Philosophy=Wisdom

Over Thanksgiving, I had the distinct pleasure--between the sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie--of good conversation with old friends. In particular, the Scientist Dad and I were able to discuss Blaise Pascal and the meaning of philosophy over baby food and coffee with a Philosopher Pater Familias.

One problem of teaching philosophy, posited he, is that you can only reward students with good grades when they demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the material. For example, the students who tend to get the best grades are the girls who sit in the back of the class and say nothing, but WOW do they know how to study. They may or may not have taken, for example, Augustine's Confessions to heart. Students, however, who engage the material, ask the philosophical questions, and apply their answers to their lives (i.e., put them into action) may or may not get good grades in philosophy class. But they are the students doing precisely what the teacher wants (or, at any rate, what a good teacher wants); the students philosophizing cannot be rewarded for actually doing philosophy.

This is the nature of wisdom: it eludes the obvious rewards.

But how to prod students to bring wisdom to their lives? Pascal recognizes the problem (of course): a man can study and even master the proofs for the existence of God, but five minutes after leaving his desk he will doubt God's existence. Reason's mastery of a subject (God) does not guarantee it will enter into his heart (which, for Pascal, is the center of the whole person).

The trick, he says, is to begin to act, to behave as if God existed. Or as if a moral life would make you happy. Or as if material things were unimportant. It is only in acting--in putting on a mask, so to speak--that the heart engages in truth. Reason cannot be certain of truth, especially in the post-modern world, until the heart is certain of truth. And for the heart to be certain, the man must bend his will and his life to certainty.

So, for the unbeliever who seeks God, Pascal suggests going into a church (a church housing the Eucharist) and kneeling. Go to a liturgy and say the prayers. The whole person--in the body's prayerful motions, the heart's desire, the mind's rest--becomes convicted of God's existence and his own wretchedness. In surrendering to the attractive face of the Redeemer, the heart begins to move to peace and certainty and love, and soon joy follows.

A good reminder for Advent. Our wretchedness. God's revelation in Christ. Joy.

Good news.

Here is an article on the resurgence of Poland's Jewish community and culture--some good news in a bleak news world! Todd and I were blessed to spend our second honeymoon in Krakow and we visited the Jewish quarter while there.

Pascal says that the best proof of the supernatural is the continuing existence of the Jewish people. It is a miracle, and there is no purely rational explanation for it. I would add it is also the best suggestion of the possibility that God is good and loves his people--not with the bland "tolerance" of modern-day ilk, but rather with a father's solicitude and care for his children's survival and fidelity to Him.

Shedding a little light...

I ran into a blessed philosopher yesterday and confided my frustrations with the thesis on Pascal. After ruefully recounting my attempts at clarity, I asked, "There's no right answer, though, is there? I'm not looking for the right answer, am I?"

"No," she said, "there's no right answer. Your job is just to shed a little more light on the subject."

Of course, I went immediately into mystical raptures over this revelation of the end for which I create the thesis at all. To illuminate--not definitively disclose--the truth of Pascal's project. Thank heavens.

This also allays many of the frustrations one feels in teaching history. Last year, I led a seminar in early modern history for high school juniors and seniors. The books we were assigned by the school's curriculum were determined to present the "right answer" to all historical problems; that means they sought to explain away all the awkwardness of the Inquisition, the conquistadores, Galileo, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, etc. It was so easy and so nauseatingly comfortable to be able to say: "And that's why it all happened the way it did. And here's how we can justify the ways of God to man, and man to God."

But what is harder, in a way, to say is that the end for which we study history is not to find the definitive answers and justifications for "the good guys." The reason we read history is to shed light on, among other things, human nature, our own origins, and the rise and fall of human civilizations.

I also find history to be a particularly convincing lesson in original sin, but, again, it only sheds light on sin. History does not prove anything (such as, original sin) in the way the hard sciences can prove something (such as, the existence of microorganisms). It simply sheds a little more light on the truth of who we are, who God is, and where we are going.

Another great distinction

I've been using the word "world" a lot in this blog and even more on the thesis essay. I'm going to borrow some more of Joseph Pieper's language to explain what I mean by "world" (this is also very Aristotlelian).

When thinking about human beings, it's important to distinguish the world from the environment.

The environment, which human beings also live in, describes that place where animals live and interact. It is governed by the natural laws, and our interactions on this level (because we are, after all, wholly animal) are instinctive.

The world, which is reserved for rational beings (human beings, angels, God), is a new level of interaction. If you live in the world, you have a conscious relation with all things. That is, because you have the ability to know things and know yourself, you inhabit the world.

Irrational animals, in traditional philosophy and even in almost all philosophies, do not inhabit the world. They stop at the level of instinct and natural laws. They don't have a personal relationship with other animals, nor are they conscious of having any relation at all with the world. They simply live, survive, and die. But we are aware that we live, survive, suffer, laugh, and die.

This is not to say that irrational animals are not in some sense worthy of our respect (though the nature of that respect is worthy of thousands of blog entries). It is simply to make a distinction between the world we live in by virtue of our desire and capacity to know and the environment we cope with on the level of our animal nature.

Being a thinking being is not all fun and games and mastery of the universe. Obviously, it is sometimes rather a bore to be conscious that I will suffer and die or that the things I hold dear at this moment may be gone the next. That is living in the world, beyond the immediate demands of the environment. But I also am able to contemplate metaphors ("God is like those mountains") or compose songs; I can anticipate with joy my child's next accomplishment; I can work to grow in virtue and wonder why it is that men can't find what they're looking for.

Dear Pascal wrote it out so beautifully: "Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the whole universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this. Thus, all our dignity consists in thought... Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality." (Pensee 200, L)

Something new...

I've had a lot of people ask what I do. Well, I am wife of Todd, mother of Miriam, and everything else constitutes about 5% of my life. In that 5%, I am working on a master's thesis in philosophy and I listen in on two dead white guys--Descartes and Pascal. Their give-and-take has helped me so much in understanding what it means to be a Catholic, a child of the modern world, and how to navigate the waters of faith, reason, religion, and science. Since Todd is a scientist and I'm ... not, the whole thesis has helped me find a way to talk with him about philosophy, theology, and science in one conversation. And that's gold!

So, here's the overview (the one I submitted to the prof.) of the thesis, which is currently on Chapter 3.

"The Enlightenment sought a purely rational basis for understanding moral world that would determine, beyond all dispute, the first principles of thought and the fulfillment of human desires. The history of its failure to do so is well-known: in the three-and-a-half centuries following Descartes’s call for those “clear and distinct” ideas that would free philosophical thought from contention and muddle, mankind strove to live by reason alone for the improvement of the human condition. The central requirement of its method was that it assume there to be no essential connection between the physical mechanics of, say, the human heart and its “final cause.” The result was a world of rationally-determined purposes without inherent ends, artificial goods with no transcendent meaning. As Blaise Pascal observed from the beginning, the modern mind is necessarily “neutral, indifferent, suspending judgment on everything, not excluding ourselves.” In an effort to find himself on certain ground, modern man lost his way and, per Pascal’s prophecy, himself.

Pascal not only criticized, however, but also offered an alternative to the Cartesian philosophy. As Lucy Beckett writes,

'The alternative is to choose to trust a tradition in which to think, to judge, to live, because we discover that a tradition does exist, a collaborative achievement of coherent intellectual effort with a long history still accessible, that confirms our experience of what we have found--using, quietly, words we cannot do without--to be good, beautiful, and true. What we may then discover is that the tradition we have come upon makes more and more sense to us, makes more and more sense of our own lives, which begin to take on the very unity that turns out to be real and full of infinitely explorable meaning (Beckett 3).'

For Pascal, the intellectual tradition making most sense of the human condition is that made possible by the Incarnation--the Word made flesh and dwelling among us. In the unity of God and man, the fragmented pieces of man’s experience of his own condition come together to form that “infinitely explorable” whole, a whole in which each piece’s meaning becomes clearer if not clear and distinct. Men are capable of knowing both more than Descartes allowed and less: a more complex understanding of human thought, based on experience, will recover both the mathematical and physical sciences as well as man’s self-knowledge. To that end, Pascal rejects the rejection of the essential, unifying principles of classical philosophy while embracing the scientific method for the purpose of mastering the material world’s mysteries. It is the tradition of the ancients and Christian thinkers, he claims, that allows him to do so. "

That's the project. We'll get back to Aristotle tomorrow. Hoorah!

[Oh, and you really should check out Lucy Beckett. Her book, In the Light of Christ, is a smashing collection of essays on various Western thinkers from Aeschylus to Augustine, from Dante to Newman, from Pascal (!) to Pope John Paul II.]