then say that while this is not unarguably present in all areas of philosophy, it is present in some areas of philosophy, areas like physics, logic, mathematics etc. In other parts of philosophy, parts identified with philosophy by Mortimer Adler and too many others, matters are more problematical. Now, in what follows, I shall principally concern myself with what is taken to be covered by the more restricted use of "philosophy," but I hope that this will not be read as in any way diminishing the importance of our suggestion as to the true range of philosophy. Of course many philosophical questions, in the restricted sense of the adjective, fall within the range of what today we call not philosophy but science. For example, the question, "What is man?" need not be regarded as a philosophical addendum to biology and anthropology and psychology -- but of course this recognition may amount to a critique of certain views of biology and anthropology and psychology. The narrowing of philosophy, by philosophers, has doubtless had deleterious effects on disciplines other than "philosophy." That is why, perhaps, interesting differences about the nature of philosophy are seldom to be found in the positions of professional philosophers, rather they are found in operative views of the unit of knowledge within the university, in the area called, alas, philosophy by education. I say alas because "philosophy" has become synonymous with such meta-views regarded as distinct from and other than the things which are bound together.

Language and Philosophy

At the beginning of this chapter, in preparation for treating the question of philosophy and tradition, we made the point that the fact of language is a powerful instance of tradition, Now, having come, I hope, some distance from that opening consideration, having seen something of the unhappy effects of our distinctly modern and really rather recent shrinking of philosophy into some sort of ineffectual competitor of science, we want to ask about the role of language as the vehicle for conveying philosophical knowledge. If language with its meanings and usages involves ordinary discourse in a necessary deference to tradition, we want to ask whether language has meaning gathered from successful efforts to ask and answer questions which go beyond the workaday world. We are suggesting, by posing the issue in this fashion, both a distinction between uses of language and a connection between those two uses. How does the teacher lead one who knows how to use language in an ordinary way to ask and ansewer questions which have traditionally been called philosophical? The preceding section indicates that our problem could be treated by asking about the proper way to teach physics, biology, economics, political science, or mathematics. Any of these disciplines could, on the basis of the previous section, be regarded as parts of philosophy. Actually we shall be proceeding in terms of considerations so general that such divisions of knowledge need not be explicitly alluded to.

    The proper instrument of the teacher is language. That ringing phrase can be attributed to Aquinas and it should strike us first as having a false tone. We think of the master plumber teaching his apprentice, and language, apart from an occasional illustrative expletive, may seem to be a small and even dispensable part of his instruction. We think of a backfield coach teaching a quarterback how to "hand off" artfully and with the maximum of deception. In principle the process could come off with a dumb coach or a deaf quarterback: the coach shows the boy how to do it. Aquinas' claim obviously does not apply to every activity we would call teaching or instruction. Nor need we think that what is involved in some latter-day extension of the use of the terms in question. Aquinas must have had in mind a certain range of uses of "teaching," perhaps even a controlling instance of teaching, in virtue of which his remark made sense. The words he uses in connection with his assertion are doctrina and disciplina. We have already seen that, for him, not every instance of coming to know is learning or disciplina; he reserves that term for coming to know with the aid of a teacher. But not every teacher uses language in order to fulfill his function. The paradigmatic instance of learning for Aquinas, as for the Greeks, is mathematics. This is embarrassing, of course, because when we speak of the language of mathematics we have the sense of employing a metaphor; we seem to be suggesting that the symbolism of mathematics is like the "natural" language and, of course, unlike it.^{14} Although mathematics would seem to be his paradigmatic instance of teaching and learning, the notions are broadened to include all questions which bear on the way things are when solutions to these questions are achieved as the term of mental activity as opposed to crafts, techniques, and so forth. Questions bearing on nature, the coming to be of things in the world, change and time and purpose, of the distinction of living and non-living bodies, questions having to do with the course of the planets, the nature of man, his difference from other cosmic entities and his destiny, human society, etc. -- these very broad matters indicate the range of human inquiry and, at the beginning, with the Greeks, the term philosophy was used to embrace them all. Its defining note, to be sure, has not yet been struck. The wisdom to which all knowledge was ultimately ordered -- and it was precisely its ordination to wisdom that made other knowledge deserving of being called philosophical -- involved asking questions about the possibility of, indeed the necessity for, a reality different from and explanatory of the real things of our more immediate experience. The destiny of philosophy, for the Greeks, was, in short, theology: what man can know of the divine. Now, as we indicated earlier, while one must maintain that in principle a man might ask some or most or perhaps all of these questions without prompting from others, the normal course of events is such that one is induced to ask them by the influence of others. Furthermore, not all these questions await the formal study of philosophy for their asking; that formal study presupposes that we recognize basic questions, that we already feel more or less at home with them. That formal study relies on our tendency to want to give an account of experience, to ask why of things that happen. Long before philosophy began, such questions were asked and various accounts given by way of an answer to them; philosophy begins under the influence of those accounts just as today the study of philosophy begins under the influence of antecedent attitudes, whether secular or religious. That is why, from the very outset, philosophy is at least implicitly critical of accepted accounts. In brief, then, philosophy begins by presupposing a natural tendency to seek an account of experience, a natural tendency which is encouraged by society and assuaged in part by its traditional accounts. As a societal effort, these antecedents involve as well a language in which the questions and traditional answeres are framed. It is by employing that language, which is the vehicle and repository of "common sense," that philosophy begins its work, a work which is at once critical and constructive. At the outset philosophy need not deal with unusual questions; in any case, it is not odd objects or questions which constitute the move to formal philosophy. What takes place is a shift in the method and quality of handling familiar questions. It is here that the notion of science (episteme: knowing in a strong sense) was introduced. As an ideal, science or episteme received a rather definitive formulation in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, but at the same time Aristotle corrects an impression Plato gave, namely, that any philosophical question, if it could be answered at all, was answerable in the same way. The notion of science or episteme became a variable one, not only because of diverse subject matters but also because of degrees of approximation to the ideal. Thus it becomes impossible to speak of philosophical method as of something unique, univocal, and unchanging.

    The kind of beginning we are attributing to philosophy now leads to the expectation that there will be a kind of sameness to philosophical questions. If formal philosophy is an attempt to do well the kind of thinking men more or less instinctively do, a questioning which initially arises out of a practical involvement in the world, that very continuity with respect to object and language with the pre-philosophical should lead to fairly broad agreement as to the range of those questions and, perhaps, a kind of progress in handling them. It is to this expectation that we now turn.

Philosophia perennis

When Aristotle looked over the work of his predecessors, he had a way of sifting that work for elements which he could then examine for the meaning and direction they implied for future intellectual labor. The elements thus sifted out of what his predecessors had said often have a surprising look to them, losing as they do in the process many of the characteristics that were theirs in their original habitat. Nor could Aristotle be more explicit in letting us know that what governs his activity is not what his predecessors might have meant, not even what they actually said, in a limited sense: he is, so to speak, looking for a truth hidden beneath the surface of the opinions and arguments and positions that had come down to him.^{15} Often there are tensions in a man's theory not wholly explicable in terms of what is explicit in the theory. What is most remarkable about Aristotle's work as an historian of philosophy is the way in which he see reality as the measure of what has been said about it. Thus he will point out that his predecessors said certain things as if compelled by the truth of being. In short, it is as if, despite idiosyncrasies and predilections, despite the favorite themes and outlook of this sect or that school, reality asserts itself in what men have had to say in dealing with certain questions. The procedure suggests, of course, that a dialectical shakedown of philosophical problems and positions, no matter how opposed and other they may superficially seem will have as its result the discernment of common truths. When the whole history of philosophy is looked upon in this way, we arrive at what has come to be called the "Perennial Philosophy."

    The notion of a perennial philosophy transcends, because it accounts for, the scandal of philosophical diversity, of philosophical pluralism. Whatever the causes of that diversity -- and, while surely uncountable, such causes could range from the trivial and absurd to the profound -- the diversity is interesting only because it makes a discoverable unity. Notice that one who holds that there is a kind of perennial philosophy which survives and thrives in the conflict of positions does not thereby come out for the extinction of diversity. First of all, however desirable the doing away of diversity may sometimes seem, it is unrealistic to expect its disappearance, unrealistic because of the nature of some of the sources of that diversity. Second, and more seriously, the believer in a perennial philosophy will usually regard it as in some way the product of philosophical diversity. If this is so, no one philosophy could be the perennial philosophy even when one philosophy is considered to be the privileged locus, custodian, and discoverer (or rediscoverer) of the perennial philosophy which is the product of philosophical pluralism and further holds that nonetheless one philosophy seems to point to a certain smugness. If this be smugness, however, smugness is an essential trait of the philosopher.

    Let me expand that enigmatic remark. Every philosopher feels an adequate judge, at least in principle, of anything that goes by the name of philosophy -- and of much else besides. It would be difficult, though not wholly impossible,^{18} to find a philosopher who holds that there are any number of truly alternative ways of doing what he is doing which are of equal value to his own. For one thing, explicitly to hold that is to adopt a point of view other than "one's own view" from which it and others are regarded and said to be mutually compatible and equally defensible. Is that higher viewpoint compatible with its contradictory? A given philosopher may in fact be indifferent to much of what other philosophers do or have done, but so soon as he relates what he is interested in to the rest he reveals the conviction that he is adequately equipped, in virtue of what he has done, to pass an implicit judgment of the whole of philosophy. What I am fumbling toward is this. One might want to oppose the notion of perennial philosophy by introducing with warm fanfare and the appropriate diffidence the notion of philosophical pluralism. That is, while some might argue for an essential unity in philosophical diversity, others may profess to be perfectly satisfied with that diversity, a diversity spoken of now in a commending way by calling it pluralism. But what is the essential difference between the philosophical "perennialist" and the philosophical "pluralist"?

    One is tempted to say that no philosopher can be a pluralist.^{17} Certainly he cannot be if by this is meant that he maintains that two views on the same matter, views which profess to say the same sort of thing about the same matter, are equally and indisputably true. But of course pluralism as a theory comes in precisely when men begin to despair of indisputable truths. Let us say then that the pluralist is one who is wary of rejecting any effort to deal with a given question in favor of another effort. To make our point quickly, doesn't this attitude of the pluralist look a lot like the attitude of one who holds there is a perennial philosophy? They are both views about the value of the diversity of philosophical opinions on roughly the same matter and they both insist that it is a positive value. Is it that the pluralist takes the diversity to be terminal whereas the perennialist takes it to be only a kind of disguise? Perhaps. But then one must justify the diversity in some way that does not imply that it covers a fundamental unity. The temptation would be to regard various philosophical theories as interesting reactions to reality which reveal to us something of the individual philosopher and his times, etc. Now if this were taken as a criterion for appreciating philosophical diversity, at least two things must be said of it. One, it would infuriate, were they present, most objects of such appreciation: philosophers would by and large prefer to be found guilty of falsity than have their claim to our attention rest on their being "interesting." Second, such appreciation surely suggests a notion of the importance of philosophical diversity which provides community within that diversity. On a more basic level, moreover, one could suggest that pluralism is one view of the history of philosophy and that, on a thoroughgoing interpretation of pluralism, it is involved in an embarrassing paradox. For it seemingly must allow as equally justifiable a view of the history of philosophy which is the contradictory of pluralism.

    To that last charge it could be replied that pluralism is not a philosophical view, but a meta-philosophical one. In reacting to that, I would invoke Aristotle's remark in the Protrepticus, quoted much earlier. Some of the criteria of meta-philosophy must belong to philosophy itself and, I should think, no meta-philosopher, no one who entertains views about philosophy's history and diversity, is really content to consider that diversity as terminal. (But again this is not the same as considering it terminable.) The conclusion would seem to be that any philosopher with an explicit view on philosophical diversity appeals to criteria which enable him to comment on that diversity and to that degree at least the diversity is not regarded as an ultimate unanalyzable fact. Needless to say, even the opinion that all or most of past philosophy has been radically mistaken and is thus ignorable counts as a view on philosophical diversity.

    We have arrived at a point where we have in effect denatured the concept of perennial philosophy as many of its proponents want to employ it. For it is intended to be not just any view of the unity of the history of philosophy but a rather determinate view. We must inquire further, consequently, but as we do it will become apparent that there is a good deal of diversity as to the meaning of philosophia perennis.

    There is a view of the perennial philosophy which would have it that one of the "systems" of philosophy actually embodies all the truths which have been discovered by man. Scholastic philosophy, or, more restrictively, Thomism, is often urged as a candidate for this role. There is some ambiguity in the claim, particularly if the philosophy in question is considered to have reached its essential achievement and perfection centuries ago. A more modest way of making the claim consists of saying that whatever truths men discover will cohere and their coherence is possible because of certain basic principles, of reality, of thought, of a malevolent demon. Thus the philosophy which actually proceeds from principles that permit a constant assimilation of whatever truth arrives from whatever source could be considered the vehicle of the perennial philosophy. Of course the perennial philosophy so understood is something in process of revealing itself and the process would doubtless have to be considered unending. That corollary calls into question the possibility of regarding perennial philosophy as a system. Systematic, yes, since it is predicated on the unity and coherence of truths; a system, no, at least if a system is taken to be a self-enclosed whole, having a beginning, middle, and end.

    Another view of the perennial philosophy does not assume that the plurality of philosophies can in some way be reduced to one of their number. Rather, it is the interplay of the various philosophies considered as autonomous which constitutes the perennial philosophy. Different philosophical systems, no matter how seemingly contradictory, are regarded as complementary, each but a partial view of a reality which can never be exhausted by the human mind and which is not therefore something accessible by means of one method or approach to the exclusion of others. On this view, the perennial philosophy is not a body of truths recognized willy-nilly by philosophers over the years, arrived at in spite as much as because of a particular method. Rather, it is a collection of half-truths each of which hint at some facet of the really real. All the hints are valuable; none takes absolute precedence over the others. In this understanding of perennial philosophy, it can be seen that truth in any strong sense of the term recedes into the background and is likely to be replaced by terms like suggestive, adequate, valuable, and relevant.

    The great danger of the notion of a perennial philosophy, as Professor James Collins had pointed out,^{18} is that it tends to regard the persistence, pervasiveness, and repetition of certain views, methods, and opinions as sufficient warrant of their philosophical importance, where this importance is read as a positive value. he rightly points out that many errors show persistence and crop up again and again in the history of philosophy. Now to make that observation requires, to be sure, a conception of philosophical truth and falsity which may appear to be the tenet of one school as opposed to others. Collins does not want simply to make this assumption; her argues that it must be made. Perhaps we can put his point in our own words and rejoin him to endorse his restricted theory of perennial philosophy.

    The reader will recall that we got into the present discussion because we undertook to analyze the way in which other men can be of aid to us in our search for knowledge. The appeal to perennial philosophy is an appeal to an element in the learning of philosophy. Now, with respect to learning in the strong sense, we wanted to say that this process cannot be understood as coming to know what another thinks just as such, as terminal. There are criteria to which we must ultimately appeal in our assessment of what another says, criteria which are not themselves learned from others. If the perennial philosophy is spoken of as a catalogue of similar statements made by philosophers over the centuries, a listing of persistent attitudes, common assertions, similar methods, the compilation has as its effect to put us in possession of information about what others have said. To possess this information is not yet to have learned anything in the strong sense; the criterion for inclusion in the perennial philosophy is repetition or pervasiveness. The criterion for learning in the strong sense is found in the things spoken about, something we gain independently of what others have said and independently of what we may already have learned in the strong sense. There is no doubt that we will pay special attention to any opinion that is commonly held, particularly if it was held in quite different historical periods and by men who are otherwise at odds with one another. Aristotle, in sifting the opinions of his predecessors, always took such common agreements as a sign that the opinion could be true. But to judge that it is true, it is not sufficient simply to say that many or even all men hold it. Rather, we judge its truth by consulting what the statement is about.

    Any notion of perennial philosophy which would withdraw completely from that kind of judgment can hardly be regarded as a philosophical view. One is tempted to think of it as a sociology of knowledge or as history in some limited sense -- but I confess I am unclear on the precise nature of that temptation. It would not be knowledge in the strong sense, the sense that controls philosophy as we speak of it here; philosophical knowledge is not knowledge of what men say simply as what they say. And no matter how intricate and symmetrical a pattern could be detected in the views and opinions of men, insofar as those views and opinions purport to be about something other than our tendency to talk, it is what those views are about that provides the criteria for assessing them. This is why any philosophical conception of the perennial philosophy cannot regard the formal mediation between "systems" and methods as more than a preparation for philosophical judgment. No more could a philosophical conception of perennial philosophy involve the reduction of other systems of thought to a privileged system whose principles and methods are regarded as arbitrary or merely chosen.

    The point just made would seem to be that insisted upon by Professor Collins. "At some point in one's defense of a perennial philosophy, one must make a direct examination of man's relation to being. What may be called an extraperennialist discussion about the nature of the real and of our knowledge of it is unavoidable when the question of philosophical truth is at stake."^{19} Now this implies, among other things, that one must do philosophy before he can undertake assessments of philosophies and that, insofar as his assessment of philosophies may include, as a moment, the listing of common tenets, methods, problems, and so forth, as a philosophical enterprise it must eventually be brought to the point where judgments susceptible of truth are made." Acknowledgment of being and its principles unites our philosophical judgments, not after the fashion of the perennialist orchestration, but through a common recognition of the same grounds of evidence and resolution for all our inferences."^{20} Collins' conclusion is not that the notion of perennial philosophy has no worth but that it does not provide us with a criterion and ultimate determinant of philosophical truth. The worth of the notion of a perennial philosophy, he wants to say, is methodological and instrumental; it is something that keeps us open and receptive to the factual pluralism in philosophy. This openness to philosophical diversity is not a tendency toward eclecticism, toward a pastiche of positions gleaned from hither and yon which functions as a map of the historical terrain. The factual pluralism exhibited in the history of philosophy may be instructive in many ways; it may in many ways correct and alter our own views, but philosophically considered, the instruction, correction, and alteration in question come about by an appeal to what the various views are views of. In short, what Collins derives from his study of the notion of perennial philosophy is an occasion for commending the role of knowledge of its history in our learning of philosophy. Before turning to that role, I want to say something of the importance of the forgoing for the situation that prompted this essay.

    Catholics who profess embarrassment at the role assigned to Thomism in our intellectual life seem often to be appealing to quite extra-philosophical criteria in calling it into question. One reads impatient articles whose burden is that no one today is in the least interested in the questions that engaged the scholastics; we are directed to the significance of certain cultural directions of the day, to the discussions which actually occupy philosophers and are urged to go and do likewise. Now it may very well be that the questions which interest contemporary philosophers are of philosophical moment, but this is not something which can be grasped simply by observing the prevalence of the questions. It may very well be that many tenets of contemporary philosophers possess authentic philosophical value, but this is not decided by observing how many hold them. It is unfortunate if philosophers have to be urged to occupy themselves with genuine philosophical contributions, but it would be a good deal less fortunate if our attitude toward philosophical activity were governed by wholly extra-philosophical criteria. It is not simply a matter of going where the action is, of taking on the coloration of a present philosophical majority or of ingratiating ourselves at all costs with those who hold dominating views We can assume that the most sincere apostolic motives generate the kind of appeal to which I refer, for aren't we urged to make revealed truth appealing and relevant by employing the philosophy or philosophies currently in style? But before a philosopher can "employ" a philosophy he must make an assessment of it; he will want to know if it is truly worth bothering about. Moreover, a philosophical approach may be extremely worth-while for accomplishing the limited task for which it has been devised and be utterly worthless for the apologetic and theological role one might wish it to assume. What I am warning against is a muddle-headed pursuit of philosophies as fads, as contingent expressions of the day which the Catholic can employ to proportion the faith to his contemporaries' predilections. In the first place, not every philosophy will be flattered by this kind of attention and surely this is relevant to the efforts of those whose watchword is relevance. To state the obvious in the simplest terms, it is not prevalence or consensus or a quorum of the current arbiters of philosophical taste which determines whether a philosophical tenet or method has philosophical relevance. What if it should turn out that a current philosophical style is downright inimical to revealed truth? Surely one would be guilty of something more than social gaucherie if he seized upon such a philosophical method as an instrument of the Good News.

    These rather obvious caveats will not be read by the serious-minded as an invitation to obscurantism. Professional philosophers should not be in need of extrinsic reminders, however woolly, to see that they have doubtless much to gain from paying attention to a philosophical current that has captured the fancy of many. They will assume, until the contrary be proven, if it ever is, that the prevalence of a philosophical attitude is a sign of its philosophical importance. But, being serious, they will try not to identify the recognition of the sign with a specifically philosophical judgment. Furthermore, if they are Catholics, the importance of a philosophical view beyond the confines of mere philosophy will not escape them. Given their different criteria of assessment, philosophers cannot be expected to be unduly rattled by the passing unpopularity of philosophical truths to which they have won through with some difficulty; their more strident advisers seem to be first over the rail whenever "Abandon ship!" is heard. Just as consensus is not as such the mark of philosophical truth, so unpopularity is not the conviction of error. The philosopher comes to appreciate the deep truth of the melancholy and oft-repeated observation that philosophical positions are not refuted but only abandoned. Abandonment here is a species of ignoring and that, however poignant, cannot be construed as even a sign of the falsity of a doctrine that has fallen from favor. Consider the following statement of that old truth. "No great philosophy has ever been 'refuted.' It has rather been discarded as irrelevant, irrelevant to another newly emerged type of intellectual and cultural experience. The system of Aristotle was not refuted by the gospels of the Hellenistic schools that followed after it in time. Rather, the need for deliverance, for a way of salvation, grew more pressing than the Aristotelian desire to understand. The imposing medieval syntheses, Arabic, Jewish, or Christian, were never refuted by the scientific humanitarianisms to which men in search of emancipation turned. Rather, men came to feel other values more insistent than the intellectual and spiritual values they had enabled men to secure. And if the scientific and humanistic philosophies of our own time are destined to be superseded by other and more dogmatic views of nature and human society, it will not be because they have been 'disproved.'"^{21} This suite of philosophical attitudes suggests that the controlling factors of the alterations within the history of philosophy are not always philosophical, that the assessment of philosophical relevance is often unphilosophical. Were this only partially true, it would indicate why those in search of knowledge about man and circumambient reality consult the history of philosophy with the expectation that among "superseded" doctrines they may find both positive and negative aid for arriving at philosophical truth. Collins had made the point already in speaking of one of the functions of perennial philosophy conceived as a method rather than as a body of doctrine. One might come to see that philosophical diversity is not always grounded in philosophical causes, that is, is dictated not by the way things are but by factors which may be broadly cultural or narrowly subjective and idiosyncratic. This of course raises severe questions regarding progress in philosophy. Critics like Adler and Reichenbach^{22} are saying something different from this when they maintain that philosophy's past has been checkered and confused: they are passing a philosophical judgment of past positions which they render quite present and competing in the process. In any case, one who would learn philosophy cannot be disinterested in its history on the easy assumption that the old is forgotten and rightly so because it has been surpassed. Age finally counts neither for nor against a philosophical doctrine; at least in many of its disciplines, philosophy is in search of truths which are not a function of an historical period or contingent outlook. If such truths there be, they will be at once timely and timeless. Perhaps the truths regarded as least relevant in a given historic epoch are precisely those of which it stands most in need. Were that ever true those whose concern is the good of men living in a particular time would be well advised not to take the word of their contemporaries as to what is relevant and what is irrelevant.

Tradition and the Individual Talent

I borrow here with some sense of the impropriety of doing so the title of an essay by T. S. Eliot. In that essay, Eliot speaks of poetic creativity and its relation to the whole tradition of poetry and what he has to say seems to me important, mutatis mutandis, for the study of philosophy. First, to get it out in the open, I want to invoke a terse comment in Eliot's essay. Someone objects that the old writers are less interesting to us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, Eliot replies, and they are that which we know. The image Eliot creates is of poetry as a living whole, beginning with Homer and extending to the present. The poet who has a truly original voice is judged to have it in terms of the tradition to which he adds and which he subtly alters by adding to it. Now I am not of course concerned here with Eliot's views on tradition and creativity in poetry, but what I want to say has been influenced by his essay which, incidentally, I first read long before I began the study of philosophy.

      In speaking earlier of learning philosophy, we stressed the fact that the novice brings to his listening criteria which enable him to assess what he hears. But of course it is most often the case that the one who teaches us philosophy is concerned to bring to our attention a vast amount of philosophical literature and the voice we hear is not simply his; rather a chorus of great minds addresses us and a kind of piety (or intimidation) is produced which postpones the critical appraisal which learning requires. When one acquires some sensitivity to the reverence in which Plato and Aristotle have been held over the centuries, he may feel less than eager to pass judgment on what they have said. Moreover, he comes to see that what they had said is by no means easily accessible to a twentieth-century reader. There is the language, of course; even if he has studied Greek, the instruction probably has not taken to the point where he feels perfectly at home with the original text. And there are countless difficulties with the text itself. It, too, has a history and one gets into the position of having to trust not only translators but the editors of the text that has been translated. Beyond this more or less material level, there is the question of the Greek outlook on man and nature and God and knowledge, an outlook which, even if one eventually comes to hold that it contains persistent and common elements, has as well features which are contingent and explicable only in terms of an historical epoch. How is one to react to all these considerations? He might turn away in despair. He might proceed with cavalier insouciance to pass swift judgments in the absence of true historical understanding. Or he may decide to take the painful route which leads him circuitously to the where he can make a a responsible philosophical use of what Plato said. Meanwhile, time has passed and one is scarcely into Plato. Again despair beckons. But if one turns from the ancients before make a philosophical appraisal of them, what assurance does he have that there is a short cut to what he seeks? contemporary philosophers may be more accessible on many counts, but most of them have a way of speaking of their predecessors and one will be in no poistion to pass even an historical, let alone a philosophical, judgment on those obiter dicta. No matter, perhaps; they speak substantively as well. But if difficulties of language and text diminish when we turn to our contemporaries, the other difficulties made up of unquestioned assumptions and vagrant interests are aggravated for we may share the assumptions unwittingly and be even less capable of criticizing them. The individual talent seems thus to be swallowed up by tradition, whether tradition is regarded as extending into ancient times or made up only of what our contemporaries are saying. For there are a great many contemporary philosophers. Reichenbach held that philosophy really began with Kant, and we might feel grateful for the restriction; but even if philosophy were considered to have begun in 1900, the task of catching up would be enormous. When, the numbed novice may inquire, when will the possibility of making any contribution arise? When learning philosophy is seen in terms of tradition, and there is no other way of seeing it however foreshortened the tradition be, it seems an endless pursuit where almost no one will be able to make a significant contribution since the vast majority of us grow old reading furiously.

    The simple fact of the matter is that few of us are destined to say anything which will mark a genuine advance in philosophy. The simple fact of the matter is that "new philosophies" more often than not are not new with any conscious and sustained comparison with what is old. Nothing is more depressing than checking out references to past philosophy in a given thinker. Thus Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations by referring to a remark of Augustine's on learning language. The citation is to the Confessions, and one has to wonder if Wittgenstein was aware of the De magistro. But Wittgenstein was not interested in doing the history of philosophy, we will be told; he was interested in clearing up confusions. Whose confusions? The confusions of philosophers, as it happens, among whom Augustine chances to be numbered. His own confusions, too, certainly, but whence did these arise and mightn't they have been avoided by consulting his philosophical elders? Which is more impertinent, that suggestion or Wittgenstein's practice?

    What I am getting at is this: our criteria for philosophical novelty can easily become hazy. Men have been in search of knowledge for a long time, and this search has been productive of a tradition, rather of traditions, and when one takes these traditions seriously into account, any early ambitions he might have had of contributing to the philosophical enterprise can come to seem a matter of youthful juiciness, for there is a long road to go before it is clear to him that what he has to say is indeed a contribution. Despite the difficulties involved in the appropriation of a tradition, moreover, they are small indeed when compared with those which would attend starting from scratch.

    What is wrong with the foregoing is that it seems to suggest that in order to learn anything we must consult everything that has been said or written on the matter which interests us. But that is patently absurd. If someone wishes to speak about language, for instance, we can compare what he has to say with our own experience of what he is talking about. In doing so, we make an assessment. True, it may be a tentative judgment, particularly if we are inclined to think that the speaker has more in mind than comes through to us immediately. But say we become convinced of the accuracy of what he says. If we do, we are no longer dependent in our judgment on the fact that he said it. Now the knowledge we thereby gain is new to us, but we are in no position to say that what we have learned is a new view of language (even if the speaker assures us it is, with many or few references to his predecessors). That is, we are in no position to say that a view of a contemporary philosopher is a new view simply on his say-so or by consulting the copyright. Once more, a small point, but it can be important, for if we make that unwarranted assumption we may acquire the conviction that we would have nothing to gain by consulting the predecessors on our informant. This indifference to past philosophy, based on the assumption that recent philosophy is both new and adequate, if fairly widespread among certain philosophers today. But does it really make any difference?

    It is not only possible but likely that nowadays a student is introduced to philosophy by being told that a revolution has taken place in the field. He doesn't yet know what philosophy is but he is assured that it is now quite different from what it used to be. From his teachers he acquires an attitude of condescension toward whole centuries of intellectual effort: Kant whom he has not read he is disposed to regard as quaint, Descartes as curious, Leibnitz as ludicrous, Hegel as hilarious, and the Scholastics as -- scholastic. These poor devils had the misfortune to be born prior to the twentieth century when, it is well known, a revolution took place in philosophy. Furthermore, and here the irony becomes delicious, this condescending attitude is said to be a consequence of a more modest view of the philosophical task. A cavalier dismissal of centuries of honest intellectual effort parades as modesty! Men who have cupped Western philosophy momentarily in their palm and then cast it disdainfully away characterize themselves as eschewing a comprehensive view! They in their modesty are content with small questions, limited tasks, piecemeal work. History is bunk, said Henry Ford. On the philosophical scene there are those who have an equally charming faith in the value of the the latest model. But is philosophy at all comparable to industrial progress? Have we indeed surpassed previous inquiries into the ultimate questions: what is man? what is his destiny? How does he differ from other things under the sun? What should he do? These are questions the seriousness of which most men need no help in recognizing; these are questions that men bring to philosophy and philosophy, by which we mean human intellectual inquiry in all its natural scope, must address itself to these questions. Surely there is something phony about a philosophical revolution which has as its result the putting away of those questions, the assertion that it is not up to the philosopher to answer them, which has as its goal not the handling of these questions but their suppression. One is reminded of Kierkegaard's remark about Cratylus' advance on Heraclitus, thanks to which the basic tenet of Heraclitus was rendered meaningless. Poor Heraclitus, to have such a disciple, Kierkegaard said. So one can regard the "revolution in philosophy" and say, Poor philosophy.

    Whether in learning philosophy we turn to past or present philosophers and thereby involve ourselves in a long or truncated tradition, the net effect may seem to be a postponing of any attempt to answer the questions that brought us to philosophy in the first place. For we may easily get bogged down in history and philology; we may find ourselves becoming expert in the writings of one man or one school, whether ancient, medieval, or modern, and a tendency to footnote rather than to argue is felt. If we begin with older authors, we may on occasion justify our specialty by saying there is nothing new under the philosophical sun; if we begin with our contemporaries, we may regard philosophy on an analogy with plumbing or technology and take it as given that the twentieth century represents an unquestioned advance over its predecessors. When we speak of the past, it will be with the cloacal humor of a Chick Sales talking of outdoor facilities. To learn philosophy by applying for instruction to authors or teachers is to become involved in a tradition; to accept what is handed down, and to become involved in a tradition has disadvantages we have not even begun to explore. When dissatisfaction sets in, as inevitably it will if we are at all intellectually alive, we may continue to philosophize but to do so against a background of rejection of all we have hitherto read or heard. But this is but another way to relate to a tradition; one continues to make covert or overt reference to one's unhappy philosophical youth. And ironically, one may, like Descartes, carry over from the rejected tradition a host of sophisticated tenets now regarded as commonplace truths. The odd thing is that we must already be involved in a philosophical tradition in order to react to it and even if our reaction seems wholly negative what we then proceed to do has much of its significance with reference to the rejected tradition. In short, the individual talent in philosophy can manifest itself, can be appraised, only in the light of tradition. For most of us the most we can hope to do is to make our own what our predecessors and preceptors have known. This is a recognition that will depress us only if we import into philosophy a concept of originality which is appropriate to other human activities. The originals in philosophy are a small elite; the idiosyncratics are legion. What ultimately counts, of course, is not that a teaching is new, not that it is mine, but rather that, in the appropriate sense, it is true. This recognition calls for a self-effacement of which few of us are capable and it is that lack of self-effacement which is partly responsible for the factual pluralism in philosophy. In short, and this is a point we would all like to avoid, the individual talent must be guided by appropriate moral attitudes. But that is something to which we shall turn later.

Summary

This essay is addressed to those who, like its author, are Catholics concerned about the present state of the philosophy engaged in by Catholics. This concern arises out of a decisive historical phenomenon of our own day, namely, Vatican II, which stemmed from Pope John's call for an aggiornamento. When one looks over the past fifty years or so of Catholic philosophy in America, what greets his eye is not likely to produce unbounded elation. The philosophy taught in our colleges and seminaries bills itself as Thomistic and it is an institutional response to the call of an earlier pope, Leo XIII, for an intellectual renewal in the Church. The response may seem to leave just about everything to be desired. With exceptions notable almost because of their rarity as because of their substantive contributions, Catholics have not been doing well philosophically and they have been out of contact with their contemporaries. Moreover, contemporary philosophy gives the impression of excitement and progress and debate and these are not precisely the marks of the philosophy that has become official with Catholics. How easy then to attribute our difficulties to the suffocating effects of tradition, how understandable to suggest that we shake ourselves loose from tradition and enter the market place of ideas and follow the going arguments whither they might lead. The feeling is current that there is something unique about philosophy as it is engaged in by Catholics and that one characteristic of that uniqueness, questions of simple talent aside, is precisely deference to tradition. Now admittedly there is an initial plausibility in this reaction. However, and this has been the purpose of the chapter we are now bringing to a close, when we begin to reflect on learning philosophy, abstracting from whether or not the learner is a Catholic, it seems to be fairly clear that anyone who learns philosophy, in the sense we have assigned the phrase, is involved in what can only be called a tradition. To learn from another is to accept what is handed down by another. Involvement in a tradition, accordingly, is not peculiar to one way of learning philosophy; it is part and parcel of what is meant by learning philosophy.

    This is our first point and there is no need to consult a seismograph to assess its impact; it is almost trivially obvious. But isn't it sometimes overlooked in impatient polemics? Given our first point, we are forced to consider different ways of being involved in a tradition and it is here the notion of authority rears its head. If we say that learning is the process whereby we heed what another is handing on to us, we must admit that the possibility exists of someone stopping right there. One might fill his head, or notebook, with what another says, with what another has written. This is the question he asked; here is his answer. Our second point was that this kind of involvement in tradition, far from being a necessary result of learning, is actually a short-circuiting of it, a failure to benefit from tradition. When we learn from another we first attend to the question he asks, the problem he works up; if his question is not ours, if his problem does not engage us, something is wrong already. Either one is not listening in the appropriate way or he is unlucky in his teacher. If the teacher is deserving of the name and if one is listening as he ought so that the question becomes truly a question for him, one for which there seem to be a number of possible answers, he can heed the answer posed by his teacher. The culmination and point of the process is the assessment of the answer. To what criteria does the learning appeal in order to make this assessment, in order to learn? He appeals to what the teacher is speaking of, that out of which the question arose, an area of experience accessible to him apart from any ministrations and aid from anybody else. Surely the one thing we cannot learn from another is experience of the area under discussion. Truly to learn, then, is to acquire a truth about an area of reality, and a sign that this has been accomplished is that reference to the person of the teacher or to the learner as possessing the truth is an unnecessary addendum. It is no longer a matter of what he thinks or of what I think but of the way things are. There may be all kinds of gradations in learning, gradations explainable as much as anything by the things in question, but whatever can be learned is ultimately detachable from biography and autobiography. And that, as we have suggested, has its ramifications for any discussion of tradition and the individual talent.

    Having argued for this inevitability of tradition and having emphasized that some objections to the effect of tradition are objections to its failure rather than to its successes, we then explored advantages and disadvantages of tradition. It is perhaps easier to perceive the leaden echo. To get involved in what men have had to say, whether these men are separated from us in time or our contemporaries, may entail either a tremendous amount of erudition, a lengthy attention to the instruments of learning, and these can easily turn into impediments, or it can conduce to an insouciant and mindless dismissal of the past in favor of the latest word, something which can have as its effect the consolidation of our unquestioned prejudices and myths. To turn to the past may be to set out on a journey from which no traveler returns; to opt for the present may be to cut oneself off from documents which would facilitate gaining answers to good and perennial questions.

    It is the hope that, despite the wrangling among them, philosophers may have succeeded over the years in coming up with some solid answers to pervasive questions, that underlies the notion of a perennial philosophy. We discussed this notion in its employment as a device to get above the shocking diversity among philosophers and saw that a great danger in it is that it can turn out to be an extra-philosophical assessment of philosophical doctrines. That is, if criteria for the ingredients of the perennial philosophy are repetition, pervasiveness, and longevity, there will be many items in the perennial philosophy which are false, since some falsehoods exhibit all these characteristics. If it is objected that such an importation of truth and falsity is inappropriate since it amounts to appealing to one school's notion of what is true and what is false, the objection exhibits the danger in perennial philosophy we pointed to. Is the alternative to select one philosophy as the perennial philosophy and to regard the others as unfortunate divergences from the straight and narrow path? Our suggestion was that the alternative is to get off this meta-philosophical plane, not only because no one can begin there, but because it defeats the purpose of doing philosophy. That purpose we want now to recall and thereby end our summary.

    To philosophize is to adjust cognitively to the world in which we are. That is, to be a man in a full sense is to wonder about the situation in which we find ourselves. Quite spontaneously, one wonders what he as opposed to other cosmic things is; one wonders about his own destiny and what he should do; one wonders about the cosmos, too, its whence and what and whither. Just as one speaks prose before being aware he is doing so, so most men ask the questions which make up philosophy or can easily be induced to ask them, ceteris paribus. Philosophy, as we are using the term, is simply a more formal and conscious addressing of ourselves to those questions. The questions arise out of our experience of reality and it is reality to which appeal must finally be made in order to assess the answer to them. Finally it makes little difference whether the answers are old or new, perennial or not. The single value we wanted to get out of the notion of perennial philosophy, and this at the suggestion of Collins, is that it keeps us sensitive to the fact that teachers other than our present ones, authors other than those we currently read, have things to say which will increase our grasp of the way things are. The true import of the notion of perennial philosophy is not its seemingly subjective reference, its calling of our attention to the variety of philosophers and philosophies, but rather its objective reference, its pointing to a various and never perfectly plumbed reality.

NOTES to Chapter Two

{1} There is an extensive literature on the relation between myth and philosophy. See my A History of Western Philosophy, Vol. I, Beginnings to Plotinus, Chicago, 1963. See also Gary Wills, Chesterton, Man and Mask, New York, 1961, pp. 186-90 for interesting remarks on Chesterton's views on myth as expressed in The Everlasting Man.

{2} G. E. Moore once said that he doubted he would have had any philosophical problems apart from reading philosophers. This is a wry remark, I think, and could be read as a strong statement of the view suggested in the text. Later I will suggest that philosophizing does not begin with the reading of philosophers.

{3} See Aquinas, Quaestio disputata de veritate, q. 11, a. 1.

{4} Kant gives these questions in Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. B 832 ff. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Kant und das problem der Metaphysik, Frankfurt, 1951, pp. 185 ff.

{5} Josef Pieper, "The Concept of Tradition," The Review of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 465-91.

{6} Mortimer Adler, The Conditions of Philosophy, New York, 1965.

{7} S. Toulmin in Metaphysical Beliefs, London, 1957.

{8} See Sidney Hook's essay, "Scientific Knowledge and Philosophical Knowledge" in his The Quest for Being, New York, 1961.

{9} See below, Chapter Four, the discussion of chatter and jargon.

{10} N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge, 1961; David Schon, Displacement of Concepts, London, 1963; B. Lonergan, S. J., Insight, London, 1957.

{11} M. Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, Chicago, 1964.

{12} The notion of the starting point of philosophy is an ambiguous one. My point here is that, while an ideal or achieved starting point is a legitimate sense of the phrase, the achieved must be put into relation with the given and if the given is messy that fact may be a message. From where do we set out to achieve the ideal starting point? The answer to that question, far from being irrelevant to talk of the achieved starting point, is essential to it.

{13} Jean-François Revel, Pourquoi des philosophes? Paris, 1957, The notion that philosophy is destined to disappear with the advance of science is strong in Comte and positivism generally and repeated by J. L. Austin. See his discussion of his paper, "Performative/Constative" in Charles E. Caaton, Philosophy and Ordinary Language, Urbana, Illinois, 1963, p. 42.

{14} See M. Evans Monroe, The Language of Mathematics, Ann Arbor, 1963.

{15} See Sir David Ross, Aristotle's De Anima, edited with an introduction and commentary, oxford, 1961, p. 17.

{16} Karl Jaspers may be a kind of exception; however, although he regards philosophical documents as more or less equally ciphers of transcending, he is not open to the claim that they can be anything more. See Jeanne Hersch, "Is Jaspers Conception of Tradition Adequate for Our Times?" and James Collins, "Jaspers on Science and Philosophy" in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. P. Schilpp, New York, 1957.

{17} See P. Gleason, "Pluralism and the New Pluralism," America, Vol. CX, March 7, 1964, pp. 308-12.

{18} James Collins, "The Problem of a Perennial Philosophy," in Three Paths in Philosophy, Chicago, 1962, pp. 255-79.

{19} Ibid., p. 271.

{20} Ibid., p. 274.

{21} J. H. Randall, Jr., How Philosophy Uses Its Past, New York, 1963, p. 21.

{22} H. Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Berkeley, 1951.

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