One Hundred Years of Philosophy 9780813232102

Table of contents :
Contents
Brian J. Shanley, O.P., Introduction
1. Thomas A. Russman, British Philosophy In The Twentieth Century: Empiricism Responding To Idealism
2. William A. Wallace, O.P., History, Philosophy, And Sociology Of Science: From Atom To Megacosm
3. Peter Phillips Simpson, A Century Of Anglo-American Moral Theory
4. Robert P. George, One Hundred Years Of Legal Philosophy
5. Frederick J. Crosson, American Reflections On A Century Of Catholic Social Teaching
6. Timothy Noone, Medieval Scholarship And Philosophy In The Last One Hundred Years
7. Kenneth L. Schmitz, Was Heisstphilosophie? One Hundred Years Of German Catholic Thought
8. Richard Schenk, O.P., The Ethics Of Robert Spaemann In The Context Of Recent Philosophy
9. Robert Spaemann, Christianity And Modern Philosophy
10. Nicholas Lobkowicz, The Latent Seduction: Marx (And Hegel) In Twentieth-Century German Philosophy
11. Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology In The Last Hundred Years
12. Daniel Dahlstrom, The Ascendancy Of Aesthetics As A Philosophical Discipline
13. Eugene Thomas Long, Western Philosophy Of Religion In The Last Hundred Years
14. A. S. Cua, Western Challenge To The Development Of The History Of Chinese Philosophy
List Of Contributors
Index Of Names

Citation preview

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PHILOSOPHY

STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY ANDTHE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY General Editor: Jude P. Dougherty

Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy

Volume 36

One Hundred Years of Philosophy Edited by Brian J. Shanley, O. P.

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS Washington, D.C.

Copyright© 2001 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American Na­ tional Standards for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library mate­ rials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. 00

OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA One hundred years of philosophy / edited by Brian J. Shanley. p. cm.-(Studies in philosophy and the history of philosophy; v. 36) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8132-3210-2 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy-History-20th century-Congresses. 2. Catholic Church and philosophy-History-20th century-Congresses. 3. Philosophy-History­ Congresses. 4. Catholic Church and philosophy-History-Congresses. I. Shanley, Brian J. II. Series. B804.057 2001 1go'.9'04-dc21 00-031418

LIBRARY

Contents

2. 3· 4· 5· 6. 7· 8. 9· 10. 11. 12. 13· 14·

J.

Introduction British Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Empiricism Responding to Idealism WILLIAM A. WALLACE, O.P., History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science: From Atom to Megacosm PETER PHILLIPS SIMPSON, A Century of Anglo-American Moral Theory ROBERT P. GEORGE, One Hundred Years of Legal Philosophy FREDERICK J. CROSSON, American Reflections on a Century of Catholic Social Teaching TIMOTHY NOONE, Medieval Scholarship and Philosophy in the Last One Hundred Years KENNETH L. SCHMITZ, Was heisstPhilosophie? One Hundred Years of German Catholic Thought RICHARD SCHENK, O.P., The Ethics of Robert Spaemann in the Context of Recent Philosophy ROBERT SPAEMANN, Christianity and Modern Philosophy NICHOLAS LOBKOWICZ, The Latent Seduction: Marx (and Hegel) in Twentieth-Century German Philosophy ROBERT SOKOLOWSKI, Phenomenology in the Last Hundred Years DANIEL DAHLSTROM, The Ascendancy of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Discipline EUGENE THOMAS LONG, Western Philosophy of Religion in the Last Hundred Years A. S. CUA, Western Challenge to the Development of the History of Chinese Philosophy BRIAN

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SHANLEY, O.P.,

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THOMAS A. RUSSMAN,

List of Contributors Index of Names

12 31 54 79 95 III

133 156 169 181 202 216 23 8 272 299 30 3

ONE HUNDREDYEARS OF PHILOSOPHY

Introduction

BRIAN J. SHANLEY, O.P. The essays collected in this volume originated in the centenary celebration of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in the fall of 1996. The centenary was marked by a special weekend conference and a weekly lecture series devoted to retrospective reflections on philosophy in the last one hundred years. The pieces published here reflect only a portion of the papers presented during that fall series, as many fine contributions had to be left out in order to produce a volume of manageable size. The essays that were chosen cover a broad range of topics intended to give a sense of the School of Philosophy's historical commitment to Catholic interests in both the uppercase and lowercase senses of the term. This display of catholicity makes it impossible to provide neat categories for all the contributions. Some essays clearly address related topics, however, and these are grouped together. In any case, they are presented according to an intelligible order that is explained in the following introductory overview. Thomas R Russman's analysis of the course of British philosophy in the twentieth century hinges on the ingenious claim that it is best understood as reflecting a long-standing preoccupation with the refutation of idealism. The table was set by F. H. Bradley's argument that the inherent contradictoriness of phenomenalism and the intrinsic incoherence of any kind of relation entailed monism. In the wake of Bradley's idealism, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore briefly retreated into realism as the only viable alternative to idealism or phenomenalism, thus anticipating the ultimate telos of British philosophy. Russell then quickly returned British philosophy to its more usual habitat of phenomenalism and embarked upon the grand project of logical constructivism. Russell's subsequent failure to ground mathematics in logic, however, marked one of the most momentous occurrences in twentieth-century philosophy; for if reason can discover no a priori grounding for its paradigmatic operation, then it would seem to be forced into accepting the realist claim that truth is to be discovered in the world. The tum to logical atomism

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exemplified in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus, with its ideal language picturing supposed atomic facts, never succeeded in showing that it was about anything because it could never show how its language latched onto anything in the world. Logical positivism came to embarrassing grief in the self-refuting character of the principle of verification. The subsequent attempts to save science through a successive retreat to criteria such as confirmability succeeded eventually in impugning science's empirical credentials. As Karl Popp~r showed, science as subject only to the principle of falsifiability is marked by a creativity, unpredictability, and provisionalness that belies both positivism and idealism. The postWorld War II move towards the therapeutic study of ordinary language, how language actually works as opposed to the way it is supposed to work, led to an increasing awareness of the way in which idealism and phenomenalism are rooted in linguistic confusion. In Russman's eyes, the study of ordinary language in philosophers like J. L. Austin and Peter Strawson has led to a creeping move in the direction of the realism that Moore and Russell once briefly recognized as the only alternative to the untenable positions of phenomenalism and idealism. Some of Russman's topics receive further elaboration in the complementary overviews of the historical development of the philosophy of science provided by William Wallace. Early developments on the continent in figures like Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare, and Pierre Duhem were characterized by a strong critique of classical science's metaphysical pretensions; science should concern itself with organizing or symbolizing phenomena for pragmatic purposes and make no claim to say what things are in themselves. In English-speaking circles up until the middle of the century, the philosophy of science was dominated by the concerns of logical positivists/empiricists. Their guiding presupposition was that philosophy's purpose is to reflect upon empirical science and display its functioning in terms of a logically precise language that could explain the relationship between empirical facts and scientific theories. This project ultimately failed, however, since it could never agree upon the criteria for scientific meaningfulness. The philosophy of science underwent a profound transformation during the period between the late 1950S and the late 1970S under the influence of a renewed interest in the history of science, the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, and the sociology of knowledge. As a result especially of the historical work of Thomas Kuhn, it became accepted that the positivistic ideal of science was far removed from the actual practice of science. The history of science does not reveal an objective, rational, evolutionary, continuous, cumulative growth in verifiable true knowledge, but rather a series of gestalt or paradigm shifts that involve non-rational factors. A kind of epistemological relativism

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seemed to win the day, and the previously privileged epistemic character of science was called into question as it came to be seen by many as just another socially constructed form of knowledge. In response to Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and other Popperians argued that scientific research programs did lead to progress insofar as they generated rational theories with greater empirical corroboration. Wallace's response to the devaluation of science's cognitive status is to argue for a return to a more realistic study of nature as outlined in his magisterial The Modeling of Nature. The widespread doubt regarding the possibility of discovering universal rational standards also figures prominently in Peter Simpson's account of Anglo-American moral theory in this century. Simpson works his way back from Alasdair MacIntyre's influential thesis that the competing claims in contemporary Anglo-American moral theory reflect a fragmentation and disagreement that cannot be rationally resolved because there is no longer either a shared set of background beliefs or a sense of a universal rationality. Simpson argues that MacIntyre overstates the depth of the disagreement, however, and that MacIntyre's own turn to traditionconstituted rationality is but another manifestation of the root problem of reason's despair in its ability to articulate any standards beyond a particular group or tradition. A prime example of this despair can be found in John Rawls's influential theory of justice because it abandons any attempt at articulating justice simpliciter in favor of an account of justice based on the moral intuitions presupposed in a modern constitutional democracy; in Aristotelian terms, it is an account of justice within a particular regime rather than an account of justice within the best regime. Simpson traces the rise oflocal ethics in the twentieth century to the failure of Anglo-American moral philosophy to answer the metaethical question of the Good posed by Moore's Principia Ethica. If the metaethical question of the Good remains unknown, then the only kind of ethics possible will be one that must beg that question by an appeal to a local or group commitment (hence Rawls and MacIntyre). Simpson argues that this failure to agree about the Good is not a failure of reason itself, but rather a failure in reasoners: Anglo-American moral philosophers have been too narrow in their analytical scope and need to draw from a wider range of sources (e.g.,John Dewey) if they are to answer the question of the Good and so do ethics again. A crisis regarding rational foundations has also marked AngloAmerican legal philosophy in the last century in its treatment of the question whether there is any standard independent of law by which it can be evaluated. Robert George begins his treatment with Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1897 Haruard Law Review article on "The Path of Law." Holmes's provocative thesis there was that the purpose of the study of

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law is to predict the incidence of public force through the instrumentality of the courts-to predict what the courts will do. Legal reasoning has nothing to do with morality; its functioning involves no appeal to independent axioms, but rather involves some estimation of social or economic advantage. Legal Realists pushed Holmes's skepticism to the extreme. There is no legal objectivity to guide judges; law is indeterminate such that any judicial decision involves the rationalization of a judgment made on other grounds in order to resolve some dispute. H. L. A Hart was the main opponent of legal skepticism on the grounds that it fails to fit the facts of legal reasoning. Hart argues that from the view of the agents involved in the practical reasoning that constitutes the legal system, legal rules do function in a rationally normative way. Hart was a legal positivist, however, so he argued that these legal rules were independent of morality; there must be a conceptual separation of law from morality so that law can be evaluated independently. Lon L. Fuller challenged this claim: there is an internal morality embedded in any legal system because a commitment to the rule of law involves some moral claims. While George does not endorse Fuller's critique of Hart, he joins John Finnis in advancing the claim against Hart that his own internal view ought to lead to a recognition of the way in which legal rules and principles function as practical reasons for the agents involved precisely because of some apprehension of their moral value. George agrees with the legal positivists in seeing law as a human creation, but he disagrees with their strict conceptual separation of law and morality because it does not do justice to the internal moral motivation of the practice of the rule of law. Frederick Crosson's reflections on a century of Catholic social teaching follows nicely because it focuses on the same basic problem as George: the relationship between the political and the moral. Going back to Rerum Novarum, Crosson identifies two key problems that have preoccupied Catholic social teaching. The first is the responsibility of the state to insure justice in the economic relations of workers and employees. This economic justice requires that the parties enjoy some kind of parity, and it is the duty of the government to promote that equality. But the main contemporary challenge for the church lies now in promoting economic justice between the developed and undeveloped worlds. Without a body competent to promote that justice, however, how can it be achieved? Jacques Maritain recognized this problem and argued that it is not enough simply to set up a world government, for without an underlying political community with a sense of the common good, such a world government would be incapable of promoting true justice. The second key problem is the responsibility of the state with respect to religion. The

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traditional Catholic view holds that the state has a positive duty to promote religion as constitutive of the common good. Monsignor John K. Ryan of The Catholic University of America argued influentially between the wars that within the American context, the government had the duty to promote religion without favoring any particular confession. John Courtney Murray backed off from that claim, however, by conceiving government as a Rechtstaat whose duty was to protect the rights of its citizens (conceived as immunities and including religious rights) and to secure public order. Murray'S posture reflects the fundamental problem for Catholic social teaching in the face of the modern liberal state. As MacIntyre has shown, modern liberal states allow for widely divergent conceptions of the good life where the only limit on such conceptions is that they cannot be binding on everyone. Public discourse within such states then is a kind of bargaining about group preferences. So the problem now is how can the Church's social teaching, which presupposes a morally thick theory of the common good, relate to states that are no longer capable of public moral discourse because they are no longer political communities in the classical sense? Crosson provides no answer to this question; the future efficacy of Catholic social teaching is in God's hands, not ours. A different encyclical of Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (1891), provides the starting point for Timothy Noone's reflections on the course of medieval scholarship and philosophy. Noone focuses his discussion on the key figures, texts, and historians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The first great historian was the Louvain scholar Maurice De Wulf. De Wulf's work provided the initial grand narrative of formation (fifth-twelfth century), apogee (thirteenth century), and decline (fourteenth-fifteenth century); asserted the formal autonomy of philosophy from theology; and controversially claimed that there was genuine doctrinal unity. Etienne Gilson contested De Wulf's assertions by stressing the intimate interconnection of philosophy and theology in Christian philosophy, and by articulating the doctrinal diversity of medieval thought. Since Gilson followed DeWulf in considering the thirteenth century in general and Thomas Aquinas in particular as the apogee, it was up to Gilson's pupil, the Franciscan Philotheus Boehner, to highlight the achievements of Scotus and Ockham and to illuminate the rich developments in fourteenth-century logic that anticipate much that can be found in contemporary logic and philosophy of language. The last great figure is Fernand Van Steenburghen, the historian of the thirteenth century who vigorously contested Gilson's interpretation. Noone outlines the ways in which the study of medieval philosophy has been advanced by the everimproving critical editions produced by such groups as the Bibliotheca

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Francisca HistMica and the Leonine Commission. He concludes with some reflections on the dialectic between medieval and contemporary philosophy. He notes that on the one hand, medieval philosophy challenges contemporary perspectives, particularly in its unified conception of rational inquiry and its shared cultural background, while on the other hand contemporary thought, as embodied in the analytic and Heideggarian traditions, has enriched and stimulated medieval studies. Kenneth Schmitz's magisterial overview of German Catholic thought in the twentieth century takes its starting point from some of the developments just outlined by Noone: the emergence of neo-Scholaticism and the historical clarification of medieval philosophy. Yet while German Catholic thought remains rooted in the philosophia perennis, what is distinctive is its engagement with contemporary currents. The emergence of the transcendental method in Karl Rahner, for example, is an attempt to reinterpret Aquinas in the light of the turn to subjectivity inaugurated in Kant; in contrast to Kant, however, Rahner argues that the transcendental turn discloses not that the finite subject is limited to the phenomenal, but rather that subjectivity bears a dynamism to Infinite being. If Rahner sought to integrate Thomas and contemporary thought, Josef Pieper sought instead to illuminate contemporary problems through a retrieval of St. Thomas. Schmitz shows that much of German Catholic thought in this century has been a creative dialogue with Phenomenology, as seen most especially in the work of Dietrich Von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, and Gustav Siewerth. From his varied analysis of the key developments in German Catholic thought, Schmitz discerns certain recurring metaphysical themes: a focus on being within an implicit horizon of creation, a strongly Neoplatonic concern with transcendence and the transcendentals, and a correlative conception of human reason as openness to being and transcendence. These themes converge in the concern with analogy reflected most significantly in the work of Erich Przywara; the way to overcome the dialectical opposition of identity and difference is through an appreciation of the way in which the analog;ia entis allows for a transcendent immanence that neither collapses being into identity nor sunders it in difference. Schmitz argues that what is most distinctive of German Catholic thought is not its development of traditional themes, but rather its orchestration of its own peculiar understanding of freedom in its ontological sense as Seinsfreiheit (as opposed to Entscheidungsfreiheit). As noted by Schmitz, and as reflected in the bestowal of an honorary doctorate on him during the course of the weekend colloquium, one of the most significant German Catholic philosophers of the latter part of the twentieth century is Robert Spaemann. Spaemann is not well known in

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North America, however, so this volume includes an introduction to his ethics by Richard Schenk. Spaemann is impossible to pigeonhole philosophically; he is rather a Socratic figure who approaches each problem with an analytical rigor, a concern for language, a trust in common moral intuitions, and a deep skepticism about philosophical claims to absolute systematic truth. His ethical thought is marked by a concern with the ways in which human deficiency, what is theologically categorized as Original Sin, limits the search for moral truths. Spaemann is critical of Enlightenment optimism regarding moral progress; he shares the early Frankfurt school's belief that the triumph of instrumental reason has deformed moral thinking. He is especially critical of consequentialism because it functionalizes the human person. The human person lies at the heart of Spaemann's ethical reflections; indeed, Schenk categorizes his thought as an "ordinary ontology of the human person." Spaemann's analysis of the relationship between Christianity and modem philosophy reveals many of the central features of his thought. While antiquity was characterized by a rivalry between philosophy and theology and the medieval period by their hierarchical harmony, modem philosophy wants to emancipate itself from theology by subsuming it. Modem philosophy integrates theology by validating some of its claims at the bar of reason and so reducing Christianity to natural religion. The key figures in this regard are Rousseau and Hegel. The lesson that Spaemann draws from this history is that none of the previous paradigms for the relationship between philosophy and theology are appropriate. Spaemann argues that the health of both disciplines requires that they exist alongside one another. They should pursue their inquiries without any coordinating presupposition. Christianity needs to listen to philosophy in order to appropriate and communicate its own content. It needs philosophy especially in order to evaluate scientific claims that give prima facie grounds for rethinking theological claims. Christianity should avoid reductionistic philosophies that claim to understand religion better than it understands itself, transcendental theories that set limits to what can be known and experienced, and consequentialist ethical theories that instrumentalize reasons and persons; it should favor philosophies that allow for realistic truth claims. Philosophy needs theology to make it think again, to guard against absolute systematizing, and to open up the good. Spaemann concludes that as long as philosophy keeps Socrates as its model, it will not lose Christ from its sight. A different strain in twentieth-century German philosophy is highlighted in Nicholas Lobkowicz's account of the powerful spell cast by ideas allegedly originating in Karl Marx. As Lobkowicz tells the story, German philosophy began to take Marx seriously when it began to read his early

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writings as a development of Left-Hegelianism. Hegel lent philosophical depth to Marx and Marx gave political-historical weight to Hegel. The early Marx, read through Left-Hegelian spectacles, became a seductive philosophical force through the imputation to him of ideas that have little or no grounding in his own thought and no connection to his mature works. For example, the Frankfurt School's concept of a critical theory is really Left-Hegelian; there is little genuine Marx in what has passed for Neo-Marxism. As Marx was considered to be the premier critic of modernity, he was putatively at the origin of any critique. Mter World War II, the renewed interest in Marx influenced by Sartre resulted in Marx coming to be seen through a French prism as a kind of precursor of existentialism. The ideas ofJurgen Habermas, the most influential German philosopher in the late twentieth century and often described as somehow Marxist, has only the most tenuous connection to anything in the texts of Marx. Thus the supposed latent seduction of German philosophy by Marx is really a latent seduction by Left-Hegelianism, and its enduring legacy can be seen in the way in which it is now taken for granted that there can be no consideration of the history of ideas without a consideration of social and political frameworks. The ultimate effect of this seduction is that sociology has now become the foundational discipline grounding philosophy and theology. A completely different strain of German thought is outlined by !Whert Sokolowski in his treatment of Phenomenology. This movement fits neatly into a consideration of this past century of philosophy since it was inaugurated by the publication of Edmund Husserl's two-volume Logical Investigations in 1900 and 1901. Husserl's great achievement was to break the grip of the Cartesian subject as a solitary self-enclosed consciousness struggling to recover a lost world. Through his understanding of intentionality, Husserl showed that rather than being locked in the psychologistic solipsism of our ideas and impressions, we experience and perceive things in the world directly through a manifold of presentations that it is the task of phenomenology to articulate. Husserl thus opened the door for the analyses of the early Heidegger. Sokolowski's perceptive analysis of the relationship between Husserl and Heidegger shows especially how Heidegger was influenced by Husserl's doctrines of categorial articulation and the intention of things in their absence in his treatment of the question of being and the abiding unconcealedness of truth. Sokolowski displays some interesting contrasts between Husserl and Heidegger: while the former was a scientist-mathematician who came to philosophy with a kind of rationalist outlook, the latter brought a kind of religiousmoral outlook with existential overtones; where Husserl had a rather skeletal grasp on the history of philosophy but wide-ranging interests,

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Heidegger brought a wide-ranging acquaintance with the history of philosophy to bear upon a monomanical interest in the question of being. Sokolowski goes on to outline the way in which Phenomenology spread into the French-speaking philosophical world through the works of Sartre, who was influenced by Husserl's understanding of intentionality and absence even as he criticized Husserl for not engaging in existentialist analysis, and then Merleau-Ponty, who was especially influential in his articulation of the phenomenology of perception. Sokowlowski goes on to outline the spread of phenomenology in other areas of the West and its influence on the subsequent pursuit of philosophy as Hermeneutics and Deconstruction. Daniel Dahlstrom's contribution illustrates the widespread influence of phenomenological themes insofar as it culminates in a discussion of Heidegger's analysis of art as an alethiological event. The overall aim of the essay is to provide a loose narrative of some prominent developments in philosophy and art in the twentieth century that have brought aesthetics to the center of philosophical inquiry. He concentrates on three general movements. The first is the connection between post-pragmatic analytic philosophy and Cubism and Dadaism. What these movements have in common is their undermining of the positivistic claim that empirical science provides a single privileged cognitive perspective on reality. As argued especially by Nelson Goodman, it is rather the case that perspective is always multiple and conventional and all perception is a human achievement with an inescapable emotional dimension. The second movement outlined by Dahlstrom is expressionism and the humanizing function of aesthetics. Here the main figure is R. G. Collingwood. Art is not mimesis, but rather the expression of the human spirit; we come to know what we feel when we give it form in art. The third and final movement is expressed in some converging themes in the New Critics and Heidegger, who were reacting against expressionism in favor of recovering the non-subjective truth-disclosing dimension of art. It was Heidegger especially who emphasized the way in which art makes genuine ontological disclosures: Beauty is the way that truth as unhiddenness prevails in being. What ultimately emerges from these reflections is a sense of the way in which our emotions color our cognitive experiences as a kind of existential dimension (Be.ftndlichkeit); that all our knowing is hermeneutical or interpretive; and that insofar as both art and philosophy are distinct from technology and instrumental reason and suffer from the dominance of the latter, their fates are inescapably intertwined. Another domain that has emerged as a central topic of philosophical concern at the close of the century is religion, and Eugene Longs "Western Philosophy of Religion in the Last Hundred Years" provides an historical

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overview of that development. Themes that were sounded at the beginning of the century recur at the end: a renewed interest in the immanence of God as encountered in religious experience and a stronger sense of the historical and interpretive quality of religious experience. The post-World War I trends away from the theoretical-metaphysical analysis of religion in favor of experience, historicity, and practical reason were reflected in pragmatism (William James) and phenomenology (Rudolph Qtto). The mid-century marked a crisis of sorts as the claim of the very possibility of philosophical/ experiential knowledge of God was subjected to the twin assaults of Karl Barth and logical positivism, with alternative positions being explored by existentialists, Thomists, and Process philosophers. From the 1960s on, the philosophical exploration of religion has been marked by a broad pluralism. Long surveys the main trends in the Anglo-American, Continental, Process, and neo-Thomistic traditions. In his conclusion he notes that the most dramatic recent change has been occasioned by the study of non-Western religions, which opens up the thorny problem of adjudicating between competing truth claims. The confrontation of East and West is the subject of Antonio Cua's exploration of the ways in which Western philosophy has influenced twentieth-century Chinese philosophers' understanding of their own intellectual tradition. As Cua notes at the very beginning, "philosophy" itself is a Western concept describing a self-conscious tradition of intellectual activity that has no simple analogue within the Chinese tradition. Thus the challenge for twentieth century Chinese historians of philosophy trained in the West has been to re-interpret constructively their own tradition in the light of the challenge of Western philosophy as they understood it in their time. For Hu Shih (1881-1962), that meant a reading heavily influenced by Dewey'S instrumentalism. Cua argues that while Hu's reading of Confucianism is thus somewhat biased, nonetheless Dewey'S pragmatism is helpful in clarifying some central features of Confucian ethics (e.g., the primacy of practice and the use of plausible presumption). The second great historian, Fung Yu-Lan (1895-1990), was influenced by the early Plato, William James, and neo-realism. The final historian of interest is Lao Szu-kwang, a contemporary philosopher who brings to bear the main currents of the century in his history of Chinese philosophy. Cua ultimately hopes that just as the self-understanding of Chinese philosophy has been constructively transformed by its encounter with Western thought throughout the twentieth century, so too may Western thought be constructively transformed by an encounter with Chinese thought as it moves into the twenty-first century. Cua argues especially that Chinese moral philosophy can provide some fresh

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resources for dealing with Western ethical questions and he has already shown this to be true in his own distinguished career. His hope that increased Western-Chinese dialogue in moral philosophy might help us answer the age-old Socratic and Confucian questions is a fitting end to this volume and a task for the next century of philosophy.

1

British Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Empiricism Responding to Idealism

THOMAS A. RUSSMAN F. H. BRADLEY AND THE RUSSELL-MOORE RESPONSE

Just before and a little after the turn of the century, Francis Herbert Bradley had a brilliant but brief influence on British philosophy. Even his eventual strongest critics, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, show in their juvenilia that they started out as disciples, and rather wholehearted disciples, of Bradley. It was a striking accomplishment that idealism should have, even for a short time, such a pervasive and powerful impact on British thought. After all, British philosophers had largely resisted the Cartesian and Leibnizian permutations that led directly through Kant to Hegel. And so British idealism, even though it obviously owed a great deal to the continental Hegelians, nevertheless needed a different way of presenting itself. Bradley argued for monism straight from the problems he found in the empiricism of John Stuart Mill. And in the end the collapse of idealism in England at the hands of Russell and Moore was nothing but a return to empiricism in a yet newer form. The fact that the entire early career of Russell and Moore can be defined first of all as adherence to Bradley and then revolt against Bradley shows in itself the shaping influence Bradley had upon the initial characteristics of twentieth-century British philosophy. In his Principles ofLOgiC, l Bradley attacked empiricism by attacking the atomism he found it to imply. He noted that Mill's theory of science required that one move from knowledge of bare particulars to scientific knowledge by a process of induction. Bradley found this explanation of scientific knowledge incoherent, arguing that from atomistic particulars no inference whatsoever can be made. Only when the particulars come to be linked by universals (which Bradley liked to call "identities"-a 1.

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F. H. Bradley, Principles ofLogic, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1928).

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term convenient for the quick move to monism it facilitates) does the move to scientific laws become possible. On this point of logic Bradley seems to be entirely right. A Thomist or Aristotelian would say that one comes to know particulars intellectually only by means of universals. Only by means of universals does one describe the patterns in the natures and causes of things that can ultimately justify a statement at the level of scientific law. Conceding this much to Bradley still leaves open the question: Whence come these universals so necessary to begin the path towards scientific knowledge? If in reply one argues that the path to universal concepts for humans begins with a pre-conceptual awareness of particulars as already formed entities, which happen in our universe to have many things in common with other particular entities, than one adopts a realistic epistemology to explain how universals arise by a process whose beginnings are prior to logic. If, on the other hand, one believes that the universal forms are innate to reason and come to impose themselves upon the raw and inchoate data of sense, then there is no pre-conceptual awareness from which universal concepts arise a posteriori. This strong a priori view is characteristic of Kantian and neo-Kantian positions. It does not allow a beginning from pre-conceptual awareness of particulars. It would appear, therefore, that Mill and his followers, in order to reply to Bradley's attack, need only develop some account of concept formation that shows how concepts are formed through an initial nonconceptual awareness of particulars, and that once formed allow for the logical moves characteristic of scien tific method. To say this is not to conclude that Mill wins this argument with Bradley. It remains to be seen whether empiricism has the capacity to give such an account of concept formation, one that does not collapse back into the epistemological atomism against which Bradley's criticism seems a success. The nexus of controversy between Bradley and his erstwhile disciples Russell and Moore was not his Principles of Logic, however, but his Appearance and Realiti published ten years later in 1893. In this work Bradley argues that "appearance"-which would seem to include all of our ordinary experience-is full of contradictions. On the assumption that reality itself must be coherent, Bradley concludes that the world of our ordinary experience is not reality. In chapters 2 and 3 of Book I, he argues that the very notion of relation is self-contradictory. This conclusion leads to monism by the following argument. In order for there to be differences, there must be relations by which the differences are different from one another. It follows that if there are no relations there are no 2.

F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

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differences. But, as Bradley thinks he has demonstrated, relations are incoherent. Reality, however, cannot be incoherent. Therefore, reality can have no relations and can have no differences. Conclusion: Reality is an undifferentiated one (monism). Obviously the key premise here is the one that insists that relations are incoherent. Bradley says a great deal in support of this premise, but his essential argument can be stated briefly. In order for us to distinguish any quality, that quality must be different from other qualities. But to be different is to be related by the relationship of difference. Therefore, any quality must both be and be related. This, however, implies that there must be a diversity within each quality, the diversity between its being and its being related. But then how are these two aspects of a quality united? If they are united, which it seems they surely must be, then they must be united by a relationship between them. But this same point can be repeated over and over again ad infinitum. To quote Bradley, "We, in brief, are led by a principle of fission which conducts us to no end."3 What Bradley is saying is that every relation between terms must itself become a term that then requires a further relation between it and each of the original terms ad infinitum. Notice here that Bradley argues for idealism directly from empiricism, not like Hegel did, arguing from the tradition of Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant. Bradley is trading here upon an empiricist assumption that goes back at least as far as Hume's Treatise, the assumption that anything which is distinguishable is distinct and separable "and may exist separately, and have no need of anything else to support (its) existence."4 In other words, Bradley's whole argument trades upon a lack of the Aristotelian distinction between substance and relation as categories. For Aristotle a distinguishable substance is a separate existent, but a distinguishable relation is not. Rather, it is the nature of a relation that it joins its relata without need for the mediation of further relations. If! am right in here suggesting that Bradley's argument that relations are incoherent shows a problem for phenomenalism/empiricism but not for Aristotelianism, then we have an explanation for the fact that both Russell and Moore, in their attempts to refute Bradley's argument, take their widest swing away from the British tradition of phenomenalism/empiricism. In his "Refutation of Idealism" (1903)5 Moore proposed that we directly perceive material things. Russell's early realism 3. Ibid., p. 26. 4. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), bk I, part 4, section 5· 5. G. E. Moore, "The Refutation of Idealism," in Philosophical Studies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).

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seems to have gone even farther than Moore's. In his Principles of Mathematics (1903) Russell not only holds that in sense perception we are immediately aware of both relations and the things they relate, he lets the momentum of his anti-Bradleyanism carry him all the way to a Platonic form of realism in which the very meaning of any term depends upon its having something to refer to. 6 While neither Moore nor Russell developed the precise Aristotelian response to Bradley's attack upon relations, they clearly shared the instinct that a realistic epistemology and ontology were the antidote. Moore never accompanies Russell into the realm of Platonism. Rather he shows a subtlety ofresponse that seems to anticipate the later Wittgenstein's observation that we must be on guard lest we be misled by grammar. Grammatically words for relations like words for things can serve as subjects and objects of verbs in sentences, but this similarity should not lead us to confuse relations with things. The logic of a larger framework makes clear that they are not the same. This observation by Moore is as close as either he or Russell come to Aristotelian insight on this matter. 7 That this early realism of Russell and Moore was entirely a function of their reaction to Bradley's idealism is shown by the fact that they abandoned it and returned to phenomenalism as soon as the influence of idealism, under constant attack in Britain, America, and on the Continent, wanes to the point of almost disappearing. Then the old problems that had led to phenomenalism in the first place moved Russell and Moore back in that direction. From the realization that the look of a thing may change while the thing itself is presumably not changing, Moore concludes that what we perceive is not the object itself but rather a sense datum. In Russell's case his later grand project of logical constructionism swamps his early realism. One part of this grand project was to reduce the physical objects of perception to more primitive atoms of experience out of which they might be constructed. This he undertook in the service of logical and mathematical perspicuity, a passion that was to dominate most of the rest of his philosophical career. The immediate effect on his theory of perception was that the objects of perception are constructs or phenomena after all. The next two major sections of this paper will pursue the career of British logical constructionism-first as Russell and Whitehead used it in their attempt to reduce mathematics to logic, and then as it played out at the high water mark oflogical positivism in the 1930S and 1940s. 6. Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938 ), pp. 47, 99- 100 ,446-55. 7. G. E. Moore, "External and Internal Relations," in Philosophical Studies.

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Before we move on to these important topics, perhaps we owe Bradley a modest final tribute. His attack upon the coherence of relations, while I think not at all successful, nevertheless forced Russell, Moore, and others to a temporary realism. When they later abandoned this realism, they seemed not to notice that this change of heart attenuated greatly the force of their earlier replies to Bradley. Perhaps it is the continued loathing ofidealism that later inclines the logical positivists to persevere in their optimistic but implausible claim that the atoms that are fundamental to their logical systems do actually refer to objects in the world. Their optimism on this point seems to lack other motivation. But to say only this much on behalf of Bradley is merely to tweak the noses of the assorted phenomenalists and logical constructionists who took his place as the philosophical leaders of British thought. Of more lasting importance perhaps is Bradley's attack upon what I call "epistemological atomism," the view that one can extract a universal suitable for logical use directly out of a singular particular. Bradley's point was, of course, to argue that particulars are just appearances. For those who want to resist this conclusion, the challenge is to explain the relationship between universal and particular, both in the realm of concept formation and in the realm of ontology. Russell's logical atomism and the ensuing logical positivism seem plainly ill-suited to meet this challenge. It seems that even the appreciation of its importance waits in British philosophy upon the work of the later Wittgenstein. THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS

All of Enlightenment philosophy used mathematics as the paragon of reason successfully at work. What was taken to be the brilliant clearness and distinctness of mathematical truth even placed the evidence of the senses in the shadows by comparison. But this implied that mathematics itself must have a foundation other than in objects of perceptual awareness. That is, mathematics must have an a priori foundation. Thus assumptions about mathematics and the certainty of its a priori foundations were the heart and soul of Enlightenment rationalism. These facts set the stage for the drama that was to unfold in the early twentieth century. Philosophers began to get very serious about discovering and elucidating once and for all the a priori foundations of mathematics. These efforts, to put it briefly, failed completely. We have no time here to catalogue and document this extensive failure. By now others have already done SO.8 To the extent that early twentieth-century British 8. Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

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philosophy participated in the ongoing tradition of the Enlightenment (which it did with enthusiasm), it too shook at the collapse of the effort to find foundations for mathematics. I shall concentrate here on one part of this drama-the effort to find foundations for mathematics in logic by reducing mathematics to a compartment of logic. The central figure in this effort was Bertrand Russell. A major part of Russell's reply to idealism had been his use of mathematics to refute the coherence theory of truth. According to idealism there are degrees of truth. Our frameworks become truer and truer as we rid them of their inconsistencies. No framework that we now have embodies absolute truth, because every framework we now have lacks complete consistency. Bradley argued for this conclusion in Book I of Appearance and &ality. According to him all the ordinary categories of human thought can be pressed to show their underlying incoherence, especially the category of relation which we have already discussed. Russell's reply was to assert that mathematics is entirely certain and coherent. It is, therefore, not just an appearance; it does not embody merely a degree of truth, but rather the full measure of truth. Russell firmly believed that what he took to be Hegel's failure to understand and appreciate the utter reliability of mathematics showed more clearly than anything else the bankruptcy of idealism. Mathematics, Russell claimed, was fully coherent and gives us what the idealists say we do not have: namely, an example of absolute truth. 9 Russell set out to demonstrate the certainty of mathematics by searching for its foundations. To find such foundations in logic itself would ingeniously refute idealism. If mathematics could be shown to be part of logic, then we would be completely assured that no incoherence could be found in it. Incoherence, after all, can only be stated as a violation of logic. Notice that the reduction of mathematics to logic, while it would be a successful reply to idealism's coherence theory of truth, would not in itself show that mathematics has a foundation. It would just move the question to the foundation of logic. Many would no doubt grant that the a priori foundation oflogic is more certain to begin with than the a priori foundation of mathematics; and so, at the very least, the reduction of mathematics to logic would be a major step towards giving it a priori foundations. The part of logic to which Russell attempted to reduce mathematics was the theory of classes. This attempt soon ran up against a paradox which bears Russell's name and can be stated in a simple question: Is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves a member of 9. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, p. 4·

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itself?lO Both a yes answer and a no answer result in contradiction. Russell tries to avoid the paradox by proposing his well known "theory of types,"ll according to which no class can be a member of itself. But this move does not seem to help Russell, because the theory of types is itself not reducible to logic. In other words, it has no justification except Russell's desire to resolve his paradox. Russell failed to reduce mathematics to logic. He, therefore, made no progress in giving mathematics an a priori foundation and, perhaps most stinging of all for him, he failed to show that mathematics is a counterexample to the idealist coherence theory of truth. No one can understand twentieth-century philosophy well who has not studied the attempts to discover the foundations of mathematics since 1900. The collapse of the effort to find a priori foundations may be as great in its significance as any philosophical failure in the history of human thought. The success of mathematics had been almost the entire source of Enlightenment optimism concerning reason. But if mathematics has no a priori foundation in reason, it seems that reason must first discover mathematics through experience. This means that the use of mathematical reasoning in the pursuit of scientific understanding is more than just the exposition and expression of reason's own coherence. Science, despite what Enlightenment philosophers have often said about it, results from the application of intelligence and reasoning to the world, a world with its own forms to be discovered, rather than a world formlessly receiving form (including mathematical form) from reason.

3.

LOGICAL ATOMISM AND LOGICAL POSITIVISM

Alfred North Whitehead, who with Russell was the co-author of the Principia Mathematica, had a more mixed reaction than Russell to ideal-

ism. On the one hand, he maintained his own unique form of perceptual realism, long after Russell had reverted to constructive phenomenalism and even Moore had returned to talk about sense data. On the other hand, he attacked the view (blaming it on Newtonian physics) that the universe is made up of atomistic substances that we can be aware of only indirectly, from which follows the sharp bifurcation of nature into two worlds: the world of physics (known indirectly) and the world of experience (known directly). Whitehead mounted the attack upon such bifurcation by analyzing both the world of physics and the world of experience in terms of events and occasions organically united into larger and larger wholes. The larger wholes finally become all comprehensive, returning 10. 11.

Ibid., pp. 101-107. Ibid., pp. 523-28.

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Whitehead to the idealist theme that all relations are internal. 12 In making these and other accommodations to idealism, Whitehead was a comparatively isolated figure. During the 1920S the primary wave of British philosophy raced with Russell and Wittgenstein away from the immensity of idealism. Russell followed his attempt to reduce mathematics to logic with an attempt to construct an ideal language for communication about everything. 13 What would make this language ideal would be its conformity to the canons of logic applied in the following way: analysis of all meaningful complex propositions into conjunctions of more elementary propositions, further analyzed into conjunctions of the most elementary propositions, finally analyzed into a logical arrangement of names. Only propositions thus analyzable can have meaning and can aspire to truth. The truth of complex propositions is a function of the truth of the elementary propositions into which they can be analyzed. As Wittgenstein put it in his Tractatus Lo[5ica-Philosophicus,14 this ideal language enables us to picture the world. The names in the ideal language correspond to "objects" in the world. Propositions picture arrangements of these objects, which arrangements he calls "states of affairs." Only propositions can be true or false. The only things we can know or say about the world are the things that can be expressed in this ideal language. "Logical atomism" is the name for this attempt to reduce all meaningfullanguage and all that can be known about the world to elementary names and propositions on the one side and elementary objects and their arrangements on the other. The picturing relationship, as Wittgenstein called it, between the ideal language and the world implies that for him, and this true also for Russell, there is an isomorphism between the logical structure of the ideal language and the structure of the world. Once again the methodology is entirely a priori. We do not decide what knowable structures the world has by looking at the world and seeing what structures it presents, but rather by proposing an ideal structure for language (indeed, the ideal structure for language) and then insisting that this structure mirrors the structure of the world. 12. Alfred North Whitehead, Processand&ality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), summary in chapters 1 and 2 with more complete discussion in Parts II and III. As we saw above, Bradley attacked even internal relations as incoherent; but he too regarded them as more coherent than external relations. In other words, according to the coherence theory of truth, a view of the universe in terms of only internal relations is more coherent than a view of the world that includes external relations. And so for Bradley as well as for other idealists, a first step towards monism is the step towards internal relations. 13. Bertrand Russell, "Philosophy of Logical Atomism," Monist (1918-1919): 28-29. 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Humanities Press, 1961 ).

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Russell had been sure that mathematical truth served as a counterexample to the idealist coherence theory of truth. Mathematics as we already had it, he thought, was fully coherent and therefore not subject, as Hegel would have it, to further and further future revisions until the absolute is reached. It is by logic that we show coherence or incoherence. Reducing mathematics to logic was to show its radical and final coherence. Now the reduction of all meaningful discourse to the forms of logically ideal language was to confer maximum coherence upon our knowledge of the world as well. This too was an attack upon coherence theory. It is clear that Wittgenstein thought he had completed something quite definitive when he finished the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Philosophy had completed its task by showing that both present and future knowledge of the world could be rendered utterly coherent. A further advantage in the battle against idealism was the fact that this fully coherent world, described or pictured in the ideal language, was an atomistic world where the relations among the objects were external rather than internal. The objects or simples in the world were radical substances which existed in independence from one another and whose relations to one another were external. As a response to idealism, all this was very neat, and it gave Russell and Wittgenstein immense satisfaction for a short time. It quickly became clear, however, that the sublime coherence of logical atomism required a steep price, the price to be expected from such an a priori methodology. The scheme set forward in the Tractatus was as coherent as one could want, but it supplied little evidence for the claim that it described the way things actually are. This problem became clear at the most basic level. Wittgenstein gave no examples of the names on the one hand or the objects on the other that were the most basic atoms for language and the world respectively. Indeed, it vexed him greatly that he was never able to produce a satisfactory example of either. In "Philosophy of Logical Atomism," Russell had already identified the objects or the names that were basic for his own logical atomism. He returned to radical empiricism. The names fundamental for language have their undefined meaning from their reference to particular sense data, properties of sense data, and relations between sense data. Whatever sense data were for Russell, they were neither common sense physical objects nor the fundamental entities of physics. Both the objects of common sense and the objects of physics were constructions out of sense data. How could one be sure, however, that any candidate for the classification "sense data" was not further analyzable? Eventually Russell saw that there was no way to guarantee absolute atomic status to anything. The point of logical atomism was to supply definitive certitude and coherence to the

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entire general frame oflegitimate human knowledge. The failure to supply the needed intuition for the undefined atomistic terms at the basis of the system showed once again that complete logical coherence does not guarantee certitude about anything. In the end the problem here for Russell and Wittgenstein was the same one Bradley had pointed out in his criticism of Mill's theory of induction. The only way for the basic terms of a system to have a logical relationship with the more complex terms is for the basic terms to be already universals. The word "this" all by itself cannot be logically constructed into something more complex that would serve the purposes of knowledge or science. It must be coupled with other terms such as in "this splash of yellow." But then we do not have singular atomic expressions on the linguistic side to picture the bare particulars that are taken to be the ultimate constituents of experience. One of the things for which we can admire both Russell and Wittgenstein is their repeated honest admission of failure to achieve what they had so ambitiously hoped for. Their failure was never greater than on the issue of foundations. At this historical point cross pollination from a philosophical movement called logical positivism with its roots in a group called the Vienna Circle, and to a lesser extent in a smaller group in Berlin, began a dominating influence on philosophy in the English speaking world through the 1930S and into the 1950s.15 Ludwig Wittgenstein was not a member of the Vienna Circle but was in regular contact with its members, especially with Schlick and Waismann. Like Wittgenstein the members of the Circle owed much to the logical work of Bertrand Russell. In fact, Russell was second only to Ernst Mach as a source of philosophical ideas for the Circle. (Mach in turn claimed Berkeley and Hume as the chief sources of his own philosophi15. In Gennany these logical positivists remained a minority with limited influence. Their strongest affinities were with the English-speaking philosophical world, whither they had almost all betaken themselves by 1938. Waismann and Neurath went to England (along with Karl Popper, whose association with the Vienna Circle was as critic rather than as member); Kaufmann, Feigl, Camap, Menger, and Goedel went to the United States (along with Reichenbach and Hempel, who were members of the Berlin group). Well before the diaspora of this group of Gennan-speaking philosophers into the Englishspeaking world, their influence had preceded them. The Americans Ernest Nagel and Willard Quine had visited Vienna to make contact. At Cambridge John Wisdom and at Oxford Gilbert Ryle found the work of the Vienna Circle congenial. Also at Oxford A J. Ayer, whose Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) was and perhaps remains the most effective fonnulation of the logical positivist position in English, had spent time joining the discussions of the Vienna Circle before their views had become widely known in England. My point in mentioning all these historical connections is to show why a movement with strong roots in Vienna and Berlin must nevertheless be an important part of the twentiethcentury history of British philosophy.

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cal thinking.) For all these reasons the stage was ready for Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicrrPhilosophicus to have a profound influence on the development of positivism in the Circle. The logical positivists concurred with the doctrine of the Tractatus on the following major points: 1. All genuine propositions are either elementary propositions or truth functions of elementary propositions. As we shall see shortly, the positivists had more to say about what could count as an elementary proposition than did Wittgenstein. 2. Logical truths are tautologies and tautologies say nothing. That is, the predicate of a proposition in logic adds nothing to its subject. Nor do the predicates in propositions of mathematics. This last point grants Russell's contention that mathematics is reducible to logic. 3. Propositions in philosophy, as they construed philosophy, also say nothing. That is, they express no doctrine, but nor are they tautologies. Rather, the entire point of philosophy is shown in propositions of the form allowed by truth functional analysis. True philosophical method is pointing out to people who propose ill formed propositions that some of the terms in their propositions have no meaning (cf. Tractatus 6.53). This limits the role of philosophy to the activity of clarifying thought.

By the canons of philosophy thus construed, most of the propositions of traditional philosophy are neither false nor contradicted, but rather "nonsensical." They are "nonsense" in that they lack sense or meaning. They lack sense or meaning because they do not connect truth functionally with proper elementary propositions. This third point carries us into a controversy of interpretation concerning the relationship between logical positivism and the doctrine of the Tractatus. The Vienna Circle found implicit in the Tractatus the "verifiability principle." This principle was the most distinctive doctrine of logical positivism. A standard logical positivist statement of this principle is the following: For a proposition to be cognitively meaningful it must be either analytic or empirically verifiable. In other words, leaving aside tautologies, all meaningful propositions either report what is immediately given in experience or are truth functionally reducible to such reports. Norman Malcolm has maintained that the logical positivists were mistaken in this reading of the Tractatus. 16 He points out that the Tractatus nowhere explicitly discusses "verification." This last point is true, but hardly conclusive. If the meaning of a complex proposition is a function of the meaning of elementary propositions, and the meaning of any elementary 16. Nonnan Malcolm, "Wittgenstein," in Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

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proposition depends upon the meaning of the names which it includes, and the meaning of any name is the object which it names-then all meaning depends upon objects. Why is this not just another way of stating the verifiability principle? Malcolm cites the Tractatus as saying that objects are independent of "what is the case." Malcolm concludes that Tractarian objects are not given in experience. From this he further concludes that the Tractarian meaning system, based as it is on objects, is not based upon empirical verifiability. It seems, however, that Malcolm is mistaken about this for two reasons: 1. "What is the case" means for Wittgenstein "objects in configuration." Since any object can enter into a number of configurations, it is itself independent of any particular configuration. It is only in this sense that Wittgenstein says that objects are independent of what is the case-that is, in the sense that no name is defined by propositions picturing configurations or states of affairs. But what is the case is just the configuration or state of affairs that is currently verified. To fail to understand this is to fail to understand the entire project of logical atomism, according to which the more elementary is not to be defined in terms of the less elementary. In other words, for Wittgenstein objects are never to be found except as part of what is the case-that is, as part of a current configuration. They are independent of what is the case (i.e., of any current configuration) only in the sense that they are capable of entering into entirely different configurations. This hardly implies that objects are not given in experience. 2. On the contrary, it seems that the objects must be given in experience, unless we are to suppose we have some other access to the world than through experience. The Tractatus makes this point rather directly: "If the world had no substance [i.e., no objects, since for the Tractatus objects are the substance of the world], then whether propositions had a sense would depend on whether another proposition was true (2.0211). In that case we could not sketch any picture of the world [true or false] (2.0212)." Propositions do not define names. The meaning of a name is the object it names. But then how can its meaning be known unless its object is an object of experience? Surely we have more than a little reason to find in this doctrine what the logical positivists found, namely the implicit presentation of a verifiability principle of meaning.

Be that as it may, the entire edifice oflogical atomism and logical positivism was soon crumbling. The most glaring problem was that the verifiability principle itself was neither tautologous nor empirically verifiable. This meant that both by the standards of the Tractatus and by the standards of logical positivism the verifiability principle was nonsense. The

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problem here is the same problem that Wittgenstein faced in the Tractrr tus when he said that there are a variety of things that are unsayable but which the Tractatus itself nevertheless says. All statements about the connection between language and the world are unsayable and indeed so are all statements that ascribe existence to objects, which are the substance of the world. Wittgenstein nevertheless declares that "unsayable things do indeed exist (6.522}." But, of course, this statement is itself unsayable. Wittgenstein believed that saying the unsayable can lead to metaphysical insight, but that these unsayable sayings must in the end be "thrown away (6.54) ," because they cannot be part of the system that says all that can be said. The verifiability principle, since it purports to ground the relationship between language and the world, is also unsayable. It is neither tautology nor empirically verifiable. The problem for both Wittgenstein and the logical positivists is that for their systems such statements can never be "thrown away" without leaving the systems themselves unintelligible. But if the verifiability principle must be said, then it must contradict itself. The attempt to limit philosophy to the clarification of thought and to eliminate metaphysics from the realm of the meaningful and sayable leaves the systems that would do so themselves meaningless and unsayable. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein tries to allow himself the needed wiggle room by declaring that there is a legitimate domain of unsayable insight, which he called "the mystical." But how does it reduce the embarrassment to claim that the truth oflogical atomism or logical positivism is beyond determination and that even an understanding of these systems must be based in part upon a mystical experience? This mystical gambit never caught on with the logical positivists themselves, and so they sought other remedies. They found even more troubling the fact that paradigmatic scientific laws were simply not reducible, in the way logical positivism required, to protocol sentences describing observations. Since it had been the ideological point oflogical positivism to champion the cause of mathematics and science against their relegation to the domain of "appearance" by the idealists, the non-reducibility of scientific laws seemed a final frustration. If the positivists threw out paradigmatic scientific laws in favor of the criterion of reducibility, they would be no longer defending science as it had actually been practiced but rather some fictional science or ideal science-a sterile and empty category. On the other hand, if they gave up reducibility in order to allow for paradigmatic scientific laws, then the certitude that was to be a counterexample to idealist coherence theory and that depended upon the logical reduction would evaporate. The positivists opted for science and played out their losing position in the end game.

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Their first move in this end game was to replace verifiability with confirmability. According to this notion a proposition is meaningful if it or a consequence of it is confirmable by observation. But this means that a meaningful scientific law or scientific theory may have many consequences that are not confirmable. This further implies that the process of producing scientific theories and laws involves insightful moves that go beyond observation and the logical permutation of observation language. This admission signaled the end of a long-standing view of the scientific enterprise. Descartes, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and many others had thought the new scientific methodology included no doubtful procedures such as the construction of hypotheses. Once again the objective was to have a science as rigorous as mathematics itself. The illusion of this strong connection between the supposed certitudes of mathematical method and the process of scientific discovery was suffering a final unveiling. Karl Popper had long pointed out that the only logical relationship between observation statements and general scientific theories and laws is not one of verifiability nor even one of confirmability, but rather one of falsifiabilityP If the relationship between scientific theories and laws had been one of reducibility to observation statements, then verification of the observation statements would render the laws and theories in question true. As we have seen, however, such reducibility is not characteristic of scientific laws and theories. Furthermore, the confirmation of consequences of a scientific theory or law does not render that theory or law true. To say it does is to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Falsification, however, of the consequences of a proposed scientific law or theory does have the logical effect of falsifying the theory or law in question. To the extent, therefore, that logic rules the relationship between scientific theories/laws and observation statements, the connection is one of falsification by denial of the consequent. Proposing scientific theories was a matter of proposing hypotheses resulting from imaginative and creative activities not reducible to rules. And so, while he was as much an opponent of Hegelian/Bradleyan idealism as were Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and the positivists, Popper regarded their hyper-quest for certitude to be a misguided response to idealism. Rather, Popper saw positivism and idealism as two sides of the same rationalist coin. Just as positivism was wrong to see the process of scientific discovery as reducible to logical steps, so idealism was wrong to see the process of history as reducible to logical steps. For Popper there is an irreducible creativity and therefore unpredictability set loose 17. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

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in both discovery and history. And so the advances made possible by the production of theories that stand up best to efforts at falsifYing them are not like the advances of the idealists' historical dialectic towards a certain and predetermined outcome. Popper would attack idealism at both ends, denying the logically definitive and all-embracing monistic teleology on the one hand and asserting on the other that what we observe and upon which we base our observation statements is not just appearance but reality itself. Our understanding of this observed world is without doubt incomplete, but it is not comprehensively incoherent. Popper deserves much credit, it has always seemed to me, for his early, strong, and accurate criticism of positivism and logical atomism and for the courage with which he carried this criticism directly into the positivist camp.

4.

LATTER DAY PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

Mter World War II philosophy oflanguage continued to be the dominant preoccupation of British philosophy, but a philosophy of language no longer limited to strict linguistic analysis. Linguistic analysis, strictly speaking, is the project that results from defining all meaningful language as reducible to elementary propositions whose basic terms are definable by reference to objects. A proposition is meaningful insofar as it is either itself such an elementary proposition or is analyzable into such elementary proposition or is translatable into a proposition that is thus analyzable. Already by the late 1940S it was clear that this project had lost its credibility. Too many propositions that philosophers wanted most to declare meaningful (especially scientific laws) could not be "analyzed," that is, they could not be reduced to elementary propositions all of whose terms were definable by strict reference to objects. Even more fundamentally embarrassing for the project of linguistic analysis was that all statements of the project and all attempts to justify it had to make use of propositions that were self-referentially meaningless a priori. And so the move was strongly away from linguistic analysis strictly defined. Nevertheless, the dominant preoccupation continued to be the philosophy of language, and this for at least two reasons. First, it was through the very study of language and through the very attempt to carry out the needed reductions that linguistic analysis (that is, logical atomism and logical positivism) failed. Secondly, after two generations of hard philosophical work trying to get linguistic analysis right, the skills and habits of working on language flourished: the momentum of preoccupation with language had developed over a long time and continued strong, producing interesting and valuable results. This happened despite the fact that the original reasons for limiting philosophy to the

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clarification/analysis of language had disappeared with the collapse of strict linguistic analysis. Remember that the Enlightenment model for knowledge of all kinds was mathematical knowledge. The justification of this role for mathematics as the model of all language was its reduction in turn to logic. And so followed the preoccupation with translating ordinary language propositions into a calculus whose reduction to the elementary could be perspicuously carried out. Just as the attempt to reduce mathematics to logic had failed, so the attempt to reduce all meaningful language to elementary propositions had failed. But this project had been the entire reason for the preoccupation with language in the first place, and this project no longer made sense. Nevertheless, it was only very slowly that such writers as John Austin and Peter Strawson began to edge gingerly into a discussion of the nature of things other than language. Ludwig Wittgenstein helped lead the way in rejecting the ideal language philosophy in whose development he had played so great part. IS He did this by replacing the question, "How might we construct an ideal language suitable for atomistic analysis?" with the question, "How does language actually work?" His standard way of making this point was the admonition: "Don't look for the meaning, look for the use." By this he meant, don't look for meaning understood as reduction by analysis in a single ideal language game to words referring to objects, but rather take notice of how the word is actually used. This use gives the word's meaning. Instead of there being just one ideal language, inclusion in which is the criterion of meaningfulness, there are many language games, use in any of which specifies the meaning of statements and terms. Meaningful language can do more than picture the world. To say that the meaning of a sentence is its use in a language game is to reject the definition of meaning as position in an ideal language outside of which all is meaningless. Each language game is local and is not all embracing. Nor is there any evidence that all the language games are on the way towards becoming part of some final all-embracing linguistic system. And so Wittgenstein's repudiation oflogical atomism and logical positivism is at the same time the continuation of his earlier repudiation of idealism, but in a new way. Previous language games do not predict the shape of new language games. The Tractatus had told us that anything new is just a new combination of the same old atomic parts; this limited new possibilities to the possible arrangements of these same old atomic parts. What Wittgenstein says later in repudiation of the doctrine of the Tractatus is that what is elementary is elementary, not absolutely, but only relative to 18. LudwigWittgenstein, PhilosophicalInvestigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953).

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each language game. The meaning ofa word is never the thing (even if there is one) that corresponds to it. Before one can find out what a name stands for, one must already have mastered the language game to which the name belongs. Only in the context of a language game can one understand to what precisely in the world a word or sentence refers. Many of these points made by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations resemble points made by idealists, Thomists, and others in their disputes with logical atomism/positivism. Bradley, however, had argued that the common sense view of the world was full of incoherence. Since reality must in the end be coherent, Bradley concluded that the common sense world and all scientific and other views connected with it are only "appearance." Reality, of course, he could not hope to characterize beyond indicating an amorphous monism. What Wittgenstein and others working more recently in British philosophy of language have argued is that the so-called incoherences that gave rise to vast metaphysical claims like those made by Bradley are really only paradoxes capable of resolution by careful attention to the various ways language is used. In Britain both idealism and logical atomism achieved whatever plausibility they did largely by criticizing one another. The antidote offered by more recent philosophy of language has been to criticize them both from a new perspective. British philosophy of the later twentieth century has at times exhibited a crab-like drift in the direction of epistemological realism. Part of the failure oflogical positivism and logical atomism was their inability to reduce statements describing physical objects to statements about sense data. The generally acknowledged failure of this reduction has been a blow to phenomenalism of the empiricist sort. The result has frequently been a kind of "linguistic realism" often associated with what has been called "the philosophy of ordinary language." "The philosophy of ordinary language" would be philosophically silly, ifit implied the canonization oflinguistic usage as it now stands. Neither John Austin nor Peter Strawson nor any other of the prominent exponents of "Oxford ordinary language philosophy" made any such unimaginative and conservative assumptions. On the contrary, they were constantly developing new language and new terminology themselves. Like G. E. Moore, and unlike most Cambridge philosophers, Austin came to philosophy from a strong background in linguistics and classics rather than in physics and mathematics. He believed that the first essential step in deliberating about any philosophical issue was first to analyze rather exhaustively the vocabulary and use of language that surrounds that issue. This procedure tends to dissolve apparent puzzles and problems that have frequently sent large groups of philosophers rocketing

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into the speculative empyrean. All this analysis, however, is for Austin no more than preliminary stage setting. By thus avoiding the oftenrepeated mistakes of earlier philosophers, one is able to devote one's energies to more effective discussion. In Sense and Sensibilia19 Austin pursues his method to polemic effect in discussing the doctrine that we do not directly perceive material things, but rather sensa of some sort or other. With an eye for fine linguistic detail that outstrips Wittgenstein's patience in such matters, Austin exposes the confusions that have led many philosophers to argue from the fact of sensory illusion to phenomenalism. Here we have a primary example of "ordinary language philosophy" serving the cause of epistemological realism. Peter Strawson, however, took the repudiation of empiricism in another, Kantian direction. He argued against Austin, insisting that "truth" is a "performative" not a "descriptive" term. 20 "Truth" does not describe a certain sort of relationship between a proposition or judgment and the way things are but rather asserts the speaker's agreement with or support of a proposition or judgment. Having thus cut himself off from foundations in the world, Strawson takes up an enterprise he calls "descriptive metaphysics." This enterprise sets out to describe the actual structure of our thought and lay bare its most general features. He uses this a priori methodology to extensive effect in his second book Individua[s21 where he shows with considerable success, across a number of philosophical domains, that the forms of thought represented in ordinary language are Aristotelian. But if Aristotelianism only happens to be our form of thought, what assurance do we have that it will continue to be our form of thought in the future? Ifwe wish to maintain that this form of thought has a stronger a priori basis than the simple fact that it is current linguistic convention, what possible grounds other than Kantian ones can we have for saying this? The realist, as opposed to the Kantian, addresses these questions by claiming that the form of thought is the way it is in large part because it fits the form of an antecedently existing world, awareness of which gave form to thought. Idealism as advocated by such British philosophers as Bradley and Bosanquet had a dominating positive position in British philosophy for only a short time. This does not mean that British philosophers in general did not take it seriously. On the contrary, responding to idealism has been a major preoccupation of British philosophy through most of the century. 19. John L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Peter Strawson, "Truth," Analysis (1949). 21. Peter Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1964).

20.

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New variations of traditional British empiricism in the form of logical atomism and logical positivism failed in the end to mount a successful response. And so they have suffered rejection in tum. Phenomenalism of the traditional British empiricist sort has been at low ebb in Britain for the last thirty-five years at least. What has succeeded it is a wider and wider range of philosophical discussion characterized by careful attention to the uses oflanguage and the problems that arise from its misuses.

2

History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science: From Atom to Megacosm l WILLIAM A. WALLACE, o.P.

The theme of this essay is closely connected with the topic, "The Philosophy of Science: The Last One Hundred Years." When first approached about my possible contribution to an understanding of this topic, however, I made the point that to cover the field adequately I would have to treat more than philosophy, I would have to enter into the history of science and the sociology of science as well. That perhaps explains why my essay is titled as it now is, "History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science." Yet its subtitle, "From Atom to Megacosm," is actually a better indicator of the message I would like to convey. For, at the beginning of our century many physicists, and Ernst Mach was foremost among them, doubted the reality of atoms and thought of them pretty much as the atomoi of antiquity. The universe was then known to be large, but otherwise it was little different from the kosmos of Ptolemy, Copernicus, or Newton. But during our century empirical proof for the existence of atoms has been offered, first by Einstein in 1905 with his study of Brownian movement, then in 1980 when electron tunneling techniques were used to obtain pictures of atoms on the surface of bodies. In the 1920S Edwin Hubble first demonstrated the existence of galaxies, then evidence for the expanding universe; now the space telescope bearing his name is peering to the limits of extragalactic space. Our knowledge of the very small and the very large has truly grown by leaps and bounds. And the question I would like to pose to you is this: has philosophy gained from this scientific explosion, is our knowledge of philosophy in relation to science any better than it was at the beginning of this century? I. Much of the material in this essay is based on chapters 6 and 7 of my The Modeling of Nature: Philosf1Jhy of Science and Philosf1Jhy of Nature in Synthesis (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), to which fuller reference is made in the final section.

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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: THE BEGINNINGS

To answer such questions we shall have to go back to the beginnings of the philosophy of science movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. We take as our starting point a philosopher and scientist named William Whewell, one of the earliest English writers to write at length on the philosophy of science, and, indeed, on a philosophy of science based on its history. Whewelliocated himself in the tradition of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, his fellow alumni from Trinity College, Cambridge. He also situated his philosophy with respect to two contemporaries, August Comte and John Stuart Mill, whom some might regard as cofounders of the discipline. In the spirit of Bacon and Newton, Whewell insisted on the importance of induction for arriving at the principles on which science must be based and so consistently referred to physics and astronomy as "inductive sciences." Whewell defined the ideal of a philosophy of science as "nothing less than a complete insight into the essence and conditions of all real knowledge, and an exposition of the best methods for the discovery of new truthS."2 Thus he identified its scope as jointly epistemological, a study of the nature of scientific knowledge, and methodological, a study of the methods whereby such knowledge can be attained. The realization of that ideal, for him, could only depend on a review of the most certain and stable knowledge we already possess and on how truths we universally recognize as such have been discovered. The premise of his enterprise is that doctrines "of solid and acknowledged certainty" exist and that these make up what we commonly call sciences. 3 Whewell's warrant for beginning this study was the systematic success achieved by the sciences in his day, which he regarded as completely unparalleled in preceding centuries. Others before him had pointed out instances in the physical sciences that supported their views of the progress of knowledge, but his was the first work, he claimed, that was drawn from a connected and systematic survey of the whole range of physical science and its history. This feature served to differentiate his effort from that of his illustrious predecessor, Francis Bacon. In Bacon's day, scarcely any of the sciences existed in developed fashion. Bacon only divined how sciences might be constructed, Whewell said, whereas in his own time it was known how their construction had actually taken place. In elaborating his philosophy Whewell had to face the Kantian problem of how necessary truths can be derived from experience, and in fact 2.

Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History,

1.1.

3. Ibid., p.

2.

2

vols. (London: 1840),

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he adapted parts of Kant's solution by making the mind an active principle for their attainment. In his view the formative activity of the mind is what structures experience so that one perceives events in space, time, and causal sequence. It does so by way of the "fundamental ideas" that are appropriate to each science. The function of such ideas is not merely regulative, as it was for Kant, but constitutive, so that it yields valid metaphysical knowledge of the structure of reality. These ideas are not grasped by all, Whewell conceded, but they can be seen intuitively by those who work in the particular sciences. There, such ideas can be grasped progressively and clarified through contact with reality, since consideration of the science's subject matter is necessary for their attainment and proper use. Whewell was especially insistent on the mind's ability to discern causal connections, maintaining that knowledge of causes is necessary for a true understanding of the universe. Largely because of his concern with causal explanation Whewell vigorously opposed Comte's positivism and his conception of scientific method. Predictably, he was critical of the law of the three stages, which regarded theological and metaphysical thought as preliminary to the scientific or positive stage. In the latter stage causal investigation was ruled out, since, for Comte, the objects of science are exclusively sensible facts and the laws or relationships that obtain between them. Whewell rejected Comte's stages on the grounds that they had no basis in history and are contrary to sound philosophy. He examined in detail the Comtian interpretation of Newton's law of gravitational attraction and characterized it as superficial. His own analysis of Newton, Whewell insisted, shows that the discovery of causes and metaphysical discussions have been essential steps in the progress of each science. Three years after Whewell published his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, John Stuart Mill brought out his System of Logic, in which he acknowledged a heavy dependence on Whewell's writings, so much so that without their aid the Logic might never have been written. Mill's work, however, was quite different in orientation from Whewell's, being more traceable to Hume than to Kant and showing pronounced Comtean influences. Mill allowed that the search for causes was essential to the scientific enterprise, but he restricted his consideration of them to the phenomenal order and so defined cause in Humean terms. The general uniformity of the course of nature, for Mill, is an invariable order of succession between phenomena. In his system induction is possible, but for him induction is a process by which we arrive at individual facts, not from universals, but from other facts that are particular and individual. Whewell published a detailed critique of Mill's logic in 1849, concentrating on these points. He also entered into a controversy with Mill over

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the role of ideas or conceptions in Kepler's discovery of Mars's elliptical orbit. Whewell insisted that Kepler had to impose the conception of ellipse on the observed facts to make the generalization possible, whereas Mill maintained that the ellipse was in the facts before Kepler recognized it. As for Mill's inductive canons, Whewell pointed out that they were merely a reworking of Bacon's "prerogative instances" and that they were of little or no help to scientists, who would already have gone through steps such as Mill describes and would not need his labeling of them to make their discoveries. In conjunction with this latter criticism of Mill, mention should be made of Whewell's friend,John Herschel, the foremost scientist in early Victorian England, who had pointed out similar limitations in Mill's System of Logic. Apart from his work in astronomy, Herschel wrote extensivelyon the methodology of science. Though generally empiricist in orientation, Herschel rejected Hume's account of causation as habitual sequence and himself provided rules for discerning invariable connections between cause and effect. Like Whewell, Herschel subscribed heartily to Newton's search for the "true causes" (verae causae) of natural phenomena. Neither had any doubt that science progresses through the discovery of laws and causes, that from this results a cumulative growth of knowledge, and that there are no limits to what the mind of man can uncover in the process. CRITIQUES OF SCIENCE

We pass quickly now to the early twentieth century, by which time a pronounced turn was beginning to occur in evaluations of science. Part of this was occasioned by the study of electromagnetism and the growth of energy concepts, particularly as advanced by the German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz. Part of it was owed to the emphasis on statistical reasoning, as seen in thermodynamics and in the writings of the British political economist, William Stanley Jevons. Part of it came from the studies of the German-born philosopher, Johann Bernhard Stallo, who taught here at Georgetown University critiquing the concepts and theories of modern science. All of these thinkers directed their efforts against the metaphysical pretensions of classical scientists, particularly in their arguments for the existence of atoms and molecules on the basis of insufficient empirical evidence. Each prepared in a different way for a movement known as empiriocritism, which included such distinguished names as Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare, and Pierre Duhem, and which was the immediate predecessor of the philosophy of science movement in the U.S. and the U.K.

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Empiriocriticism

The main figure in empiriocritism is Ernst Mach, a physicist who wished to develop an epistemology that could be used by scientists in their work of criticism. Having studied scrupulously the methods and conclusions to which classical mechanics had come, he was intent on showing its inherent limitations. Mach used positivist principles in his critique, and, being convinced that there is no profound truth beyond empirical data, effectively denied the possibility of metaphysics. The principal points of the philosophy of science elaborated by Mach may be summarized as follows. The object of any science is sensation and sensation alone; science does not attain to any object distinct from subjective impressions. Sensations are not disconnected but are organized into constant groupings that are designated as "things." Thus, contrary to a realist epistemology, Mach's empiricism proposed that sensations do not refer to things but that things are symbols of sensations. He thus conceived the task of science as one of analyzing sensations and their relationships so as to organize them into some type of synthesis. The aim of this synthesis is not to inquire into the causes of phenomena or to supply explanations for them. Rather the end of science is to enable man to adapt himself, with a maximum economy of thought and effort, to the conditions that produce the sensations he experiences. Mach admitted hypotheses into his science as temporary and useful aids, for example, to organize experimental data and to suggest new experiments. In his view one should never ask if they are true or false but only if they are useful. Similarly, laws for him are rules that can be used economically to replace a series of facts. Whenever possible they are to be expressed in mathematical formulas. On Mach's terms it is impossible to know laws of nature as extramental regulators of phenomena. So, like his empiricist and positivist predecessors, Mach practiced the philosophy of science with an anti-metaphysical bias. And yet he did admit a certain congruence or agreement between natural events and the expectation of them attained through scientific reasoning. He thought that this required more than chance as an explanation, and invoked a type of psychophysical parallelism as its underlying basis. Such an account was inconsistent with his positivist principles, and it left the way open for philosophies of science that would concede some validity to metaphysics. Critique de la Science

Closely akin to empiriocriticism is the French movement known as Critique de La science, which flourished around the same time and whose foremost representatives were Henri Poincare and Pierre Duhem. Both were

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more tolerant of metaphysics, though both were intent on keeping it completely out of their science. Poincare was the preeminent mathematician, mathematical physicist, and astronomer of his day, whereas Duhem was a physical chemist and pioneer historian of medieval science, well known for his Catholicism at a time when anti-clericalism was at its height in his native land. Though coming from different backgrounds and motivated by different reasons, their views of science and its philosophy turned out to be quite similar. They exerted a strong influence on our sister university, the University of Louvain. Poincare's philosophy, known as conventionalism, epitomizes the critique of science movement. Through the influence of Antoine Cournot and Emile Boutroux, Poincare came to be convinced that science has no absolute epistemic value, particularly when based on its success in prediction. Any explanation being used at a given time to account for future phenomena, he said, must ultimately give way to a better explanation. While conceding that scientists speak of their theories as true, he maintained that in actuality theories are not true but only convenient: they serve to simplify the work of scientists and provide them with an aesthetic picture of the universe. In working out the details of his system, Poincare proposed a distinction between sciences that are merely rational and those that are empirico-rational. The merely rational sciences, the paradigm of which is mathematics, are for him free constructions of the human mind. The role of experience is completely extrinsic to their development, merely suggesting possibilities to them and providing instances for their application. The objects of such sciences are beings of reason (entia rationis). The relationships that obtain among these objects are expressed by axioms; these are freely postulated and implicitly define the objects and their properties. Yet they are not completely arbitrary. They must avoid internal contradiction and be at least convenient, that is, simple and adapted to the properties of the entities with which they deal. The empirico-rational sciences, on the other hand, are for Poincare concerned with the objects of experience, with entities in the external world. Experience provides single facts, which the mind uses to ascend to the universal order by constructing hypotheses. Such hypotheses in his view are again not merely arbitrary: they must agree both with experience and with experimental laws. Still they are selected by "free convention," insofar as a great number of different possibilities may be excogitated to explain the same facts. For this reason, hypotheses, like laws, should not be said to be true or false, but more or less convenient for describing phenomena. Duhem assimilated the teachings of Poincare and on them erected a

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philosophy of science that was influential, particularly in Catholic circles, on philosophers such asJacques Maritain. A prolific scholar up until his death in 1916, Duhem opened up pathways in the history of medieval science that are still being pursued in the present day. Basic to Duhem's critique is his sharp distinction between two orders of knowledge, the one of philosophy and the other of science. Philosophy seeks the explanations, causes, and essences of things, whereas the physical sciences do not. The knowledge the sciences provide is essentially symbolic: they do not explain phenomena, they merely represent or symbolize them. In Duhem's view scientific laws, those based on physical experiments, are very different from the self-evident principles invoked by philosophers. They are symbolic relations whose meanings are unintelligible to anyone who does not know the theories on which the experiments are based. Since they are symbolic, they are never true or false, and, like the experiments on which they rest, they are approximate. Duhem further maintained that the degree of approximation of a law is relative to the experiments on whose basis it was formulated. While sufficient for the time being, progress in experimental methods will render them insufficient in the future. Thus a law of physics is both relative and provisional. No doubt Duhem's positions on these matters were influenced by his conservative views and his interest in protecting his religious faith against the inroads of a materialism based on science. In effect he placed the "perennial philosophy" of the Church beyond question, while according only a conjectural status to the advances made by modern science. But the wall of separation he introduced between philosophy and science met with approval in many educational circles, and its effects are still widely felt in the present day. THE LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENCE

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the evolution of mathematics led to another type of critique that was no less profound than that just dealt with. Of the many developments in that field, non-Euclidean geometry and set theory had the most significant impact on the philosophy of science. Both seemed to illustrate how statements once taken without question as simple presuppositions of mathematics are in fact not certain at all. They thus directed attention to the analysis of apparently simple concepts and to the axiomatic construction of systems. In set theory particularly, right at the end of the century, attention was drawn to new paradoxes, that is, contradictions derived by correct methods of inference from apparently simple and obvious assumptions.

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These resisted resolution to such a degree that the very foundations of mathematics seemed on the verge of collapse. In close conjunction with this crisis came the growth of interest in formal logic, especially the type known as symbolic or mathematical logic. About the middle of the nineteenth century two English mathematicians, Augustus de Morgan and George Boole, published works that gave impetus to work in this field, then carried forward by the Italian Giuseppe Peano and the Germans Ernst Schroder and Gottlob Frege. But it was not until Bertrand Russell made contact with Peano in 1900 and published his Principles of Mathematics in 1903 that philosophers, particularly those in English-speaking countries, took note of these investigations. The new discipline was placed on firm ground when Russell collaborated with Alfred North Whitehead to produce the Principia Mathematica, a work of monumental proportions that aimed to place all of mathematics on consistent logical foundations.

Logical Positivism The impact of this work on the philosophy of science can be seen in the movement known as logical positivism, which developed in Vienna around the 1930S and continued the work of criticism inaugurated by Mach, Poincare, and Duhem. By that time, through the writings of Max Planck and Albert Einstein, quantum theory and relativity theory had assumed tractable form and were presenting physicists with their own set of antinomies. The nucleus of the movement was a group of philosophers and scientists, known as the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis), who met informally to discuss each other's problems. The circle included Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath. More loosely allied to them were Hans Reichenbach and Carl Hempel, then working in Berlin, and Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, centered in Cambridge, England. Also related to the circle was Karl Popper, who reacted against some of its teachings and pursued an independent career in London. The most important figures in the movement later found their way to North America, where they were variously known as logical positivists or logical empiricists. The founder of logical positivism is generally regarded as Moritz Schlick, one of Mach's successors as professor of the inductive sciences at the University of Vienna. Schlick's aim was not so much to develop a new system of philosophy as to inaugurate a scientific way of philosophizing. For him, as can be seen from his Philosophy of Nature (1936), philosophy is identified with the philosophy of nature, which he took to be the same as the philosophy of science. He conceived the task of

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science to be to obtain knowledge of reality, and that of philosophy to interpret scientific achievements correctly and to expound their underlying meaning. Philosophers of science are also concerned with scientific hypotheses, Schlick allowed, but in a way quite different from scientists. All natural knowledge is formulated in propositions, and the laws of nature are no exception; they too are expressed in propositional form. But the knowledge of a proposition's meaning is a prerequisite to testing its truth. Thus there are two tasks within the scientific enterprise: one concerned with ascertaining the truth of hypotheses, the other, with understanding their meaning. The methods of science assist in the discovery of truth, those of philosophy in the elucidation of meaning. Thus the philosopher of nature takes on the function of interpreting the meaning of the propositions of science. He is not a scientist, but one dedicated to discerning the meaning of what Schlick called "the laws of nature." Unfortunately Schlick went on to define the meaning of propositions, somewhat simplistically, as their method of verification. Present at the meetings of the Vienna Circle where verifiability was being discussed-not only in the context of meaningfulness but also as a criterion of demarcation between science and metaphysics-Popper reacted vigorously to verifiability and argued for falsifiability instead as the better overall criterion. As he explained in his Logik der Forschung (1934), the proper empirical method is not one of verifYing theories but rather one of repeatedly exposing them to the possibility of being falsified. Through the proper application of rules for falsification, he maintained, science would evolve, be self-correcting and progressive, and so dynamically approach the truth. In a later work, Conjectures and Refutations (1963), he proposed that the entire history of science could be viewed as nothing more than a sequence of conjectures, followed by their refutations, then revised conjectures, additional refutations, and so on. These characterizations by Schlick and Popper of the respective tasks of the scientist and the philosopher of science may be said to have provided the positive inspiration for the philosophy of science movement in the pre-World War II era. Previous thinkers had pointed out the necessity of a reflective consideration of the work of science, but many of them had fostered a negative view of philosophy as this relates to science. Poincare and Duhem had maintained, in effect, that science raises no philosophical questions and that it can provide no definitive answers to questions posed by philosophers. In the Wiener Kreis, however, philosophy was placed once again in closer relationship to science. It was taken into partnership, as it were, and given the task of interpreting the symbolism of

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science, of discovering the profounder meaning that underlies its laws and theories. Hans Reichenbach early advocated a relationship between science and philosophy similar to that proposed by Schlick. What was only implicit in Schlick's thought, namely that philosophy is to be identified with the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of nature with the philosophy of science, came to be explicitly stated by Reichenbach. Unable to conceive of any philosophical enterprise that did not base itself on the findings of science, Reichenbach consciously elaborated his "scientific philosophy," the main lines of which are set out in his The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951). As he explained it, since philosophy is dependent on science, this dependence should be a conscious condition of the philosopher's work: he should acknowledge that the nature of knowledge could be studied only through the analysis of science. Thus the philosophy of science subsumes within itself all that had previously been regarded as epistemology. Reichenbach was also insistent that there is no ontology, no separate realm of philosophical knowledge that precedes science. For him philosophy does not contribute any content to knowledge; it merely studies the form of knowledge as exhibited in the work of the scientist and exanIines all claims to validity. His scientific philosophy would therefore evaluate the findings of science as an ongoing enterprise. There could be no finality in a philosopher's results-the philosopher's only function would be to keep the world abreast of scientific progress.

Logical Empiricism It was not long before imperial claims such as these, combined with the aggressive anti-metaphysical attitudes of Reichenbach's colleagues, gave a bad name to logical positivism. As the movement developed in the U.S. this label fell out of favor and those sympathetic to its program became known as logical empiricists, or as tolerant or non-dogmatic empiricists, or simply as neo-empiricists. Representative of the latter group is the American philosopher Ernest Nagel. Working within the framework provided by Schlick and Reichenbach, Nagel attempted a more systematic approach to the philosophy of science. By 1960 the growth in literature associated with logical empiricism had led to the application of the term "philosophy of science" to a heterogeneous collection of problems related in various ways to science. Textbooks of readings on the subject had also appeared. These discussed, among other things, problems relating to epistemology, such as the validity of sense perception; those relating to the genesis and development of scientific ideas, the nature of scientific laws and theories, etc.; and various logical problems relating to the axiomatization of systems, the justification

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of inductive procedures, and the confirmation of theories. From this listing one can see in a general way that the definition of the philosophy of science proposed by Whewell in 1840 had been remarkably prescient: the main efforts in the field over a period of more than a hundred years had in fact centered themselves around problems relating to epistemology and the methods scientists use to achieve their results. Yet Nagel complained that the discipline so delineated was not a welldefined area of analysis, and so he preferred to concentrate instead on the logic of scientific inquiry and the logical structure of its intellectual products. In effect he would make the philosophy of science more explicitlya logic of science. He thus proposed a systematic exposition of these matters in three parts: the first would deal with the logic of scientific explanation, the second with the logical structure of scientific concepts, and the third with the structure of probable inference and the validation of inductive arguments. Only the first of these was ever published, however; this was The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, which appeared in 1961. The logical reconstruction of science envisaged by Nagel by this time had already achieved substantial results, and a firm consensus had begun to emerge among logical empiricists regarding the main theses being embraced within their version of the philosophy of science. The first of these relates to the language levels employed by scientists, the second to the logical structure of scientific laws, and the third to the logical structure of scientific theories. Because each of these in its own way came to be called into question in subsequent decades, a brief characterization of them may prove helpful at this place. With regard to the first, the language of science was seen as made up of a hierarchy of four levels: the lowest level is concerned with the primary experimental data on which scientific conclusions are based; the second level, with concepts extracted from such data and expressed in quantitative terms; the third level, with laws that express invariant or statistical relations among scientific terms; and the fourth, with theories or deductive systems in which laws appear as theorems. Within this language system, wherein instrumental data are at the bottom and theories at the top, each level is seen as an interpretation of the one below. The predictive power of statements also increases as one goes up the ladder. The three lower levels-data, concepts, and laws-may be referred to as "observational levels," and as such are differentiated from the top or "theoretical level," that of theories. They provide the ground against which statements at the top level are ultimately to be tested. The transition from the first level to the second generally invoked Schlick's dictum that the meaning of a concept could be discerned from

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its method of verification, revised now to stipulate that that method be stated in operational terms. In other words, as proposed by Percy W. Bridgman in his The Logic ofModern Physics (1927), scientists attach values to concepts by the instrumental procedures they use in the laboratory to make measurements. If no operational definition could be attached to a concept, Bridgman had maintained that the concept has no empirical significance and as such should be excluded from scientific discourse. The next transition was one of incorporating scientific concepts thus defined into generalizations or scientific laws and specifying the logical relations that should obtain between laws and concepts. In an important paper written in 1948, Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim addressed this problem by analyzing what it means to offer a scientific explanation for empirical facts. The solution they proposed is referred to as the covering law model. In this model a scientific explanation is construed as an answer to the question "why?", and this is seen as a deductive pattern wherein the premises are a scientific law or empirical generalization together with an enumeration of the various conditions under which it is applied. The law is a universal statement explicitly or implicitly containing the quantifier "All," plus a series of observational terms. The conditions then enumerate the boundary conditions within which the law is believed valid and the initial conditions that obtain when the answer to the "why?" question is being sought. The transition from the third to the fourth level was that from law to theory. A theory was usually differentiated from a law by the fact that, although both contain the universal quantifier "All" and observable terms, a theory additionally contains terms that designate non-observables, that is, entities that escape observation by the senses. These are thought of as postulated or hypothetical entities and the terms designating them are known as theoretical terms. As formulated by Rudolf Carnap, a theory is thus an axiom system containing some terms that are undefined; since these cannot be directly interpreted in terms of empirical evidence, the theory is only "a partially interpreted formal system." Carl Hempel and others have proposed a "safety-net" model of a theory that is somewhat similar. In it the axiom system is a net supported at critical points by connectors that anchor the net to terms in the scientific language referring to observables. Theoretical terms, unlike observable terms, cannot be defined operationally. Nonetheless they take their meaning from their place in the overall network and by semantic or correspondence rules that tie them to observables. Finally, theories understood in this way can be used to explain laws, again on the deductive nomological model just described. Moreover, there are hierarchies among theories, with a few overarching theories

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being used to explain others. This gives rise to the problem of theory reduction-whether some theories, at least, are reducible to others, which can be regarded as more fundamental on that account. A related question has to do with scientific growth, namely, when one theory is replaced by another, whether the replaced theory can ultimately be incorporated into the one replacing it. If so, should one eventually be able to formulate a super theory that explains all the others, a grand unified theory or "theory of everything," this will obtain inductive support from all the previous findings of science. Would it not then supply the ultimate answers to questions about the universe? An affirmative reply to all these queries would bring to realization the ideal of a "unified science" expressed by Otto Neurath in the early days of the Vienna Circle: one science, presumably physics, would then serve to provide the foundations for all of human knowledge. THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE

A year after Nagel'S The Structure of Science appeared, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was published, and this marked a watershed in the philosophy of science movement. Ironically, it appeared as Volume 2, Number 2, of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Knowledge, with Neurath, by then deceased, still listed as Editorin-Chief and Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris as Associate Editors. The logical reconstruction of science had already reached a stage where it could be formulated in terms that were well agreed upon and could provide the basis for scholastic controversy. Paradoxes had occurred in the application of formalisms to physical problems, and these invited a variety of solutions. The justification of induction, the allied problem of law-like generalizations, the difficulty of dealing with powers or dispositional terms, and the reoccurrence of interest in causal efficacy and necessary connection, all had raised once again the specter of Hume and his unsolved difficulties. A particularly vexing problem for empiricists was the ontological reference of theoretical terms. Do they designate real entities or are they merely fictions that are useful in the scientist's work of prediction? If realism is the answer, then science is suggesting a transempirical element in knowledge that a radical empiricism had earlier ruled out as meaningless or forever unattainable.

Kuhnian Criticism None of these problems, oddly enough, was the precise target of Kuhn's criticism in his exploration of the structure of scientific revolutions. Put simply, his focus was on a striking anomaly: the logic of science,

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carefully developed as it had been, seemed quite at variance with science's history, and particularly with the fact of science's somewhat haphazard development and the time-to-time occurrence of scientific revolutions. By training a theoretical physicist, Kuhn had earlier published The Copernican Revolution (1957), a work that, like The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had grown out of his teaching physical science to non-scientists using an historical approach. This experience convinced him that there was a role for history in the understanding of science. Properly understood, he argued, history could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science then generally accepted, one that had come from science textbooks and their simplified accounts of the procedures and logical operations whereby science is produced. Previous to Kuhn's work scientists had viewed their science as an objective and rational enterprise, employing a methodology that eliminates subjective judgments and ultimately contributes to a cumulative growth of knowledge. Philosophers likewise had consistently regarded science as a special type of critical inquiry-one productive of knowledge that is publicly verifiable, grows more or less continuously, and thus is essentially evolutionary in its mode of development. As the titles of his works suggest, by concentrating on the revolutionary character of science as opposed to the evolutionary, Kuhn launched a frontal attack on this "cumulative growth of knowledge" thesis. The burden of his analysis was to show that the larger part of scientific activity, what he calls "normal science," is essentially puzzle-solving within the context of paradigms or sets of rules that are accepted within a scientific community. At rare intervals, in his view, scientists break out of this normal pattern and institute a revolution. This is equivalent to re-tooling within the community and adopting a new paradigm that solves yet further puzzles. Through a series of such revolutions, however, there is not necessarily linear progress or cumulative growth. Scientific revolutions really amount to different ways of looking at things, like Gestalt switches. Thus one should be wary of regarding them as productive of new truths, or even of seeing them as tending asymptotically to objective truth as the limit of a knowledge acquisition process. Science, for Kuhn, is not evolutionary at all; it is basically revolutionary, ever changing, and not a stable body of knowledge to which additions are constantly being made by an evolutionary process. A scientific revolution, therefore, is nothing more than a transition to a new paradigm. Or, in Kuhn's own words, scientific revolutions are "noncumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one."4 4. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 91; 2d ed., 1970, p. 92.

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But the thesis, so stated, has further implications. For one thing, Kuhn claims that, after a revolution has occurred, scientists see a different world. Their new way of conceptualizing nature and its problems is very much like a switch of visual Gestalt. Sense experience is thus not fixed and neutral with regard to different interpretations that may be put upon it. Mter a revolution the data themselves have changed. And the new ways oflooking at things are not closer approximations to the way things are, nor are they closer approximations to the truth. Science seems to progress towards truth, Kuhn admits, but it progresses for a simple reason: because its progressive procedures are circularly defined as scientific. Thus scientific progress lies in the eyes of its beholders-those engaged in the process, scientists themselves. They progress because they define their puzzle-solving activity so that progress is inevitable. Moreover, their education insulates them from the intellectual world at large. Their textbooks disguise the revolutions that have previously taken place in their discipline, and their authoritative sources make the history of science appear linear and cumulative. Actually the choices by which the scientific community selects new paradigms are made on hunches, on subjective and aesthetic considerations, and have little or nothing to do with objectivity and truth. Popperian Reaction The resulting indictment of modem science is devastating in the extreme, and its full implication can only be appreciated when Kuhn's line of reasoning is extended to every other intellectual enterprise, philosophy not excluded. His attack on the concept of truth provoked a reaction from Karl Popper and some of his associates in England, most notably Imre Lakatos. The latter, while sympathetic to certain aspects of Kuhn's thesis, felt that Kuhn failed to take account of the results of rational inquiry in furthering human knowledge. Popper himself, as already noted, focused on the method of falsification and saw this as a way of approaching truth, at least as an ideal. He, however, disagreed with the logical positivist and neo-empiricist lines of thought as these had developed in the U.S. Meanwhile, Paul K. Feyerabend had attacked the received view of scientific theories and its distinction between observational and theoretical terms as inadequate accounts of scientific practice. He also questioned the way in which theory replacement was used to account for advances in science, and in this way agreed with Kuhn's repudiation of the "cumulative growth of knowledge" view of the scientific enterprise. Lakatos's critique of Kuhn was more thorough-going. His focus was on Kuhn's use of paradigms, which he identified as "super theories" or

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general theories that exercise a regulative influence on the evolution of science. Lakatos attributed to such theories, which he called research programs, some of the characteristics found in Kuhn's paradigms, but he rejected others that for him made Kuhn's proposal border on the irrational. The crucial difference between the two is that Lakatos believed that scientific progress is not illusory, that it actually comes about, and that it is reflected in ever more responsible and better-corroborated account of the cosmos. So he asserted that successive theories within a research program register progress and that they do so to the degree that they possess a greater empirical content or have better empirical corroboration. These are the features that make one theory superior to, or more progressive than, another. Therefore the adoption of theories is not a whimsical matter, something based on the social and psychological factors influencing the investigator, but is rather a matter of rational choice based on testable consequences. The controversy that developed between Kuhn and the Popperians set the philosophy of science movement on rather a new course. Logical difficulties continued to be explored, but they no longer took center stage in the discipline. The history of science obviously came to be taken more seriously, not merely to supply an example or two of how a logical method actually worked, but to be understood on its own terms and in light of the actual context in which science developed. This meant a renewed interest in philosophies other than logical empiricism, and the exploration of social, cultural, and political factors that were instrumental in science's growth. To sum up, then, by the 1970S the philosophy of science movement had gone through at least three stages, the critique of science stage, the logical reconstruction stage, and the history of scientific revolutions stage. The first had provoked the second, and this had run into serious difficulties. Some of these were internal to formalism, such as flaws in confirmation theory. Whether one used Rudolf Carnap's verifiability canons or Karl Popper's attempts at falsification, both showing that one can never arrive at an apodictic result using hypothetico-deductive reasoning, the best one could hope for was some degree of probability. Others were external, such as the irrelevance of all this to the ~ctual practice of scientists. The third or scientific revolutions stage had failed even more radically, for it ended up by questioning the very rationality of science itself, effectively denying its objectivity, even maintaining that science can never attain truth about the world of nature. No surprise that philosophers of science would tell you that all science is fallible, all science is revisable; certitude had exited from science, and truth would not be far behind. None of this, needless to say, sat well with the scientific

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community, though it delighted many literary people, who were happy to see once-mighty science brought down at last to the level of discourse they all could understand. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENCE 5

Considering the emphasis placed by Kuhn and the others on the scientific community, the locus where paradigms and research traditions are to be found, it is not surprising that sooner or later attention would be focused on the social dimension of science and the way social factors influence the acceptance of beliefs among scientists. An early focus was on the ways scientists use "rhetoric" when presenting the results of their research-not in the Aristotelian sense of rhetoric, but in the modern political sense of using deceptive language or illustrations to dress up their data and so gloss over its shortcomings. That would surely be a case where science was being "socially constructed," obviously to its great disadvantage. But then a more serious concern began to manifest itself. Is not knowledge basically a social phenomenon, and should not the sociology of knowledge be employed to cast light on the problems of scientific change? This, one might say, is the most recent development in the philosophy of science. In a way it pulls another support from under the traditional view that science is a perfect type of knowing that reaches necessary conclusions. Not only is science now at best probable, but its probability is affected by factors thus far un-thought of, factors that have nothing to do with reason and objectivity, seen at the end of the nineteenth century as essential attributes of the scientific enterprise. One way of handling this "sociological turn" in the philosophy of science, as it has been called, is to invoke a distinction long recognized among historians, that, namely, between "internal history of science" and "external history of science." Internal history studies the development of science in terms of its concepts, laws, theories, and methodologies, and thus is intelligible only to those who have at least a basic grasp of physics, chemistry, biology, etc., depending on the field whose development they are studying. External history studies the institutions and associations, the social, political, and intellectual ambiences in which science has developed at different places and historical periods, using historiographical techniques that are known to all historians, whatever their specialization might be. It is commonly recognized, of course, that 5. For a fuller development of the materials sketched in this section, along with documentation, see J. E. McGuire, "Scientific Change: Perspectives and Proposals," in Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, ed. Merrilee H. Salmon et al. (Englewood Cliffs, N J.: Prentice Hall, 1992). pp. 132-78.

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one cannot do history of science without doing both internal and external history. But it is in the latter aspect that the focus will be on matters that interest the sociologist and the political scientist, whereas in the former it will be on matters of interest to the logician and the philosopher. This proposal is not enough for advocates of the "strong program" in the sociology of science such as David Bloor, working at Edinburgh. In his KnOOJledge and Social Images (1976), Bloor argues that the sociology of knowledge is not restricted to external factors. He makes the stronger claim that the cognitive order is itself causally reducible to the social order. Knowledge is nothing more than whatever informed groups take it to be, what a cognitive community collectively endorses by social consensus. What this involves, he says, is ultimately being impartial with respect to truth and falsity: true beliefs are produced in precisely the same way as are false beliefs. In a later study, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of KnOOJledge (1983), Bloor takes up the Wittgensteinian theme of "language games" wherein speaking a language is part of an activity, a "form of life" that is open to empirical investigation. Here language becomes for him an interactive tool among communities of speakers, ever changing with the dynamics of social and political interests. And science itself becomes a natural and social activity that generates language games driven more by communitarian interests than by cognitive aims. Bloor's uncompromising relativism, which makes scientific knowledge simply a reflection of power relations within society and so rejects its rationality and objectivity, has found few advocates. But some aspects of it have been pursued by other writers. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, in their Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), take up the theme of the scientific enterprise being a form of life in the sense of an integrated "pattern of activity." Just as for Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, or the state, is an artifact or a construct that explains human activity, so for Robert Boyle the air pump (and, more particularly, his laboratory) is an artifact or a construct that produces scientific knowledge. "It is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know," they write. "Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions."6 Thus, for them, the experimentally produced fact is a social construct. From an analysis of how science functions in society they then pass quickly to the conclusion that science is made by society. This is a bigjump indeed, yet they use it effectively to tie the rise of modem science to the rise of a new social order in the seventeenth century. Along similar lines are the arguments developed by Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar in their Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts 6. Leviathan and the Air Pump, p. 344, cited by McGuire, p. 165.

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(1986). In this they attempt to generalize the theme of social constructivism. In their view scientific facts do not come from nature pure and unalloyed; they are all socially constructed. Just as earlier thinkers had made the claim that all facts are "theory laden," so they pursue the claim that all facts are "sociologically laden." And just as Kuhn had argued that science is so presented that all traces of its having a history have been removed, so Latour and Woolgar propose that scientific facts are so constructed that all traces of the construction have likewise disappeared. In the initial stages of investigation persuasion and rhetoric may well be involved, but when community agreement has been reached, results are quickly accorded "fact-like" status. Within the discipline the fact takes on a life of its own and the procedures used to construct it henceforth become invisible. In Laboratory Life Latour and Woolgar further attempt to develop an anthropology of science, studying what went on in the Salk laboratory from the viewpoint of "anthropological observers." Practices in the laboratory became extended texts that for them were "linguistic practices"; artifacts and instruments similarly became for them "inscription devices."7 In this way they graphically presented the recent problem of how researchers, and particularly medical researchers, work up and present their findings. Such findings are of great interest to the public, and so it is a small step from this type of analysis for the average person to see rhetoric, with its various appeals, as an integral part of scientific endeavor. Even scientists who seek funding for research or prepare grant proposals, including those in the physical sciences, can agree that rhetoric easily enters into their science. And if that is true of the physical sciences, the use of rhetoric will be even more discernible in the human sciences, where the practice is said to have become pervasive. s This perhaps suffices for the introduction of rhetoric and the social construction of science within the context of the current devaluation of science's cognitive claims. A fallible and revisable character first came to be attributed to science at the beginning of the twentieth century, when problems posed by quantum and relativity theories led to its logical reconstruction by members of the Vienna Circle and their followers. Then science's historical reconstruction began shortly after midcentury with the work of Thomas Kuhn and those he inspires. And finally its social reconstruction is taking place towards the century's end under the aegis of David Bloor and the Edinburgh School. Each reconstruction has managed to cut into science's epistemic value, into the 7. Again see McGuire, pp. 167-73. 8. See The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed.John S. Nelson et aI. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Ig87).

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truth and certitude that were its hallmarks from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Can anything now be salvaged for science's knowledge claims, or are social acceptance and probability, and an incalculable probability at that, the best that one can hope for after four centuries of modern science? SCIENCE AND NATURE

Our answer to that question, in my view, tells us where philosophy of science stands after one hundred years, as we approach the new millenium. But must the picture as I have painted it be the end of the story? Well, not for me anyway, but to elaborate on signs of hope would require more than another essay. Fortunately much of what I would relate is already contained in the book to which reference has been made in the first footnote of this essay. In the space remaining let me sketch a few ideas on which I have been working that may show a way out of the current impasse. My book's title is The Modeling ofNature. The term "nature" here points to the direction in which we should go. A philosophy of science based on a Humean or Kantian theory of knowledge, one based on an axiomatic logic, one based on authoritative paradigms, one based on social consensus, all are doomed to failure from the start. There is only one legitimate starting point for a philosophy of the natural and human sciences and that is the world of nature. If we do not know th~ natures of elements and compounds, of plants and animals, of human beings, then to think that we can have any science of nature is foolhardy in the extreme. And by that I mean the answers to such simple questions as "what is sulfur?", "what is water?", "what is a cat?", "what is an oak?", and "what is a planet?" And again I mean answers to these questions that are true and of which we can be certain. Put simply, if we have no theory of knowledge based on our common-sense experience of nature, we deceive ourselves when we think we can have a philosophy of science based on what we "see" with an electron tunneling microscope or the Hubbel Space Telescope. (And note that I enclose the word "see" in quotation marks.) Perhaps I am overly optimistic here, but there are indications that the intellectual climate is changing and that a "new consensus" is beginning to emerge within the philosophy of science. It is difficult to characterize that consensus, but let me try. For one, empiricism is under attack and various realist alternatives are being actively explored. Prominent among these are what some have referred to as "naturalized epistemologies." That expression can be interpreted in various ways, but what I have in mind are epistemologies in which the concept of "natural kind" is the

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starting point and where causal conceptions of reference are being investigated to replace the standard empiricist accounts. Most important, an overarching logical reductionism that would pretend there is only one philosophy of science applicable to all disciplines is giving way to the realization that there can be a legitimate philosophy of physics, of biology, of psychology, and of the social sciences, and that the one is not reducible to the other. In other words, the content or subject or matter being investigated, the content logic that in former times was regarded as "material" logic, must henceforth be taken on a par with "formal" logic. The fact that different natures are being studied in the different special sciences inevitably makes a difference in the way the philosophy of those sciences is to be investigated. The most fundamental change behind the consensus is a general relinquishing of the doctrines David Hume has hitherto imposed on the discipline. One reason for doing this is the undisputed progress of science over the past one hundred years, a progress that invalidates many of Hume's key suppositions. Much as Whewell could criticize Bacon for basing his canons on a science that was primitive and undeveloped, so the philosopher of the late twentieth century can criticize Hume for imposing strictures on scientific knowledge based on an eighteenth-century understanding of the microstructure of matter. Simply put, we ought to do for Hume what Galileo proposed to do for Aristotle. We should say that if Hume were alive today he would side with the anti-Humeans rather than with those who still continue to defend his teachings. Let me expand on this briefly. In both his Treatise of Human Nature of 1740 and his An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding of 1748 Hume argued that, in the study of nature, there is no way one can either discover or demonstrate any necessary connection between cause and effect on the basis of a priori reasoning. He saw that such a connection would have to be founded on observable experience, and thus, by implication, on the basis of a posteriori reasoning. Up to this point he was on solid ground, but from then on his theory of knowledge failed him. Hume could not see how ordinary sensory qualities could ever disclose any power or energy within the natures of things that could effect the appearances they present to us. Man's natural state of ignorance was such, he thought, that natural powers have to remain "secret powers," and, as a consequence, that the natures underlying them have to remain secret too. Unfortunately this line of reasoning also appealed to Kant, despite the fact that it involves a very superficial way of viewing the properties of natural objects-"superficial" in the primitive sense of superficies, the Latin term for surface. A surface viewing of any nature, whether it be inorganic, plant, or animal, is almost the polar opposite of a scientific study

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a.p.

of that nature, as the subsequent history of science has shown. (This is the whole point of the materials I develop at length in my The Modeling of Nature.) Hume, penning away in his library, can be excused for not knowing or even suspecting what "secrets" the human mind would unveil in centuries to come, and Kant likewise, when writing his famous Critique of Pure Reason of 1781. But that surely can be no excuse for twentiethcentury philosophers, particularly those who present themselves as versed in modem science and its discoveries. Another element of the new consensus that discourages a too formalistic attitude towards truth and certitude is seen in Arthur Fine's call for philosophers to adopt what he calls the "Natural Ontological Attitude" (NOA), to become knowers in the sense of NOAers. 9 In effect what he proposes is that philosophers of science give scientists the benefit of the doubt. The NOA disposes one to accept science as it is. This involves a commitment to take the certified results of science as knowledge claims on a par with the findings of common sense. Ifwe equate common sense with reputable opinion or endoxa, to adopt an NOA is to grant that most of what scientists hold is true. Consider now that most of what all of us know about the world in which we live is based on endoxa, and yet, somewhat paradoxically, most of what we know is true.lO To say that all science is fallible is then to miss the point of scientific research. Better to say that the content of science is true, at least in the minimal sense that it represents a truth that is partial and perhaps obscure, but still is able to be completed and clarified in ever-greater detail. The focus then would be on what is known prior to a scientific discovery, on the truth already possessed, rather than on the changes that result from the discovery. Unfortunately there has been a tendency among philosophers of science to view scientific change pessimistically, as though it represents a loss of truth rather than an addition to it. Scientific growth ought to be seen the other way around. Scientific controversy is not a sign that all truth claims are fallible, but rather that scientists are intent on rooting out error and misapprehension, and so coming to a truth that is clearer and more complete than the truth they already possess. I spoke at the beginning of this paper about knowledge of atoms and of the cosmos at the beginning of the twentieth century, and about William Whewell's confidence that the science of his day was the most stable knowledge humankind possessed, knowledge "of solid and acknowledged 9. In his The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 112-35. 10. See Kurt Pritzl, ·Ways of Truth and Ways of Opinion in Aristotle," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 67 (1993): 241-52; also his "Opinions as Appearances: Endoxa in Aristotle," Ancient Philosophy 14 (1994): 41-50.

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certainty," as he put it. What are we to say about our present-day knowledge with respect not only to the structure of the universe, but also to its micro-structure and its mega-structure, after another hundred years of scientific growth? Not long ago Paul Feyerabend dismissed the philosophy of science as "a subject with a great past ... [having] nothing whatever to do with what goes on in the sciences."ll Are we to allow that statement to be the epitaph of the philosophy of science movement? I would say no. But what we need in the movement are philosophers who know and appreciate scientific knowledge from within, who can defend its claims for truth and certainty, rather than depreciating it on the basis of their limited logicist understanding of what it is to know. That is the program I advocate in The Modeling of Nature, and I can only commend both it and the epistemology and ontology it incorporates for your fuller consideration. 11. "Philosophy of Science: A Subject with a Great Past," in Historical and Philosophical Perspectives of Science, ed. Roger Stuewer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), pp. 172, 181.

3

A Century of Anglo-American Moral Theory

PETER PHILLIPS SIMPSON 1

Anyone who proposes to give an interpretative overview of AngloAmerican moral philosophy during the past one hundred years is immediately confronted by the fact that one of the more significant things that has taken place in this field is the presentation by one prominent AngloAmerican moral philosopher of precisely such an overview. I refer, of course, to the thesis presented by Alasdair MacIntyre in Ig81 in his book After Virtue and elaborated in other books since.! Given the importance of this thesis within modem Anglo-American moral philosophy and the controversy it caused, I am under some obligation to begin my task of giving an overview by first giving an overview of MacIntyre's overview of Anglo-American moral philosophy. MacIntyre's thesis is that modem moral philosophy, especially in the Anglo-American world, is marked by a set of disagreements that it is impossible rationally to resolve. Proponents of rival moral views do indeed argue, and argue validly, from or to certain premises or first principles; but these premises or first principles themselves never get beyond the status of arbitrary assertion. 2 The reason, says MacIntyre, is that in our contemporary culture the language of morality is in a state of grave disorder and fragmentation. It contains ideas and concepts that are derived from several different and conflicting traditions where those ideas and concepts were originally at home. Once divorced from their contexts, however, these same ideas and concepts not only undergo various changes of meaning but also, because they have conflicting 1. After Virtue was published by the University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, and appeared in a second edition in 1984. Some indication of the interest and debate it caused can be found on the back cover of that second edition. All my references are to the second edition. MacIntyre's later books, WhoseJustice, Which Rationality? and Thrtle Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, were published by the same press in 1988 and 1990 respectively. 2. After Virtue, pp. 6-8.

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sources, fail to come together into a coherent whole. Instead they form an "unharmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments."3 Consequently when modern moral philosophers come to use this melange to argue about morality, they can justify their conclusions well enough from one or more of these fragments. But they cannot justify these fragments themselves or say why this one should be adopted rather than another or why the one they have adopted is superior to all the rest. For the contexts in which it was and would be possible to justify any such fragments have been lost. Argument collapses, therefore, into blank assertion and counter-assertion. Such is the thesis and the first thing to ask about it is whether modern Anglo-American moral philosophy does display the kind of disagreement MacIntyre says it does. One must certainly concede that Anglo-American moral philosophy presents us with a series of rival moral doctrines (as notably the several forms of utilitarianism and deontology) and also with a series of rival positions on moral issues (as notably on abortion, euthanasia, social justice, welfare and so on). But one would be hard put to find any period of philosophy anywhere that did not similarly present us with a series of disagreements and rival doctrines. 4 Moreover, one should not exaggerate the amount and degree of the disagreement. For instance, there are only two or perhaps three moral theories that have any great currency or standing in modern Anglo-American moral philosophy, I mean the two of utilitarianism and deontology, along with their several variants, and virtue ethics as the third (which is a relative new-comer on the scene and is by no means as well worked out). There are other theories floating about the edges to be sure, as the natural law theory of Finnis, 5 which add some extra variety, but in the mainstream the options given serious attention are remarkably few. If there is anything new that has broken into Anglo-American moral philosophy in more recent years it is various group- or culture-centrist theories. I have in mind theories that take their premises and methods from some group or other that has, so it is claimed, been historically marginalized or oppressed by the dominant philosophy. The most obvious of these theories are certain sorts of feminism, but there are, or could also be, similar theories focused round homosexuals and lesbians, blacks, Hispanics, native Americans and the like. Such theories, despite their differences, agree in their basic strategy. They say, for instance, 3. Ibid., p. 10. 4. So Frankena in his "MacIntyre and Modem Morality," Ethics 93 (1983): 580-81. 5. First presented in Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), and further argued in Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1983)'

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that the favored group in question has a collective view or approach to ethics that is significantly different from, and, at least according to its proponents, significantly superior to, the prevailing view. This prevailing view, whether it be utilitarian or deontological or something else, may claim to be operating on the basis of universal principles of objective reason, but its so-called reason and its so-called objectivity are really the particular self-interest of the dominant class. 6 This class is typically identified as white, European, and male. These group-centered theories that repudiate the tyranny (as they see it) of the reason of the dominant class not un typically claim that there is no single reason or rationality valid for all men everywhere but rather many reasons and rationalities each valid for the several groups, or genders, or cultures or traditions that there may be. They represent, in other words, a fairly radical break-down in a consensus about reason that has been a distinctive mark, not only of Anglo-American philosophy, and not only for the past one hundred years, but for almost all philosophy for almost all its existence. The consensus in question was that reason was objective, universal and the same for all, and that philosophy was the attempt, using this reason, to reach objective and universal truths the same for alP MacIntyre is like these group-centered theorists in this regard, for he too represents a break-down in the same consensus. He claims that the fragments of conflicting traditions from which modem moral philosophy is currently made up lead to irresoluble disagreement, not only because they have been divorced from the traditions where they naturally belong and have their sense, but also because these traditions themselves are not rationally commensurable. For rationality, says MacIntyre, is itself the product of a tradition and is always relative to that tradition. There exists, he says, no rationality as such; there exists only rationality within a tradition. So the fragments from different traditions that, according to MacIntyre, constitute moral language within modem Anglo-American philosophy not only meet each other as mutilated fragments but also as fragments that carry with them wholly different rationalities and standards ofjustification.8 MacIntyre's thesis about Anglo-American moral philosophy thus turns out to be part and parcel of a much larger break-down, not indeed in 6. This is a point noted by MacIntyre himself in WhoseJustice?pp. 5-6. 7. MacIntyre contends that this consensus was only ever true of the Enlightenment (Whose Justice? pp. 6-11). But this contention seems plainly false, for there is hardly a single great philosopher before the present century who did not accept and appeal to a universal and objective reason. 8. These points are made especially in Whose Justice? chapters 18-20.

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Anglo-American moral philosophy simply, but in philosophy altogether. Still, for all that it could remain true as a thesis about the nature of philosophy, or of Anglo-American moral philosophy in particular. Perhaps rationality is always the rationality of a tradition and perhaps AngloAmerican moral philosophy is the result of an attempt to philosophize as if this were not so. But this question can, in fact, be answered fairly quickly. For MacIntyre's thesis and the argument he gives for it labor under insoluble difficulties. First, the premise of the argument is false. That premise is the assertion, not just of disagreement, but of radical or incommensurable disagreement within Anglo-American moral philosophy. There has been no such radical or incommensurable disagreement over the past one hundred years, or if there has been it has emerged only very recently and only among people like MacIntyre !J,imself who espouse group-centered theories of rationality. People have disagreed, to be sure, as philosophers have always done, but they have also agreed that the way to solve disagreements is by appeal to objective and universal reason. Examples are legion of philosophers changing their minds and giving up positions or adopting new ones because of the arguments of other philosophers. If the arguments keep going on, it is because there is always more left to understand and because old philosophers are always giving way to young ones who have to do the arguing and understanding all over again for themselves. Second, the conclusion does not follow from, nor is rendered plausible by, the premise even were the premise true. For that people disagree, even irresolubly, does not by itself show that there is no rational way to resolve the disagreement. There may well be such a way but not all people can be got to follow it. Some might not be intelligent enough to follow it. Some might be too ignorant to follow it. Others might be perverse and refuse to follow it. Others might want to follow it but fail to do so because of cowardice or impatience or despair or lack of self-control. MacIntyre's thesis would only follow from or be supported by his premise if he assumed the further premise that everyone will behave rationally or can be persuaded to accept the determinations of reason. But that premise is false. As Aristotle bluntly put it over two millennia ago: some people need force, not persuasion. 9 Third, even if the conclusion did follow, nothing would be proved, for the conclusion is indeterminate and arbitrary. It is indeterminate because g. Metaphysics 1oo9a17-18. MacIntyre is, in fact, aware that his conclusion is not strictly entailed by his premise (Whose Justice? p. 346). But what he fails to realize is that his premise does not even give any support to his conclusion unless the other and plainly false premise, or something very similar, is assumed in addition.

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what is meant by a tradition is indeterminate. MacIntyre speaks of a tradition as something extended through time and embracing certain fundamental agreements. lO But how do we know when an agreement is to count as fundamental and when not? Surely one of the things that traditions will disagree on is precisely what to count as fundamental. Views about what is fundamental and what is trivial must inevitably form a substantive part of what, in a given MacIntyrean tradition, it means to be rational. So if conditions on what can reasonably count as fundamental can be laid down in advance then there will after all, contrary to what MacIntyre says, be a rationality that is independent of traditions or a rationality as such, namely whatever these conditions are. But if no such conditions can be laid down in advance then we are never going to be in a position to pick out one tradition from another because we are never going to know which set of agreements is fundamental and so actually constitutes a tradition. The traditions we do in fact pick out will be arbitrary. They will just reflect the opinions that we ourselves happen to have about what may reasonably count as fundamental. Certainly, not a few critics will be quick to say this of the traditions MacIntyre picks out. Every one of these traditions is constituted, for instance, by thinkers who are white, European, male and, for the most part, dead. Nowhere, for instance, does MacIntyre suggest that the views of women, living or dead, might ever have constituted a tradition of their own. At all events, we are now in a position to conclude that MacIntyre's thesis cannot be a true account of modem Anglo-American moral philosophy. For it is too indeterminate and arbitrary to be the account of anything. MacIntyre's thesis is rather one of the things that any account of modem Anglo-American moral philosophy is itself going to have to account for. One should start then by noting that that thesis, as is evident on its face, is a thesis of despair-despair of reason, or of a reason that could form the universe of discourse for all men always and everywhere. MacIntyre attributes this despair in his own case to what he sees as the failure of the Enlightenment to find such a universal reason. I I That failure induced him to look for another kind of reason and what he found, or, to be more precise, what he constructed out of his reading of history, was the thesis in question. In this regard MacIntyre is just another fellow-traveller of the historicist thinking that has been dominant in Continental philosophical thinking since Hegel, or at any rate Nietzsche, and has now become increasingly dominant in Anglo-American philosophical thinking too. Hegel and Nietzsche were also, like MacIntyre, reacting to Enlightenment claims to universal reason. But the 10.

WhoseJustice?p.

12.

11.

Ibid., pp. 6--7.

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causes of historicism, and so of MacIntyre's thesis also, are too deep and too wide-ranging for this paper. 12 2

Nevertheless MacIntyre is not the only nor the first within AngloAmerican philosophy to succumb to despair of universal reason. Wittgenstein is a case in point, the Wittgenstein who abandoned the brilliant severity of the Tractatus for the pervasive relativism of the Philosophical Investigations. 13 Wittgenstein has had a legion of followers in this regard, but there are similar indications to be found in rather different writers, as W. V. O. Quine and David Lewis among others. 14 But these are all writers noted for their work in areas of philosophy other than ethics. Are there similar indications of despair within modern Anglo-American moral philosophy? There are indeed, and in a place one might not immediately think of, I mean John Rawls's A Theory 0/Justice. 1S This book has had enormous influence ever since it was first published in 1971 and it is probably still the single most influential work of moral and political philosophy within the contemporary Anglo-American world. 16 Rawls's project in this book, especially if we read it in the light of his more recent clarifications,17 was to find an organized set of principles, or a coherent overall theory, which would express for us, as well as possible, the structure and meaning of our considered moral judgments. So we are all inclined to say, and to go on saying after due consideration, that justice requires that people should be left free to manage their own lives as much as possible and should not, for instance, be forced to believe one religion rather than another or to serve someone else as his slave. These beliefs or 12. One may, however, begin with Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 13. A complaint voiced by Bertrand Russell. 14. As noted by MacIntyre himself, After Virtue, pp. 266--67. MacIntyre also rightly refers to R Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 214-17, but to this one may also usefully add]. Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 15. It was published by Harvard in 1971 and by Oxford in 1972. The word "despair" is actually used of Rawls's work, or his later work as they see it, by C. Kukathas and P. Pettit in their Rawls: A Theory ofJustice and its Critics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 15D-51. 16. One may refer in particular to the first chapter of Kukathas's and Pettit's Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics cited in the previous note. This chapter is significantly entitled, in reference to Rawls, "A New Departure." 17. "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223-51, especially pp. 223-26, 228. The same idea can be found, if not stated with the same clarity or pursued with the same consistency, in A Theory ofJustice at pp. 19-21,46-53,206,243-44, and especially pp. 451-52.

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judgments are just there as beliefs or judgments we are disposed to make. But there is, presumably, some principle or principles which these judgments reflect or instantiate, principles which, if made explicit and put into some logical order, will not only account for why we make these judgments and in this particular way, but also enable us to bring the rest of our judgments into harmony with them, by telling us which other judgments are consistent or not consistent with them or are entailed or excluded by them. Now this process might take some to-ing and fro-ing, for it may be that our first attempt at stating what principle our judgments instantiate succeeds in saving some of those judgments but not others. We will then have to decide whether to change these other judgments in line with the principle or to change the principle in line with the judgments or perhaps do a bit of both. At all events, if we continue this process long enough we should eventually come to a set of principles and their corresponding judgments which, all things considered, we are happy to acknowledge as best expressing the ensemble of our settled beliefs. Such is the thesis. Now it might appear, and has so appeared to some,18 that Rawls is begging the question in all this. For he first starts off with a set ofjudgments we are disposed to make and then looks for principles to account for these judgments, and any principles that look as if they might account for these judgments but tum out eventually not to (as Rawls says is true of the principles of utilitarianism) are rejected in favor of others that will (as Rawls says is true of the two principles of justice he actually adopts). In other words, the judgments are first used to justify the principles and then the principles are used to justify the judgments. There are certainly elements of A Theory ofJustice that give this impression. However, the criticism is in the end unfair. For it was, in fact, never Rawls's intention to justify either the principles or the judgments, or to prove that they are the judgments and principles that are universally correct and express the truth about justice and human persons simply. On the contrary, Rawls's aim was, as he now puts it, political and not metaphysical, simply to state what justice looks like from the point of view of a modem constitutional democracy and not to give a general conception ofjustice or morality that is true and applicable universally. Rawls does not, to be sure, say that one cannot ask the universal or metaphysical question, as he calls it, nor does he say that one cannot offer answers to it. He does not even say that his own theory of justice could not eventually be made to serve as the answer to such a question. What he does say is that it is a different question and not one that he has been 18. As notably R M. Hare, in N. Daniels, Reading Rawls (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), especially p. 84. But see also MacIntyre Whose Justice? pp. 3-4.

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concerned to ask or answer. His project is a far more modest one: to state a theory of justice that is applicable to a modem constitutional democracy or, if you like, that could enable modem democrats to be more consistent, reflective and systematic in carrying out, in their institutions and practices, the idea of democracy. 19 A parallel may perhaps make the point clearer. For what Rawls is trying to do for democracy is like what Aristotle also tried to do for democracy, and indeed for oligarchy too (not to mention tyranny), namely to state what the idea of each of these regimes was and to suggest ways in which the respective partisans might best be able to arrange their favored regime so that it would be internally coherent and lasting. 2o Aristotle did this, of course, despite the fact that all of these regimes were unjust and had an understanding ofjustice (which Aristotle calls democratic justice and oligarchic justice) that was not justice, or not justice simply.21 For Aristotle did have a theory of justice simply, according to which he was able to pass judgment on all regimes and their corresponding theories ofjustice and determine which was correct and which incorrect, which best and which worse or worst. 22 So, to apply the parallel, what we get in Rawls is just part of the whole that we get in Aristotle. For Rawls gives us an account ofjustice as it is seen in some particular regime, the regime of a modem constitutional democracy, but not an account ofjustice simply (or even an account ofjustice as it is seen in other rival regimes). Rawls's A Theory ofJustice should really have been called A Theory ofDemocraticJustice. If, however, we were to ask about the justice of Rawls's democraticjustice, or to ask how far that justice was in agreement with justice simply, there would be nothing in his book to enable us to answer the question. But, Rawls would say in response, it was never his intention to answer that question. For he never set out to talk about justice; he only ever set out to talk about democratic justice. Aristotle, we may recall, blamed Plato and other thinkers for only talking about justice simply, or only talking about the justice of the simply best regime (or also of some second best, but still difficult and rare, regime). They had left the rest of political philosophy, the discussion of inferior and commonly existing regimes and their theories of justice, completely undone. 23 So, conversely, we may imagine Ig. These points are made with sufficient clarity in "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," pp. 224-31, but they actually reflect the teaching of A Theury ofJustice too, as at pp. 19-21, 46-53, 577-83. 20. Politics bks 4-6 (in the manuscript ordering), and especially 6.2-5. 21. Politics 3.g.1280a7-11. 22. Politics 3.6-7. 23· Politics 4. 1. 1288b35-128ga7·

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Rawls being blamed by Aristotle for leaving the first part of political philosophy, the discussion of justice simply and of the best regime simply, completely undone. Now Rawls, as we have noted, would readily admit that this criticism was correct, that there was this other part of political philosophy and that he himself had not done it.24 He would only reply that there was no need for him to do it, since all he wanted to do was come to the aid, as it were, of modem constitutional democracy and help it to understand and organize itself better. He only ever wanted to do politics, not philosophy. Perhaps we should not blame Rawls for this narrow aim, and perhaps Aristotle would not blame him either. For after all it is legitimate as far as it goes; it is even an act of charity as far as it goes (a doctor should do his best by the patient he has, whatever that patient's state of health) . But for Rawls to confine himself to this task alone means that he has, for all intents and purposes, abandoned the attempt to do moral and political philosophy.25 For he has abandoned the attempt to do what is at the center and heart of moral and political philosophy, namely the study of justice simply and of the best regime simply. He is confining himself only to certain things on the periphery or, as he himself confesses, on the surface. 26 It is this abandonment that lies behind the complaints, and is the truth in the complaints, of those who have accused Rawls of begging the question. The abandonment of moral and political philosophy is, however, both different from, and, in a way, more serious than, a mere begging of the question. For to beg the question is at least to take up the question one is begging. But Rawls is refusing even to take up the question. Nevertheless, when his book first came out, he did seem to be doing moral philosophy and was taken by many actually to be doing moral philosophy. Indeed, his book was hailed as the first attempt to do full-scale moral and political philosophy in a very long time. 27 At least it was so hailed in the world of Anglo-American philosophy. For it was the first book, or one of the first books, in the Anglo-American world actually to deal with substantial moral and political questions in a very long time. Prior to Rawls, most writings on moral philosophy had not been about what people 24. He actually says this, though in different words, in ':Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," p. 225. 25. Kukathas and Pettit do actually accuse Rawls of this, Rawls: A Theury ofjustice and Its Critics, pp. 150-51. 26. ':Justice as fairness deliberately stays on the surface, philosophically speaking," he says on p. 230 of ':Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical." 27. As noted in chapter 1 of Kukathas and Pettit, Rawls: A Theury ofjustice and Its Critics, and also on the back cover of the 1978 printing of the Oxford paperback edition of A Theory ofjustice.

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ought to do but about what people are doing when they talk about what they ought to do. 28 They had been about metaethics not ethics, as the jargon had it, that is, they had been about the conceptual analysis of ethical terms. Rawls's book, however, was very much about ethics, for it was about justice and what people ought to do in order to be just. Indeed, one of the things Rawls claimed for his book was that it made this shift from metaethics to ethics. 29 The popularity and immense influence exercised by Rawls's book, both when it appeared and since, owes not a little to this fact. Here at last was a philosopher who was ready and willing to talk ethics, to descend from the ivory tower of conceptual analysis, as it were, and get his hands dirty in the nitty gritty task of giving advice about what to do. Rawls's book has been a principal factor behind the veritable explosion of books and articles on practical ethics that has occurred over the past twenty and more years. People had, indeed, been conscious for some time of the lack of practicality in Anglo-American moral philosophy,30 and were anxious to rectify the deficiency. But how to do it in a respectable way? How to do it and at the same time escape, or disarm in advance, the accusations of the conceptual analysts that one was omitting the indispensably prior task of determining the meaning or logic of moral terms? Rawls provided the answer. He declared, in effect, that the conceptual disputes did not matter as much as people had thought and could be side-stepped, or if necessary sorted out as one went along. Solvitur ambulando. He accordingly refused to let himself be bothered or deterred by the accusations from conceptual analysts that were sure to come, as come they did. 31 Now it mattered a great deal that Rawls was saying and doing this and not someone else. Or rather it mattered a great deal that Rawls was a professor, and a most distinguished professor, at the most distinguished university in America. For if a Harvard professor could come along and say it was all right to ignore the conceptual disputes and get on with substantive moral questions, and if this Harvard professor went on to provide a method of doing so, then it must be all right for everyone else at every other university, from Yale to Po Dunk, Iowa, to do the same and follow the same method. So everyone could line up behind Rawls and start doing ethics in the Rawlsian 28. So W. D. Hudson in his Modern Moral Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books, 1970), p. 1. 29· Theory ofJustice, pp. 51, 579· 30. C. L. Stevenson, Facts and Values (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 116; B. A. O. Williams, Morality (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 9-10;]' Wilson, Reason and Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. Iff. 31. Hare, in Daniels, Reading Rawls, p. 85.

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manner. And if one of those nasty conceptual analysts came along and started complaining, all one need do was point to Rawls and say: "Harvard says it is all right, and if Harvard says it is all right who are you to say it is not all right?" Such is more or less what happened, and it is striking how much of what was subsequently written on substantive moral questions depended on or took its beginning from Rawls's Theory ofJustice. Remember, however, that according to Rawls himself what he was doing in Theory ofJusticewas only part, and indeed only a superficial part, of the whole of moral philosophy. The remaining and chief part of moral philosophy, or the metaphysical part, he had deliberately put aside in order to do the political part. His work was thus only a fragment, to use MacIntyre's word, of a larger whole. But this larger whole was not a MacIntyrean tradition that had somehow gotten lost; it was, according to Rawls himself, the larger whole of moral philosophy proper, a whole which had not gotten lost at all but just left to one side. Yet Rawls only admitted and made perfectly clear this fragmentary character of his work some fourteen years after the publication of Theory ofJustice. This was the view he held now, he said in 1985, and not necessarily the view he may have given the impression he held in 1971. 32 In other words Theory of Justice gave the impression, as indeed is evident from what was said about it at the time and has been said since, that it was an attempt at the whole of moral philosophy, and not at a fragment of it, or at any rate an attempt at its chief and metaphysical part and not just at its superficial and political part. But what this means, of course, is that in 1971 a most distinguished professor of moral philosophy at Anlerica's most distinguished university was giving everyone the impression that ethics, or the examination of substantive moral issues as opposed to the examination of the meaning of moral terms, was just a matter of relying on one's moral intuitions or those that one's society or group actually happened to have and of putting these intuitions into some kind of systematic order. It was not a matter of examining the truth of your intuitions to find out which were or were not correct and why. One of Rawls's sharpest critics at the time was not slow to predict the result. 33 Since different people and different groups and societies generally have different moral intuitions, to reduce moral philosophy to the systematizing of such intuitions is to reduce moral philosophy to the assertion, albeit a systematic assertion, by one group after another of its own arbitrary intuitions. One cannot, assuredly, blame Rawls for the present irrationalist riot of group-centerisms and 32. "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," p. 224. 33. Hare, in Daniels, Reading Ro.wls, pp. 82-83.

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culture-centerisms in morals and politics, or the craze for multiculturalism generally. The phenomenon is far too complex and wild for even someone with the prestige of a Harvard professor to have brought about single-handedly.34 But one can fairly say that Rawls's Theory of Justice could and did do nothing to stop it and may well have done a great deal to encourage it. For, if not itself despairing of universal reason, it was giving comfort and succor to those who did despair of it. The particular critic who predicted that such would be the result of Rawlsian moral philosophizing had every right to be, and in fact was, very upset and annoyed at the way Rawls was carrying on. The critic in question, R. M. Hare, was and is noted most of all for his contributions to metaethics, or to the conceptual analysis of moral terms. 35 But Hare has least of all been guilty of the charge of failing to deal with substantive moral questions. On the contrary he has asked and answered in a careful and systematic way substantive moral questions of a more concrete and complex nature than Rawls himself has attempted. 36 Moreover Hare never gave the impression, as Rawls by his own confession has, that substantive moral questions could be settled by appeal to prevailing and unargued intuitions. Hare has instead developed over the years a complete moral theory that includes a fully and cleverly argued analysis of moral concepts, a method of moral reasoning consistent with that analysis which does not rely on unargued intuitions, and a series of concrete examples showing how that method works in practice. It is a veritable tour de force of modem analytic philosophy. Hare was for a long time White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford in England. That Rawls's work has had a greater effect than his on modem Anglo-American moral philosophy would th"us seem to indicate that Harvard enjoys more prestige these days and exercises more influence than Oxford. But perhaps it rather indicates that Hare, in refusing to rely on unargued intuitions and insisting instead on reason, is, unlike Rawls, swimming against the tide of our multiculturalist age. Rawls, to be sure, is not a multiculturalist nor does he share its irrationalism. But his work provides no defense against it. Part of what induced Rawls to go down this path was, as already noted, his dissatisfaction with the dominance of metaethics in AngloAmerican moral philosophy. And it certainly is true that the bulk of that 34. Some of the complications are explored by MacIntyre, After Virtue, chaps. 2-3, Whose Justice? pp. 4-6, Three Rival Ver.5ions, chap. 2, though one might also usefully ponder Pope St. Pius X's encyclicals Pascendi and Lamentabili of 1907. 35. His first major book, The Language ofMorals, was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1952; his second, Freedom and Reason, by the same press in 1963; and his third, Moral Thinking, again by the same press in 1981. 36. See the bibliography of Hare's writings at the end of Moral Thinking.

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moral philosophy was focused on metaethics. Even Hare's published work was, up to then, predominantly metaethics. These metaethical debates had, in fact, been rumbling on for most of the century and even though they had come to occupy almost the whole of moral philosophers' attention there was still no consensus in sight. Accordingly there was not much hope either that, if these debates continued to dominate in the way they had, any serious treatment of substantive moral questions would occur. Rawls's attempt to change this state of affairs and to bring the substantive questions back into the center of moral philosophy was not only successful, it was also reasonable. These questions certainly did belong at the center and should never have got pushed to one side. It was not in this that Rawls erred, but rather in the method he adopted.

3 Rawls found support and inspiration for his method, the method of bringing our intuitions into some sort of order and coherence, in the way the classical writers on ethics at least as far as Sidgwick had, so he said, understood the subject, and he mentioned Aristotle as an instance along with Sidgwick. 37 There are certainly elements of Rawlsian method to be found in Sidgwick and Sidgwick himself declared he had found these elements in Aristotle. 38 At any rate Sidgwick came to think of Aristotle's Ethics as an attempt to reduce to consistency "the common sense morality of Greece," and he wondered accordingly whether he himself might not do the same for the common sense morality of his own day. It is plainly false, however, to suppose that all Aristotle was doing in his Ethics was systematizing the moral intuitions of ancient Greeks. True, he appeals to certain common beliefs, but these are not the beliefs of all Greeks or the beliefs of Greeks only. They are the beliefs of gentlemen, not the vulgar, and of gentlemen always and everywhere, not in Greece alone. Moreover they have their source ultimately in nature and the soul and can be corrected by reference to nature and the soul. 39 Actually it would also be false to Sidgwick to think that he confined ethics to Rawlsian systematizing of opinions. Sidgwick was acutely aware of the question of the ultimate truth of these opinions and was never content with the mere fact that they were held. He was never merely political, in Rawls's sense, but also always metaphysical. So if Rawls is following Sidgwick it is only part of Sidgwick he is following, and not the 37. Theory ofJustice, p. 51 n. 6. 38. The Methods ofEthics, 6th ed. (London: MacMillan, 1901), pp. xix-xx. 39. I have argued these points in my article ·Contemporary Virtue Ethics and Aristotle," Review ofMetaphysics 45 (1992): 503-24.

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whole. Still whatever Sidgwick was doing he was certainly doing moral philosophy in its traditional sense; he was certainly engaging in the discussion of substantive moral issues. So what was it that changed after Sidgwick to bring about the shift to metaethics if, as Rawls seems not implausibly to believe, it was after him that the shift occurred? When Sidgwick died in 1 goo, he was working on the sixth edition of his major work on moral philosophy, The Methods of Ethics. That sixth edition (the last for all practical purposes) was published posthumously in 1 go 1. Two years later, there appeared on the scene a book of moral philosophy which was, in the words of one its admirers, "the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth."40 The book in question was G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, and what Moore did in that book may, for present purposes, be reduced to two things. First he declared that the first job of ethics was to determine the meaning of moral terms, and in particular the term good, and second, having so determined it, he declared what things were in fact good and how to get them. The latter declaration was what earned for the book the title of a new heaven and impressed people most at the time, especially Moore's friends in the Bloomsbury Group. But the latter declaration depended crucially on the former and it was this former declaration that drew the most interest from philosophers and gave Anglo-American moral philosophy, from then on virtually up to Rawls, its direction and object. ' What Moore declared in this respect was that the meaning of good was simple and indefinable and incapable of being equated with any other notion at all. The attempt to define it Moore dubbed the naturalistic fallacy, the fallacy of equating goodness with some natural property or matter of fact like pleasure or happiness. Moore had a striking argument for this contention, the so-called open-question argument. If, he said, you tried to equate good with some natural property or fact, say pleasure, so that good just meant "pleasure," as triangle just means "three sided plane figure," then the statement "pleasure is good" will reduce to the statement "pleasure is pleasure." But the question whether pleasure is good is not a trivial tautology like the question whether pleasure is pleasure. On the contrary it is an open and significant question and it is never trivially tautologous to ask if pleasure is after all good. What thus holds for pleasure will hold, says Moore, for anything else proposed as the definition of good. So, he concludes, good cannot have a definition. It must be simple and indefinable. 41 40. The words ofJohn Maynard Keynes as quoted by Macintyre, After Virtue, p. 14, and see also p. 16. 41. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. 15-17.

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What this open-question argument actually proves, if it proves anything, became a subject of much debate among philosophers. Few of them, however, followed Moore in saying good was a property, though they did follow him in saying it had no definition. For they agreed that good had the peculiar feature that whatever subject it was predicated of it could not be identified with, nor defined in terms of, that subject or any of its properties. Suppose, for instance, one calls a certain red,juicy strawberry good. One cannot say that that strawberry's goodness just is its redness and juiciness. For then to say this red, juicy strawberry is good will be like saying this red, juicy strawberry is red and juicy, which is not at all what one meant.42 In order to account for this feature of goodness, or the fact that goodness cannot be equated with the things it is predicated of, philosophers after Moore said that good did not signify any sort of property at all, not even a Moorean property, but expressed the attitude one took towards things. So when one says the red, juicy strawberry is good, what one is doing is not predicating some special property of goodness of it, but expressing an attitude of approval or favor towards it. This expressing of attitudes came to be understood in two basic ways. The first way was that of the emotivists, in particular A J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson, who said that good expressed emotions or feelings. 43 On this theory, to say of a red, juicy strawberry that it is good is like saying: "this red, juicy strawberry, hurrah!" The second way was that of the prescriptivists, notably Hare, their founder and chief, who said that good was expressive of something more deliberate and rational than feelings. It expressed rather one's choices or one's decisions. On this theory, to say of a red, juicy strawberry that it is good is like saying: "this red, juicy strawberry, please!" The difference between the "hurrah!" and "please!" is meant to draw attention to the fact that while emotions can be, and often are, arbitrary, choices can be deliberate and rational. Hare, in fact, made a significant advance in this respect over the emotivism of Ayer and Stevenson, who seemed to have reduced morals to the expression of arbitrary preferences. He was able to show instead that the making of moral judgments, when these were understood as expressive of choices and not of feelings, had to conform to some fairly strict rules and was very far from arbitrary. It is not necessary, however, to pursue this difference between the theories of emotivism and prescriptivism. What does deserve noting is that the problem that motivated them, the problem about good uncovered by 42. Hare, in Language ofMorals, pp. 83-93. 43. Ayer Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1946), chap. 6; C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).

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Moore's open-question argument, is a genuinely puzzling and important one. How it eventually gets solved has consequences for the whole of one's moral philosophizing. For if "good" really does have no meaning or definition, if its function in a sentence is not to state what is the case but rather to express attitudes, whether feelings or choices, then no moral theory that supposes that good has a meaning, or supposes that some things are good by nature or as a matter of fact, can be correct. For there will be no matter of fact that "good" expresses. If, on the other hand, one does suppose that "good" expresses some matter of fact, how is one going to account for that peculiar feature of it which was uncovered in Moore's open-question argument? This problem about goodness went under the name given it by Moore, the problem of the naturalistic fallacy or the problem whether it was a fallacy, a misunderstanding of the use of words, to suppose that "good" had a meaning or expressed some matter of fact about things. Because of its importance, and indeed because of its intrinsic fascination, it came to dominate the whole of Anglo-American moral philosophy and to be virtually its one and only focus of interest. But the naturalistic fallacy is metaethics, not ethics. It is about the meaning, the conceptual analysis, of "good" and moral words generally. It is not about what it is good or bad, right or wrong, for us to do. Moore's Principia Ethica proved indeed to be a beginning, not of a new heaven, but of a new preoccupation for moral philosophy, the preoccupation with metaethics. It did bring about that shift in the attention of moral philosophers after Sidgwick noted by Rawls. For even though Moore spoke as much about what it was good and right for us to do as any previous moral philosopher, nevertheless this part of his book was largely ignored. It may have been the part that impressed the Bloomsbury Group, but it is not the part that fascinated the philosophers. Still metaethics, for all its fascination, is not ethics and even something fascinating can become boring eventually. Misgivings about the preoccupation of moral philosophers with the problem of the meanings of moral words were already in the air when in 1958 G. E. M. Anscombe published her article "Modern Moral Philosophy."44 This became perhaps the most influential of the protests against the prevailing state of moral philosophy. For our purposes it had two principal effects: the resurgence of virtue ethics and MacIntyre's theory of fragmented traditions. Anscombe argued that the problem of the naturalistic fallacy arose 44. It first appeared in Philosophy 33 (1958) but was republished in Hudson's The Is/Ought Question (London: MacMillan, 1969)' My references are to Hudson's anthology. Anscombe had already anticipated some of the points of the article in her book Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957).

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from the fact that people were using words in ways that no longer made any sense. She focused, in fact, on the word "ought" rather than "good," for this word too, not surprisingly, had come to the center of the debate about the naturalistic fallacy. Just as the followers of Moore contended that "good" did not mean some fact or property of things, so they contended that no "ought" could logically follow from an "is." For whether something or other "ought" to be done seems as open a question as whether it is "good," and if there is no fact that one is compelled, on pain of logical inconsistency, to call good, there can be no fact that one is compelled, on pain oflogical inconsistency, to say ought to be done. Or, in other words, no "is"-judgment entails any"ought"-judgment. This slogan, no "ought" from an "is," was actually traced back to Hume rather than to Moore, though one may doubt whether it had the same significance for Hume as for the followers of Moore. 45 At all events the prominence that the slogan acquired in modern Anglo-American moral philosophy owes everything to Moore's open-question argument, for only after that argument had itself come to prominence did philosophers discover in Hume, or read back into him, the famous "is-ought" distinction. Anscombe's charge against this distinction was that the "ought" it used was empty, being only a hangover from a previous tradition of moral thought whose demise had rendered it meaningless. That previous tradition was the divine law tradition of Christianity, which understood "ought" to be expressive of what one was commanded to do by God. So when the dominance of Christianity waned and the idea of a law-giving God was abandoned, this meaning of "ought" should have been abandoned too. It was not, however, because it had become too deeply embedded in our language. The result was that there was now a word in common use that had lost its only intelligible support. The only thing that philosophers could do when faced with this puzzle, short of giving up the use of "ought" altogether, was to say that "ought" had some special sense in moral contexts. It is this special sense, declares Anscombe, that cannot be inferred from an "is" because it has only mesmeric force and no content and so cannot be inferred from anything at all. 46 This is an interesting story and one can readily see how it could have inspired MacIntyre's theory offragmented traditions. 47 But it is no more successful as an account of what was going on than is MacIntyre's theory. For suppose that "ought" does just mean "commanded by God." There is as much an open-question, a question not closed by mere rules oflogic 45. So MacIntyre, in Hudson, The Is/Ought Question, pp. 48-51, and my own remarks in Goodness and Nature (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 117, 125. 46. In Hudson, The Is/Ought Question, pp. 180-82. 47. MacIntyre so acknowledges his debt to Anscombe, After Virtue, p. 53.

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or word-usage, about whether one really ought to do what is commanded by God as about any other "ought"-judgment one cares to make. So if the same puzzle about "ought" arises even in a divine law theory of ethics the loss of such a theory cannot be what explains the rise of that puzzle within modem Anglo-American moral philosophy. But Anscombe also attacked the way modem moral philosophers were understanding the word "good." For it is an implication of the open-question argument that anything at all can be called good. If "good" has no meaning, or cannot be identified with any particular facts about things, then there is nothing about it that could render incoherent or logically impossible its predication of anything whatever. But, responded Anscombe, there are some things one cannot intelligibly call good, as for instance a saucer of mud. There are limits, she said, to the application of "good" and this fact would be clear if instead of concentrating on the rather abstract and indefinite word "good" one concentrated on words like "courage" or '1ustice." For these words have a definite content and show that definite things are morally good or bad and that not everything can coherently be called good. It was this suggestion, to focus on the concrete goods of the virtues, that was enthusiastically taken up by Philippa Foot, and it has been largely through Foot, thus inspired by Anscombe, that virtue ethics has come back into popularity in Anglo-American philosophy.48 One would be mistaken, however, in supposing that talking about the virtues does anything by itself to resolve the puzzle of the open -question argument. One may certainly say, and Hare himself was quite happy to say, that it is foolish or bizarre to call certain things good. But that, he insisted, was beside the point. For the issue does not tum on what it is foolish or sensible to do but on what it is logically possible to do, and the open-question argument shows, if it shows anything, that it is logically possible to call anything good. If someone calls a saucer of mud good, he may be crazy, but he is not offending logic or breaking any rules for the use of the word "good. "49 This tum towards the virtues, then, does nothing to resolve the puzzles of the open -question argument, but it was both a sign and an instance of the increasing desire of moral philosophers to move from questions of meaning to questions of moral substance. It was also a sign and an instance of the desire of moral philosophers to develop theories of ethics other than utilitarianism. For Hare, who had most stressed the importance of the conceptual questions and had developed by far the most 48. Foot, Theuries of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 8-g, 83-100; Virtues lmd Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 49. In Hudson, The Is/Ought Question, pp. 247-52.

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clear and coherent answer to them, also argued that this answer required, in the end, the adoption of utilitarianism. 50 Hare was as compelling and as subtle on this point as he was also on the conceptual questions. But the fact that he was so did nothing to hold back, and did much to encourage, the desire of philosophers to tum away from the conceptual questions and concentrate on the substantive ones. Certainly this was true of Foot. 51 It was also true of Rawls, whose Theory ofJustice was as much an attempt to get away from utilitarianism as to get away from mere conceptual analysis. 52 Rawls was, in fact, particularly clever in this respect. For both Hare and Foot, and indeed all those who had engaged in the debate about the naturalistic fallacy, were citizens of modem liberal democracies and evidently in fundamental agreement with the principles and goals of modem liberal democracy. Why not ignore the disagreements then, which were after all diverting attention from questions of substance, and start with the agreements? Why not begin with the liberal democratic convictions everyone already shared and try to work out what set of principles these convictions best instantiated or what set of principles would enable us to put those convictions into the most coherent and satisfactory order? Why not regard moral philosophy, in partial imitation of Sidgwick, as the task of organizing the opinions we all already share? This re-focusing of the task of moral philosophy promised to bring with it many advantages. It would relegate the conceptual questions to the background, where the lack of consensus about their resolution would cease to get in the way of asking and answering substantive questions; it would enable one to set about developing theories besides utilitarianism; and it would, at the same time, enable one to put to the test whether and how far utilitarianism was in fact an acceptable theory. For if utilitarianism proved not to be as good a way of organizing our opinions as some other theory, then it would, to that extent, be shown not to be as acceptable as that other theory. 53 Such was in general Rawls's strategy and, as a response to the problems within Anglo-American philosophy that he was immediately confronting, it had no little justification. But it did not have enough justification, or not enough for Rawls to give the impression, at the same time, that that was all there was to moral philosophy. To escape one set of problems by promoting or countenancing others that are·as bad or worse is not an improvement. 50. Notably in Mural Thinking. 51. See in particular the introduction to Virtues and Vices. 52. Theury ofJustice, pp. vii-viii. 53. Ibid., chap. 3.

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4 I have told a long and complex story briefly and with simplifications. Indeed, in thus tracing the course of modem Anglo-American moral philosophy from Rawls and back again to Rawls, I have passed quickly over more than fifty years of philosophy. I have omitted, perforce, many names and many ideas and movements that did not fit into my immediate focus. Certainly there was more to these years than the debate about the naturalistic fallacy and the figures who achieved prominence therein. But since that debate was, by common consensus, the chief preoccupation of the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy, it necessarily had to be my chief preoccupation too. There will, however, be an opportunity to make good at least one of the omissions shortly. For the present I wish to stress that although Anglo-American moral philosophers failed to come to an agreement on the questions at the center of the naturalistic fallacy debate, or even on the question what was the best theory of substantive moral theorizing, this does not mean that there was no answer to these questions, nor indeed that no one had found it. Perhaps there was and is such an answer and perhaps someone really did find it. Hare for one has remained convinced that this is so in his case, and of all Anglo-American moral philosophers he has perhaps the most right to be so convinced. Certainly no one has come up with an account of the meaning of "good" and of what theory of moral reasoning must thereby follow that comes anywhere close to his in its grasp of the issues, its subtlety of analysis and its cleverness of development. But the fact that so few other philosophers have been persuaded to agree with Hare does not tell us that Hare is wrong. Nor does it tell us that Hare is right. In fact it tells us nothing at all either way. Disagreement, even on fundamentals and even on matters where the truth is to be had, has always been a feature of human reasoning and philosophizing. We might wish it to be otherwise, but the fact that it is not otherwise is no reason to doubt, with MacIntyre, the existence of a reason that is universal instead of bound to some particular tradition. The fault is in ourselves, not in reason, that we are unreason's playthings. For it is not reason that fails: it is we who fail in our use of reason. We fail and can fail in many ways: in lack of native talent to begin with, but also in yielding to passions, or in making bad choices and developing bad habits, or indeed in the simple fact that we are all dying and suffer the weariness and decay of mortality. About some of these failings we can do nothing; they are what flesh is heir to. But about others we can do something. We can refuse to give up on the use of reason for one thing. I have already indicated that a noticeable feature of more recent

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Anglo-American moral philosophy has been the giving up on reason, whether expressly in the relativism of group- and culture-centric theories and the historicism of MacIntyrean traditions, or indirectly and, as it were, by default in the retreat to unargued intuitions and superficiality of Rawls. But to refuse to give up is only a start and, by itself, merely a rejection, the rejection of a certain sort of temptation. There is need of something more positive. One very important thing that can be done is to take as much advantage as possible of the wisdom of those who have gone before us, and marked out the path of understanding. Failings in this respect, indeed, are older and more endemic in the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy, and not just moral philosophy, than failings to persevere in reason. 54 For one of the features ofthis mainstream is that while remarkably clever it is also remarkably narrow. The range of options it has considered for solving the problems it raises has been carefully confined within certain very restricted boundaries, and philosophers in this mainstream seldom allowed themselves to go, or be drawn, beyond these boundaries. MacIntyre, of course, went way beyond them, but it is not his sort of going beyond which we need. For he gave up on universal reason and tried, and still tries, to cover too much ground and too many thinkers too quickly. Rather what we need is to go beyond and yet not give up on reason nor try to do too much at once. If philosophers in the mainstream had done more of this they would have found other solutions for their problems which, even had these solutions still been rejected, would yet have cast much fresh light on the issues at stake. 55 The boundaries in question are guarded by certain key figures in the history of philosophy, such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. To stray too much beyond these and the like guardians is eventually to incur a sort of ostracism. One can stray towards Hegel, perhaps, though not too much, and also towards Plato and Aristotle, though only to a Plato and Aristotle read in a suitably modem way. 56 To stray towards Nietzsche is pushing it and to stray towards Heidegger is 54. Thinkers in the Anglo-American world over the last hundred years who have tried not to fail in this respect have, by that very fact, generally put themselves outside the mainstream. Apart from those I refer to shortly, others who deserve a particular mention in this regard are those working out of the Catholic tradition, such as Vernon Bourke, Austin Fagothey and Henry Veatch. 55. A point I argued at length in my Goodn.ess and Nature and illustrated more compendiously in "St. Thomas and the Naturalistic Fallacy," The Thomist 51 (1987): 51-69. See also the last chapter of Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism. 56. A point I made with respect to Aristotle in my "Contemporary Virtue Ethics and Aristotle," especially pp. 504,506,523-24.

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to have gone too far. To stray towards medieval philosophy, unless it be late medieval logic and unless one is really writing history, is something that only those do who have not properly distinguished between philosophy and their Catholic or Jewish or Islamic faith. Finnis went that way and so, in his own peculiar fashion, did MacIntyre; and if the first contributions of these writers attracted a lot of attention, their later ones have attracted much less. As for such exotica as Chinese or Asian philosophy generally, to stray towards these is only what Chinese and Asians do and so unusual as to be quaint. I am indulging a little in caricature, but not too much. Certainly those who focus on philosophers beyond the boundaries, and who try to generate a serious discussion of doctrines that are expressly drawn from or expressly based on these philosophers, find it hard to get much of a hearing. One suspects they would have found it easier had they been silent about their sources. But if so, that only confirms the narrowness they had to confront. This narrowness, moreover, is not just a function of which philosophers of the past are read or taken as sources of inspiration. For there are philosophers thoroughly within Anglo-American philosophy, even over the past one hundred years, who could have been brought in to broaden things out but whose unusual interests or unusual conceptions of philosophy have left them standing on the margins. What of Paul Weiss, or Charles Hartshorne, or Richard Collingwood, or Alfred North Whitehead (the Whitehead of other fame than as co-author of what is often misleadingly called Russell's Principia)? What, indeed, of John Dewey, whose name is now regularly ranked by historians of philosophy with the famous names of the past? Dewey is, in fact, an interesting case in point, for in 1939, three years after the first publication of Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, five years before the publication of Stevenson's Ethics and Language, and thirteen years before the publication of Hare's Language of Morals, Dewey published a book entitled Theory of Valuation. 57 This is a striking book in many respects, but there are three things about it in particular that are of importance for our present purpose. First, Dewey pointed out that the problem of valuation, that is of the status and meaning of valuejudgments including moral ones, had only become problematic within contemporary philosophy because of prior changes in epistemology and metaphysics, and notably because of the elimination, or attempted elimination, of value-conceptions from science. Classic philosophy by contrast, he declared, "identified ens, verum, and bonum, and the identification was 57. It was published by Chicago University Press, Chicago, in the same series in which appeared, in 1962, T. S. Kuhn's enonnously influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

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taken to be an expression of the constitution of nature as the object of natural science. In such a context there was no call and no place for any separate problem of valuation and values, since what are now termed values were taken to be integrally incorporated in the very structure of the world."58 In other words, the problem of value as this had arisen within the naturalistic fallacy debate was not a problem of logic or the meaning of words, as everyone then took it to be (and as Hare still takes it to be), but of knowledge and the nature of nature. Or it was only a problem of logic because it was first a problem of knowledge and the nature of nature. 59 Second, Dewey pointed out that Ayer's theory of moral terms as merely ejaculatory, like "boo!" and "hurrah!", either involved a flawed subjectivist psychology (Dewey attacked talk of irreducibly private feelings the same way Wittgenstein was then trying to do, but with far more sureness and clarity), or made sentences containing these terms into straightforward empirical statements. 60 Third, Dewey pointed out that the same emotive theory that allowed that sentences about means could be empirically true or false but denied that sentences about ends could be, was supposing a separation between the valuation of means and ends wholly false to actual life; confusing mere impulse with choice (a point Hare was to make his own many years later); and describing a condition of mind that could only be true of those who had failed to grow Up.61 Had these points and others made by Dewey already in 1939 been read and taken seriously, they would have short-circuited a great deal of the naturalistic fallacy debate and, if not brought it to a conclusion, at least have made clear just what set of other ideas the opposing sides in that debate were necessarily buying into. Dewey was a comprehensive philosopher who wrote and thought deeply about all departments of philosophy and who would never have dreamt that moral philosophy could be just a matter of analyzing the meanings of moral terms. Neither would he have tried to reduce the making of moral judgments to some utilitarian calculation. On the contrary, in his own moral writings, which range over the whole terrain of moral philosophy, he took great pains to discover what is good, if partial, in each of the rival doctrines, utilitarianism, deontology and 58. Theury of Valuation, pp. 1-3· 59. MacIntyre made this point in After Virtue, chap. 5, as I also did in Goodness and Nature, pp. 108-10, 129-31, though in complete ignorance, I am afraid, of Dewey's work. 60. Theury of Valuation, pp. 6-12. 61. Ibid., pp. 23-33. Stevenson thought this point of Dewey's deserved particularly serious attention (Facts and Values, p. 116).

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virtue. 62 In this respect he bears some resemblance to Sidgwick, who was, like Dewey, as fully aware of, and as emphatic about, the importance of virtue as any contemporary proponent of virtue ethics. Perhaps if Rawls had paid more attention to these aspects of Dewey'S writings on ethics,63 he might have been able to present in Theory ofjustice a less dangerous way to overcome the dominance of the conceptual disputes and of utilitarianism that he found so objectionable. I do not wish, by these remarks, to say that Dewey's thought is without fault or to recommend a return to his philosophy. I merely wish to point out how an Anglo-American philosopher, a great Anglo-American philosopher, of whom no Anglo-American philosopher could have been ignorant, was nevertheless ignored, and ignored precisely when and where he could have been of most help. But Dewey is not the only philosopher to have been ignored. To some extent, indeed, we should not complain too much. For we cannot all read everybody. We must all limit ourselves somewhere. Non possumus omnia omnes. Still, if we cannot all do everything we can all at least do something, and specifically we can all do something to stop ourselves and others becoming too narrow. The mainstream of modem Anglo-American philosophy is, and has been for a long time, too narrow. It badly needs to open itself to fresh ideas and fresh perspectives from outside. Whether it will so open itself I am inclined to doubt, for if the mainstream is not a MacIntyrean tradition possessed of its own exclusive rationality, it is certainly, through its hold on the major positions in the major graduate universities, an institution with its own way of perpetuating itself and of passing on its habits to the next generation. Still, it is not a monolith, and renegade ideas and renegade professors are always floating around its edges ready to break, if only temporarily, into the center. At that center, indeed, even if there is narrowness, there is also cleverness, a cleverness that at times approaches genius. Without such cleverness, and without patience and persistence in the use of reason, broadness can spell disaster whereas narrowness can, by contrast, spell safety. Too much undisciplined and unschooled knowledge can plunge one into worse errors than a little schooled and disciplined knowledge. Certainly if Anglo-American moral philosophy had stayed focused on the naturalistic fallacy debate it would not have strayed, or encouraged others to stray, into the wildness of multiculturalism. What it said would, to be sure, have had little effect, but better no effect than a bad effect. Still, narrowness is 62. Theury of the Mural Life (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1960), which is the central section, written entirely by Dewey, of a larger work, Ethics (New York: Holt) ,jointly authored by Dewey and Tufts and first published in 1908. 63. He notes only one of Dewey's works in a footnote, Theury ofJustice, p. 400 n. 2.

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a failing all the same, and it would not take much to overcome. The resources exist in abundance, for it is a feature of philosophy in America, if not in the United Kingdom, that everything gets studied by someone somewhere sometime. Every possibility gets actualized here. Of course the bad ones get actualized too and, looking at some of them, one may be tempted to wonder if Armageddon is not already upon us. Rawls and MacIntyre are not Armageddon, to be sure. They represent, nevertheless, in their different ways, a giving up on the timeless task of philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom and of a wisdom that is itself timeless. They have become part of the much larger tradition of despair that may be the first shocks of Armageddon. They are not the best of AngloAmerican moral philosophy during the last one hundred years, even if Rawls in particular now stands out so prominently. The best, at least of the mainstream, is represented rather by Hare and others in the naturalistic fallacy debate. There was sometimes better on the edges, as the case of Dewey helps to show. But if there is to be better in the future it will be because those who come after have, without giving up on universal reason, learnt to sit at the feet of a greater and more varied range of teachers from the past. We can hope anyway. For if even Pandora did not take hope from us, neither surely can MacIntyre and Rawls. 64 64. An earlier version of this article appears as the first essay in my recently published Vice5, Virtues, and Consequences: Essays in Mural and Political Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001).

4

One Hundred Years of Legal Philosophy

ROBERT P. GEORGE There is a sense in which twentieth-century legal philosophy began on January 8, 1897. On that day, Oliver Wendell Holmes, then ajustice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, spoke at a ceremony dedicating the new hall of the Boston University School of Law. In his remarks, which were published that spring in the Harvard Law Review under the title "The Path of the Law,"l Holmes proposed to debunk the jurisprudence of the past and to set a new course for modem jurists and legal scholars. Holmes's themes-the question oflaw's objectivity and the relationship between law and morality-have preoccupied legal philosophy in the century which was then dawning and which has now drawn to a close. My mission in this chapter is to survey the treatment of these themes by some influential twentieth-century British and American legal philosophers and jurists and make some observations about where we find ourselves a little more than one hundred years after the publication of "The Path of the Law." Let us look first, though, at Holmes's own treatments of his themes. The opening sentence of his lecture invited his audience-lawyers, law professors, and law students-to consider what it is we study when we study law. We are not, he said, studying a "mystery," but, rather, "a well known profession" (p. 61). People are willing to pay lawyers to advise and represent them because "in societies like ours the command of public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees" (p. 61). Now, this is a fearsome power. So, "people will want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared" (p. 61). The object of the study oflaw, therefore, "is prediction, the prediction of 1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Path of the Law," Harvard Law Review Internal page citations are to this article.

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the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts" (p. 61). This was the thesis of "The Path of the Law." It was intended, 1 believe, as a provocation. And so, Holmes formulated it in provocative ways: A legal duty so called is nothing but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court. (P·45 8 ) The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law. (p. 461) The duty to keep a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it,-and nothing else. (P.462)

Of course, the power of provocation is enhanced to the extent one obscures one's intention to provoke. And so Holmes claimed merely to be proposing a "business-like understanding of the matter" (p. 459). And such an understanding, he insisted, requires us strictly to avoid confusing moral and legal notions. This is difficult, Holmes suggested, because the very language oflaw-a language of "rights," "duties," "obligations," "malice," "intent," etc.-lays a "trap" for the unwary. "For my own part," he declared in another famously provocative sentence, "I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law" (p. 464). Holmes's implicit denial of law's objectivity is not unconnected to his insistence on the strict separation of moral and legal notions. "One of the many evil effects of the confusion between legal and moral ideas," he stated, "is that theory is apt to get the cart before the horse, and to consider the right or the duty as something existing apart from and independent of the consequences of its breach, to which certain sanctions are added afterward" (p. 458). A corrective, according to Holmes, was to adopt the viewpoint of a "bad man" when trying to understand the law as such. If you want to know the law, and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which [legal] knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience. (P.459)

And what exactly is being corrected by adopting the bad man's point of view? You will find some text writers telling you that [the law] is something different from what is decided by the courts of Massachusetts or England, that it is a system of reason, that it is a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or

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what not, which mayor may not coincide with the decisions. But if we take the view of our friend the bad man we shall find that he does not care two straws for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the Massachusetts or English courts are likely to do in fact. (pp. 460-61)

"I am," Holmes declared, "much of his mind." Still for all his skepticism-legal and moral-Holmes denied that his was "the language of cynicism" (p. 459). The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race. The practice of it, in spite of our popular jests, tends to make good citizens and good men. When I emphasize the difference between law and morals I do so with reference to a single end, that of learning and understanding the law. (P.459)

Going still further, Holmes claimed to "venerate the law, and especially our system of law, as one of the vastest products of the human mind" (p. 473). It was not, he assured his reader, disrespect for the law which prompted him to "criticise it so freely," (p. 473) but rather a devotion to it which expresses itself in a desire for its improvement (p. 474). Holmes's aim was merely, he said, to expose some common fallacies about what constitutes the law. For example, some people-Holmes. doesn't tell us who they are-hold that "the only force at work in the development of the law is logic" (p. 465). This erroneous way of thinking is, Holmes advised his audience, "entirely natural" for lawyers, given their training in logic with its "processes" of analogy, discrimination, and deduction, but it is erroneous nevertheless. Moreover, "the logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind" (p. 466). "But," Holmes went on to say-without, it should be added, the slightest hesitation or expression of doubt, certainty generally is an illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. Behind the logical form lies ajudgment as to the relative worth and importance of competing legislative grounds, often an articulate and unconscious judgment, it is true, and yet the very root and nerve of the whole proceeding. (p. 466)

Now, this is getting interesting. The man who would later utter, in another connection, the famous aphorism that "the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience," has already told his audience in this lecture that law is a matter of prediction, of prophecies of what courts will do in fact. And he has expressed great skepticism about the role of logic in guiding the decision-making of judges whose rulings, one way or the other, will constitute the law. So, how are those decisions to be rationally guided? What is "the law" from the perspective, not of the "bad man," but of the "good judge," who, facing a disputed question of law, will not be comforted by the assurance that "the law" is

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a prediction of how he will in fact resolve the case. In fact, what he wishes to do is to resolve the case according to the law. That, he supposes, is his job. He wants to rule on the matter favorably to the litigant whose cause is supported by the superior legal argument. But what constitutes legal argument? What are the sources of law upon which legal reasoning operates? Of course, one candidate for inclusion in the list oflegal sources is history. And, according to Holmes, "the rational study of law is still to a large extent the study of history" (p. 469). Is this good or bad? "History must," Holmes says, "be a part of the study, because without it we cannot know the precise scope of rules which it is our business to know" (p. 469). But then comes the punch line: "It is part of the rational study, because it is the first step toward an enlightened scepticism, that is, toward a deliberate reconsideration of the worth of those rules" (p. 469). The legal rules that are uncovered and clarified by historical inquiry are not found to be authorities that guide the reasoning of the conscientious judge. On the contrary, the study of history exposes the value of such rules to "an enlightened scepticism." But then, by appeal to what standards are such judgments of value to be made? And-most critically-are these standards internal or external to the law? Does the judge discover the proper standards in the legal materials-the statutes, the cases, the learned treatises-or does the judge bring the standards to those materials? If the latter, then what is the discipline from which he derives them? These are questions that were to be central to the theoretical reflections of jurists and legal scholars for more than a hundred years. They were answered one way by Jerome Frank and his fellow "legal realists" in the first half of the twentieth century, and precisely the opposite way by Ronald Dworkin and his followers in the second half. Herbert Hartwho was the greatest of the English-speaking legal philosophers of the twentieth century-will refer to the realists' answer as the "nightmare" that law does not exist, and to Dworkin's answer, as the "noble dream," that law as such provides a "right answer" -a single uniquely correct resolution-to every dispute which makes its way into the courtroom. 2 Holmes's own answer was tantalizingly ambiguous. In "The Path of the Law," he said at one point that "I think the judges themselves have failed adequately to recognize their duty of weighing considerations of social advantage" (p. 467). At another point he made this remarkable statement: 2. H. L. A. Hart, "American Jurisprudence through English Eyes: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream," in Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 198 3).

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I look forward to a time when the part played by history in the explanation of [legal] dogma shall be very small, and instead of ingenious research we shall spend our energy on a study of the ends sought to be attained and the reasons for desiring them. As a step toward that ideal it seems to me that every lawyer ought to seek an understanding of economics. (p. 474)

Three-quarters of a century later, Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook, Richard Epstein, Guido Calebresi, and other theorists and practitioners of the "economic analysis of law" would take this last piece of advice quite literally. Their books, law review articles, and-in the cases of Posner, Easterbrook, and, most recently, Calebresi-judicial opinions would subject legal rules and social policies to cost-benefit tests and other forms of economic analysis to assess their instrumental rationality and, thus, in some cases, their legal validity. What these scholars and jurists do fits pretty well with Holmes's desire for lawyers and judges to "consider the ends which the several rules seek to accomplish, the reasons why those ends are desired, what is given up to gain them, and whether they are worth the price" (p. 476). But, one must ask, would Holmes really approve their doing it? Although Holmes was, in his politics, "a moderate, liberal reformer,"3 he was resolutely determined, as a judge, not to "legislate from the bench." Indeed, during a period of unprecedented "judicial activism," he became the symbol of opposition to the judicial usurpation of legislative authority under the guise of interpreting the constitution. As an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, he drew as sharp a line as any jurist of his time between "law" and "politics"-even when the subject in question was political economy. In what is perhaps his most celebrated dissent, Holmes castigated the majority in the 1905 case of Lochner v. New Yom,4 invalidating a state law setting maximum working hours for employees in bakeries on the grounds that such a regulation violated the "freedom of contract" that was held to be implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Holmes argued that this so-called "substantive due process" doctrine was an invention designed to authorize what was, in fact, the illegitimate judicial imposition of a theory of economic efficiency and the morality of economic relations on the people of the states and the nation. His claim was not that there was anything defective in that theory; on the contrary, its "social Darwinist" dimensions held considerable appeal to him. Rather, it was that judges had no business substituting their judgments of efficiency and value for those of the people's elected representatives. 3.]' W. Harris, Legal Philosophies (London: Butterworths, 1980), p. 94. 4· 198 U.S. 45 (1905)·

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Now, it is not that any of this is flatly inconsistent with what Holmes said in "The Path of the LaW." Indeed, at one point in that lecture he seems to suggest that training in economics and a due weighing of considerations of social advantage will have the salutary effect of encouraging judicial restraint. "I cannot but believe," he declared, "that if the training of lawyers led them habitually to consider more definitely and explicitly the social advantage on which the rule they lay down must be justified, they sometimes would hesitate where now they are confident, and see that really they were taking sides upon debatable and often burning questions" (p. 468). But plainly Holmes, as ajudge-and, above all, as a dissenting judge-is supposing that the law is something more than merely a prophecy of what the courts will in fact decide. As a dissenter, he holds that the Courts have decided the case incorrectly. Of course, he does not deny that their rulings-even where incorrect-have the binding force of law, at least until they are reversed by higher courts of appeal; but he does suppose that the judges in the majority "got the law wrong." So, apparently, judges in resolving disputes should be guided, in some significant sense, by law. And this presupposes the reality of law, and, indeed, the pre-existence oflaw, as something more than "a prophecy of what courts will do in fact." So we must press the question: To what standards of legal correctness should the judge look in reasoning to the resolution of a case? Are the standards internal to the legal materials and discoverable, by some method, in them? Or are they external? Do judges "find" the law? Or do they, necessarily, "create" it? Can lawyers predict or "prophesy" what a good and conscientious judge will do by figuring out what he should do in light of the legal materials which should control his reasoning? If that is all Holmes means by "prediction" and "prophecy," then his debunking exercise is, for all its provocative language, far less skeptical than it appeared. Drawing their inspiration from Holmes, however, there soon emerged a group of legal scholars who were prepared, for a while at least, to expose the idea of law to truly radical skepticism. The legal realist movement, which reached the peak of its influence in the 1930S and 1940s, advanced the debunking project well beyond the point at which Holmes had left things in "The Path of the Law." Felix Cohen, Karl Llewellyn,Jerome Frank, and others pressed to an extreme the idea ofjurisprudence as an essentially "predictive" enterprise. "Law," according to Llewellyn, "was what officials do about disputes."5 In accounting for their decisions, he insisted, it could only rarely be true to say that they 5. Karl llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study, rev. ed. (New York: Oceana, 1951), p. 12.

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are guided by rules. The trouble is not-or not just-that judges and other officials are willful, and thus willing to lay aside the clear command oflegal rules in order to do as they please. It is that legal rules are necessarily vague and susceptible of competing reasonable interpretations and applications. Even the problem of selecting which rule to apply to a given set of facts can only rarely be solved by looking to a clear rule of selection. The result is a measure of indeterminacy that makes nonsense of the idea of legal objectivity. The key to understanding the phenomenon of law-accounting for what judges and other officials do, or predicting what they will do, about disputes-is not the analysis of legal rules. It must be something else. True,judges and other officials cite the rules in justifYing their decisions. But if we are to be realistic about what is going on, according to Llewellyn, we must recognize that this is the mere legal rationalization of decisions reached on other grounds. Frank's realism was, if anything, still more extreme in its denial of legal objectivity. Going beyond Llewellyn's "rule-skepticism," Frank declared himself to be a "fact-skeptic" as well. 6 Thus he denied law's objectivity even in the rare cases in which a clear rule was obviously applicable. Since rules must be applied to facts in order to generate a legal outcome, everything depends on findings of fact in trial courts and other fact-finding tribunals. And facts are, in most cases, virtually as indeterminate as legal rules. In statements which seem eerily, well ... realistic, in the aftermath of the O. J. Simpson trial, Frank argued that our perceptions of facts are deeply influenced by conscious and subconscious beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices which vary among groups and individuals. So the key to understanding law-understood in legal realist terms-is understanding people's beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices, and why they hold them. Since law is a sort of epiphenomenon of human psychology, legal scholarship should be directed to scientific (e.g., psychological) and social scientific studies of human motivation. To be realistic, it should abandon the idea that law pre-exists and is available to guide legal decisions. The legal realists' insistence on the indeterminacy of law would, in our own time, be reasserted by advocates of "critical legal studies," though this time in the service of a "new left" political agenda and with nothing like the realists' faith in the objectivity and explanatory power of the natural and social sciences. The realists themselves were, like Holmes, political progressives-moderate liberals-eager to bring instrumental rationality to bear to solve social problems. Many were New Dealers. A few became 6. See generally Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (New York: Coward-McCann, 193 0 ).

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judges. And those who did, were, like Holmes, far less radical in practice than their theoretical views would have led one to predict. Although appeals to the alleged findings of social science became an increasingly common feature ofjudicial opinions as the twentieth century wore on, realists who became judges rarely cited their own subjective views or prejudices or psychological predilections as grounds for their decisions. Rather, they cited legal rules as the ultimate reasons for their decisions; and claimed, at least, to lay aside their own preferences in fidelity to the law. (Interestingly, Frank, in the aftermath of the revelation of Nazi atrocities in Europe, declared himself in the Preface to the Sixth Edition of his Law and the Modern Mind, to be a follower of the natural law teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on the basic questions of law and morality. Nothing in his earlier writings, he insisted, was ever meant to suggest otherwise.)7 Of course, realism had its appeal precisely because it was, from a certain vantage point, realistic. Trial lawyers take issues of venue and voir dire very seriously because they know-and knew long before the O. J. Simpson case-that who's on the jury can be critical to whether facts are found favorably to their clients or not. And one of the first questions lawyers at any level of litigation want to know the answer to is who are the judge or judges who will be making determinations of law at the trial or on appeal. Often enough, different jurors or a different judge or judges means different results. So far forth, the phenomenon of law includes elements of "subjectivity." But, of course, the realists overstated their case. They got stuck on the same question we put to Holmes a little while ago. From the point of view of a conscientious judge, the law is not-for it cannot be-a prediction of his own behavior. Often they, like Holmes, were faced with what they themselves perceived to be a duty to follow rules whose application generated outcomes that ran contrary to their personal preferences. True, a willful judge can simply give effect to his prejudices under the guise of applying the law, at least until reversed by a higher court of appeal (if there is one). But this is no modern discovery. And it is no more a threat to the possibility of law's objectivity than is the fact that people sometimes behave immorally a threat to the objectivity of morals. Just as a conscientious man strives to conform his behavior to what he judges to be the standards of moral rectitude, the conscientious judge strives to rule in conformity with the controlling rules of law. And no account of the phenomenon of law which ignores the self-understanding of such a judgeno account which, that is to say, leaves his point of view out of accountcan do justice to the facts. 7. See Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind, preface to the sixth edition.

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This, I think, was clear to Herbert Hart. He above all other Englishspeaking juridical thinkers in the wake of legal realism recognized that the shortcomings of legal skepticism and the radical denial of law's objectivity had mainly to do not with the dangers of its project of debunking to the body politic by its capacity to undermine the public's faith in the rule of law, but rather with realism's inability realistically to account for the phenomenon of law in human societies. Realist theories failed to fit the facts. And they failed to fit the facts because they approached the phenomenon of law from a purely external viewpoint. The problem, according to Hart, was not that legal realists were bad lawyers; it was that they were bad psychologists and social scientists, even as they looked to psychology and social science to explain the phenomenon of law. Social phenomena-phenomena created or constituted, at least in part, by human judgment, choice, cooperation, etc.-can never adequately be understood, Hart argued, without adopting what he called the "internal point of view." This is the point of view of those who do not "merely record and predict behavior conforming to rules," or understand legal requirements as mere "signs of possible punishment," but rather "use the rules as standards for the appraisal of their own and others' behaviour."8 On this score, Hart faulted not only the legal realists, but also the leading figures in his own intellectual tradition, the tradition of analytical jurisprudence inspired by Thomas Hobbes and developed by Jeremy Bentham and his disciple John Austin. The problem with their jurisprudential theories, Hart observed, is that they too fail to fit the facts. And they fail to fit the facts because they do not take into account the practical reasoning of people whose choices and actions create and constitute the phenomenon of law-people for whom legal rules function as reasons for decisions and actions. 9 Hart in no way denied the wide variability of legal rules. Beyond some basic requirements of any legal system-what Hart called the "minimum content of naturallaw"-there could be, and, in fact, one finds in the world, a great deal of variation from legal system to legal system. But in all societies that have achieved a legal order-that is, moved from a pre-legal order to a regime of law-law exhibits a certain 8. See H. L. A Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 95-96. On the idea of the "internal point of view," see John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 11-18. For a critique of Hart's idea of the importance of the internal point of view from a perspective sympathetic to Hart's legal positivism, see Jules Coelman, "Authority and Reason,' in The Autonomy of Law: Essays on LegalPositivism, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), chap. 10. 9. For a defense of Austin and Bentham against Hart's criticisms, see L. Jonathan Cohen, "Critical Notice: Hart, The Concept ofLaw," Mind 71 (1962).

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objectivity and autonomy from other phenomena, including other normative systems. And the law of any system is not truly understood by the theorist proposing to give an intellectually satisfying account of that system until he understands the practical point of the law from the perspective of actors within the system who do not perceive their own deliberations, choices, and actions to be "caused," but rather understand themselves to be making laws for reasons and acting on reasons provided by the laws. In his masterwork, The Concept ofLaw, Hart invited his readers to treat his analysis as "an exercise in descriptive sociology."l0 But his was a sociology designed to make possible the understanding of legal systems "from the inside." So what he proposed, and what the tradition ofanalyticaljurisprudence has now more or less fully accepted as Hart's most enduring contribution, is that even "the descriptive theorist (whose purposes are not practical) must proceed ... by adopting a practical point of view, [he must] assess importance or significance in similarities and differences within his subject matter by asking what would be considered important or significant in that field by those whose concerns, decisions, and activities create or constitute the subject-matter."ll If Hart rejected the externalism of Bentham and Austin-with its understanding of law (in Hobbesian fashion) as constituted by commands of a sovereign ("orders backed by threats") who is habitually obeyed by a populace but who in turn obeys no one-he retained their commitment to "legal positivism." He described this much misunderstood commitment as the acknowledgment of a "conceptual separation" of law and morals. Although he was yet another moderate liberal in his politics, Hart did not mean by "positivism" the idea that law ought not to embody or enforce moral judgments. True, in his famous debate with Patrick Devlin over the legal enforcement of morals, 12 Hart defended a modified version of]. S. Mill's "harm principle" as the appropriate norm for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate state enforcement of morality; but he fully recognized that this principle itself was proposed as a norm of political morality to be embodied in, and respected by, the law. Moreover, he understood perfectly well that the content of legal rules reflected nothing so much as the moral judgments prevailing in any society regarding the subject matters regulated by law. So Hart cheerfully acknowledged the many respects in which law and morality were connected, both Hart, The Concept of Law, p. v. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural /Ughts, p. 12. 12. See Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Murals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); and H. L. A Hart, Law, Liberty and Murality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). 10.

11.

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normatively and descriptively. In what respect, then, did he insist on their "conceptual separation"? As I read The Concept of Law, as well as Hart's later writings, the "conceptual separation" thesis strikes me as rather modest. It has to do above all, I think, with the legitimate aspiration of the descriptive sociologist to keep his descriptions, to the extent possible, free of coloration by his own normative moral views. One can recognize a law, or even a whole legal system, as a law, or legal system, irrespective of whether one believes that that law, or legal system, is just; indeed, even a gravely unjust legal system can be, from a meaningful descriptive viewpoint, a legal system. And what is true of the descriptive sociologist or legal theorist can also be true of the judge, who may conclude in a given case that the law-identified by authoritative criteria or standards of legality-provides a rule of decision in the case at hand that is, from the moral point of view, defective. In repudiating what he took-wrongly, in my view-to be the defining proposition of the natural law theorist, Hart denied in an unnecessarily wholesale fashion the proposition lex iniusta non est lex. Although his views in fundamental moral theory are frustratingly elusive, nothing in Hart's positivism commits him in any way to the moral skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism characteristic of the positivism of, say, Hans Kelsen or which one detects in the extrajudicial writings of 01iver Wendell Holmes. In fact, the student of Hart's who has remained closest to his views in legal theory, Joseph Raz, combines Hartian legal positivism with a robust moral realism. Hart and Raz have both insistedrightly, in my view-on the necessity of some conceptual separation oflaw and morality for the sake of preserving the possibility of moral criticism of law. As John Finnis has recently observed, the necessary separation "is effortlesslyestablished [by Aquinas] in the Summa, [by] taking human positive law as a subject for consideration in its own right (and its own name), a topic readily identifiable and identified prior to any question about its relation to morality. "13 Nevertheless, Hart's positivism generated one of the century's most fruitful jurisprudential debates when it was challenged by Lon L. Fuller in the late 1950s. Fuller-whose careful explication and working out of the diverse elements of the Aristotelian ideal of the Rule of Law constitutes a genuine achievement of twentieth-century legal philosophyproposed an argument to show that law and morality are, as a matter of brute fact, more tightly connected than Hart's positivism would allow. He sought to show that law necessarily embodies an "internal morality" 13. John Finnis, "The Truth in Legal Positivism," in George, Autonomy of Law, pp. 2 0 3-20 4.

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that defies Hart's "conceptual separation" thesis.l 4 He offered to argue the point, not as a normative matter about moral standards that positive law ought to meet, but, rather, on Hart's own terms, as a descriptive proposition about moral standards that law has to embody before even the purely descriptive theorist can recognize it as law. In the Morality ofLaw, Fuller offered an apparently "value-free" definition oflaw that any legal positivist ought to be able to accept: "Law is the enterprise of subjecting human behavior to the governance of norms." Nothing in this definition demands that those who make and enforce the laws be wise, virtuous, benign, or concerned in any way for the common good. Still, some things follow from it. For example, people cannot conform their behavior to rules that have not been promulgated, or lack at least some measure of clarity, or apply retrospectively. So promulgation, clarity, and prospectivity are aspects of the Rule of Law. Where they are absent, no legal system exists, or, at most, a highly defective legal system exists. And there are other requirements, including some significant measure of reliable conformity of official action with stated rules. Taken together, Fuller argued, the Rule of Law constitutes a moral achievement. While adherence to the Rule of Law does not guarantee that a legal system will be perfectly just-in fact, all legal systems contain elements of injustice-it does mean that a certain minimum set of moral standards must be met before a legal system actually exists. And, sure enough, or so Fuller supposed, grave injustice is rarely found in systems in which the rulers-whatever their personal vices and bad motives-govern by law. It is in societies in which the Rule of Law is absent that the most serious injustices occur. Of course, Hart wasn't buying this for a moment. While he admired, and for the most part accepted, Fuller's brilliant explication of the Rule of Law, he saw no reason to refer to its content as an internal morality. Moreover, he argued that there is no warrant for supposing that a system of law could not be gravely unjust, or that the Rule of Law provided any very substantial bulwark against grave injustice. Indeed, Raz argued against Fuller that the Rule of Law was analogous to a sharp knife, valuable for good purposes, to be sure, but equally useful to rulers in the pursuit of evil objectives.l 5 The Hart/Fuller debate (like the Hart/Devlin debate) was an illuminating one. I count on it every year for one or two lively meetings of my seminar in philosophy of law at Princeton. My own judgment is that 14. See Lon L. Fuller, The Murality of Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). For Hart's response see "Book Review: Fuller, The Murality ofLaw," Harvard Law Review 78 (1965)' 15. See Joseph Raz, "The Rule of Law and Its Virtue," in The Authurity of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 226.

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Fuller scored a point or two in establishing a certain moral value of the Rule of Law, but that Hart rightly resisted Fuller's somewhat exaggerated moral claims on its behalf. In any event, I do not think that Fuller undermined the central appeal of the "conceptual separation" thesis: the methodological aspiration to avoid confusing "law as it is" with "law as it ought to be." Nor do I think that Ronald Dworkin's celebrated critiques of Hart's positivism are telling,16 Hart's theory has, as I have suggested, certain implications for the question Dworkin is most concerned about, namely, the question ofjudicial discretion in "hard cases"; but these implications are quite limited. Hart is fundamentally interested in developing methodological tools to enable the descriptive legal theorist to give a refined and accurate account of law in a given society. Thus, for example, he proposes the union of "primary" and "secondary" rules as "the key to the science of jurisprudence"; he distinguishes "duty-imposing" from "power-conferring" rules; and he develops the idea of a rule (or rules) of recognition to which actors in a legal system resort as establishing criteria oflegal validity. Hart'sjurisprudence is not "court-centered." In this respect, it differs sharply from the jurisprudence of Dworkin and most other American legal philosophers, including, interestingly enough, Holmes and the legal realists. For Hart, the question of how much law-creating (or "legislative") authority a judge has, if any, or where that authority obtains, is not to be resolved at the level of general jurisprudence. Different legal systems differ-indeed, reasonably differ-on the question of how such law-making authority is to be allocated among judges and other actors in the overall political system. To be sure, Hart observes that legal rules are inevitably "open textured," and, thus, in need of authoritative interpretation in their concrete application; and this entails a certain measure of judicial discretion and law-making authority as a matter of fact, even in those systems which exclude it in theory. Does this mean that the wall between legal validity and the moral judgment ofjudges is porous, even in systems of avowed legislative supremacy (such as the British system)? Yes, indeed. Does it vindicate Dworkin's "right answer" thesis? Not at all. Hart's legal positivism is, in fact, completely compatible with the recognition that judges in some legal systems are invited or even bound under the positive law of the constitution to bring moral judgment to bear in deciding 16. See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 1-130; for Dworkin's more recent criticisms oflegal positivism, see Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). For Hart's reply to Dworkin see postscript to the second edition of The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)·

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cases at law. Hart's is not a theory designed to show judges how they can resolve cases without making moral judgments, though neither is it a theory offering to justify their doing so (as Dworkin's is). The theory simply isn't addressed to such questions. What I think Hart is to be faulted for is a certain failure to see and develop the fuller implications of his own refutation of Benthamite and Austinian positivism and of his adoption of the internal point of view. Some of these implications are acknowledged by Raz in his recent work)7 The central or focal case of a legal system, to borrow a principle of Aristotle's method in social study, is one in which legal rules and principles function as practical reasons for citizens as well as judges and other officials because of people's apprehension of their moral value. Aquinas's famous practical definition of law as an ordinance of reason directed to the common good here has its significance in descriptive legal theory. As Finnis remarks: If we consider the reasons people have for establishing systems of positive law

(with power to override immemorial custom), and for maintaining them (against the pull of strong passions and individual self-interest), and for reforming and restoring them when they decay or collapse, we find that only the moral reasons on which many of those people often act suffice to explain why such people's undertaking takes the shape it does, giving legal systems the many features they have-features which a careful descriptive account such as H. L. A. Hart's identifies as characteristic of the central case of positive law and the focal meaning of "law," and which therefore have a place in an adequate concept (understanding and account) of positive law.!8

Yet Hart himself, in The Concept of Law and elsewhere declined to distinguish central from peripheral cases of the internal point of view itself. Thus, he treated cases of obedience to law by virtue of "unreflecting inherited attitudes" and even the "mere wish to do as others do" from morally motivated obedience or fidelity to law. These "considerations and attitudes," like those which boil down to mere self-interest or the avoidance of punishment, are, as Finnis says, "diluted or watered-down instances of the practical viewpoint that brings law into being as a significantly differentiated type of social order and maintains it as such. Indeed, they are parasitic upon that viewpoint." 19 Now, this is in no way to deny any valid sense to the positivist insistence on the "conceptual separation" oflaw and morality. It is merely to highlight the ambiguity of the assertion of such a separation and the need to 17. See Joseph Raz, "Fonnalism and the Rule of Law," in Natural Law Theury: Contempurary Essays, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 339. Also see generally Neil MacConnick, "Natural Law and the Separation of Law and Morality," id. IS.John Finnis, "The Truth in Legal Positivism," in George, The Autonomy ofLaw, p. 204. 19. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, p. 14.

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distinguish, even more clearly than Hart did, between the respects in which such a separation obtains and those in which it does not. Still less is it to suggest that belief in natural law or other forms of moral realism entails the proposition that law and morality are connected in such a way as to confer upon judges a plenary authority to enforce the requirements of natural law or to legally invalidate provisions of positive law they judge to be in conflict with these requirements. Important work by Finnis and others has clearly identified the misguidedness of such a suggestion. The truth of the proposition lex iniusta non est lex is a moral truth, namely, that the moral obligation created by authoritative legal enactment-that is to say, by positive law-is conditional, rather than absolute. The prima facie moral obligation to obey the law is defeasible. What about law's objectivity? Does law exist prior to legal decision? Can judicial reasoning be guided by standards internal to the legal materials? At the beginning of the new century, we can, I think, affirm a position more subtle than Holmes asserted at Boston University. Yes, the standards to guide judicial reasoning can be internal to the law of a system that seeks to make them so, though never perfectly. Positive law is a human creation-a cultural artifact-though it is largely created for moral purposes-for the sake of justice and the common good. That is to say, law exists in what Aristotelians would call the order of techne, but it is created in that order precisely for the sake of purposes that obtain in the moral order (praxis). So, for moral reasons, we human beings create normative systems of social enforceable rules that enjoy, to a significant extent, a kind of autonomy from morality as such. We deliberately render these rules susceptible to technical application and analysis for purposes of, for example, fairly and finally resolving disputes among citizens, or between citizens and governments, or between governments at different levels. And to facilitate this application and analysis, we create a legal profession (from which we also draw our judges) which is composed of people socialized and trained in programs of study that teach not-or not just-moral philosophy, but the specific tools and techniques of research, interpretation, reasoning, and argument relevant to legal analysis. 20 Now, to stress law's objectivity and relative autonomy from morality is by no means to deny the Thomistic proposition that just positive law is derived from the natural law. For Thomas himself did not suppose that positive law was anything other than a cultural artifact, a human creation, albeit a creation of great moral worth brought into being largely 20. I develop these thoughts at greater length in "Natural Law and Positive Law," in George, The Autonomy of Law, chap. 11.

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for moral purposes. Nor did he suppose that a single form or regime of law was uniquely correct for all times and places. His stress on determinar tiones by which human lawmakers give effect to the requirements of natural law in the shape of positive law for the common good of their communities-enjoying, to a considerable extent, the creative freedom Aquinas analogized to that of the architect-reveals his awareness of the legitimate, potentially very wide, variability of human laws. Whomever Holmes may have had in mind in criticizing those "text writers" who saw law as a set of deductions from a few axioms of reason, the charge has no applicability to Aquinas. In this, as in so many other respects, the Angelic Doctor was a man of the twentieth century, and-if I may engage in a bit of prediction and prophecy myself-of the twenty-first and beyond.

5

American Reflections on a Century of Catholic Social Teaching FREDERICK J. CROSSON

The centennial of the School of Philosophy comes at a time helpful for looking back over a century of Catholic social philosophy, for the modem emergence of Catholic social teaching may reasonably be said to have begun with the encyclicals of Leo XIII, Rerum Novarumin particular (1891). Not only did that encyclical enunciate many of the principles of such teaching and formulate their application to the contemporary political economies of the West, but it became a reference point for the later papal teaching of such encyclicals as Quadregesimo Anno, Populorum Progressio and Centesimus Annus. I want to remind you of two topics in particular that were emphasized by Leo XIII and to trace some of their subsequent evolution. They are, first, the responsibility of the state to insure justice in the economic relations of workers and employers, and second, the responsibility of the state with respect to religion. I want to reflect on the conceptions of the nature of political society and of the state as they present themselves in that evolution. As will become clear, the two topics have some interconnected philosophical issues in common. And so I shall track three Catholic thinkers-indeed Thomists-in America (two of them transplanted) who have written on those issues. 1

Leo saw the responsibility of political authority for the promotion ofjustice in the area of economics as steering between the two opposing doctrines of ownership by the state on one hand, and the proscription of any state "meddling" on the other: socialism vs. laissez-faire. Against the first he defended the right of private property and the usefulness of a market system, and against the latter he affirmed the right and responsibility of the state to insure that the requirements ofjustice were not lost sight of in the inequalities produced by the laissez-faire capitalist economies. 95

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More specifically, in seeking to outline the need for insuring greater equality between the contracting parties of entrepreneurs and workers, he asserted, for example, the right of the workers to organize themselves into unions in order to aggregate some bargaining power in negotiating employment with the owners and managers of capital. That teaching, reinforced and articulated by Pius XI, had a strong and lasting influence in this country during the period of the 1920S and 1930S when industrywide unions were fighting to organize themselves. The social program of the "New Deal" of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was powerfully assisted in its pursuit of justice for labor by the teaching and support of the American church, and of course one of the strongest voices developing the papal teaching was the well-known moralist Msgr. John A. Ryan of the Catholic University of America. Leo XIII not only asserted the need for justice in the treatment of the working classes, he made that the responsibility of the civil authority. To illustrate the classical context of his teaching, let me quote from Rerum Novarum: We have insisted ... that, since the end of society is to make men better, the chief good that society can possess is virtue. Nevertheless, it is the business of a wellconstituted body politic to see to the provision of those material and external helps, "the use of which is necessary to virtuous action." ... Justice, therefore, demands that the interests of the working classes should be carefully watched over.... [I] t lies in the power of a ruler to benefit every class in the State, and amongst the rest to promote to the utmost the interests of the poor, and this in virtue of his office, ... since it is in the province of the commonwealth to serve the common good. And the more that is done for the benefit of the working classes by the generallaws of the country, the less need will there be to seek for special means to relieve them.!

At the same time, that classical context in the encyclical is sometimes coupled with unclassicallanguage and ideas, for example that man precedes civil society (respublica) and, prior to the formation of any civil society (civitas), must have by nature the right to sustain his life and care for his body.2 1. Op. cit., " 32,34. Text quoted is from The Church Speaks to the Modern World, ed. E. Gilson (New York: Doubleday, 1954), pp. 222-24. 2. Ibid., 1 7. See the discussion of Locke's influence on some of the content of the encyclical in Richard Camp's interesting work The Papal Ideology of Social Refurm (Leiden: Brill, 1969) pp. 54-56, and more extensively in E. Fortin's article "'Sacred and Inviolable': Rerum Novarum and Natural Rights" in Theological Studies 53 (1992) pp. 203-33, from which the above quote is adapted (p. 219). Mary Ann Glendon has argued (Rights Talk: the ImplY/Jerishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991» that "rights" language is not well-fitted for the discourse of citizens in democratic civil societies.

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However that may be, it would take us too far afield to pursue the issue of "rights" language and its appropriate role in understanding the nature of political society and of citizens. Rather I want to remark on a similarity between the teaching of Rerum Novarum and Populorum Progressio. The same principles lie behind the discussion there, although the field of application is different: it is not the relation of worker and owner but the field of trade relations between the rich and poor countries. Like Leo, Paul VI observes that the free trade of a market economy has evident advantages when the parties involved are not economically too unequal, but when they are, like Leo, he calls into question the justice of the "fundamental principle of liberalism" i.e. the justice of free trade. Indeed Barbara Ward remarked on the resemblance of the people of the post-colonial countries in the third world and the situation of industrial workers in the capitalist economies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like the industrial workers, these third world countries, she says, have been drawn into an economic system they did not initiate and do not control. Like them, they earn a disproportionately small share of the wealth they are helping to create. Like them, they still lack the power to act together to redress the balance. 3

Paul VI explicitly cites the same principle as Leo: The teaching of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum is still valid: if the positions of the contracting parties are too unequal, the consent of the parties does not suffice to guarantee the justice of their contract, and the rule of free agreement remains subservient to the demands of the naturallaw. 4

But now who is responsible for the pursuit of justice in the common good of nations, of mankind, in the way that the government is responsible for the pursuit ofjustice in the common good of a particular political society? Well, one answer to that question is to say that some "world authority" or world government is going to be necessary to address those substantive questions ofjustice as well as the more practical ones of order and security.5 That is an idea that we do not nnd strange, whether we support or oppose it. Provinces or states have a central government, nations presumably could have a world government. 3. From her commentary on Populorum Progressio in Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Pope Paul Won the Df:llelopment ofPeoples (New York: Paulist Press, 1967), p. 21. 4· Populorum Progressio, #59· 5. Cf. ibid. #78: "Who does not see the necessity of thus establishing progressively a world authority, capable of acting effectively in the juridical and political sectors?" John Paul II comments in Centesimus Annus that there ought to be "effective international agencies which will oversee and direct the economy to the common good." #58.

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And yet, as Jacques Maritain insisted, there is a problem about the very concept of world government. The problem is not that it is utopian in the sense of unrealizable, impossible, but rather that two quite different notions are confused in our common talk. If "world government" means a system of administration-legislature, executive agency, judicial bodies, etc.-having authoritative jurisdiction over all nations, then one is thinking of what Maritain calls a "merely governmental theory of world organization."6 But, he affirmed, the basic political reality is not the State [i.e., the set of offices and their holders] but the body politic ... and the moral community which grows out of it.... The State is [only] the particular agency which specializes in matters dealing with the common good of the body politic ... its functions are merely instrumental [with respect to that moral community]; 7

The issue is not simply world government, it is world political society, and even if the world government officeholders were chosen by popular election and representation, that would only fulfill a necessary and not a sufficient condition for a truly political world government. Democratic election of a "merely governmental" world authority, Maritain insisted, would only be a technical or juridical procedure and "would be entirely insufficient to change in any way the fact that I am pointing out." It would only create a State without a body politic or a political society of its own, "a world brain without a world body." It would result in a "democratic multinational Empire, which would be not better than the others."8 It's not that we couldn't create such a "merely governmental" world authority, it is rather that such an authority would not ipso facto have the common good of the human community as its goal. For that there must be sharing in a sense of the common good of one human people in a world-wide political community, a common good on the basis of which deliberations about the justice and injustice of actions and situations would be possible, and through which a sense of civic friendship could animate our relations with other peoples. Without a sense of forming one community, economic interdependence tends to produce not togetherness but conflict. For a sense of what is involved in the notion of a common good, think of the community formed by a family. Here the good is a life together, a life of doing things with and for each other and for the group's good. There is a shared human and moral good, achieved through and realized in their actions: learning to be and being fair, thoughtful of others, 6. Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) p. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 203.

202.

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sharing, honest, loving.... There is a life together to which each contributes (not merely by doing their assigned "chores"), which has its celebrations and its rituals, and from which each one draws an essential part of his or her identity, and finally where each learns that the good of the whole-which is also the good of each of the parts-comes before the private good of the individual parts. 9 It is not a question of the homogenization of cultures: Maritain championed what he called a "pluralist unity, taking place only through the lasting diversity of the particular bodies politic, and fostering that diversity."l0 It is rather that "one body politic is one organized people." To ask presently, for example, that people in the developed countries accept a serious lowering of their standard of life in order to provide people on the other side of the world with an equivalent raising of their standard of living would be to ask for heroic virtue. But in a world political society, one people with a common good, justice would claim a certain relative commensuration of the living conditions of all persons, of those who would be fellow-citizens of we in the developed countries. ll So the critical issue here is not the institution of a "merely governmental" world government that would try, like the United Nations, to adjudicate claims between distinct constituencies. It is rather the need for a world political society, united in sharing the sense of a common human good and of the responsibility we have to each other. 2

The second issue to be examined is that of the relations between the state and the Church, or in later terms, the question of religious liberty. Consistent with his view of the responsibility of the state for the promotion of the human good ofits citizens, Leo XIII asserts that ... men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, no less than individuals, owes gratitude to God who gave it being and maintains it.... Since, then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its teaching and practice-not such a religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins ... it is a public crime to act as though there were no God. So, too, it is a sin for the State not to have care for religion, as though it were something beyond its scope . . . for we are bound absolutely to worship God in the way He has chosen. 9. Allen Bloom, who was not a religious person to say the least, once told me that he thought his students who came from homes that divorce had divided learned from that painful situation that "number one comes first." Bloom was concerned about this as a lesson for future citizens. 10. Ibid. p. 209. My emphasis. 11. Ibid. p. 208.

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... one of the chief duties [of those who rule] must be to favor religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws, and neither to organize nor enact any measure that may compromise its safety. 12

And if the Catholic Church is the true church, then it is in principle the responsibility of the state to promote the well-being of that church. (At the same time-in the same encyclical-he affirmed that no one could or should be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will.) Alexis de Tocqueville had remarked on how the independence of church and state in the United States had been a healthy state of affairs for religion there. Leo, in a message to the American hierarchy in 1895, commented favorably on the freedom of the American church to live freely and act without hindrance. However, he wrote, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirabie status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.l 3

So although it is not the optimal solution to the relation of the two powers, it may be the best solution available under the circumstances to make the "establishment" of any church unconstitutional in such a religiously pluralistic political society. This teaching remained the standard for most of the twentieth century. Perhaps its most widely disseminated and influential statement was in Msgr.John A. Ryan's book The State and the Church (1922, reissued in 1940 as Catholic Principles ofPolitics). Ryan stated the principle as that "the State should officially recognize the Catholic religion as the religion of the commonwealth"; but he discussed the dangers of abuse in such an establishment and insisted that no particular historical arrangement could serve as the norm for such a relationship. In Ryan's account, the reason for the principle is that the state is responsible for promoting the common good of its members, and if religiousness is part of that human good, then the true form of religiousness should be sought by the state for its members. The reasons for accepting a situation of religious pluralism where no religion is privileged over others-the First Amendment situation-are, first, the classical principle that more harm than good would likely follow from the attempt to give political primacy to the true religion, and second, that if religious freedom is a fundamental constitutional provision, then the obligation to respect that freedom is binding in conscience. ImmortaleDei (1885) #6 in Gilson op. cit. p. 164. 13. LO'fIgingua Oceani reprinted in The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII (Rockford, IIl.: Tan Books, 1995) p. 323. 12.

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Nonetheless, Ryan honestly confronts the question of whether, if a state became predominantly Catholic and any such constitutional provision could be amended, the Catholic Church ought not to be given singular status. His response is candid: yes. But, he adds, the event of its practical realization in this country is so remote in time and in probability that no practical man will let it disturb his equanimity or affect his attitude toward those who differ from him in religious faith. Some people, he acknowledges, will continue to attack the Church on these grounds, but, we cannot yield up the principles of eternal and unchangeable truth in order to avoid the enmity of such unreasonable persons. Moreover, it would be a futile policy; for they would not think us sincere.l 4 And he adds that he is confident that the majority of our fellow citizens will be sufficiently honorable to respect our devotion to truth and sufficiently realistic to see that the danger of religious intolerance toward non-Catholics in the United States is so improbable and so far in the future that it should not occupy their time or attention.l 5 But of course that is a legal and moral position awkward to hold vis-avis one's fellow citizens, and of course it was attacked as un-American. There is, however, a way to avoid it without accepting all religions as equally true and thus surrendering the Catholic Church's claim of uniqueness. That way is to re-conceptualize the nature of the state, and to restrict its responsibility to protecting the rights of its citizens and securing public order. And that is the position that Fr. John Courtney Murray found his way to.l 6 On Murray's account, the transition from the one conception of the state to the other had already taken its decisive steps by the time of Pius

XII. He [Pius XII] abandons Leo XlII's ethical concept of the society-state.... Instead he adopts the juridical concept of the state (Rechtsstaat), whose genesis 14. Ryan and Boland, Catholic Principles of Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1940) pp. 316- 2 1. 15. Ibid. p. 321. 16. I shall be discussing this final position (if it can be described as "final"). For a very clear and responsible tracking of the development of Murray's thought cf. Keith J. Pavlischek, John Courtney Murray and the Dilemma of Religious Toleration (Missouri: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1994). ' A recently discovered memorandum that Murray wrote for then-Cardinal Montini contains a very brief and lucid statement of his position in 1950. cr. J. C. Murray, "The Crisis in Church-State Relationships in the U.S.A.," in Review of Politics 61, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 68 7-7 04.

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owed more to Christian inspiration. The state is ... an agent of society for certain limited purposes. 17

And he quotes Pius to validate that claim. Pius said: To protect the inviolable rights that are proper to man, and to have a care that everyone may more readily discharge his duties-this is the chief function of the public power.l 8

Murray comments: Pius XII shows his awareness of the distinction between society and state, between the total common good of society and the elements of the common good that are committed to the power of the state. In his own idiom, the distinction is between the wider order of "social life" and the narrower "juridical order of society."19

If the total care of the common good were committed to the rulers of states, what would follow, Murray says, is "the disappearance of the distinction between society and state."20 On the issue of religious freedom, then, Murray argued that the state's responsibility was simply to protect the right to that freedom. Could the exercise of religious freedom be restricted, and if so on what grounds? He maintained that it could not be restricted by the state on either theological or moral grounds, but only on grounds consistent with the state's competence and responsibility, namely public order. He was willing to include a moral dimension in "public order" provided that the standards invoked were "commonly accepted standards of public morality."21 And he also included justice in the state's charge,justice understood as what is due to the people, namely protecting their rights. So religion is indeed "a social good, a fundamental element of the 17. The Problem of Religious Freedom (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1965) p. 65. (Henceforth referred to as PORF.) Similarly: "These Popes [Pius and John XXIII] laid aside the more Aristotelian, ethical conception of the state that is to be found in Leo XIII." Cf. "On Religious liberty," America 109 (Nov. 1963): 706, quoted in Pavlischek, p. 187. 18. PORF p. 66. Note that this quote and the longer quotation that follows it in PORF are taken from wartime radio addresses. 19. Ibid. (My emphasis.) Murray calls this "a badly needed aggiurnamento of the official political philosophy of the Church." Ibid. p. 67. Nonetheless he also quotes later texts from Pius XII on religious freedom that he admits "are in continuity with Leo XIII." Ibid. PP·13- 14· 20. Ibid. p. 56. 21. Ibid. 42-43; cf. 29-30: "public morality, as determined by moral standards commonly accepted among the people." This measure of morality does not seem substantially different from that of an eminent proponent of the limited liberal state,John Stuart Mill, who also allows restrictions on freedom of action on the grounds of what is deemed to be indecent.

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common temporal good of society," but "governmental favor of religion formally means favor of the freedom of religion." Government "must somehow stand in the service of religion" but "this duty of service is discharged by service rendered to the freedom of religion in society. "22 It should be noted that Murray insisted that the grounds for the claim to religious freedom from state interference were different for the Catholic Church and for other religious associations: for the Church, it is its divine mandate; for other religious associations, it is the dignity of the human person. 23 When I pressed him, at a meeting at Notre Dame in 1965 (he died the following year), on whether the state could not legitimately promote the free exercise of religious acts by its citizens, he responded by saying that in his view all the fundamental human rights are immunities and he didn't understand how you could promote an immunity. The underlying issue here, to which he candidly referred, was a clause inserted into the final draft of the Declaration on Religious Freedom (of which he was the primary architect) by bishops at the Council, which stated that Government, therefore, ought indeed to take account of the religious life of the people and show it favor, since the function of government is to make provision for the common welfare. 24

He went on to say that he interpreted that to mean not that government could favor religion as such, but that since having religious citizens may benefit society in terms of justice and order, it is appropriate for government to favor it in that respect. This line of argument certainly secures the right to religious freedom by making the state incompetent to legislate about religious acts. Note that to avoid the awkwardness of the John A. Ryan position, Murray must accept (as he did) that this conception of the state having no competence to seek the fuller human good is not simply a de facto situation, but that this conception is an advance and clarification in our understanding of the nature of the state. 22. "The Issue of Church and State at Vatican II," Theological Studies 27 (Dec. 1966): 598. Emphasis mine. I have left out of consideration here the (ironic) fact that coincident with Vatican II, the First Amendment protection of religious freedom was being interpreted by the Supreme Court to include the right not to be religious, and so not to have to be forced to be present at religious exercises. I refer to the school prayer cases, beginning with Abington School District vs. Schempp (1963). 23. Cf. his commentary on the Declaration in Documents o/Vatican lIed. W. Abbott and J. Gallagher (New York; Fordham, 1966) p. 682, quoted in Pavlischek, p. 181. 24. Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal, ed. John Miller (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), p. 580 (cf. p. 572). Murray quoted his own translation: the Latin is bonum commune.

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But it seems to entail a number of consequences about which one might have hesitations. I think Murray himself was not completely comfortable with some apparent implications of the argument. For example, he quoted approvingly what he called the basic rule ofjurisprudence: Let there be as much freedom, personal and social, as is possible; let there be only as much restraint and constraint, personal and social, as may be necessary for personal order. 25 That sounds very much like the classical modem conception of the liberal state that stems from John Locke and John Stuart Mill. (And it requires the kind of pragmatic reading that Murray gave of the Declaration's statement that the state ought to favor the religious life of the people since it is concerned with the common good.) But if the state has no responsibility-and no competence-to seek justice (other than by respecting immunities), then it would seem also to be required to stay out of the economy. The argument would seem to encourage if not to require a laissez-faire attitude towards the market. 26 Murray does allow the juridical object of the state's mission-public order-to include justice, but as we have seen, he seems to limit justice to the securing of immunities (rights). And if he includes "public morality" in the state's responsibility, it is only in the sense of "moral standards commonlyaccepted." Moreover, if the state has no mandate to promote justice (beyond assuring immunities) and moral values (beyond commonly accepted standards) as a component of the common good, it is hard to see how the Church's social teaching about justice can be appropriately directed to governments. Such teaching could still be directed to society, because, as we have seen, on Murray's account there is a "total common good" of society as distinguished from those" elements of the common good" that are committed to the power of the state. I mention these possible consequences not to "refute" Murray'S argument but simply to articulate what appears to be involved in accepting-not without reasons-the modem liberal conception of the state. 25. PORF p. 31. At the Notre Dame conference, Murray's paper-written a month or so before the meeting-contained the assertion that "freedom is not only the primary method of politics; it is also the highest political goal." When 1 questioned him about whether that was consistent (as he had argued) with the Preamble to the Constitution, he replied that 1 might not have noticed that when he delivered the paper at the meeting, "I left out 'highest political goal' because 1 am not at all sure freedom is the highest political goal," Op. cit. pp. 574, 580. 26. So theologians like Charles Curran have claimed. See the discussion in Pavlischek, 194·

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He retains the notion of a "thick" common good but allocates responsibility for it to political society.27 But is society capable of assuming that responsibility?

3 Alasdair MacIntyre has developed in several books an analysis and critique of the present situation of public discourse, discourse about what to do, in which we members ofliberal democracies may be able to recognize ourselves. Our situation is one in which the public realm has been reconstructed by the culture of liberalism, a liberalism that was born in the attempt to replace the tyranny of tradition by principles that every rational person ought to accept. The liberal claim was to provide a political, legal and economic framework within which persons with widely different, even incompatible conceptions of the good life could live together peacefully. Liberalism claimed to rest its frameworks not on any specific conception of the good life, but only on principles that anyone could see to be reasonable. As MacIntyre puts it, Every individual is to be equally free to propose and to live by whatever conception of the good life he or she pleases ... unless that conception of the good involves reshaping the life of the rest of the community in accordance with it. 28

So there is a limit to conceptions of the good that are tolerated. And that means that there are rules for entering into the debate of the public arena. What is permitted in that arena is the expression of preferences, either the preferences of individuals or of groups .... It may well be that in some cases it is some nonliberal theory or conception of the human good which leads individuals to express the preferences that they do. But only in the guise of such expressions of preference are such theories and conceptions allowed to receive expression. 29

It is the aggregation of such preferences which exercises influence or authority in public discussion. And of course, given the fact that the 27. "It is religion itself, not government, which has the function of making society religious.' "The Issue of Church and State at Vatican II,' loco cit. 28. MacIntyre, Whose Justice' Which Rationality' (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 336. Emphasis mine. The whole of chapter 17 is relevant to the issues here discussed. 29. Ibid. Similarly in the liberal market economy, preferences are the form that reasons for action-production, marketing, etc.-take. If enough people prefer some direction for the market, i.e., if the price can be paid, then the voices are heard.

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liberal state eschews any conception of the human good, there is no rational principle for the ordering of these preferences. So the resolution of differences among preferences, or the resolution of conflicts, comes through political procedures of arbitration and bargaining. Practical reasoning in this situation proceeds not from a premise about what is good or right but from the premise "I/we want it to be the case that such and such." Such a premise no longer merely expresses a motive for action-it becomes itself a reason for action. Hence polls and surveys come to exercise an important function. It therefore may (or may not) be interesting that you think that "such and such" is morally wrong, inhuman; that judgment may enter into the public arena only as the expression ofa preference (e.g., sexual preferences) or a right (e.g., to privacy) or an interest (e.g., ofa group). The consequence of the predominance of this form of practical reasoning is that there is a change in the character of public discourse. One must now understand arenas of public choice, not as places of debate, either in terms of one dominant conception of the human good or between rival and conflicting conceptions of that good, but as places of bargaining between individuals [and groups of individuals] each with their own preferences. 30

And so resolution comes about through counting votes and doing market surveys. Debate is barren, since the discussion does not and cannot appeal to a shared set of moral premises: rival appeals to accounts of the human good or of justice necessarily assume a rhetorical form such that it is as assertion and counter-assertion, rather than as argument and counterargument, that rival standpoints confront one another.... [P]ersuasion replaces argument.... Standpoints are construed as the expressions of attitude and feeling and often enough come to be no more than that. 31

In this situation, MacIntyre argues, the state becomes primarily the provider of goods and services, and the arbitrator of differences. It is the means to the achievement of our preferences. Although to my knowledge he never mentions John Courtney Murray, he seems to agree that the modem state is incapable of exercising the role of a moral agent seeking a common human good. Indeed he goes far beyond Murray in contending that neither can the responsibility for the "total common good" be allotted to society. This is part of the reason why MacIntyre has always vigorously separated himself from the "communitarians" with whom he is often identified. Communitarians recognize the need-in a society where none of 30. Ibid., p. 338. 31. Ibid., p. 342.

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the contending interests can claim to override the claims of others, where resolution of conflicts cannot require that individuals give up their preferences as simply wrong, inadmissible-they recognize the need for some overriding allegiance to the system itself, to the community as a whole. It is proposed that we retrieve the common values that we can find in our tradition and give an overriding common allegiance to them. MacIntyre's question is: "what good reasons could an individual find for placing himself or herself at the service of the public good rather than of other goods?" Given his description of the liberal state and its public arena, it is consistent of him to side with contemporary liberals (and with Murray) against the communitarians on the grounds that the attempt to retrieve common values is only going to recover what Richard Rorty calls what "we" think, or what Murray called "commonly accepted standards of public morality."32 Indeed he believes that the attempt to make the liberal state an all-embracing community opens the door to totalitarianism. These analyses and the perceptions on which they are based are not as singular as they may at first seem. Not only can we, I think, come to recognize a kind of self-portrait therein, but others have remarked on the same phenomena. In Centesimus Annus, John Paul II observes that there appears to be a kind of crisis within democracies themselves, which seem at times to have lost the ability to make decisions aimed at the common good. Certain demands that arise within society are sometimes not examined in accordance with criteria of justice and morality, but rather on the basis of the electoral or financial power of the groups promoting them. With time, such distortions of political conduct create distrust and apathy, with a subsequent decline in the political participation and civic spirit of the general population, which feels abused and disillusioned. As a result, there is a growing inability to situate particular interests within the framework of a coherent vision of the common good. The latter is not simply the sum of particular interests .... 33

And four years later, in Evangelium Vitae, insisting on the relation between democracy and moral values, he writes: 32. See MacIntyre's remarks in After MacIntyre (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 302-303. I should add that his position is that the "cultural of liberalism" is only the historical form that our nation-states have assumed, and that the very nature of the modem nation-state and its size and organization prevent any genuine political community from emerging within it. Cf. ibid. and "Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats," in On Modern Poetry, ed. V. Bell and L. Lerner (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1988), pp. 145-57. 33. Op. cit. #47. See also Evangelium Vitae #4: "Choices once unanimously considered criminal and rejected by the common moral sense are gradually becoming morally acceptable ...

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The basis of these values cannot be provisional and changeable "majority" opinions, but only the acknowledgment of an objective moral law which ... is the obligatory point of reference for civil law itself. If, as a result of a tragic obscuring of the collective conscience, an attitude of skepticism were to succeed in bringing into question even the fundamental principles of the moral law, the democratic system itself would be shaken in its foundations and would be reduced to a mere mechanism for regulating different and opposing interests on a purely empirical basis. 34

The problem is not democracy as a political form, which John Paul strongly supports-it is rather that separation of freedom from the truth which characterizes the "culture ofliberalism" and sets the ground rules for political discussion. "Freedom," he says, "attains its full development only by accepting the truth. "35 Indeed, as a bishop at the Vatican Council thirty years earlier, Karol Wotyla had criticized early drafts of the Declaration on Religious Freedom for just such a separation. 36 One way to glimpse the problem of the relation of freedom and truth for democracies here is to recall John Stuart Mill's argument for freedom of discussion in his Essay on Liberty. We need to listen to all viewpoints, he says, because we can never be sure that the opinion we think to be true is true, and if we don't listen to opposing positions we will never have the opportunity to exchange what may be our erroneous view for the true view. 37 That sounds persuasive to our ears (it has become the conventional wisdom) until we ask ourselves: ifwe can't ever be sure that the opinion we hold is the true one, how will we know that the exchange won't go in the other direction and we will end up having exchanged our true opinion for a false one?38

4 It should now be apparent why I began with Maritain's concerns about "merely governmental" world government. Not only, it seems to me, does that form of international authority likely lie ahead of us, it is the form of authority that has already come to exist in modern liberal democracy. We no longer form one political community, sharing a sense of one human good which we seek together and which we argue about within a common set of moral principles. (Indeed, arguing is how a community articulates 34. Evangelium Vitae#7 0 · 35. CentesimusAnnus#46 . 36. Acta synodalia Concilii Vaticani II Period II, 2.53°-32.

37. Richard Rorty has a wonderful Gordian knot solution to this dilemma: just define the truth as what comes out of free discussion. 38. For a discussion, CC. my "Mill's Dilemmas," Interpretation 16, no. 2 (winter 1988-1989).

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that sense.) Many of us no longer find an essential part of our identity in our being part of one political society for whose good we strive, despite the images and symbols drawn from the history of our nation. That has not, in my view, been the case for all of our history (and I speak of the United States here since I know that best). In the last century, in one of the most closely followed political debates in the country, Lincoln was able to assert-along with many "political" and constitutional arguments-that it was simply wrong for one human being to own another.39 But that was a century ago, and I do think that MacIntyre's analysis of the arena of public discussion is now largely on the mark. John Courtney Murray perceived this change in the nature of existing government and hence saw the need to remove the responsibility for moral evaluations from the jurisdiction of the state. That meant rejecting the traditional (thesis/hypothesis) position because that traditional position rested on the normative conception of the state as a moral agent responsible for seeking the common good. Murray thought that the common good was still a legitimate goal for society to pursue. But there are unresolved problems with the form of disengagement between state and society that he tried to articulate and defend. MacIntyre is more radical. For him, not only is the modern state not structured, not competent to decide questions about human good, but neither is the society within a liberal democracy. The fact that the same terms may be used doesn't mean that Aristotle and John Stuart Mill were talking about the same thing when they talked about "political society." Assume, for the moment, that these thinkers were attuned to "the signs of the times" and that Maritain's concerns about merely governmental government were valid. Where does that leave the social teaching of the Church? How does the Church relate its teaching to political societies incapable of public moral discourse because they are without a shared moral common good, and so are no longer political societies in the traditional sense? It doesn't seem to me that it changes anything radically. Clearly, recent popes have seen no inconsistency in speaking of a universal common good of all humanity40 even though no political society now exists that corresponds to it and no world government has jurisdiction over it. Maybe we will have to live with merely governmental government for 39. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. H. Holzer (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), e.g., p. 258: "I believe that slavery is wrong, and [I believe] in a policy springing from that belief that looks to the prevention of the enlargement of that wrong, and that looks at some time to there being an end of that wrong." Compare the politician who says "Personally I'm opposed to (such and such) but I'm not going to impose my views on others." 40. E.g., Sollicitudo Rei Socialis #lO et passim.

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some time on both the national and, possibly one day, the international level. But encyclicals can-and must-still address questions of justice and of right and wrong and continue to assess and teach morality without having to assume governments to be more than merely governmental. As Maritain never tired of pointing out, it is possible to agree about things to be done without necessarily agreeing on the reason to do them. And the Church can try to bring to the consciences of its hearers the perception of what demands simply being human makes. Would the structures and public arenas of democracies allow those sparks 'in consciences to turn into flame? Only God knows.

6

Medieval Scholarship and Philosophy in the Last One Hundred Years TIMOTHY NOONE

To trace the course of scholarship on medieval philosophy in the last one hundred years would seem to anyone familiar with the subject a difficult, if not daunting, task. Add to this task the further goals of relating the themes of such scholarship to the developments of philosophy itself in the last one hundred years and of confining one's remarks to less than fifty minutes; now the task might be described as nigh on impossible-at least Herculean, if not Sisphyean. So I shall not, contrary to the title of the present lecture, attempt the task here in all of its breadth, depth, and complexity, for to do the topic justice would require nothing less than a book. Instead, I shall restrict my efforts and remarks to that part of Latin, Christian medieval philosophical thought in which its historians have declared its greatest richest treasures are to be found, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Happily enough, this period is the primary area of my own research and interest, so I can speak with some degree of familiarity on the subject. But even within the confines of these two centuries, the number of historians of philosophy and the diversity of their approaches are so great as to preclude the possibility of discussing them in a comprehensive fashion. Accordingly, I shall focus our attention on a small group of Catholic historians-Maurice de Wulf, Etienne Gilson, Philotheus Boehner, and Ferdinand Van Steenberghen-whose works are exemplary either in respect to the method of their approach, the impact they had on the advance of scholarship, or the issues their works raised for other historians of philosophy. 1 Closely related to the historiography of this past century and stimulating research into the history of medieval thought are the critical editions of the works of medieval philosophers and theologians. Thus the advancement of the knowledge of medieval philosophy in the 1. The focus on Catholic historians is justified partially by the occasion of these remarks and partially by the weighty influence that these historians have wielded on the development of studies on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thought.

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last century also needs to be seen in light of the critical editions that have made, and continue to make, much of it possible. Finally, I shall suggest some general reflections on what major lessons have been learned about the nature of medieval philosophy through the scholarship of the last century and how the development of such historical knowledge has interacted with twentieth-century philosophy. To approach our subject properly, we must begin by recalling briefly the state of medieval philosophical scholarship in 1895. Within the domain of Catholic scholarship, a tremendous stimulus had been given to research on medieval philosophy, after centuries of neglect, through the publication of Aeterni Patm (1879), the celebrated encyclical of Leo XIII. Although Aeterni Patris by no means originated the revival of interest in the thought of St. Thomas and Scholasticism,2 it spurred on the efforts already underway and encouraged new studies to be undertaken. Indeed, by 1895 the outlook of Leo XIII may be said already to have had, after encountering stiff resistance, an institutional effect with the founding of the Institut Superieur de philosophie at Louvain under Cardinal Mercier, the establishment of the Academy of St. Thomas in Rome, and the formation of the Leonine Commission to edit the works of St. Thomas. 3 Meanwhile, outside of Catholic circles there was a similar revival of interest in medieval culture, arising partly out of nineteenth-century romanticism and partly out of the burgeoning of historical studies so characteristic of late nineteenth-century European intellectual culture. In Germany, this was the era of the great classical scholars Ranke, Mommsen, and Mollendorff as well as the medieval historians publishing the early volumes of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; in England, the historical editors of the Rolls Series were just in mid-stride; and in France the great medieval historian Michelet only recently had died. 4 Within medieval philosophy proper, in Germany Georg von Hertling (1843-1919) and Clemens Baeumker (1853-1924), professors at Bonn and Breslau respectively, had just founded a new book series devoted to 2. Etienne Gilson, Thomas Langan, and Armand Maurer, Recent Philosophy: Hegel to the Present (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 330-45; Armand Maurer, "Medieval

Philosophy and Its Historians· (1974; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990), pp. 465-66. For bibliographical information on the latter, see below, p. 113, n. 7. 3. Robert Wielockx, "De Mercier a de Wulf: debuts de l'ecole de Louvain," in Gli studi di filosofia medievale fro otto e nuuecento: contributo a un bilancio storiografico, Storia e letteratura: raccolta di studi et testi, 179, a cura di Ruedi Imbach et Alfonso Maieru (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1991), pp. 1-20; R Aubert, "Aspects divers du neo-thomisme SOllS Ie pontificat du Leon XIII," in Aspetti della cultura cattolica neU'eta di Leone XIII (Rome, 1961); L. de Raeymaeker, Le Cardinal Mercier et l'Institut Superieur de philosophiedeLouvain (Louvain, 1952). 4. For a discussion of Ranke, Mommsen, and Michelet, see G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913; Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), pp. 72-97,

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the study of the subject, Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelaltm,S while in France the work of the great medievalists Victor Cousin and Barthelemy Haureau had attracted so much attention that there was a post created for the study of medieval philosophy in Paris at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, a post which in 1895 was occupied by Fran(ois Picavet, one of the future teachers of Etienne Gilson. 6 Yet, in retrospect, we must say that the amount of advanced study devoted to the Middle Ages and the number of scholars pursuing medieval philosophical subjects in 1895 were quite small compared to the intellectual culture of today. Indeed, so great was the ignorance of medieval philosophy among philosophers of the time and so correspondingly great their prejudice against it that most would probably have concurred with the judgment of Octave Hamelin when he said, about a decade after 1895, the "philosophy of Descartes came after the ancients almost as though there was nothing in between."7 That few of our contemporaries, even those in the largely ahistorical Anglo-American analytic tradition, would subscribe to such a view today is in large part attributable to the veritable flood of books, articles, critical editions, and centers for the study of medieval culture that have appeared in the twentieth century. The most important feature of the background just sketched for our purposes is the papal document Aeterni Patris. This document encouraged Catholic scholars, both the ones to whom we shall devote our attention and numerous others, to carry certain expectations with them to their study of the Middle Ages. It encouraged them to seek for an underlying unity in Scholastic thought, one which would be found to an eminent degree in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas; it also inclined them, 168-77, 459-77. For infonnation on the Rolls Series and the Monumenta Germaniae Histl1l'ica, consult David Knowles, Great Histlll'ical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., 1963), pp. 65-97,101-34. 5. Kurt Flasch, "La concezione storiografica della filosofia in Baeumeker e Grabmann," in Gli studi, pp. 51-67; Martin Grabmann, "Clemens Baeumker und die Erforschung der Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Philosophie," in Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelaleers, vol. 25 (Miinster: Aschendorff, 1927), pp. 1-38. 6. Jean Jolivet, "Les etudes de philosophie medievale en France de Victor Cousin a Etienne Gilson," in Gli studi, 1-13. 7. Octave Hamelin, Le systeme de Descartes (Paris: Felix Aican, 1921), p. 15: "Ainsi, de tous cotes, nous retombons sur la meme conclusion: c'est que Descartes vient apres les anciens, presque comme si'il n'y avait rien entre eux et lui .. ." Quoted also in Almand Maurer, "Medieval Philosophy and Its Historians," in Essays on the Reconstruction of Medieual History, ed. V. Murdoch and G. S. Couse (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), pp. 69-84, and reprinted in Almand Maurer, Being and Knowing: Studies in Thomas Aquinas and Later Medieual Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990), pp. 461-79. It is noteworthy that Hamelin would have penned these words prior to the publication of Gilson's doctoral thesis on Descartes.

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however, to think that this unity would be doctrinal and hence did not prepare them adequately for the true diversity of Scholastic doctrine. To see why, let us refresh our memories on some of the document's key points. First, this and other papal documents originating in Leo XIII's pontificate speak of "Scholastic philosophy" and "Christian philosophy," while narrating a history of this philosophy that finds its culmination in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, commending Thomas's wisdom above all other Catholic thinkers, whether Scholastic or Patristic. 8 Unfortunately, this means that there is a certain ambiguity in the documents. Were Catholic philosophers to study Thomism chiefly (or perhaps exclusively)9 to the neglect of whatever other Scholastic traditions of thought were prevalent among their religious orders or universities? Or was the Pope encouraging a revival of Scholastic philosophy as a whole, however pluralistic it might be, in which Thomism would be the pars praecipua? What did the documents mean by Christian philosophy? Was this Christian philosophy a historical reality to be found in the Middle Ages or was it a methodological construct of the historian? Did the term "Christian philosophy" simply designate Catholic philosophy as receiving external guidance from religious teaching or did it suggest a more intimate and immediate connection? Furthermore, whichever way the relation between religious teaching and philosophy proper was conceived, did such Christian philosophy respect the proper autonomy of reason? Finally, what exactly were Catholic thinkers to do with respect to Thomistic and Scholastic thought? On the one hand, the need for reading and teaching Scholastic thought in such a way as to recapture its original insights seemed to be in order (a historical recovery of the Middle 8. Leo Papa XIII, Aeterni Patris, in Acta Sanctae Sedis, studio et cura losephi Pennacchi et Victorii Piazzesi (Rome: Vaticana Polyglotta, 18g4), 12.108: "lam vero inter Scholasticos Doctores, omnium princeps et magister, longe eminet Thomas Aquinas: qui, uti Caietanus animadvertit, doctures sacros quia summe veneratus est, ideo intellectum omnium quodoammodo surtitus est. Illorum doctrinas, velut dispersa cuiusdam corporis membra, in unum Thomas collegit et coagmentavit, miro ordine digessit, et magnis incrementis ita adauxit, ut catholicae Ecclesiae singulare praesidium et decus iure meritoque habeatur." (Italics are found in original.) g. On the possibility of the exclusionist reading and the unprecedented elevation of Aquinas, Leonard Boyle, O.P., writes: "This famous encyclical took the world of learning, within and without the Catholic Church, by surprise. There had been nothing like it before in the history of the church. Popes had praised Thomas and recommended him. Councils had consulted, cited and accepted him. But at no point, not even in the pontificates of the Dominican Popes Pius V and Benedict XIII, had any pope attempted to put Thomas on the pedestal on which Leo XIII now placed him, and to the exclusion, seemingly, of all others." Leonard Boyle, "A Remembrance of Pope Leo XIII: The Encyclical Aeterni Patris," in One Hundred Yean of Thomism: Aeterni Patris and Afterwards, A Symposium, ed. Victor B. Brezik (Houston, Tex.: Center for Thomistic Studies, Ig81), p. II.

Medieval Scholarship and Philosophy in the Last Hundred Years Ages); on the other, the papal documents themselves pointed out the need to synthesize Scholastic philosophy with the findings of modern science and to bring its principles to bear upon the problems of modern societies (an updating of ancient wisdom),10 In the actual course of events, the documents were diffuse and manifold in their influence on Catholic scholarship generally: at Quaracchi and Rome, the interest in medieval Franciscan thought, which had already begun prior to Leo XIII, considered itself officially justified and therefore continued, albeit under intermittent strain and pressure from the Holy See;ll at Louvain, the Institut Superieur de philosophie turned its attention to putting into practice what the documents recommended by studying the findings of modern 10. Leo XII, Aeterni Patris (ed. Pennacchi, 12.114): "Sapientiam sancti Thomae dicimus: si quid enim est a doctoribus Scholasticis vel nimia subtilitate quaesitum, vel parum considerate traditum, si quid cum exploratis posterioris aevi doctrinis minus cohaerens, vel denique quoquo modo non probabile, id nullo pacto in animo est aetati nostrae ad imitandum proponi." 11. Organizations such as the Jesuit and Franciscan Orders that cultivated the Scholastic, but non-Thomistic, philosophies of Francesco Suarez, St. Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus found themselves, at times, hard pressed. Since Leo XIII became increasingly ill disposed towards non-Thomistic forms of Scholastic thought as his pontificate wore on, he tended to bring the weight of papal authority to setting a Thomistic direction to the progress of the neo-Scholastic revival that his encyclical helped to promote. For example, he warned the minister general of the Franciscan order (and by extension the professors of the Athenaeum Antonianum, the main center for Franciscan philosophy and theology in Rome) not to allow their teaching to deviate from the principles of St. Thomas (see Acta Ordinis Fratrum Minorum, vol. 17 [1898], pp. 201-203, epistola Leonis XIII, datum die XXV Nov. 1898), just as he had earlier urged the professors of the Antonianum during an audience to study Bonaventure after the manner the Dominicans study Thomas (see "Audientia summi Pontificis Leonis XIII Collegio S. Antonii," in Pontijicium Athenaeum Antonianum: ab origine ad praesens [Rome: Ed. Antonianum, 1970], p. 556). If anything, Leo's immediate successors were even more firm on this point: in 1911, professors of the Antonianum who favored non-Thomist views were dismissed and sent to minor seminaries to teach, while the Minister General of the Order was removed (this story was related in the lecture of Fr. Conrad Harkins, O.F.M., "In sanctitate et doctrina: Franciscan Studies since Aeterni Patris," p. 7, delivered at the Convention of the American Maritain Association on the Centenary of Pope Leo XIII' Encyclical "Aeterni Patris," Toronto, April 20, 1979); in 1915, Catholic teachers of philosophy were directed to teach the fundamenta and principia of Thomism in Catholic universities and colleges (Pius X's Doctllris Angelici, datum 29Jun. 1914, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis6, no. 10 Uuly 1914]: 336-41), while the Sacred Congregation of Studies identified these fundamenta as the famous twenty-four theses ("Theses quaedam, in doctrina Sancti Thomae Aquinatis contentae, et a philosophiae magistris propositae, adprobantur," die 27 Jul. 1914, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 6, no. 11 [August 1914]: 383-86]). Only in the pontificate of Benedict XV was the legal authority of the theses relaxed so as to accommodate the teaching of Suarez (and by extension other non-Thomistic Scholastic philosophers). For the impact of these and related developments on the critical editions of Bonaventure's writings, see below; for an account of the progressive impact of Aeterni Patris in the pontificates of Pius X and Benedict XV as well as some keen observations about the current position of Thomism within Catholic circles, see Nicholas Lobkowicz, "What Happened to Thomism?: From Aeterni Patris to Vaticanum Secundum," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 59 (1995): 397-423.

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psychology and science with a view to synthesizing them with Scholastic principles; and finally at Paris, Rome, Louvain, and elsewhere the historical study of Thomism and its relation to medieval thought in general began to quicken with the first of our historians, Maurice de Wulf, as a principal representative. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

Maurice de Wulf (1867-1947), having studied neo-Thomism at Louvain under Mercier, embarked, at Mercier's suggestion, on a comprehensive historical study of medieval philosophy; this study was to occupy de Wulf for the remainder of his scholarly career. As each successive edition of his Histoire de la philosophie midiivale showed, 12 de Wulf strove to develop an overarching view of the whole of medieval philosophy. Medieval philosophy was best divided, according to de Wulf, into three periods: a period of formation lasting from the fifth to the twelfth centuries inclusive; a period of culmination (apogee) which coincided with the thirteenth century; a final and long period of decline (diclin) consisting of the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries with the second half of the latter and the sixteenth century preparing the way for modem philosophy. 13 Within this progression of philosophical periods, de Wulf maintained that were two constants. First, there was true philosophy in the Middle Ages, despite the religious character that Christian theology imparted to the philosophy of the period-that is to say, philosophy, in the sense of a systematic and rational understanding of reality, existed without any direct doctrinal dependence on theology,14 This independence was a point that de Wulf insisted upon both against the rationalist school of nineteenth-century historians, such as Victor Cousin, who considered medieval philosophy to be nothing other than the more rational parts of medieval theology, and against the less scholarly but commonplace opinion of ordinary early twentieth-century philosophers, who held that there was no philosophy in the Middle Ages worthy of the name. Second, 12. Historie de la philosophie midievale (first published in 1900; final revision 1947). 13. This division of medieval philosophy's history is the one found in de Wulf's final edition (see Maurice de Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie midievale, sixieme edition, entierement refondue [Louvain; Paris: Institut Superieur de Phiiosophie;J. Vrin, 1934-1947], 1.30-31); in the previous edition, de Wulf proposed four periods: formation (ninth through the twelfth centuries); culmination (thirteenth century); decline (the fourteenth century and first half of the fifteenth century); transition to modem philosophy (second half of the fifteenth century through the seventeenth century). On the latter, see Maurice de Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie midievale, cinquieme edition (Louvain: Institut Superieur de Philosophie, 1924)' 1.33-34. References are to the sixth edition unless noted otherwise. 14. de Wulf, Histoire, 1.284-85.

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and more controversially, de Wulf claimed that there was a doctrinal unity to be found among the thinkers of the High Middle Ages, one that he characterized initially as a Scholastic synthesis, but eventually as a common patrimony. Whether synthesis or patrimony, however, the doctrinal unity characteristic of medieval thought was believed by de Wulf to have been a historical reality,15 not merely an artificial and abstract construct, and to have had its supreme expression in the thirteenth century, when the vast majority of philosophers universally endorsed a certain set of theses. Among these theses de Wulf included the formal procedural distinction of philosophy from theology, and the metaphysical distinctions of essence and existence, of act and potency, of matter and form, and of substance and accident. 16 Objections to de Wulf's synthetic approach to medieval philosophy arose within his own lifetime. Among the critics was, of course, the famous Dominican scholar Pierre Mandonnet, who complained that the Scholastic synthesis of de Wulf was only the Christian Aristotelianism of St. Thomas and St. Albert to which neither the Franciscans inspired by Augustine nor the Latin Averroists subscribed)7 De Wulf simply had to face the fact of considerable diversity even within the century that witnessed the triumph of the Scholastic synthesis (or the finest expression of the common patrimony); try as he would, his theory could only accommodate the recognition of such diversity with difficulty. His convictions are understandable, however, when seen in light of the background of Aeterni Patris, which implied there was such a unity to be found in medieval philosophy. Before we leave de Wulf, moreover, emphasis must be placed on his notion of philosophy. For what we see in de Wulf we shall also see in a modified form in Van Steenberghen: the tendency of the Louvain historians was to accept the notion of philosophy as the rational explanation of the real neither in formal doctrinal dependence on revelation nor in any intrinsic connection with it, a notion of philosophy not unlike the commonplace one found among modern philosophers. Their propensity to do so may simply be the result of their own philosophical education or personal convictions, but to maintain a notion of the philosophical fairly close to that found among modern philosophers was essential, in their opinion, both in order to justify the study of medieval thought in the modern academy and to provide a context for 15. Ibid., pp. 367-68. 16. Ibid., pp. 370-74. 17. Pierre Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'averroosme latin au XIIIe sieck, 2 vols. (Louvain: Institut Superieur de Philosophie, Ig08, Ig11), 1.28-42,51-55. See also the discussion by Anton C. Pegis, The Middle A~ and Philosophy (Chicago: Henry Regnery and Co., 1963), pp. 42-47.

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the reappropriation of medieval thought in the modem world. It was on precisely this point that Etienne Gilson would disagree. Bold indeed would be any attempt to summarize in a few short paragraphs the work of a philosopher, historian, and man ofletters as prolific and influential as Etienne Gilson (1884-1978). Over one hundred books came from his pen during his long career, most of them detailed studies of medieval philosophers and theologians, and an even greater number of articles.l 8 In Europe, his legacy as a promoter of the value of medieval intellectual culture set the stage, according to a recent essay by Alain de Libera,19 for the discussion, lasting now over forty years, of Heidegger's criticism of medieval metaphysics. In North America, his teaching career ranged from the period of the 1920S when he lectured at the University of Virginia and Harvard, to the end of that decade when he helped to found the Pontifical Institute in Toronto, to the 1950S when he lived most of the year in Toronto, functioning as the Director of the Institute. 2o Fortunately, there is no need to summarize all of his scholarly achievements or findings in order to appreciate the novelty of his thought in terms of the historiography being sketched here, for Gilson himself returned repeatedly to what made his approach to medieval thought distinctive and summed it up in a single phrase: Christian philosophy. To appreciate Gilson's novelty, we need to remember that, unlike the vast majority of his colleagues in medieval philosophy, he was not formally trained in the Scholastic tradition. In fact, quite the opposite was true. He had become interested in medieval philosophy only through the happenstance of writing a thesis comparing Descartes's metaphysical doctrines to those of the Scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages. In his own words, Gilson describes the results of that thesis as follows: The conclusions were surprising to me. It was on the occasion of this work that, having to go back from Descartes to what I supposed to be the medieval sources of his philosophy, I became acquainted for the first time with Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastic theologians .... As the work progressed, I experienced a growing feeling of intellectual dismay in seeing what impoverishment metaphysics had suffered at the hands of Descartes. Most of the philosophical positions he had retained had their proper justification, not in his own works, but in those of the Scholastics.... From Scholasticism to Cartesianism the loss in metaphysical substance seemed to me frightening. 21 18. Margaret McGrath, Etienne Gilson: A Bibliography (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982), pp. 1-83. 19. Alain de Libera, "Les etudes de philosophie medievale en France d'Etienne Gilson a nos jours," in Gli studi, pp. 23-24. 20. For the details of Gilson's life, see Laurence K. Shook, Etienne Gilson, Etienne Gilson Series, 6 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984). 21. Etienne Gilson, The Philosopher and Theology, trans. Cecile Gilson (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 88.

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Gilson owed, then, both his interest in and his ever-growing understanding of medieval thought to an immersion in the historical texts themselves; that is why he often came to such historically well-grounded but independent conclusions. What Gilson was to emphasize throughout his long and fruitful study of medieval philosophy was that the most creative and innovative philosophers of the Middle Ages were theologians. Of course, most historians had noticed this fact before. But for Gilson this fact was not incidental to the philosophical achievements of medieval thinkers; rather, in his view, being theologians was precisely what enabled the great medieval philosophers such as St. Thomas and Duns Scotus to attain such brilliant insights. In short, the theological context of medieval philosophy had resulted in advances in philosophy itself; indeed, it had engendered a new type of philosophy that Gilson termed "Christian philosophy." Although he had formulated his basic ideas about this type of philosophy when he wrote Le thomisme (1919) and La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (1924), the most succinct statement of what he meant by "Christian philosophy" may be found in his Gifford Lectures, The Spirit ofMediaeval Philosophy: Thus I call Christian, every philosophy which, although keeping the two orders [offaith and reason] formally distinct, nevertheless considers the Christian revelation as an indispensable auxiliary to reason. For whoever understands it thus, the concept does not correspond to any simple essence susceptible of abstract definition; but corresponds much rather to a concrete historical reality as something calling for description. 22

Naturally this notion of philosophy quickly aroused hostility among historians, whether rationalist or Catholic, since it called into question their basic assumption that medieval thought merited the name philosophy only to the extent that it contained analyses that could be legitimately considered apart from any connection to revelation. 23 Despite these controversies, however, Gilson continued to use the notion of Christian philosophy and employed it as a generic term to cover the whole history of Christian speculation which employed Greek philosophical sources, of various pedigrees, to construct a rational understanding of the world in light of the Christian revelation, a history that began withJustin the Martyr and concluded, perhaps, with Nicholas of Cusa. 22. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, trans. A. H. C. Downes (New York: Scribner's, 1940), p. 13. For excellent discussions of Gilson's understanding of Christian philosophy, see Helen James John, The Thomist Spectrum, Orestes Brownson Series 5 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), pp. 32-51, and Armand A. Maurer, "The Legacy of Etienne Gilson," in One Hundred Years of Thomism, pp. 28-44. 23. De Wulf, Histoire, 1.17-21; Pierre Mandonnet, Bulletin Thomiste, 1 (1924-1926), 1926: 50-54·

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Regarding the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in particular, Gilson's fundamental judgment was remarkably similar to that of de Wulf: medieval philosophy had reached an unprecedented height in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Unlike de Wulf, however, he did not tend to see that height in terms of a more elaborate synthesis of the fundamental metaphysical notions that constituted the common patrimony; Thomism, a la Gilson, was rather a quantum leap in the understanding of what is first in the nature of reality, namely being. Thomas's notion of ens as har hens esse was the greatest philosophical achievement of the Middle Ages, in fact of the whole history of metaphysics, and simultaneously the supreme expression of Christian philosophy, since the Thomistic originality flowed directly from reflection on the data of revelation. Yet Gilson was sufficiently sensitive to the diversity of historical data to grant that there were other syntheses that were both original in their metaphysical insights and also Christian philosophies: the metaphysics of St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus all could claim to be such. They did not need to be seen, not even in the case of Scotus, as a decline so much as alternative, although inferior manner of Christian philosophizing, in the final philosophical judgment. Our third historian in this historiographical sketch, Fr. Philotheus Boehner (1901-1955), was in many ways a pupil and disciple of Gilson. Born in 1901 at Uchtenau, Westphalia (Germany), Boehner developed tuberculosis while studying for the priesthood and was never expected to make his final vows in the Franciscan order. Quite surprisingly, he regained his health and during his convalescence managed to translate into German Gilson's La philosophie de Saint Bonaventure, which had recently appeared (1924). Moreover, after receiving holy orders and finishing a doctorate from Munich in biology, Boehner came to Paris to attend one of Gilson's summer seminars on medieval philosophy and the two became close friends. Gilson suggested to Boehner that he write a history of medieval philosophy in German and Gilson made his lecture notes on the subject available to Boehner; the resulting volume, Die Geschichte tier Christlichen Philosophie von ihren Anfiingen his Nicolaus von Cues, became a standard German text in the history of philosophy and gained prominence for Boehner in the study of medieval philosophy.24 Although his training in medieval studies was largely due to Gilson, Boehner's own pursuits took him in a quite different direction. He perceived that the fourteenth-century Franciscans Scotus and Ockham had a unique contribution to make to the story of Christian philosophy-Sco24. For the details of Boehner's life, see Gedeon G:il, "Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M.," in Dictionary of Medieval Scholarship (forthcoming); The Editors, "Father Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M.," The Cord 5 (1955): 206-15.

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tus in metaphysics and Ockham in logic. At Gilson's invitation, Boehner came to the Pontifical Institute in Toronto in April 1939 to lay the groundwork for a critical edition of Ockham. Scarcely had Boehner begun this task, when war broke out and Boehner, as a German citizen, was a persona non grata in Canada. Fortunately, he did not have to return to Germany where his stirring preaching against the Reich had already made him unpopular with the Nazis; instead, he was invited by the Franciscans of Holy Name Province to teach at a small college in rural western New York, St. Bonaventure College. Here at last Boehner, finding a kindred spirit in Bonaventure's president Thomas Plassman, settled down to intensive research on Scotus and Ockham. 25 This research found its expression in the foundation of the Franciscan Institute and the journal Franciscan Studies, the production of the series of monographs and texts known as the Franciscan Institute Publications, and finally, years after Boehner's own death in 1955, the critical edition in seventeen volumes of William of Ockham's philosophical and theological writings (completed in 1988). Our interest in this extraordinarily varied, if sadly brief, career concerns the research that Boehner published on Franciscan studies and medieval logic. Gilson's own publications, of course, had focused in part on Franciscan topics and Boehner's work was, in many ways, a continuation and deepening of the work done by Gilson and a host of Franciscan scholars in Europe since the time of the formation of the research group at Quaracchi in the 1870s. In the area of medieval logic, however, Boehner had many more contemporaries, scholars such as Grabmann, Bochenski, and the Kneales, than predecessors. Naturally, his scientific training and disposition served him well in this area-in particular, we must credit Boehner's remarkable talent to state clearly, in terms understandable to contemporary logicians, the achievements of medieval logic for the success accorded his Medieval Logic: An Outline of Its Development from I250 to circa I4oo.26 To appreciate, moreover, the full scope of his contribution, we must bear in mind that the logic of the fourteenth century had largely been written off as hopelessly obscure even by most medievalists. True, medievalists noted strange-sounding questions in medieval manuscripts such as "whether 'Caesar' has any signification, given that no man exists" and "whether this is logically proper: I promise you a horse; therefore, I promise you this horse." But they had done so more out of a sense of duty to document the full range of medieval philosophical literature than any sense of the importance of such questions; only 25. The Editors, "Philotheus Boehner," pp. 208-209. 26. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

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Boehner and a few other highly trained specialists bothered to analyze such texts carefully. What Boehner proposed in his Medieval Logic, and what has been confirmed in numerous studies since his death, is that medieval philosophers and theologians had anticipated many of the discoveries of modem logic and most of the problems plaguing contemporary philosophy oflanguage; in fact, Boehner suggested that, in many cases, the medieval philosophers had developed better solutions to the problems of the philosophy of language than those offered in the writings of Russell, Frege, and contemporary analytic philosophy generally. Such a conclusion was not only revolutionary at the time, it also encouraged many others to use the tools of modem logic in order to analyze medieval philosophical and logical texts. The resulting studies, in tum, allowed more and more of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth-logical treatises to be recognized for the valuable, technical pieces of logical theory that they are rather than as arcana of mere historical curiosity. Regarding the theme of unity in the High Middle Ages, Boehner's investigations tended to broaden the range of philosophical positions that would have to be recognized and subsumed within any unitary vision of medieval thought. Boehner himself contended that there were really two high points in the medieval period: the first was the age of original metaphysical speculation beginning in the mid-thirteenth century and lasting until the end of the fourteenth; the second was the remarkable period of advances in formal logic and the philosophy of language, which began in the late thirteenth century, reached its zenith in the fourteenth century, and entered into a state of decline at the opening of the modem era, under the withering criticism of Renaissance humanism. As Boehner saw the matter, medieval thinkers only developed the logical tools to express clearly and concisely their metaphysical distinctions and insights at the close of the Middle Ages, when, tragically enough, the creative era of metaphysical speculation had drawn to a close. 27 If with the work of Philotheus Boehner we begin to see the appreciation for, and appropriation of, fourteenth-century philosophy among Catholic historians, we return once more to the world of the thirteenth century with the work of our final historian, Ferdinand Van Steenberghen (1904-1993).28 Educated at Louvain and interested in the role of the Latin Averroists in the development of medieval philosophy, Van 27. Boehner, MedievalLogic, pp. 92-93. 28. On Van Steenberghen's career, see James McEvoy, Jacques Follon, and Philipp W. Rosemann, "Vi!tera novis augere: a la memoire du chanoine Ferdinand Van Steenberghen," Bulletin de la philosophie midiivale 35 (1993): 254-58.

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Steenberghen was among the early critics of Gilson's idea of Christian philosophy.29 Like his great predecessor at Louvain, de Wulf, he adopted an account of the philosophical that was similar to the one advocated by modern philosophers: thought could only be truly philosophical to the extent that it proceeded on rationally discernible principles in no formal doctrinal dependence on revelation. Using this account of the philosophical and a phenomenal command of thirteenth-century philosophical literature, Van Steenberghen produced a rich study of thirteenthcentury thought, La philosophie au XIIIeme siecle, which was recently re-issued (1991) in a revised edition shortly before his death. In his revised history, Van Steenberghen constructs the story of thirteenth-century philosophy along dramatic lines leading to the condemnations of 1270 and 1277. Prior to 1250, Latin philosophy is characterized by an eclectic Aristotelianism, a mixture, in different measures, of the newly translated Aristotelian writings with doctrinal elements drawn from Augustine, Avicenna, Averroes, and PseudoDionysius. Between 1250 and 1275, there appear two new forms of neo-platonizing Aristotelianism-more synthetic in character-in the philosophies of St. Bonaventure and St. Albert, a wholly new philosophical outlook in Thomism, and a revival of ancient thought in the radical Aristotelianism of the Latin Averroists. As much as de Wulf and Gilson, Van Steenberghen argues that Thomism is the intellectual culmination of medieval thought; indeed, he goes even further in some ways when he claims that Thomism is the "first truly original philosophy produced by Christianity."30 Yet this innovative philosophy was checked in its infancy by the more radical Aristotelianism of Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant and prevented from attaining its full stature of recognition. For when radical Aristotelianism produced an understandable institutional reaction in the form of the condemnations, a new philosophico-religious movement arose, which Van Steenberghen labels "neo-Augustinianism," one that tended to confuse Thomism with radical Aristotelianism and oppose them both on the same grounds. Although Van Steenberghen's claim that Augustinianism as a distinctly philosophical movement was a reaction to Thomism has been challenged, what is of more interest to us is the mixed success he had in discovering unity in the thirteenth century. Certainly in Van Steenberghen's 29. See Ferdinand Van Steenberghen, Aristote en Occident: les origines de l'aristotelisme parisien (Louvain: Institut superieur de philosophie, 1946), pp. 139-47. On his career, see "Ferdinand Van Steenberghen," in ContempllT'ary AuthllT's, ed. Susan M. Trosky (Detroit, New York, and London: Gale Research Inc., 1990), pp. 454-55. 30. Van Steenberghen, La philosophie, p. 454.

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history the dramatic flow of events and succession of philosophical ideas and approaches finds its culmination in the 1270s: Thomism, radical Aristotelianism, the condemnations, and the conservative reaction he terms neo-Augustinianism. What poses difficulties for Van Steenberghen's portrayal of the century, and for his depiction of medieval philosophy more generally, is the blossoming of metaphysical speculation in the writings of late thirteenth-century philosophers and theologians, such as Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, and John Duns Scotus. For example, Henry of Ghent tends to become, in this history, a highly skilled proponent of neo-Augustinianism, much to the neglect of Henry's stock of original ideas that so influenced later philosophical developments, while Scotus is omitted altogether on the grounds that his thought is more an anticipation of fourteenth-century thought than an integral aspect of thirteenth-century philosophy. With the work of Van Steenberghen, our historiographical sketches are complete. From a thematic point of view, we have seen a continuous dialectic between the search on the part of Catholic scholars to discover unity in medieval thought and their encounter with greater diversity among medieval thinkers than their historical models would tolerate. Perhaps the clearest example of this is to be found in our final author, Van Steenberghen, whose unitary conception of the thirteenth century works admirably for three quarters of that century, but then hampers him from organizing the balance of the century. Gilson's depiction of the High Middle Ages, however, also seems inadequate: not only in the sense that his notion of Christian philosophy is questionable and needs to be defended on philosophical grounds independent of its historical deployment, but also in the sense that in his depiction of the Middle Ages (despite rather acute observations in his History suggesting the opposite)31 Gilson strains to recognize metaphysical achievements after St. Thomas and does not give due weight to the importance of the logical discoveries of the fourteenth century. Yet the intuition of Catholic scholars that medieval philosophy represents a unity of philosophical approach may well be correct and we shall return to the problems raised by this historiographical excursus later. CRITICAL EDITIONS

If the last century has witnessed an explosion of historical knowledge in regard to the Middle Ages, of no area within medieval studies is this 31. Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosr1'hy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 471.

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truer than that of the editions of medieval philosophers. Presently, critical editions are in progress on the works of the following better known authors of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: William of Auvergne, St. Albert the Great, Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Peter Aureolus. During the past century either the entire corpus or at least substantial portions of the following authors have appeared, to mention only the more significant names: Alexander Hales, Phillip the Chancellor, William of Auxerre, Robert Grosseteste, St. Bonaventure, Robert Kilwardby, Peter John Olivi, Roger Marston, Siger of Brabant,John Peckham, Godfrey of Fontaines,James ofViterbo, Dietrich of Fribourg, William of Ockham, Adam Wodeham, Walter Chatton, and Gregory of Rimini. Comparing these extensive lists of critical editions, which are by no means exhaustive, to the number of medieval philosophers of the same period whose works were either available in critical edition a century ago or whose works were being prepared for critical edition, we can readily appreciate the progress; in 1895, only two major projects had been begun or had borne much fruit: the edition of the opera of St. Bonaventure at Quaracchi, and the Leonine edition of St. Thomas's writings at Rome. Yet an enumeration of the editions that have either appeared or are in progress by no means gives an adequate picture of the amount we have learned during the course of the past century about medieval texts and their transmission. For both in preparing materials for these editions and in the editing process itself, scholars have discovered a great deal about how medieval authors worked, how their works were disseminated and copied, and the overall material circumstances for the intellectual milieu of the High Middle Ages. Furthermore, editors of medieval philosophical texts have made substantial contributions to, and considerable analysis of, the methods employed in editing generally by providing a kind of laboratory in which different methodological approaches to editing are tested and re-tested. Since to narrate, within the available space, the history of all the major text editions mentioned would be preposterous, I propose instead to give a sketch of a few of the highlights by confining our attention to the accomplishments and techniques of only two of the major projects: the Quaracchi editors of St. Bonaventure, Alexander Hales, and the Bibli,Q. theca Franciscana Historica; and the Leonine editors of St. Thomas Aquinas. The Quaracchi editors of the Bonaventurian opera were a group that originated from the inspiration of Fr. Fidelis Fanna, general director of Quaracchi until his death, Fr. Ignatius Jeiler, Fanna's successor, and Fr. Bernadino del Vago, then Minister General of the Franciscan order.32 32. For details on the formation and work of the Quaracchi editors, see Ignatius c. Brady, "The opera omnia of St. Bonaventure Revisited," in Proceedings of the Seventh Centenary

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Working together in a small religious house outside Florence after conducting preliminary research that involved examining some 5,000 codices scattered in 400 European libraries, the patres editores of Quaracchi produced in their opera omnia Sancti Bonaventurae a fine humanistic edition that was a model of excellence for its time. The consultation of manuscript material was considerable, if not exhaustive; the documentation of materials used by St. Bonaventure was adequate; and the presentation of the opera in handsome folio volumes over the course of twenty years (1882-1902) was prompt, even speedy, for the genre. But, for all that, there were and remain difficulties with the edition. 33 First, the editors disagreed sharply among themselves regarding the method to be employed in establishing the text: Fr. Fanna, trained in les belles lettres, favored the techniques of the Maurists; Fr.Jeiler, imbued with the latest critical methods of German classical scholarship, inclined towards a more "scientific" approach in the tradition of Lachmann. Instead of thrashing the matter out in a frank and thorough discussion, the editorial team tended to split along national lines (four Italians; six Germans) and the Minister General was finally left to decide the matter. He decided to favor Fanna, but the latter's premature death and the elevation ofJeiler to Fanna's post meant the prevalence ofJeiler's method in the actual production of the volumes. Second, the Quaracchi editors knew altogether too little about the transmission of texts in the Middle Ages to avoid mistakes. At the time, no one knew anything about the pecia system or its use at medieval universities. What this meant for editorial technique was that, even if the patres followed the more rigorous "scientific" method of Jeiler, they could not develop justifiable criteria for rejecting or including manuscripts for collation. Lastly, Fr. Jeiler's decision to include, probably under pressure from higher ecclesiastical authorities, scholia purporting to show fundamental philosophical agreement between the Seraphic and Angelic Doctors marred the edition, as both Cardinal Ehrle and Etienne Gilson subsequently pointed out. 34 Celebration of the Death of St. Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure, N.Y: Franciscan Institute, 1975), pp. 47-59; Ignatius C. Brady, "The Edition of the «Opera omnia» of Saint Bonaventure (1882-1902)," in Il Collegia San Bonaventura di QJtaracchi: Volume commemurativo del Centenario della fondazione I877-I977 (Grottaferrata, Rome: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1977), pp. 116-40. 33. Brady, "The Edition," pp. 130-40; Jacques G. Bougerol, "Pour des «Prologemena Postquam» de l'edition critique de S. Bonaventure Quaracchi 1882-1902," in The Editing of Theological and Philosophical Texts from the Middle Ages, ed. Monika Asztalos (Stockholm: Alenquist and Wiksell International, 1986), pp. 121-36. 34. Etienne Gilson, La philosophie de Saint Bonaventure, 3eme ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1953), p. 11 n. 1; Franz Ehrle's views are discussed in Bougerol, "Pour des «Prolegomena»," p. 126, 126 n. 18.

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Yet much was learned of lasting value through the process of editing the Bonaventurean writings. The practice of working as a group rather than in isolation, despite its pitfalls with quarrels over method, was successfully used in the later Quaracchi productions of Alexander Hales and the Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastica series,35 and imitated elsewhere in editions of Scotus at Rome and of Ockham and Scotus at the Franciscan Institute. The perceived need to settle on a scientific method, felt so strongly by Fr. Jeiler, brought home to the Franciscan editors early in their history the question of alternative methods and their effectiveness. The great Franciscan editors of the twentieth century-Ferdinand Delorme, Victorinus Doucet, Ignatius Brady, Charles Bali!;, and Gedeon Gal-can be credited with developing a meta-method, if not a method. Actual experimentation with texts copied under divergent circumstances, many of which were copied by friar-scholars none too concerned to reproduce the wording of their exemplars, taught them to be wary of adhering strictly to either the methods of Bedier or Lachmann and instead encouraged them to adapt the method employed in editing a text to the state of the evidence available for the text. If there was a fine professionally or semi -professionally produced copy of a text surviving from early in a text's history perhaps a Bedier method would be used, although random samplings (known as soundings) in the other witnesses would also be made; if the text, as was usually the case, survived in numerous witnesses produced by friar-scholars, a group of manuscripts would be chosen after soundings were made of all available witnesses. Victorinus Doucet termed this meta-method, if such it can be called, the "rational method"36 and characterized it as basing one's editorial decisions on the full range of the manuscript evidence, bearing in mind that both the codex optimus (Bedier's preference) and even the full range of witnesses (the evidence favored by Lachmann) may, in a given place, prove false; the duty of the editor becomes, then, to establish a critical text by making the most sensible reading, considering the genre of the work, the context of the statement, and the known proclivities of the author. Turning to the Leonine Commission of St. Thomas's works, we find many parallels in its history to that of Quaracchi. Early in its history, the 35. For a history of the institutional setting for the vast production of the Quaracchi team of editors, see Clement Schmitt, "Le College de S. Bonaventure de 1877 a 1977," in II Collegio, pp. 11-70. 36. Cf. Victorinus Doucet, Prologomena in librum III neenon in libros I et II "Summae frams Alexandri" (Quaracchi prope Florentiam: Collegium Sancti Bonaventurae, 1948), pp. xiv, xlix-I.

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Leonine too was plagued with disagreements over editorial technique, ones made perhaps more acute by the fact that Leo XIII wanted an edition to be placed, in short order, in the hands of Catholic teachers of philosophyand theology.37 Yet it is not so much the history of the Commission which I wish to illustrate this morning as the remarkable success the Commission had in adapting and improving a fundamentally Lachmannian technique to the editing of St. Thomas's Parisian productions. This remarkable success was thanks in the main to an equally remarkable man,Jean Destrez. Destrez was a Dominican scholar who was forced tragically to separate from the Dominican order when both his parents died and the duty of supporting his younger siblings fell to him.38 Despite these confining circumstances, Destrez managed to amass a great deal of evidence, based on the study of some seven thousand manuscripts, regarding the publication and reproduction of medieval philosophical and theological works during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although his conclusions were occasionally erroneous concerning the precise import of his findings for editorial method,39 Destrez's studies revealed that there was a system of professional copyists that copied small sections (pecifU!) of works under the direction of a university official (petionarius or stationarius), who was duty-bound to maintain the fidelity of the pieces lent for copying with reference to the copy originally received from the author. To be sure, the stationers often were negligent in their duties of checking the accuracy of the pecifU!, and the demand for certain authors, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, caused them to engage in the questionable practice of having more than one set of peciae in circulation at once, contrary to what Destrez surmised. Yet despite all we have learned about the system since Destrez's work, it was chiefly through his seminal work La pecia that this official copying system, now known simply as the pecia system, became known to the scholarlyworld. 40 37. For the early history of the Leonine Commission, see Louis:Jacques Bataillon, "Le edizioni di opera omnia degli Scholastici e I'Edizione Leonina," in Gli stud~ pp. 141-54; auteur anonyme, "La Commission Leonine pour l' edition des oeuvres de S. Thomas d'Aquin," Analecta S.O.P. 47 (1983): 72-83; Louis:Jacques Bataillon, "L'Edition Leonine des oeuvres de Saint Thomas et les etudes medievales," in Atti deU'VIII Coogresso Tomistico Internaziooale, I: L'enciclica "Aeterni Patris» neU'arco di un secolo, Studi Tomistici 10 (Citta del Vaticana: Libreria Editrice Vaticane; Pontificia Academia di S. Tommaso e di Religione Cattolica, 1981), pp. 452-64;James P. Reilly, "The Leonine Commission and the Seventh Centenary of St. Thomas Aquinas," Thomas and Bonaventure: A Septicentenary Commemaratioo: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 48 (1974): 286-94. 38. On Destrez's life, see G. Fink-Errera, "Jean Destrez et son oeuvre: La pecia dans les manuscritsuniversitair!sduXIlleetXIVesiecle," Scriptorium 11 (1957): 264-65. 39. Bataillon, "L'Edition Leonine," pp. 460-62. 40. See Jean Destrez, La pecia dans les manuscrits universitaires du XIIIe et XIVe siecle (Paris: Editions Jacques Vautrain, 1935)' For a further discussion of the pecia system, see Richard

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Knowledge of the pecia system and its vicissitudes has enabled the Leonine Commission to refine considerably its basically Lachmannian method. When a pecia was used for copying, the copyist who borrowed it normally placed a mark in the lateral margin indicating the new numbet: of the pecia from which he was beginning to copy. Careful observation of the numerical sequencing and textual location of these peciae breaks or divisions has allowed scholars to determine which manuscripts were copied from the same peciae grouping and hence, ultimately, to determine which manuscripts were part of a given stream of derivation from the copy sent to the stationer by the author (the apograph). This determination means, in turn, that later and derivative copies can be eliminated with some confidence, provided that soundings do not indicate any internal variations in the allegiance of a codex. What this implies for textual editing is that one can base one's edition on a relatively small portion of the total manuscripts surviving, yet do so armed with the knowledge that one is drawing upon the best evidence available for reconstructing the text. Not only has the Leonine's study of the pecia system revolutionized the Commission's own editorial procedures, it also has proven to be of tremendous value for editors working on Parisian or Bolognese masters whose writings were reproduced through the pecia system. For example, the works of Henry of Ghent are currently being edited using an approach similar to that of the Leonine. 41 Indeed, I would venture to say that the Leonine Commission has provided a model of excellence for editors of medieval and classical texts to follow generally since it has shown how to cope successfully with large numbers of manuscripts in a scientifically rigorous manner. REFLECTIONS

To say the least, we have learned an enormous amount, through the past century of scholarship, about medieval philosophical texts, their authors, and their doctrines. What I would like to underscore here are questions raised by the historiography sketched and the problems as well as the prospects for future text editions. Let us begin with the latter. The use of computers has improved and eased in many ways the process and progress of text editing. No longer Rouse, "The Book Trade at the University of Paris ca. 1250-1350," in La production du livre universitaire au Muyen Age: exemplar et pecia, ed. Richard Rouse, L. J. Bataillon, and B. G. Guyot (Paris:J. Vrin, 1988), pp. 41-11441. cr., for example, the introduction ofR Macken in Henrici de Gandavo, Quodlibet I (Leuven/Leiden: Leuven University Press/E. J. Brill, 1979), pp. xliii-Ixxxvii.

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does one record variant readings on lengthy collation sheets, a practice that tended, when the text was typed and re-typed, to result in errors reminiscent of medieval scribes' copying errors. Instead, the base text of a given manuscript is entered once into a computer file where its accuracy, dependability, and strength are constantly challenged as variant readings of other witnesses are recorded in the same file. The ability of the contemporary editor to transfer directly to printed text the results of his collation and deliberative judgment about the proper reading of a Latin text is an unparalleled development in the history of text editions, one that must be accounted a great boon. The benefit of computer usage for indices, concordances, and word searches is even greater; what customarily took hours or days of patient scholarly labor can now be accomplished in minutes, or in some cases seconds, by a computer database search program. Nonetheless, despite the incalculable advantages of using computers in the production of text editions, the prospects for editing the mass of yet unedited material in the areas of medieval philosophy and theology are not entirely bright. Too few scholars, especially young scholars, are trained well enough in the somewhat peculiar combination of disciplines needed for solid textual research: medieval Latin, paleography, codicology, philosophy, and theology. Indeed, all too commonplace are young aspirants in philosophy and theology interested in an exclusively systematic, as opposed to a historical, understanding of their subjects and who look with disdain upon the research of text editors, while, on the other hand, most students of medieval Latin studies lack either the interest or the training in philosophical and theological topics to become reliable editors of philosophical texts. There is, in fact, a legitimate basis for asking where the next generation of text editors for medieval Latin philosophical texts will come from. Related to this cautionary note is a second, and in many ways more disturbing, one. All the distinguished editors mentioned above, and a host of others not mentioned, were not simply excellent readers of Latin texts; they were themselves speakers and writers of the Latin language. In comparison even to the best Latinists of the present day, they were native speakers, for they were imbued through their scholarly and ecclesiastical training with an intellectual culture that took philosophical and theological courses in Latin and produced studies written in Latin. Sadly enough, this culture, both in its academic and ecclesiastical forms, has passed away. What impact the loss of this Latin-speaking culture may have upon the quality of text editions in the long run simply remains to be seen. Promised at the beginning of this lecture were reflections on what the last century of scholarship has revealed about the nature of medieval

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philosophy. Perhaps the easiest way to approach this matter is by returning to the historiographical sketches with which we began and by pondering the basic question they raise. All of the historians whose works we reviewed attempted to locate a unity, whether doctrinal or otherwise, within medieval philosophy. To what extent is there unity in medieval philosophy? Or are all attempts to find unity in medieval thought pointless? Certainly, the state of historical knowledge is in flux, and the efforts we reviewed to discover unity within medieval thought seem to be premature; yet the search for a unity in medieval philosophy is not pointless. The type of unity there actually is in medieval thought, however, challenges our notion of the philosophical, perhaps even, as MacIntyre suggests,42 of the rational. On this point, Gilson's insistence that Christian philosophy is fundamentally a historical reality may well come closest to the mark: quite unlike contemporary philosophers, medieval philosophers enjoyed a shared conception of what intellectual enquiry should be like. This rather obvious fact is what makes even the greatest doctrinal diversity within the medieval philosophy seem slight; the medieval philosophers had a shared cultural inheritance, in which revelation formed the principal part, that allowed them to disagree intelligently and to communicate their speculative insights clearly to an appreciative audience. Consequently, one thing I would like to suggest that we have learned about medieval thought in the past century is the extent to which it possessed a cultural unity that our own intellectual culture lacks; the unity we perceive there is real, but it is so acutely perceptible to us because of our own fragmentary culture. How has the study of medieval philosophy influenced twentiethcentury philosophy and how, conversely, has twentieth-century philosophy influenced the study of medieval philosophy? To answer the first question, medieval philosophy has influenced twentieth-century philosophy mainly in the way already suggested, by substantially revising the way in which even the most contemporarily minded philosopher looks upon the history of his subject. The conventional modern outlook on medieval thought, so clearly expressed in Hamelin's words quoted earlier, has been thoroughly discredited. But the study of medieval philosophy has also, more recently, begun to have a more properly philosophical influence. Through the work of MacIntyre and others, contemporary philosophers are beginning to appreciate to what extent medieval philosophy calls into question the manner in which philosophical problems are approached nowadays; what has seemed, especially to analytic 42. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Venions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 7-31, 58-195.

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philosophers, the obvious places to start in philosophy are beginning to be recognized as largely modern preoccupations that may be entrances to blind alleys after all. What, then, of the influence of twentieth-century philosophy upon the study of medieval philosophy? Here I would like to suggest that both in research on medieval metaphysics and in research on medieval logic, awareness of twentieth-century discussions has caused historians to bring to medieval texts questions they would otherwise never have brought. In the area of logic, clearly the works of Boehner, Bochenski, Knutilla, Pin borg, De Rijk, and Kretzmann are all heavily indebted to contemporary discussions in the philosophy of language. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, for all its faults and its unfortunate tendency to overlook the theological dimension of medieval philosophizing, is a testimony to the extent to which contemporary philosophy has affected the questions that medievalists put to philosophical texts. In the area of metaphysics, the influence of contemporary discussions of being and its history, discussions largely arising out of Heidegger's writings, has been equally telling. The focus of study on Aquinas's notion of esse as existential act and efforts to discover to what extent other medieval philosophers shared a like notion of being are obviously indebted to the critique of traditional metaphysics and its object marshaled by the existentialist movement. Nor has the case of existentialism been unique: the use of analytical tools by contemporary Christian philosophers of religion has certainly encouraged students of medieval philosophy to frame their studies of philosophical theology in the terminology of contemporary discussions. 43 In general, we must conclude that medieval philosophy has been a field of historical research in which tremendous progress has been made in the last century. But the field is far from exhausted. The number of important philosophers still unstudied from the fourteenth century alone is remarkable, while many of the lesser lights of the thirteenth century are also neglected. What I hope I have given here is some idea of the questions this branch of historical lore raises for philosophers and historians as well as some of the tentative answers given to date. 43. For a recent book illustrating the use of such analytic tools in the study of medieval philosophical theology, see the commentaries of Antoine Vos in John Duns Scotus, Contingency and Freedom: Lectura I 39. intro., trans., and comm. by AVos Jaczn et al. (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994).

7

Was heisst Philosophie? One Hundred Years of German Catholic Thought KENNETH L. SCHMITZ

I have given the title "What is philosophy?" to these reflections on German Catholic thought during the past century in order to provide a focus for unifying a quite astounding variety of philosophical endeavors. Needless to say, the unity will not resemble the unity of a system, but more that of a symphony in which recurrent themes resound. In sounding these themes I perforce must seem to abandon the rich variety; but then it would be absurd to try to provide a history of one hundred years of thought within the limits of an essay. Fortunately this was not intended, but rather a philosophical reflection on the significance of these years is intended. The reflection will be guided by a second limitation that is imposed by my own interests, and by the question itself that orients my reflections towards metaphysics and ontology. As a result, important figures in political philosophy and the philosophy of science will scarcely receive the attention they deserve. The truth of my reflections will rest, of course, upon the actual presence of the selected themes within the variety. Now, not only are they present, but they show forth a certain inner consistency in shaping the exercise of philosophical thought among these thinkers. In addition to the great tradition of philosophy stemming from the Greeks, the forces which shape German Catholic philosophy are, not surprisingly, cultural and religious; that is to say, German and Catholic. Their interplay gives the topic its interest and importance. It is fair to say that the variety has increased during the century as philosophy among German Catholics has opened up to more and more diverse influences, both ancient and contemporary. This has happened not only in the relation between Catholic and non-Catholic sources of thought, but also within Catholic thought itself. IfI were forced to render a general judgment in terms of classical philosophy, I would say that the Platonic and neo-Platonic aspects have strengthened throughout the

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century while the Aristotelian elements have receded. But such a judgment is premature, and incomplete because it is unqualified.! In orchestrating the manifold variety, I will provide an overview of five developments, illustrating each by indicating the central concern of one or two of the most significant representatives of each development. The developments are: (1) the emergence of neo-Scholasticism (2) the growing sophistication in mediaeval historical research (3) for want of a better name, the turn to dialogue, that is, the direct application of St. Thomas's key conceptions to current issues rather than the prior attempts to integrate his thought as a whole, that is, as a neo-Scholastic system, integrated with one or another modern system (4) the appropriation of the method of transcendental philosophy, and (5) the adoption of phenomenology in its several forms-Husserlian, Schelerian, and Heideggerian. Finally, from these developments, I will draw up a profile of the major constants in play in the thought of German Catholic philosophers, especially during the middle and latter part of our period. The story begins shortly before our period. As everywhere else in the Catholic world, Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) had a marked effect in the late years of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth one. Negatively, its effect was to cut off, or rather to postpone, further development of inherently German modes of thought; I mean the attempts in the first half of the nineteenth century among Catholic thinkers to draw upon the thought of the great German idealists-Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. These Catholic thinkers-who may be identified especially but not exclusively with the Tiibingen and Munich circles-had signaled a new and original response of Catholic thought within the modern world. On the other hand, among Catholic seminaries and academies, a good deal of eclectic borrowing from modern rationalist thought was still evident in the Scholastic manuals then in use, especially in the mode of presentation and in the ideal of philosophical argumentation. More deeply engrained even, however, was the older influence of Suarez and nominalist principles within a generalized Scholasticism. Even giants in the Thomistic revival, such as Joseph Kleutgen (1811-1883), were not free of Suarezian elements. 2 The positive effect of Leo XIII's initiative, then, was to return Catholic thought to a high point in its two-thousand-year career, and to propose 1. An exception, for example, is Gallus Manser (1866-1950) who was vehemently opposed to all variations of neo-Platonism. His interpretation of St. Thomas stressed its development of an Aristotelian realism: Das Wesen tier Thomismus, 3d ed. (Fribourg/Schweiz, 1949), p. 169. 2. Die Philosophie tier Vorzeit verteidigt, 2 vols. (1860-1863), vol. I, 2d ed. 1878. Also Tilmann Pesch (1836-1899), Die Philosohie der Vorzeit in ihrer Bedeutungfor die Zukunjt in StimmenausMariaLach9 (1875) 138-61.

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Scholastic thought, pre-eminently in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, as a model and norm for clerical education and formation. The papal initiative was soon identified as a charter for neo-Scholasticism and especially for the revival of Thomism. The fir.st development within our period, then, is that of nerrScholasticism. Its origins can reasonably be situated in the middle years of the nineteenth century, although the name itself dates only from the last two decades of the past century.3 It is associated in Germany with centers at Munster, the later Mainz circle, Maria Lach and various seminaries. 4 The new Scholasticism was not without its controversial aspects, stemming in part from ecclesiastical and political considerations, prominent among them being criticism of Ignaz von Dollinger and the deutsche Theologie associated with his circle; but also the suspicion that neo-Scholasticism was too closely tied to Rome. Yet neo-Scholasticism was more than the prolongation of the doctrine of the schools. For what the new Scholasticism sought to do, through the work of thinkers such as FranzJakob Clemens5 (1815-1862) and Joseph Kleutgen was to engage contemporary philosophy through a revival of what was judged to be living in Scholastic philosophyand, in the case of Hermann Ernst Plassmann (1817-1864), particularly what was vital in the thought of St. Thomas. 6 In the later stages of neo-Scholasticism, which fall within our time period, the philosophers and the issues altered. During the first years of the period under our consideration the antagonists were not-as earlier-Gunther and Hermes (suspected of idealism), but Spencer and Darwin (identified as materialists), so that much was written in defense of the spiritual nature of the soul and its freedom, against the determinism and mechanism of late nineteenth-century scientific materialism, rather than as earlier against Descartes and the idealists. Nevertheless, 3. Heinrich Schmidinger, '''Scholastik' und 'Neuscholastik'-Geschichte zweier Begriffe," in Christliche Philosaphie im katholischen Denken des I9. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. E. Coreth, W. Neidl, and G. Pfligersdorfer, 3 vols. (Graz, Wien, Koln: Verlag Styria, 1987-1890); vol. 2: Ruckgriffaufscholastisches Erbe, pp. 23-53, at p. 48. For a more detailed account of the centers and figures involved, see Peter Walter, "Die neuscholastische Philosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum," ibid., pp. 131-94. The three-volume Christliche Philosaphie does not limit its consideration to the strict sense of the title, but ranges over a remarkable number of topics and thinkers whose Catholicity has in some sense come into play in relation to their philosophy. It has been an invaluable aid in the preparation of the present essay, especially in bibliographical references and factual matters. I will refer to pertinent articles giving the author, volume and pages as from CP. 4. Mention ought also to be made of Eichstiitt, where Albert Stock! (1823-1895) taught from 1850 to 1862 and from 1871 to 1895. 5. Unser Standpunkt in der Philosaphie, in Der Katholik (Mainz) 39/1 (1859) 9-23, 129-54. 6. Several works "gemiiss der Schule des hI. Thomas von Aquino" appeared during the years 1858-1862.

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while much of the discussion was taken up with "in-house" issues,7 still it can be said that neo-Scholasticism had more and more shed its closure and indifference to modem thought and had taken up a more confident-although in most cases one could not say a more positive-attitude towards modem thought, once that thought was subjected to correction in accordance with the principles of the philosophia perennis. For the commentatorial tradition within Thomism and within Scholasticism had, despite inter-Scholastic disputations, preserved the notion of a unified and shared philosophia perennis, ostensibly Aristotelian in character. But the alleged unity of that philosophy was being challenged by intensive historical research. And this brings us to the second development: the historical clarification of mediaeval philosophy and particularly of St. Thomas's thought. Still, the clarification came about only gradually,S and only by means of a brilliant series of scholarly researches. 9 But by 1895 in Germany and elsewhere a clearer historical understanding of the manifold character of mediaeval philosophy was beginning to emerge, as was a more knowledgeable attitude towards the High Middle Ages. Even the variegated Latin styles of a John of Salisbury, a St. Anselm of Canterbury or a St. Bonaventure were gaining new appreciation in the face of the contempt that had originated with the Renaissance Humanists, while a liberation from the rationalist preoccupations of the AufkHirung was also coming about. 10 The systematic unity of neo-Scholasticism began to give way to a more differentiated sense of the actual condition of philosophy in the High Middle Ages. Thus Franz Ehrle ll (1845-1934) brought forward 7. The publication of the 24 Theses (1914) may well have had the effect of turning neoScholasticism even more into itself and away from close engagement with modem philosophy. 8. Indeed, the subsequent clarification was also slow in coming to this continent. The papers read at the founding meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association at the Catholic University of America in 1926 manifest an intelligent and confident but still generalized neo-Scholasticism, stemming principally from Louvain and Wiirzburg but directed towards American Realism. More generally, metaphysics was presented, especially among the Jesuits, in the form of a kind of bowdlerized Suarezianism in which being was taken as a concept whose distinguishing feature was its empty generality. A generation later, as a young teacher, I first encountered the generalized scholastic manuals that were still in use during the middle of the century in the majority of Catholic seminaries and colleges. 9. cr. Wolfgang Kluxen, "Die geschichtliche Erforschung der mittelalterlichen Philosophie und die Neuscholastik," in CP, 2.362-89. 10. In this country the change was brought about at first in the broader society by a growing admiration for the art and architecture of the High Middle Ages, popularized by the writings ofJohn Henry Adams and others, while the attack upon a narrow rationalism received expression in the works of American philosophers such as Santayana, and in the pragmatisms of William James and Charles Pierce. 11. DieScholastik und ihreAufgabein unserer Zeit (Freiburg/Br., 1918).

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the presence of an Augustinian tradition in St. Thomas, while the researches of Clemens Baeumker 12 (1853-1924) and Martin Grabmann13 (1875-1949) brought new and subtler understanding to the broader field of mediaeval thought. Many other names could be added, of course: Bernhard Geyer (who directed the Albertus Magnus Institut in Bonn and contributed to the I I th edition of Ueberweg's Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie) , Franziskus Schmitt (who edited the opera omnia sancti Anselmz) , Josef Koch (b. 1885) (who founded the Thomas Institut in Koln), and Michael Schmaus (b. 1897) (who founded the Martin Grabmann Institut in Munich). To be sure, the gradual recovery of a more accurate understanding of mediaeval philosophy was the result of an international scholarly initiative. The work of non-German scholars, such as Pierre Mandonnet (1858-1936) and Etienne Gilson (1884-1978) cannot be ignored, nor can that of Maurice De Wulf (1867-1947), who defended the notion of a unified Scholastic philosophy in the high Middle Ages. Grabmann, who held a chair in Christian philosophy in Vienna during the years of the World War I (1913 -1918), had already shown the intimate relation of mediaeval philosophy to theology, a relation that was increasingly to be seen as a healthy and reasonable resource rather than as the curse that Hegel, for example, had thought it to be. Etienne Gilson, drawing upon the growing recognition of the inherent variety of mediaeval thought, pressed (as had Grabmann before him) for the close, even inseparable, association of Catholic or Christian philosophy with theology. The stable material basis for this recovery of a more accurate picture of the energy and diversity of mediaeval thought was provided for by the foundation of journals such as Baeumker's Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalter.s in 1891, and institutes and centers at Koln, Munich and in other countries. There followed then in Germany and elsewhere the publication of critical editions of the great mediaeval thinkers; the first of the modern editions being the brilliant Quaracchi edition of St. Bonaventure, prepared by Fidelis a Fanna and brought to publication by IgnatiusJeiler (1823-1904). But if the founding ofjournals and scholarly centers marked a mature and definitive step in how neo-Scholasticism was perceived, it is noticeable that the term itself has more recently acquired a limited and properly historical meaning in place of the earlier normative and systematic meaning. This marks a significant transformation within the spectrum of 1 2. Studien und Charakteristiken zur Geschichte der Philosophie insbesondere MS Mittelalters in Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophic und Theologie MS Mittelalters, 25 (Munster) 1927. 13. Geschichte derscholastischen Methode, 2 vols. (Herder, 1924).

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Catholic philosophy. A striking indication of this shift is the practice of dropping the name from journal titles, such as the alteration of the journal title Scholastik to Theologie und Philosophie in 1965, and here in North America several years ago the journal New Scholasticism was renamed The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. No doubt this reflects not only a change in the name but also a change in the status of the movement within the Catholic philosophical community here and in Germany as well. The changes of name not only herald a consciousness of the variety within Catholic philosophy but also its frank and close association with the Catholic faith. One of the most striking shifts in the German context during this period, however, may be traced to the middle and late 1930s. It constitutes the third major development. It is the emergence of the transcendental philosophy initiated by the Belgian jesuit, josef Marechal (1878-1944). The German expression and development is associated notably with the work of johannes Baptist Lotzl4 (b. 1903), Karl Rahner l5 (1904-1984), and Emerich Coreth l6 (b. 1919). Other names might be added, not only in Germany but in North America as well where Rahner's thought has dominated Catholic theology for many years. The movement took shape in the 1930S when the historical reinterpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas's thought was well under wayl7 and when Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of Sein and Dasein promised new possibilities for a philosophical anthropology and ontology. The common factor among the followers of Marechal was the Belgian's critical appropriation of the transcendental method proposed by Kant, and 14. Das Urteil und das Sein. Eine Grundlegungzur Metaphysik (Pullach/Miinchen, 1957); Die transzendentale Methode in Kant's "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" und in der Scholastik, in Kant und dieScholastik Mute, ed.J. B. Lotz (Pullach/Miinchen, 1955), pp. 35-108. Cf. Otto Muck,

"Die deutschsprachige Marechal Schule-Transzendentalphilosophie als Metaphysik ... ," in CP, 2.590-622, particularly 594-600. 15. Geist in Welt. Zur Metaphysik derendlichen Eikenntnis bei Thomas von Aquin (1939) (rev. 3d ed. (J. B. Metz], Miinchen 1964; Eng. trans. from the 2d ed. New York: Herder & Herder, 1968); HUrer des Wortes. Zur Grundlegung einer &ligionsphilosophie (1941) (rev. 2d ed. U. B. Metz) Miinchen, 1969; Eng. trans. from the 2d ed. New York: Herder & Herder, 1969). For Rahner's revised position on the relation of philosophy and theology, see "Philosophie und Theologie," in Schriften zur Theologie, 16 vols. (Einsiedeln/Ziirich/Koln, 1954-1984), vol. 6,1965, pp. 91-103. Cf. Otto Muck, ibid., particularly 600-606. 16. Metaphysik. Eine methodisch-systematische Grundlegung (1961) (3d ed. Innsbruck, 1980); Yom Sinn der Freiheit (Innsbruck, 1985); Was ist der Mensch? Grundzuge einer philos(}o phischenAnthropologie (1973) (4th ed. Innsbruck, 1986). Cf. Otto Muck, ibid., particularly 61Off.

17. Indeed, it is now a commonplace in German scholarship to distinguish between the commentatorial tradition, termed "thomistisch" and the actual historical positions of St. Thomas, termed "thomasisch" or "thomanisch." See, for example, Richard Schenk, Die Gnade vollendeter Endlichkeit. Zur transzendentaltheologischen A uslegung der thomanischen Anthropologie (Freiburg, 1989), pp. 76-78.

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indeed it is not overly simplistic to distinguish the new emphasis as a concentration upon method rather than upon system. Indeed, more generally in philosophy at this time the unity of rational thought was finding its vindication, not in the pretentions of a system as in neo-Scholasticism, but in the more modest discipline of method. The German thinkers took up the task of situating the thought of St. Thomas within a critical appropriation of the method of Immanuel Kant. In the English Foreword to Qtto Muck's Transcendental Method,IS Rahner speaks of a "turn"-and he uses the term Kehre that is so closely associated with Heidegger's Letter on Humanism. It is a turn, Rahner tells us, that signals the end of neo-Scholasticism as hitherto understood, since the transcendental philosophy does not add a new doctrine to Scholastic philosophy, nor does it develop an old one, but it rather provides a new foundation and a new horizon in which, Rahner is confident, the original insights of St. Thomas can be preserved and further developed in keeping with the task of a contemporary Christian philosophy. There are marked differences among the Marechalian German thinkers. Both Lotz and Rahner stand in the shadow of Hegel and Heidegger, but with somewhat different emphases in that relationship, while Walter Bruggerl9 (b. 1904) has sought to establish a systematic metaphysics and Gotteslehre on the basis ofa critical evaluation of Kant's dialectic. 2o In his early philosophical works, Geist in Welt (1939) and HOrer des Wortes (1941), Rahner's thought brings into close systematic interplay three philosophical developments: the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics in its historically updated form, the existential-ontological analysis initiated by Heidegger's phenomenology, and the transcendental method of German idealism in its Kantian and post-Kantian forms. Moreover, all of this is seasoned with an appreciation for the new interest generated towards the end of the second decade of the twentieth century by Nicolai Hartmann's concrete reading of Hegel in Das deutsche ldealismus and more basically by Hegel's rejection of the Kantian limitation of knowledge to phenomena and the enlargement of the scope of reason to the knowledge of Absolute Spirit. In following Heidegger's path of thinking, Rahner's own thought carried his reflections behind the articulate and thematic forms of metaphysical expression (what was said) to the presuppositions that lay unsaid, implied but not explicit, yet present in the very activity of questioning 18. Eng. trans. New York, 1968; Die transzendentale Methode in tier scholastischen Philosophie der Gegenwart (Innsbruck, 1964). 19. Summa einer philosophischen Gotteslehre (Mimchen, 1979); Grundziige einer philosophischenAnthropologie (Munchen, 1986). Cf. Otto Muck, ibid., 606-10. 20. This differs from the emphasis placed by Rahner on the transcendental analytic.

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the possibility of metaphysics. The focus of the activity was directed to the act (Vollzug) of the human subject in putting the question. For, unlike the modem version of neo-Scholastic metaphysics, the focus of enquiry was not to take up the question of being considered as an object. The task of transcendental philosophy was to investigate, not the properties of being apprehended objectively, but to enquire into the possible conditions of the question itself. (Indeed, Coreth in a radicalization of the procedure was to derive the metaphysical method itself from such an enquiry.) What Rahner found within the activity of putting the question was a pre-understanding (Vorbegriff) of being itself. This fore-knowledge or pre-understanding discloses itself within the activity of questioning as an unlimited horizon ofbeing. 21 St. Thomas's well-known insistence upon the empirical origin of human knowledge becomes, under Rahner's Umdeutung, a re-interpretation of the concrete consciousness of the human person's historical-existential subjectivity situated within the horizon of the world. More importantly, precisely in the conversion to the phantasms through which we encounter the things of this world, the person transcends the conditions of finitude of the self and the world in the unthematic pre-conception of absolute being itself. The ground of this possibility is the unity of being and knowing in absolute being, and indeed, points to the inexhaustible and infinite being of God. For, while recognizing the insistence upon finitude, so pressed by both Kant and Heidegger, Rahner argues that the pre-understanding gives access to transcendent being. It is the task of philosophy to bring that pre-understanding to explicit or thematic expression. At the root of its existential situation the human person is open to God in such a way that it is possible to recognize his or her own being as a subject (obediential potency) capable of hearing the word spoken by God in history. These early philosophical works set forth an anthropology of human existence grounded in a pre-understanding of being and an openness to the being of God. This has the effect of binding together in strict interdependence the metaphysics of being and the metaphysics of knowledge in the anthropology of the human subject. In this way Rahner sought to unite the substantive claims of traditional metaphysics with the new sensitivities 21. Though it lies outside the scope of the essay, it is noteworthy that Gabriel Marcel also implicates the questioner in the questioning of being but he begins with rather than arrives at a level that lies beyond both subject and object, so that it is not the questioner but being itself that draws the questioner into its presence. No doubt this is also the intention of the transcendental Thomists, but one can wonder whether they do not place too much weight upon the subjective aspect of knowledge. For a sympathetic yet critical reading of Rahner's theological anthropology, see Anton Losinger, Orientierungspunkt Mensch. Der anthropologische Ansab: in der Theologie Karl &hners (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1992).

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to human subjectivity that are widely recognized as the distinctive feature of modern thought and culture. Afourth development was that which held the task of philosophy to be one of dialogue with the contemporary culture in terms of specific issues. This turn was also brought about in part by the recovery of the thought of St. Thomas in its historical situation. For if neo-Scholasticism sought to integrate the system of perennial philosophy with modern thought, and if transcendental philosophy sought to integrate the system of St. Thomas with that of one or another of the systems of German idealism on the basis of method, a thinker such as Josef Pieper 22 (b. 1904) did not so much seek to integrate systems of thought as he sought to illuminate certain modern issues with particular insights taken from St. Thomas and transformed by his own experience and thought. This free and direct movement of thought permits Pieper to rework certain basic insights of St. Thomas and to show their relevance to the understanding of contemporary issues, issues of leisure,justice, wisdom, tradition, and philosophy itself. While Pieper rejects the notion of system, he is by no means undisciplined. He is not so much without method as that he does not let an a priori method determine the career of his thought. Instead, it is as though certain approaches to reality and thought resurface as he engages each situation. This conception of the unity of philosophy is made possible only through a broader cultural shift in the understanding of reason itself, a shift that has taken place well beyond Catholic circles in the course of twentieth -century philosophy. It is an understanding that releases rationality from its confinement in the epistemological prison of modern rationalism and from the modern notion of system. For there is a significant philosophical movement away from system and method and towards dialogue, pre-eminent also in the work of Romano Guardini 23 (1885-1968), Peter Wust 24 22. Among numerous brief works, many of them translated into English, mention may be made of Was heisst Philosophieren? Vier Vorlesungen (Miinchen, 8th ed., 1980); Verteidigungsrede for die Philosophie (Miinchen: KOsel, 1966; Eng. trans. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992); Josef Pieper: Lesebuch, Vorwort von H. U. v. Balthasar (Miinchen: KOsel, 2d ed. 1984; Eng. trans. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989); Hoffnung und Geschichte. Funf Salzhurger Vorlesungen (Munchen: KOsel, 1967; Eng. trans. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994); Wahrheit der Dinge (Miinchen: KOsel, 1966; Eng. trans. in Living the Truth, San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989); and Gluck und Kontemplation (Munchen, 4th ed., 1979). Cf. Siegfried Battisti, CP, 2.666-72. 23. Der Gegensatz (1925) (Mainz, 3d ed., 1985); Welt undPerson (1939) (Wurzburg,5th ed. 1962); Uber die Hoffnung (Leipzig: Hegner, 1935; 7th ed. Miinchen: Kosel, 1977; Eng. trans. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986). cr. Thomas Schreijiick, CP, 3.201-15. 24. Gesammelte Werlee, 10 vols. (Munster, 1963-1969), particularly Ungewjssheit und Wagnis (1936) (Miinchen: Kosel; 6th ed., 1955) (Gw, vol. 4, 1965); Naivitiit und Pietiit (Tubingen: Mohr, 1925) (Gw,vol. 2, 1964); Auferstehungder Metaphysik (Gw,vol. I, 1963)' cr. Hermann Westhoff, CP, 3.112-28.

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(1884-1940), and Ferdinand Ebner25 (1882-1931) who brings dialogue to its peak in his exposition of the vocative nature of speech, placing in the mouth of God the words: "Ich bin, und dUTCh mich bist duo "26 The tum to dialogue gave to Catholic reason a broad cultural base from which to address the totality of human concerns out of the center of the person. This new enlargement of the notion of the evidence available to philosophical reason points towards the fifth development. Phenomenology offered a method favorable to the more generous scope of Catholic thought. It is not accidental, therefore, that a group of Catholics, and those who later became Catholics, found their master in Edmund Husserl: among them, Adolf &inach (1883-1917), Edith Stein27 (18911942), and Dietrich von Hildebrand 28 (1889-1977). But if Husserl was the master, the closer inspiration came through Max Scheler29 (18741928), himself a sometime Catholic. By not following Husserl in the radical tum to transcendental subjectivity, Scheler showed Catholic thinkers a new and contemporary mode of philosophizing that was explicitly objective and realistic. At the same time he restored to an overly intellectualized consciousness a dimension of feeling, and gave back to Catholics the root concept of person, till then more or less compromised by its association with the subjectivism of the neo-Kantians. Among those who followed in Scheler's wake two figures of special interest stand out. Dietrich von Hildebrand cultivated a realism and personalism of objective values, rooted not in the Scholastic appeal to sensory phantasms but to personal experience in which reason uncovered its own governing necessities in the things themselves. He was critical of St. Thomas, though he did not always understand him in the most sympathetic light. 3D Moreover, he argued that a personalist metaphysics provides a better ground for his own brand of philosophia perennis with 25. Schriften, 3 vols. (Miinchen, 1963-1965), particularly Zu einer Pneumatologie des Wortes (Schr., vol. 3). Cf. Peter Kampits, CP, 3.129-46. 26. Schriften, 1.96. 27. Edith Steins Werke, 11 vols. (Freiburg/Br. & Leuven, 1950-1987); Zum Problem der Einfuhlung (Halle, 1917, reprint in &ike Edith-Stein-Ko:rmel, Tiibingen 1980; Eng. trans. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964); Endlickes und Ewiges Sein (Werke, vol. 2, 2d ed. 1962); Des hi. Thomas von Aquino Untersuchungen iiber die Wahrheit (Werke, vols. 3 -4, 1952, 1959); and Welt undPerson (Werke, vol. 6, 1962). Cf. Waltraud Herbstrith, CP, 2.650-65. 28. Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols. (Regensburg & Stuttgart, 1971-1984); Was ist Philosophie? (CW, vol. 1, 1960); Ethik (CW, vol. 2); Das Wru-en der Liebe (CW, vol. 3); Astketik (CW, vols. 5-6); Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft (CW, vol. 4). Cf. Josef Seifert, CP, 3.172-200. 29. Gesammelte Werke (Berne & Bonn, 1954ff.); Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (CW, vol. 2); Yom Ewigen in Menschen (CW, vol. 5); Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (CW,vol. 7). Cf. Heinrich Schmidinger, CP, 3.89-111. 30. Thus, for example, von Hildebrand argued that Thomas makes the good, true, and beautiful mere properties of being relative to appetite and not transcendentals in se. No doubt, St. Thomas places a pre-eminent emphasis upon being and roots the

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affinities to the Franciscan tradition than did the neo-Scholastic and neo-Thomist systems. He made for his own Husserl's call zu den Sachen selhst! To a reason equipped with a realistic phenomenological method, the things themselves yielded the essential necessities of being and thought that are already grounded in them. And so, adopting a non-idealistic material a priori, he opened up to reason a content-filled and non-formal ethics in which love plays the determining role. What is most striking, however, is von Hildebrand's anthropology in which he distinguishes the category of the good precisely as the good of the person. 31 The properly human and higher good is not that which satisfies an appetitive faculty, but that which is for the pmon and fulfills the person as such. 32 Nothing is more revealing of von Hildebrand's simultaneous affinity with and opposition to Kant than his concept of "valueresponse" (Wertantwort) according to which an appropriate response is due. The duty is grounded, however, not in a Kantian self-reflexive reason but in the objective nature of the good. Edith Stein, more directly attached to Husserl, nonetheless applied the phenomenological method to several very important matters not broached by her master. Spirit as person is open to a world of objects and other persons in community. This openness stands in contrast to Husserl's indirect recognition of other persons in the Cartesian Meditations. She was further drawn towards metaphysical and religious enquiries that lay beyond HusserI's own application of the phenomenological method. 33 In her search she turned to St. Thomas and has provided a contemporary reflection upon St. Thomas's De Veritate. She has also taken up the theme of finite and eternal being. In the latter work she has engaged Martin Heidegger's Seinsontologie, finding the Ontological Difference inadequate to grasp even the traditional sense of the being of God that it is meant to criticize. 34 Under the influence of Erich Przywara, Stein has drawn upon the concept of analogia entis. In sum, she has gone beyond transcendentals in it because of his emphasis upon actuality, but in principle he does identify them with being as not really distinct from it. (Summa theologiae I, 5) Still, von Hildebrand finds Thomas's view too exclusively intellectualist. 31. Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II, has often cited the works of von Hildebrand, and like him has also distinguished the will and the good in their personal character. (See The Acting Persoo [Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel], in Analecta Husserliana, vol. 10, 1979, pp. 264, 3 20.) 32. "The Modes of Participation in Value," International Philosophical Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1961 ): 58 - 84. 33. Her capital work in this field is Die Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie uher Joannes a Cruce (Gw, vol. 1, 3d ed. 1985; Eng. trans. Chicago: Regnery, 1960). 34. Others, such as Gustav Siewerth and Hans Drs von Balthasar have used the Ontological Difference for their own purposes, von Balthasar identitying it with the

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transcendental subjectivity to person, beyond epistemology to metaphysics, from Husserl towards St. Thomas without giving up the phenomenological method, and towards a transcendent and analogical sense of being and the mystery of God. 35 Undoubtedly the most powerful philosophical influence upon German Catholics during this century has been the thought of Martin Heidegger. Rahner was wont to say that Heidegger had taught him how to think, and many others would say the same. Indeed, it would be misleading to write a history of German Catholic thought in the twentieth century without an extensive chapter setting forth Heidegger's own thought. The reader would miss a great deal of the depth of those whom he influenced, since he set a new path for much of Catholic thought. It was Heidegger, more perhaps than any other thinker, who gave striking expression to the cultural shift in the meaning and scope of rationality, a shift that had been building since Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche, and who gave new pre-eminence to the role of relation. He formulated that shift against the background of the whole of Western philosophy, especially the metaphysics of being. Perhaps what was most attractive to Catholics was his apparent recovery of something like an ancient pervasive sense of the sacred as well as his trenchant critique of modern technological society into which the Catholic tradition did not easily fit. At the same time, he appropriated the recent turn to history and the sense of historicity as ingredient in human thought and existence. Although it was wont in the 1960s to refer to Max Miiller 36 (b. 1906) as the "Catholic Heidegger," no Catholic thinker of stature was in complete agreement with Heidegger's positions. Like Heidegger, MUller opposed the Kantian primacy of value over being, but he linked being with spirit rather than with temporality in his early works, only gradually bringing to bear his own Seinsgeschichte, in which he coupled the history of being with that of freedom. He considered that a new consciousness has arisen which seeks in the conditioned history of being an analogical unity that only finds its realization in concrete and conditioned historical distinctio realis in Wahrlteit der Welt, thus marking the distinction between God and the world. Siewerth remarks that by making such an identification, Heidegger's thought becomes freer for God than does the onto-theo-logical circle attributed to traditional metaphysics. 35. Martin Grabmann writes an appreciative introduction to her "conversation" with St. Thomas's De veritate, recognizing it not as a historical commentary but nevertheless as a genuine effort of thought. 36. Sein und Geist, Systematische Untersuchungen iiber Grundprobleme undAuJbau mittelalterlicher Ontologie (1940; 2d enlarged ed. Freiburg/Miinchen, Ig81); Existenzphilosvphie. Von der Metaphysik zur Metahisturik, ed. A Halder, 4th enlarged ed. (Freiburg/Miinchen, 1986). Cf. Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, CP, 3.318-27.

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situations. Such a metahistory calls for continuous reflection and historical praxis in order to discover our ethical obligations in the concrete cultural institutions of our time without the support of timeless ethical norms. Insofar as being is spirit, it is knowable. With this the transcendentals come into play to provide the metaphysical texture of being. On this foundation rests the possibility of the agreement of our knowing with being. In Miiller's later work the theme of being as spirit is developed into freedom and history. He agrees with the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics as the science of being as beings and of the highest being within the whole of being, but not entirely. Metaphysics is not the parent of modern technology that develops without the presuppositions of traditional metaphysics. Yet Heidegger is right in charging metaphysics with its inability to thematize the understanding of Being (Sein). For metaphysics does not see through to its own presuppositions. It reaches out for an unattainable trans-temporal universality, not realizing that no ontological claims can be absolute, because being is historically conditioned. The task of philosophy-or rather of metahistory-is to understand beings in their conditionedness. For metahistory is neither plain history, nor is it metaphysics; neither is it cultural relativism or timeless truths. It searches out the plurality of historical situations and the pluralism within historical situations in order to discern what is analogous in them. We have no access beyond the situated world and must discharge our responsibilities on the basis of freedom in that situation. Freedom, however, is not a property we possess but rather that which possesses us. No timeless system can determine our duties, but we can discern them only through dialogue within the cultural structures and institutions of our own concrete situation. 37 The most profound engagement with the thought of Heidegger is to be found in the work of Gustav Siewerth38 (1903-1963). In a reinterpretation (Umdeutung) of St. Thomas's thought-a reinterpretation, I must add, of spectacular daring-Siewerth displaces the primacy of the principle of act and potency (esse and Wesen) as understood in neo-Thomism with the neo-Platonic principle of exemplar causality. This admittedly radical surgery on the texts of St. Thomas permits him to reject the dialectic of Absolute Spirit in Hegel, for the latter leads to 37. I have relied especially upon the essay by Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, art. cit., for an interpretation of Muller's later work. 38. Gesammelte Werke, 4 vols. to date (Dusseldorf, 1971ff.), particularly Der Thomismus als ldentitiitssystem (vol. 2), Das Schicksal do Metaphysik von Thomas z.u Heidegger (vol. 4), Metaphysik do Kindheit (1957; 2d ed. Einsiedeln, 1963), and Das Sein als Gleichnis Gotles (Heidelberg: F. H. Kerle, 1958). Cf. Walter Neidl, CP, 3.249-72.

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unity as absolute identity. It also permits Siewerth to criticize the thought of Heidegger who is alleged to have mistaken the Scotistic metaphysic of essence for the Thomistic metaphysics of being. In Gleichheit-Ahnlic1ikeit 39 he writes that: Philosophy is the attempt to think Being.... Being is the light and the highest brightness of thought and at the same time the starting point of a long path that puts being [itself] in question.

Instead of following Heidegger, who imprisoned metaphysics within the confines of the onto-theo-Iogical circle (what Siewerth refers to as metaphysical theology), Siewerth thinks out from the horizon of theology itself (what he refers to as theological metaphysics). This is characteristic of his open and frank acceptance of Christianity as providing a horizon for philosophical reflection. He marks philosophical reason as openly cognizant of its own limits and its resources. This is in contrast to both Hegel and Heidegger, whom Siewerth characterizes as differing in positions and in the manner of thinking but at one in their trust of the self-empowerment of the human spirit. The fate of metaphysics in Western culture is traced to the primacy of contradiction that, on the one hand, leaves an unresolved difference (Heidegger) or an absolute identity (Hegel). Once Siewerth has re-interpreted St. Thomas, he finds in his thought the basis for an exemplaristic identity that does not absorb being into consciousness. Such an exemplaristic unity refuses to separate cause from effect and resolves their difference into the unity of original and image (Urbild und Abbild), so that all being is in the image of God. This overflowing relation is the very freedom of God. Only if one sees that the highest and first, the manifest and real difference, is not that of Being and Essence (potency), but that of Act and Subsistence, is it possible to displace the logical necessity which is present in Hegel's dialectic. And only then is it possible to hold Being in the difference of its own self-unfolding and self-penetration without the underlying compulsion to define the absolute one in relation to the otherness of finite essence [as does dialectic] and [only then is it possible to] allow being to come to itself and complete itself in the transcendent Super-Being. 40

With this remarkable effort of thought I complete the summary overview of the main developments of German Catholic philosophy during this century and have already begun to outline the profile of certain constant features that are unable to escape the notice of an observer of such 39. Gesammelte Werl!e (Dusseldorf: Patmos Verlag), 1.439. 40. Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger; Gesammelte Werl!e, vol. 4 (Diisseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1987), p. 289.

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a broad canvas. These constants include a cluster of terms that indicate a stability on the side of the content of their philosophies, such terms as God, person, and the real world as created. Since the present essay bears upon the character of philosophy, however, I will emphasize those terms that designate the act of philosophizing itself. The first of these shared features has already been indicated in the quotation from Siewerth: "Philosophy is the attempt to think Being." This is a point on which Siewerth and the neo-Scholastics agree, even if their understanding of the term differs. It seems natural to these thinkers, even inevitable, that philosophy should be inscribed in the letters of being, and yet we know that nothing in philosophy should be treated as unreflecting and automatic, for philosophy is an actus humanus not a mere actus hominis. Why, then, is being-and not only being but a fairly determinate structure of being, not at all the Seinsgeschick of Heidegger-why is being the ultimate context in which such thought unfolds, rather than language or power or performance? Is it drawn by its Christian horizon towards that supreme creatio ex nihilo that draws all that is into existence from the abyss of total nothingness? To be sure, once one leaves the strict neo-Scholastics, one is not likely to find treatises on created being such as St. Thomas has given us in Summa theologiae 1,44-45, and yet an openness to the world as contingent creature is operative here. 41 A second feature is that of transcendence, and precisely as a pathway to absolute being that lies beyond and above finite being, indeed, that terminates in God as infinite Being. With the prevalence, one might even say the dominant preference for Platonic and neo-Platonic themes, one might expect to hear more of a "One beyond being," but among these thinkers unity does not contend with being for highest honors. Nevertheless, Theodor Haecker (1879-1945) professed a broadly shared conviction when he said that: "The higher can explain the lower; the lower never the higher."42 This general insistence upon transcendence should also alert us to a more or less definite understanding of the capacity of human reason that differs radically from the understanding of both rationalists and Heideggerians. And this comprises a third feature. This difference about the nature and capacity of rationality holds true even for Max Muller who insists upon the situatedness of human thought. For upon this understanding depends a different, at once freer and more ambitious-if I may so say, 41. An example is provided by Josef Pieper, whose thought is filled with a receptivity of being-as-created, yet who never undertakes a philosophical demonstration of it. 42. Was ist deY Mensch? (Leipzig, 1933), p. 11; Vergil. Vater des Abendlandes (Leipzig, 1931); Tag- und Nachtbilcher (1947; newed. H. Siefken, Innsbruck, 1989)' Cf. Michael Langer, CP, 3.216-25.

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more Blondellian-definition of philosophy. This openness and receptivity has gone far beyond the neo-Scholastic defense of a reason capable of knowing transcendent truths objectively, and acknowledges an intimate yet "unfathomable access" to the divine being not merely as cause or object but as living presence. The openness of reason rests in and upon an intelligibility of being that is neither the surface glare of a narrow rationalism nor the dark obscurity of post-Nietzschean voluntarism. This breadth and depth to the scope of human reason is the answer given by these Catholic philosophers to the question: Was heisst philosophieren ?43 Is it out of this openness and positive transcendence, then, that the doctrine of analogy abounds almost without exception among these thinkers? It is not enough to simply trace this recurrent theme back to the influence of St. Thomas, since these thinkers show an independence of mind and a readiness to criticize what they take to be weak in the tradition. Is it not rather that analogy presents itself out of the background of the living presence of the doctrines of creation and transcendence? For in different senses but showing a considerable consistency of meaning, we find the principle operative in almost every major German Catholic philosopher during this period. It goes without saying that the thought of St. Thomas plays an important role in contemporary developments of the notion. But it is all the more remarkable in that analogy is formulated out of and sometimes against a variety of provenances. Thus, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Edith Stein draw from Erich Przywara, whereas Gustav Siewerth, Bernhard Welte 44 (1906-1983) and Max Muller propose it against the background of Heidegger's ontological difference. Bernhard Rosenmoeller45 (1883 -1974), on the other hand, finds its origins in the Augustinian tradition and von Hildebrand attempts to reconcile Scotistic thought with analogy. This fourth commonly shared feature-permit me to call it the analogical understanding of analogy-is brought to exquisite grandeur by Erich Przywara 46 (1889-1972) who provides a profound exposition of 43. The title ofa work by Josef Pieper (9th ed., Miinchen: Kosel, 1988). 44. Religionsphilosophie (Freiburg-Basel-Wien, 1978); Meister Eckhart (Freiburg-BaselWien, 1980); Zwischen Zeit und Ewigkeit (Freiburg-Basel-Wien, 1982). 45. Religionsphilosophie (1932) (2d ed. Miinster, 1939); (ed.) Philosophia S. Bonaventura textibus ex eius operibus selectis illustrata in Opsucula et textus. Series scholastica 15 (Miinster 1933); along with essays in Wissenschaft und Weisheit (Freiburg-Diisseldorf, 1936-1949). 46. Schriften, 3 vols. (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1962, includes an enlarged version of the 1932 edition of Analogia entis. Metaphysik. Ur-Struktur und All-Rhythmus (vol. 2»; Mensch: Typologische Anthropologie (Niimberg, 1959); Ringen der Gegenwart. Gesammelte Aufsatze I9:1.:1.-I9:1.7, 2 vols. (Augsburg, 1929); In und Gegen (Niimberg, 1955). Mention might be

made here of the influence ofJohn Henry Newman upon some of these authors, such as Przywara who wrote two works on him, as well as Edith Stein who translated his work, and Max Scheler, Theodor Haecker, and August Brunner (1894-1945).

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the all-pervasive analogia entis, and who finds its theological expression in the co-ordinates of the Cross ofJesus Christ, "the deeper form of analogy, the secret of the Cross."47 Hans Urs von Balthasar touches a nerve when he speaks of the pathos that inspires Przywara's insight and finds the motto of his doctrine of analogy in the teaching of the Fourth Lateran Council to the effect that "between God and creatures there cannot be observed so great a similarity as that there is not between them an even greater dissimilarity. "48 This expands analogy to the infinite difference between God and creatures-far beyond the Ontological Difference of the Fourfold-even as it holds creatures in the intimate embrace of their creator. Here, as with Siewerth and Guardini, Przywara refuses to accept the ultimate opposition of identity and contradiction cultivated by dialectic, and acknowledges instead the polarity (Gegensatz., Polaritiit) of love and mystery. So that, instead of building conflict itself within the first principle, the polarity is the bond of createdness in the mysterious unity-indifference of creatures and their God. But this polarity is not external either; it is both In und Gegen. Paradoxically, the denial of God derives from the suppression of the creature; for, in affirming "God alone" -either God or us-modern thought is tempted to decide: "us alone," "man alone."49 Instead, the affirmation of "both/and" affirms both God and creatures even as it sets up the tension of the analogy in which they are held together. It is for this reason that Przywara finds in the God-man Christ the very core of analogy, since the Incarnation unites the most extreme polarities of Creator and creature in the most intimate unity without the assimilation of their natures into a confused (immediate) identity. The contemporary danger is the nominalist mode of thought that seeks immediacy, an immediate unity that implodes difference into absolute identity or explodes difference into unresolved diversity after the manner of the postmodern philosophers. Finding in St. Augustine the suggestive phrase "Deus exterior et interior" and in an extremely subtle and ingenious etymology of the word, Ana-logie, Przywara develops the notion of God both above and within us, ilber-in. 5o In this relationship he finds the horizontal analogy among creatures subordinate to and participant in the vertical analogy of creature and God. This is the dynamic rhythmic tendency of 47. Analogia entis, p. 250. 48. Erichfuywara. Sein Schriftum I9I2-I962 (Eindsiedeln:Johannes Verlag, 1963), p. 12. The reference to this text of the Fourth Lateran Council permeates the discussion in Analogia entis. 49. In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx makes this a condition for revolutionary praxis. 50. Romano Guardini also rejects the couplet "above and below" in favor of "above and within." WeltundPmon (1939) (5thed. 1962).

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analogy. The vertical analogy is not a principle from which we derive creatures but a mystery towards which we as creatures ascend. That ascent is without limit, drawn by the Ignatian spirit of "ever-more, evergreater" (Deus semper major). Here again in the dynamism of analogy,51 we catch that pathos of which von Balthasar has written. And before someone, rightly conscientious about the integrity of philosophy, should dismiss this candid inspiration from revelation, we might ask whether, after all, contemporary philosophical reason, shorn of its either/or prejudices, can be satisfied with any other first principle of actuality and intelligibility than "that than which none greater can be conceived?" But we might also ask if such a doctrine of analogy is a theological form or a philosophical principle? The suggestion of an answer may be found in Przywara's dissatisfaction with Aristotle's horizontal analogy, which needs completion by subordination to and participation in a vertical analogy in order to recover the unity that it displays but does not account for. So much at least might be said by a philosophical thought that is open (in obediential potency) to meaning that lies beyond its power. Employing the "Catholic" formula of "both/and," we might answer that Przywara's doctrine of analogy is both philosophical and theological. It is theological in its source and philosophical in its responsibility to the canons of reason. Josef Pieper suggests that philosophy asks for an answer but, contrary to Heidegger, does not exclude the answer being spoken by another nor think its questioning tainted by that possibility. 52 The relation of analogy is developed among these thinkers often as a counter-point to dialectic, and not merely out of speculative interest, but to engage the crisis of modern culture, since analogy recommends itself as overcoming difference without relapsing into an undifferentiated unity that threatens our liberty. Indeed, long before the post-modern critique of Hegelian dialectic and neo-Marxist structuralism by Jacques Derrlda and other post-modernists, Romano Guardini 53 (1885-1968), along with Przywara, drew upon the complementary polarity within analogy in order to dislodge the false identity that masked itself in the form of dialectical negation and opposition. A related notion of considerable interest in the work of Hans Urs von 51. Przywara's full formula expresses the dynamism of ascent and descent in the words: ana in-iiber kato. That is, the infinite being and love of God who is both in and above us descends and ascends in the incarnate Word. This is the theological horizon within which philosophical thought can discern the outlines of analogy, whose ground lies beyond it, even as that ground lies beyond Aristotle's initial sense of analogy constituted by the four causes. 52. Verteidigungsrede, 130ff. (Eng. trans. 115ff.). 53. cr. fn. 23·

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Balthasar54 (1905-1988) is that of paradox. He, too, in his discussion with Karl Barth has made analogy central to Catholic thought,55 but he emphasizes the notion of paradox which, without abandoning the sense of unity-in-difference characteristic of analogy, raises the level of tension to account for the dramatic energy in existence. 56 In a similar sense, the notion of paradox is also present in the very personal thought of such philosophers as Peter Wust 57 (1884-1940), and Ferdinand Ebner58 (1882-1931) who speaks of the paradoxical logic of the Word. I have already remarked upon the general trend towards a Platonic and neo-Platonic atmosphere, but among some thinkers, such as Ebner, Wust, and Guardini, there is also an atmosphere emanating from a Biblical vision of the world, drawn no doubt from recent Biblical study and a deeply personal life of prayer. The three pervasive and basic notions of being, transcendence, and ana!" ogy are orchestrated in many of these thinkers through the transcendentals: 59 truth, beauty, and the good. To see the basis for this strategy, we might tum to Plato, who remarks in the Republic 60 that, In the case of just and beautiful things, many people are content with what are believed to be so, even if they aren't really so, and they act, acquire, and form their own beliefs on that basis. However nobody is satisfied to acquire things he merely believes to be good, but everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains those that are merely believed to be so.

And soon after, Plato draws this illuminating conclusion: So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good .... Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they. In the visible realm light and sight are rightly considered sun-like, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike but wrong to think that either of them is the good-for the good is yet more prized. 54. The trilogy, Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Asthetik, 3 vols. (Einsiedeln, 1961-1969), Theodramatik, 4 vols. (Einsiedeln, 1973-1983), and Theologik, 3 vols. (Einsiedeln, 19851987), with Epilog (Einsiedeln, 1987). Much has already appeared in Eng. trans. from Ignatius, remainder to appear; also Apokalypse der deutschen Seele. Studien zur einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen, 3 vols. (Salzburg, 1937-1939) (the author has expressed some reservations about this early work). 55. Przywara called analogy the Catholic principle. 56. Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II has also stressed the dramatic quality of human existence in his plays and later writings. 57. Cf. fn. 24· 58. Cf. fn. 25. 59. Rare among non-Catholic philosophers, the Freiburg phenomenologist Eugen Fink has given his own cosmological sense to the transcendentals in Sein, Wahrheit, Welt. 60. Republic 505d, 508d-e (Eng. trans. G. M. A Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, Indianapolis: Hacket, 1992).

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This is at once a shrewd and profound observation, and one that has been operative in what I have called the trend towards a more Platonic atmosphere of philosophical reflection among these thinkers. By that I do not mean a sterile quarrel about whether intellect or will, intelligibility or value is uppermost. It is a much more important "climatic" change; for a certain shift in the criteria of truth is discernible here. Without abandoning demonstration of the fact by way of causal principles after the manner of a St. Thomas, these philosophers do not practice it much. Instead, they have been convinced of the truth of their positions by participation in the meaningfulness of the conceptions they endorse. We might put the matter thus: They pursue, not so much an extensive or referential theory of meaning, as an intensive and participatory one in keeping with the general trend towards a Platonic oudook in which the good exercises its power within experience. 61 Plato has caught at the magnet of power in human thought and action. And the fascination with that insight has led him to place the good somehow above both truth and beauty. We know, however, that St. AugUstine has gone further, and has grasped the supreme good as personal. In so doing he has drawn both intellect and will, knowledge and freedom as proper to the person up into the circle of the good, praising its beauty, "ever ancient, ever new," and endowing truth with the power of the good. St. Thomas has in a certain sense completed the convergence of the true and the good, hesitating somewhat over the beautiful. In his dry yet pregnant language the transcendental good is pronounced to be really identical with being. 62 Indeed, Plato almost anticipates such a convergence, commenting in the same argument: You should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it,

though (unlike St. Thomas) he retains the reservation: although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power. 63 61. I take the distinction between extensive and intensive theories of meaning from a paper read to the Hegel Society of America (1994) by Brigitte Falkenburg of Heidelberg. And I find the participatory (as distinct from the referential) character of truth operative in most of the philosophers under study. While the participatory practice has affinity with the intensive theory of meaning, it is not simply identical with it, if only because participation incorporates affectivity explicitly within it. Hence the frequent invocation of love as the primary relation and-if the term is understood spiritually-the primal energy. 62. Summa theologiae I, 5. 63. Republic 509b. Robert Spaemann has provided an introduction to St. Thomas's treatment de bonitate in Thomas von Aquin. Uber die Sittlichkeit der Handlung. Sum. TheoL I-II q. I8-2I, German trans. and commentary by Rolf Schonberger (Weinheim: VCH/Acta humaniora, 1990). He has also given us a clear and carefully argued commentary on the good in the context of moral philosophy. See his Muralische Grundbegriffe (Miinchen: Oscar Beck, 1982); esp. cc. 1,2 & 7. (Eng. trans. Basic Mural Concepts, London: Routledge, 1989.)

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With the convergence of the true and the good with being, St. Thomas's fuller insight, brought to its fullness by St. Augustine and by his own sense of actuality, the real and original source of power is identified with the good, the true and the beautiful and now receives its proper name: the actuality of being (esse, actus essendi). Not all German Catholic philosophers agree with this primacy of being. It is significant, however, that even von Hildebrand-not sympathetic to St. Thomas on this point-struggled to overcome the gap between being and value that was a residual inheritance from Scheler. Undoubtedly, von Balthasar in his philosophical thought has most consistently cultivated the transcendentals. They provide the architechtonic to his great trilogy: Herrlichkeit, in which the good and the true manifest themselves in beauty; Theodramatik, in which the good empowers human existence; and Theologik, in which the true culminates in a light towards which Plato's own thought sought to move. So far I have pointed to shared features that derive principally from the Catholic tradition and that have been transformed by the meeting of the Catholic faith with German culture and thought, but I have reserved to the last what I consider to be a distinctive contribution of German culture to Catholic thought. It is an understanding of freedom that is implicit in the Gospel but is raised to prominence by these thinkers. The modern period of Western civilization is usually understood to have developed an increased sense of freedom, especially for the individual. But it is Immanuel Kant-in his third rather than his second Kritik-who, in his analysis of the dynamical sublime, gives canonical expression to the experiential basis of a new sense of freedom. This notion immediately showed its promise in the development made of it by Fichte (in the field of morality), by Schelling (especially in the spheres of nature and art), and by Hegel (in the domain of speculative spirit). I do not mean here what the British and French mean by the term "freedom of choice" nor even simply what the Latin tradition knows as liberum arbitrium, the liberty to choose between alternatives. The German notion-not readily appreciated by Anglo-French thinkers-is the very ground movement of being itself and with it of our being. It is not simply self-determination in an anthropological sense, however, though it includes that. It is the understanding of the most fundamental character of all being. It is the great ground-swell of nature, history, and existence realizing itself as ontological freedom. Hans-Eduard Hengenstenberg puts the notion clearly. He distinguishes between two senses of freedom: "decisional" freedom (Entscheidungsfreiheit) and "ontological" freedom (Seinsfreiheit). The former calls for a choice between two already constituted possible alternatives, whereas the latter breaks open

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new possibilities. 64 Even more radically, freedom is understood not simply as the property of an autonomous individual, but as the very name of being itself. The central insight of the modern Enlightenment and its sense of historicity is retained even as it is resituated within a received, i.e., created world. The genesis of the notion cannot be localized in an individual thinker, nor even in one nation or national culture; nevertheless, its source is somehow associated with profound intuitions resident in the Germanic culture that the barbarian invasions spread throughout Western Europe. There is an apperception of change that is different from that which was instinctive to Mediterranean cultures. It is a sense of freedom participated in by most modern European cultures in which Mediterranean and Germanic elements have intermixed, but it is brought forward in a distinctive and emphatic way by these German thinkers. A negative indication ofthe difference between the two senses of freedom is that it is not easy to formulate a politics or ethics on its basis, while it lends itself positively towards a profound understanding of the movement of the whole of reality. I dare to speculate, moreover, that without it there would be no modern sciences of motion as such in contrast to motion inquantum ens. Its moving spirit is Geist, not the Latin Spiritus with its precise sense of form but the principle of totality. Its energy is prodigious, not least among the philosophers under consideration. Among these Catholic philosophers, however, freedom is not taken by force nor understood as an unquestionable property of man, but is received instead from on high, as all things are received in a world that is created. Peter Wust is not afraid to say that we must become as children. 65 The way to childhood is prayer which macht still, macht kindlich, macht objektiv. 66 Ferdinand Ebner counsels us to be hearers first before becoming doers. When freedom is empowered with the transcendental power of the good and the good precisely as the actuality and truth 64. Philosophische Anthropologie (1957) (3d ed. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), pp. 376-78, the section entitled Das Wesen der Freiheit: "Freiheit besagt nicht zwischen schon bestehenden Moglichkeiten 'wiihlen', in ihr werden vielmehr neue Moglichkeiten geschaffen.· Nevertheless, Hengstenberg (b. 1904), starting with the structure of freedom, finds in it reception from a transcendent source. Heimann Krings (b. 1913) develops his philosophy from das Primip Freiheit as a transcendental Idea without, it seems to me however, reconciling the dimensions of freedom and necessity. Cf. the "Festschrift Prinzip Freiheit,' ed. H. Baumgartner et al. (Freiburg/Miinchen, 1979); also by Krings himself, System und Freiheit. Beitrag zu einem ungelosten Problem, in 1st systematische Philosophie moglich? (ed. D. Henrich, Bonn, 1977, pp. 35-51). Finally, Jakob Hommes (1898-1966) also treated freedom as foundational in Krise der Freiheit. Hegel-Marx-Heidegger (Regensburg, 1958). 65. "Das Wagnis der Weisheit is nur moglich, wenn das hochste menschliche Ethos erreicht ist, das Ethos der kindliche Gelassenheit," Ungewissheit und Wagnis, pp. 3I2-I3. 66. From his Abschiedswort (GW7, 336ff.).

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of being, it provides a ground, not only for transcendence and analogy, but also for a transcendental and ontological love. Indeed, in receiving being through creation, the reality of receptivity so prominent in the work of these thinkers is grounded in a love of the transcendent good. The shift previously mentioned in the criteria of truth accounts not only negatively for the relative absence of demonstration by causal principles but also positively for the presence of an affective and participatory experience of truth that has affinities more with an intensive theory of meaning than with an extensive one. Before closing, I should like to think that the power of the true and the good indicated above provides the basis of an honor role too little appreciated outside of the German Catholic world. It holds the names of philosophers who remained true under the repressive conditions of a brutal National Socialist regime. Edith Stein's fate is well known, though it may be laid to her race rather than her philosophy. But in a letter to Hitler in 1937 Dietrich von Hildebrand was named by Franz von Pappen as leader of a "clerical:Jewish-Marxist" conspiracy (!) and eventually had to flee; the venia legendi was withdrawn from Alois Wenzl who was expelled from the University and forbidden to reside in Munich; Romano Guardini's chair at the University of Berlin was withdrawn in 1939; Theodor Haecker was forbidden to lecture in 1935, his publishing house was shut down in 1938 and because of connections with the White Rose circle he suffered a house search; Alois Dempfwas suspended from his chair in Vienna and ordered to silence; Gustav Siewerth was not permitted to habilitate in 1932, in 1937 his promotion to Dozent was denied by Berlin without cause being given, and a post at the Frankfurter Zeitungwas denied on political grounds;Jakob Hommes's habilitation was hindered and he habilitated only in 1946; Bernhard Welte was a member of the Freiburger Kreis; as was Max MUller who was arrested in 1942 because of connections with the White Rose circle. To this list one might add the names of Bernhard Rosenmoeller and Peter Wust among others, including that of my own teacher Ignatius Eschmann, who was sent to Dachau for preaching against the regime. As I recall my notes, even after this long reflection I realize how many illustrious philosophers whose work I have passed over in silence: Alois Wenzl (1887-1974), Alois Dempf (1891-1982), August Brunner (18941985), Ferdinand Ulrich, Bernhard Lakebrink, I. M. Bochenski, among others. The blame is to be laid at the shutter-gauge of my philosophical view-finder rather than at the scope and depth of their achievements. If philosophy is drawn into the truth by the power of its good, we can look forward with hope to an increase in the harvest of a long and worthy tradition.

8

The Ethics of Robert Spaemann in the Context of Recent Philosophy RICHARD SCHENK, o.P.

The reflections here are meant to be transitional. They look back at the theme of philosophy in the last hundred years, and they prepare for the convocation conferring upon Professor Dr. Robert Spaemann the degree of doctor honoris causa of The Catholic University of America. Inasmuch as we are honoring a contemporary philosopher who most always takes the aporiai of contemporary thought, culture, politics, and theology as the starting point of his philosophy, this transition may not seem especially difficult or problematic. Fortunately for the speaker, however, there are several problems that deserve our attention. One such problem is rooted in Spaemann's own ideal of philosophical discourse as a mediation of contemporary theories with common sense and again of present views with past ones. The goal of mediation is in each case a consensus which will appear neither especially original nor especially rare.! A laudatio for Robert Spaemann must point out cases where this goal of transparency has not yet been achieved. Spaemann might see those points of his philosophical work that are still identifiable as examples of unique Spaemannian originality as his failures, but they do not come for him entirely unexpected. Spaemann is dedicated to an ideal of philosophy that is suspicious of the categories of complete success. In the Socratic tradition, a successfully completed philosophy would surely be an even worse failure than unfinished critiques. Spaemann's dedication to public philosophical discourse never denied the utopian character of what philosophy has to seek in terms of ultimate solutions, of ideal communities of communication, or of perfect knowledge. In fact, 1. a. the foreword of R Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence, trans. Jeremiah Alberg, SJ. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. vii: "My hope is that these thoughts contain nothing fundamentally new." He continues, however: "In seeking answers to questions about the right kind of life, only the false could really be new. Still, given that the actual conditions of life and the concepts available for our self-understanding change, even that which humans have always known has to be rethought from time to time."

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much of his philosophic energy has gone into reminding us of the secondary status of philosophical thought: the secondary status of systems over and against Socratic critique; the secondary status of exclusive clubs of communication over and against the common convictions of humanity and its basic moral intuitions; and the secondary status of philosophical insight over and against divine truth. To understand Spaemann as a philosopher, it is necessary to understand his argument that the very excellence of philosophy is found in its helping theory to work its way down to a secondary status. It is also necessary to understand the reasons why Spaemann was happy to dedicate most of his life and energies to this so vital, because secondary, undertaking. CONFIGURATIONS OF LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

While most philosophers after World War II share the conviction that some ability to assert what is needed for happiness is necessary, they differ on the degree to which they consider this task to be possible, difficult, and urgent. This question not only divides whole philosophies from each other, but it can distinguish discrete strains of the ambivalence within any individual philosophy. Put another way: philosophies define themselves by the way they relate to something like the presence of original sin and the limits it places upon successfully completing the search for happiness. The contours in various pictures of humanity differ according to the depth of their reliefs and their ability to capture shadows. Robert Spaemann has contributed much to retracing the philosophical odyssey and the transformations of the doctrine of original sin from Rousseau onward. In continuing this line of investigation, we might distinguish three basic options in philosophy since the end of World War II, before we ask about Spaemann's own place in this history. 1. The first option is to play down the difficulty or urgency of arriving at valid norms of behavior leading to the well-lived life. The most common strategy for doing so is simple self-affirmation, which, while willing to admit some degree of self-limitation, considers this to be of no great consequence. The continuation of the traditions of positivism and behaviorism is usually of this kind. F. Fukuyama admits the trade-off between liberty or prosperity and equality, but sees this as a successful end of history. Consequentialist ethics also precedes from the assumption that individual good intentions are widespread and sufficient for providing an access to happiness. 2 Neo-Kantian discourse ethics, based 2. For a critique of this position cf. M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy andPhilosf1!hy (Cambridge et al., 1986).

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on the confidence that discussion within a well-selected circle of communication will lead to a consensus in truth sufficient to make for a just society, demonstrates, e.g., in Habermas's critique of the earlier school of Frankfurt, a continuation (or rather an attempt at the restoration) of the Enlightenment project. The more optimistic forms of postmodernism and poststructuralism, which see in new plurality chiefly new freedom and a better future, also belong to this genus of not taking finitude all too seriously. The other two genera of philosophical types in the second half of the twentieth century share a very different conviction about the seriousness posed by the distance from human perfection and happiness. In Walker Percy's words, this conviction begins with what is little more than a sensation of the smell: "Something is wrong here; I don't feel good."3 The difference between these two positions lies in the degree to which they think that this disturbing distance from perfection can be overcome in the present life: 2. Those who think that there is something absolute enough in human history to do so follow a lead already mapped out by Husserl's attempt at first philosophy or Scheler's identification of the human as the divine face of nature. Whiteheadian theodicy in its claim to offer an adequate consolation to suffering humanity is one example of this type; C. G. Jung's increasingly affirmative stance towards religiosity is another. Communitarian ethics can be considered an instance of this philosophical genus, insofar as it feels no need to continue the search within a given society for universally valid claims beyond the factical standards of that particular society for its own individuals. Still another is the justification of otherwise unjustifiable actions by the movement towards the realization of seemingly utopian hope, as asserted by the philosophical voices of orthodox Marxists such as G. Lulcics. In all such cases, the crisis of imperfection remains in fact largely hypothetical; it would exist were the absolute not already certain and present, which delivers us from the otherwise unbearable burden of finitude. 3. The third general option is that already indicated by Walter Benjamin. It is based on the conviction that the crisis of our times is neither minimal (the first option) nor hypothetical (the second), but continues to be serious and urgent. While no representative of this type sees the presence of an absolute within history that would eliminate the perilous deficiencies of our day, only some deny the real possibility of happiness altogether; such thinkers include the contrafactical utopians, Benjamin, 3. Cf. Peter S. Hawkins, The Language of Grace: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Perry, and Iris Murdoch (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 51.

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Adorno, and Horkheimer. It would still need to be asked: to what degree could an idea that is defined as unrealizable still have the regulative function required to define injustice and suffering? Whether the existential, linguistic, and structuralist critics of ontological philosophy belong to this third group or not depends less on their categorical positions than on the transcendental question of whether the often real imperfections they identifY seriously impair human life (e.g., whether the limits imposed by language or by the search for power upon the freedom and objectivity of thought seriously contradict a vital human desire); if not, they are examples of the first option. BASIC ISSUES OF ROBERT SPAEMANN'S PHILOSOPHY

Robert Spaemann was born in 1927 in Berlin. At the end of the war he was seventeen, and those abiding decisions that one makes in late youth had fallen during the dramatic years leading up to 1945. The awareness of the fate implied by the seizures both of the mentally handicapped and of the Jews had led him not only, e.g., to help distribute the forbidden, pastoral letters of Bishop von Galen or to successfully avoid military service in the final weeks of the war, but more importantly to come to a principle insight into the possible error of widely held theories and convictions. Neither widespread consensus, nor the claim to progress, nor the conviction of conscience suffices to verifY a position or make it good. True or false, good or evil, are not questions of new or old. At the same time, Spaemann had gained an experience that even widespread error can be identified and opposed; neither fate nor a fully perverted human nature prevented such demasking. No aberration is necessary of itself. The conviction that truth is neither guaranteed to nor impossible for any given age will remain fundamental in Spaemann's thought. This corresponds well to a view of original sin that sees a CUTVOr tio, not a corruptio, of human nature. For Spaemann, there are two important instances that are free or largely free from corruption. The one is the divine word, which is external but not indifferent to philosophy. The other is an intrinsic principle of philosophical reflection: common language, common logic, and common moral intuitions, which at a level more basic than theories rarely fail. Spaemann calls common language "the meta-language" and the "medium" of philosophy. These instances remain fairly reliable measures of judgment in Spaemann's examination of theoretical arguments from past and present. Parallel to the school of ordinary language, Spaemann's thought could be described as a theory of the ordinary ontology of person.

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Robert Spaemann is counted among the members of the philosophical school ofJoachim Ritter, with whom he studied in Muenster. As will be the case later with the Spaemann school, the Ritter school is not characterized so much by a set of doctrines as by a style of discussion and by an interest in the problem of the alienation of tomorrow from yesterday, of the future from the past. Several of Spaemann's colleagues in the Ritter school will become notable defenders of the status quo. Odo Marquard will defend the compensatory culture of late modernity, and Hermann Luebbe will defend the pragmatic politics of capitalistic and technologically progressive democracy. Spaemann's difference from these colleagues will become evident by his greater readiness to criticize developments in contemporary society, technology, statehood, and church-with no lesser loyalty in doing SO.4 Two years before the completion of his doctorate at Muenster, Spaemann acquired by chance a copy of Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which he ranks alongside Ritter's own works and the Summa theologiaeas books that have made a mark on his thinking. While Spaemann never shared many of the premises and conclusions of the book, which he considers to be trapped in that very oscillation between utopian hope and fatalistic despair that it analyses, he sees a correspondence between the insights of this work and the analyses in C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. There are three features of The Dialectic that recur in Spaemann's own thought: First, there is a sensitivity to the internal ambivalence, even the counter-productivity, of certain features of the Enlightenment heritage in twentieth-century thought and society. Far from leading to a renunciation of contemporary society, this enables Spaemann to develop a closeness to the age lacking in those who are deaf to its cries of pain, those who have no sense for the situation of a W. Benjamin trapped at Lourdes. Applying a sense for this dialectic to Ritter's problem of the alienation of promise and heritage, Spaemann begins a program of his torical pathology, not altogether unlike Heidegger's deconstruction of the history of philosophy, tracing back counterproductive developments to their origins. The future is to be prepared by a philosophical reflection on the history of how the present came to be at odds with its own truth and goodness. Second, just as The Dialectic of the Enlightenment identified the major ill of modern society in the self-mutilation demanded by a predominantly 4. Cf. H. Ottmann, 'Joachim Ritter," in J. Nida-Ruemelin, Philosophie tier Gegenwart in Eim.eldarsteUungen (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 504-509. As an example of Spaemann's willingness to call for changes in political and economic realities cf. R. Spaemann, "Christentum und Kernkraft," Die politische Meinung 25 (1980): 39 -46.

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"instrumental reason," so Spaemann's philosophy will focus above all on the modem problem of an all-encompassing "functionalization,"5 asking when a steadily increasing functionalization starts to be dysfunctional, counterproductive. Spaemann's dissertation on de Bonald shows how the restoration gives society a total claim on its members and how it deliberately functionalizes religion to this end. 6 Thus it marks not only the beginning of sociological interpretation but also a development of modem instrumental reason, not yet thought of in the revolution's more factional and individualistic animosities. Finally, Spaemann shows a preference for examining individual arguments on the basis of common insights over comparing whole systems of thought. Spaemann admits a certain kind of anarchy both in philosophy and in common language: both forms of thought follow rules, but every attempt to follow only what has been explicidy defined about them within one system will prove more destructive than leaving them implicit. "The elimination of this anarchy would in the end mean the abdication of the human being before human products."7 This preference proves liberating, both for historical research and actual discourse. In returning to the historical origins of thought, Spaemann protects his freedom to pick and choose among arguments, to distinguish truth and error in the same thinker, to draw on classical opponents like Plato and Aristode. Spaemann shows a preference in patristics for Augustine and in medieval thought for Thomas Aquinas, but he is neither an Augustinian nor a Thomist. Spaemann draws positively from both, but he also places the beginning of the fatal loss of the idea of finality in Thomas's concept of the final cause. Kant is central to Spaemann's thought, although he defines a kind of realism as his philosophical ideal. s If Spaemann thus avoids total identification with past thinkers, he also disproves by performance the increasingly popular claim that previous epochs are too strange to allow us a philosophizing dialogue with their arguments. The same Socratic preference for arguments over global claims brought to Spaemann's seminars both a relative freedom 5. Cf. R. Schoenberger, "Robert Spaemann," in J. Nida-Rueme1in, Philosophie der Gegenwart in EinzeldarsteUungen (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 571-75. Schoenberger sees the critique of functionalism as the main unifying moment in Spaemann's diverse philosophical investigations. For a bibliography of Spaemann's writings cf. the excerpt from R. Ries's longer compilation in R. Loew, ed., Oikeiosis. Festschrift fuer Robert Spaemann (Weinheim, 1987), pp. 321-39. 6. R. Spaemann, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus rkm Geist der Restauration (Muenchen, 1959)' 7. R. Spaemann, Philosophische Essays, Erweiterte Ausgabe (Stuttgart, 1994), p. 129· 8. This ideal is evident in R. Spaemann, "Welche Erfahrungen lehren uns die Welt verstehen? Bemerkungen zum Paradigma von Whiteheads Kosmologie," in Whiteheads Metaphysik der Kreativitaet, ed. R. Rapp and R. Wiehl (Freiburg 1986), pp. 169-81.

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from the conflicts of ideological camps and something of the excitement of a gambling casino. Each hand of cards, each argument, could be won or lost by every player: Whether from a Thomist or a Marxist, each concrete argument could be judged as unconvincing or as a reason demanding all the others, including Spaemann, to change their view of the question. This preference for the disputed question over the indisputable system means of course that philosophy itself can never be considered finished. INTERSECTING CIRCLES OF DISCUSSION

While Spaemann avoids the construction of a system, his thought does show a marked interest in a recurring set of interrelated themes. None of these lacks a reference to the question of the relationship between ethics and the ontology of person: 1. The principle of responsibility. One area where the crisis of the world has become more evident following the oil crisis of 1974 is the environment. Spaemann has not only added his respected voice to those calling for controversial action steps, such as the suspension of the use of atomic power until a solution for the problem of wastes can be found. He has also developed philosophical analyses of the many underlying ethical issues. 9 Spaemann accepts in substance what Hans Jonas has called the "principle of responsibility," meant to replace the utopian "printiple of a hope" in unbounded technological development. lO Unlike the utilitarian form of responsibility ethics, which with Max Weber distinguishes itself from an internalized ethics of pre-set idealist principles, this principle of responsibility is no longer free to experiment in every direction. The lack of a bad conscience, far from making acts against environmental conservation good, is part of the problem. Spaemann identifies the current culture of disposable goods as a typical example of functionalism: the goods of creation have become mere "resources," not irreplaceable goods in themselves. They are called goods only insofar as they are seen to be instrumental to another good, which itself is only good as instrumental to another, and so on. The irony of it all, of course, is that this kind offunctionalism doesn't function well. Consumer society has less and less interest in the goods it consumes, but only in a quick and unlimited succession of goods, which nolens volens speeds their depletion. g. cr. R. Spaemann, "Technische EingrifIe in die Natur als Problem der politischen Ethik," Scheidewege (lg79): 476-87; also in D. Bimbacher, Oekologie und Ethik (Stuttgart, Ig80), pp. 180-206; and R. Spaemann, Philosophische Essays, op. cit., pp. 232-60. 10. cr. Spaemann's "Laudatio" for HansJonas, in Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels I987 (Frankfurt a.M., 1987), pp. 17-32.

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2. Overcoming the dualism of humanity and nature. Another issue seems tojoinJonas and Spaemann: the desire to overcome that excessive separation of nature and human spirit, which is evident in the restriction of moral goodness to conscious intention. Both thinkers see here one of the most problematic heritages of Europe. Jonas investigates its sources in Christianity and gnosticism; Spaemann, in modern thought especially since Rousseau. The question led Spaemann to examine more fundamentally and in detail the evolutionary paradigm of our day,1l Spaemann identifies a two-fold process of alienation: first every movement towards an intrinsic goal, every teleology, is banned from nature as being anthropomorphic. Evolution is made a matter of efficient causality alone and a function of mere survival, where the difference between bene esse and esse is irrelevant: good being is merely a function of being good at survival. The second step occurs when even human being is reduced to this already reduced, mechanical view of nature. The assertion of a dynamic or a dignity proper to humans is dismissed, ironically, as again too anthropomorphic,12 As an alternative, Spaemann takes up a suggestion that Kant had made, despite his role in widening the gap between natural efficient causality and the human constitution of goals. Kant sees that organic life implies teleology, just as morality implies something like nature. While Spaemann focuses especially on Kant's third critique, even The Critique of Practical Reason had stated that nature can be understood only as if it acts for ends, just as the categorical imperative can generate morality only by conceiving it as something like the universal laws of nature. Spaemann develops this double argument that evolution can be understood only from the paradigm and analogy of human intentionality and that what is reasonable and moral for humans is something like their nature. Reason vis-a.-vis nature is arguably one of the most dominant themes in Spaemann's work,13 On both sides of the coin, the truth of ordinary convictions about animals and the good human life is recalled. The unnecessary and misleading suggestion implicit in the word

11. Compare in the series of CMTAS-discussions Spaemann's introduction to R. Spaemann, R. Loew, and P. Koslowski, eds., Evolutionismus und Christentum (Weinheim, 1986), pp. 1-5, along with his essay "Sein und Gewordensein. Was erklaert die Evolutionstheorie?" in Evolutionstheorie und menschliches Selbstverstaendnis, ed. P. Koslowski, R. Loew, and R. Spaemann (Weinheim, 1984), pp. 73-91, with Hans Jonas, "Evolution and Freiheit," in Evolution und Freiheit, ed. P. Koslowski, Ph. Kreutzer, and R. Loew (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 147-61. 12. Cf. above all R. Spaemann and R. Loew, Die Frage Wozu? (Muenchen/Zuerich, 1981 ). 13. Cf. apart from the Philosophische Essays, op. cit., R. Spaemann, Das Natuerliche und das Vernuenftige (Muenchen, 1987), especially "Ueber den BegrifI einer Natur des Menschen," 13 sqq.

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"evolution," made explicit in the ideological misuse of valid evolutionary theory, namely that individuals and species are but mere alterations of one abiding substrate rather than discrete beings of unique identity, is corrected in such a way as to re-awaken a sense of the dignity of both animals and humans. Spaemann has drawn out the consequences, among others, for the practical issues of animal rights, which cannot be reduced to the considerations of functional utility. The issue of personal dignity leads to a notable difference between the dualism-critiques of Jonas and Spaemann. Hinted at already in his early works on the defense of Pharisaic and Pelagian notions of law, but explicit in Organism and Freedom14 and in much of his defense of environmental tutiorism, Jonas develops what might be called a Spinozan view of unity in a way even more obvious than in Scheler's The Place of the Human in the Cosmos. While human freedom can be seen already forming in non-organic structures and sub-human organisms, human freedom itself does not radically exceed the potentiality for freedom visible elsewhere in the cosmos. Spaemann, by contrast, interprets the evolving cosmos from the analogy of the human, not the other way around. This allows Spaemann to associate human being with an even greater dignity and responsibility for the world than maintained in the works ofJonas. 3. The critique of consequential ethics as self-instrumentalization. Still, Spaemann has warned against exaggerating the principle of responsibility. His critique of what in the context of individual morality is presently called "responsibility ethics" (consequentialist or teleological ethics) traces how an inflation ofthe claims to be responsible for all direct and indirect consequences of action and non-action in fact vitiates responsibility itself. In Spaemann's view, an exclusive pursuit of consequentialist ethics will involve the self-instrumentalization of every action and ultimately of the entire person, once means incompatible with human dignity are justified by their function for some good end. Without advocating the exclusive pursuit of a "deontological ethics" interested in principles but not in the effects of their application, Spaemann again calls upon ordinary moral convictions to show that some acts so violate the dignity of humanity that no further function can justify them.I 5 This position has led Spaemann into his best known dispute with the 14. H. Jonas, Organismus und Freiheit. Ansaetze zu einer philosophischen Biologie (Goettingen, 1973)' 15. R. Spaemann, ·Ueber die Unmoeglichkeit einer universalte1eoiogischen Ethik," PhilosophischesJahrbuch 88 (1981): 70-89; and R. Spaemann, "Nochmals: deontoiogische oder te1eoiogische Moralbegruendung?" Herder-Korrespondenz 2 (1983): 79-84.

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majority of Catholic moral theologians in Germany,16 To appreciate this dispute, it is necessary to notice the paradigm shift involved in the theological discussion. At the Second Vatican Council, German theologians, with the still recent experience of their country in mind, warned against expecting too much from the illuminative role of the conscience. With a view towards the political paradigm, they warned that even with much reflection and idealism, an erring conscience is possible and anything but selfjustifying,17 That remains the view of all ethicians whose paradigm of an ethical situation is the political one. No thinker concerned with the North-South dichotomy would accept the often clear consciences of Northerners as a moral justification of inadequately distributive justice; quite to the contrary, such subjectively good consciences are a part of the problem. By the end of the 1960s, the theological concern in affluent cultures had shifted from a public to a very private paradigm of moral choice with an exclusivity that is the privilege of countries of means. Weight shifted from the function of conscience as accusans et instigans (or at least remordens) to its function as excusans, the principle that can justify the preservation of one's chosen practice despite its flaws. While Spaemann entered into the consequentialist-deontological debate with arguments from what Aristotle calls monastic (individual) ethics, there is no doubt that Spaemann's early memories of the limits of conscience in the interpersonal and political realms continue to provide the leading paradigm for his ethical thought,18 Spaemann is concerned with a critique of that self-instrumentalization, which, in the name of universal responsibility, would erode one's own and the other's dignity in a way which would ultimately destroy the very bases of responsibility itself,19 4. Reasonable authority. Spaemann's sensitivity to the limits of the truth and goodness of private and public convictions has led to controversies 16. Cf. R. Spaemann, "Wovon handelt die Moraltheologie? Philosophische Ethik und Moraltheologie," Communio 6 (1977): 289-311, afterwards slightly re-worked in R. Spaemann, Einsprueche. Christliche &den (Einsiedeln, 1977), pp. 65-93' 17. For literature on the council's thought on the conscience cf. R. Schenk, "Evangelisierung und Religionstoleranz: Thomas von Aquin und die Gewissenslehre des II. Vatikanums," Forum Katholische Theologie8 (1992): 1-17. 18. a. R. Spaemann, "Ueber den Begriff der Menschenwuerde," in R. Spaemann, Das Natuerliche und das Vernuenftige, op. cit., 77 sqq., as well as his more recent work on the rightful claims of personhood to recognition and respect. The critique of political consequentialism is developed, e.g., in R. Spaemann, "Ars longa vita brevis," in Expertenwissen und Politik, ed. R. Loew, P. Koslowski, and R. Spaemann (Weinheim, 1990), pp.16-26. 19. R. Spaemann, oWer hat wofuer Verantwortung?" Herder Kurrespondenz. 7 (1982): 245-350, 403-11; and especially R. Spaemann, Muralische Grundbegriffe (Muenchen, 1982 ).

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involving his call for the "courage to educate"20 and for his critique of an ethics based solely on a public discourse whose only prerequisite would be its freedom from authority past and present. In a widely followed discussion, Spaemann argued thatJiirgen Habermas's neo-Kantian plan of public ethics as the consensus of an ideal community of dialogue is, to its credit, nota proposal for justice by decree of the majority. Democracy, while important, is no guarantee of human rights, which can be abused by the power of a stronger majority. Spaemann recalls in this regard Thucydides's portrayal of the indifference of the greater Athenian power to the weaker but just claims of the Meliens. In attempting to work out the standards implied by Habermas's insistence on the anticipated reason of an ideal community, Spaemann proposed the alternative of reasonable authority. Whether it is reasonable depends not on the fact of its convictions but on their truth. 21 5. The face of the other. Spaemann's concern with an ethics based on human dignity is evident in his increasing occupation with the problem of "the other" and the dignity of the person. 22 Spaemann has followed closely the confirmation by experimental psychology of Levinas's foundation of morality on the imperatives presented by faces of other concrete persons. Without sharing Levinas's aversion to ontology, Spaemann does appreciate the realism implied in Levinas's metaphysics of the other. Spaemann's predilection for a perhaps exaggerated ideal of realism in epistemology and (in a related sense) of pure love in the theory of volition was expressed already in his habilitation on Fenelon. 23 Spaemann's preference for Fenelon's ideal of pure love over Bossuet's more genuinely Thomistic view of a love rooted in self-interest (pace Spaemann) was as clear as his greater fascination with an acquired or even infused spontaneity of charity rather than the self-reflection (timor Dei) which makes it possible. In Happiness and Benevolence, Spaemann follows the weight of this inclination and shows the necessity of complementing Aristotle (the search for happiness) with Kant (the benevolence owed to the other). Spaemann argues, not without parallels in Levinas, that the eudaimonistic theory of ethics going back to Aristotle's foundation of ethics upon a pursuit of self-fulfillment is insufficient to account for the whole depth of obligation that comes from the encounter with the other. It needs to be complemented by an ethics of Kantian obligation, or 20. Cf. his contribution to the collection Mut zur Erziehung (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 16-34. 21. Cf. R Spaemann, Zur Kritik tier politischen Utopie (Stuttgart, 1977). 22. Robert Spaemann, Personen. Versuche ueber den Unterschied zwischen "etwas" und "jemand" (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996); id., "Person und Versprechen. Einfuehrung," in R Schenk, ed., Kontinuitaet tier Person. Zum Versprechen und Vertrauen, Collegium Philosophicum 2 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1998), pp. 3-6. 23. R Spaemann, Rejlexion undspontaneitaet: Studien ueberFenelon, 2d ed. (Stuttgart, 1990).

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better, an ethics of benevolence and the acknowledgment of the validity of the claims of the other independent of my needs. In this sense, an ethics based on Happiness and Benevolence is a matter of combining Aristotle's "idealism" with Kant's "realism."24 6. The religious dimension. Even (and precisely) when Spaemann's ideal of the "realism" of pure love might appear to embody an unrealized, regulative idea for epistemology and ethics, it points to a dimension of what remains for him transcendent to philosophy: the religious realm. While Spaemann has resisted attempts to absorb the doctrine of original sin into philosophy,25 his religious convictions about it have both liberated and enriched his philosophy. Far from dictating the results of his philosophy, the fact that Spaemann does not seem to expect his salvation from philosophy frees him from the necessity of defending anyone position. That Spaemann can allow his students such great freedom in philosophy has to do with its status as a secondary discipline. To the question, "How are you doing today?" the doctrine of original sin may answer: "I hope not all too well; because if this is all that bene esse means, then my hopes for humanity and for my own life have been too great." In this sense it is possible to speak of "hoping for guilt," since the Christian doctrine of original sin is simply the reverse side of its hope for salvation. It is this sense oflack and want that testifies that we are called to more than we actually are or have; because of this calling, humans possess a dignity beyond what empirical observation can verify.26 It is this very conviction about human dignity that allows us to perceive much of the "usual" treatment of humans by humans as injustice, as the "normal" violation of the "norm." The kind of hope which frees from the deafness to the cries coming from the felt need for salvation cannot be successfully imitated or hypothetically presupposed for the sake of its social and political functions, although it bears eminently social and political fruit.27 Spaemann's philosophy reminds us that a philosophy is not closer to the world for overhearing its anguish. Mourning is the condition of the possibility of hope. An awareness of the anguished sense of entrapment in the counterproductive results of the world's promises, an ear for the voice of those who have suffered most under the ideology of progress,28 24. Cf. R. Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence. 25. Cf. R. Spaemann, Rousseau-Buergerohne Vatcrland (Muenchen, 1980). 26. Cf. R. Spaemann, "Religion und 'Tatsachenwahrheit,'" in W. Oelmueller, ed., Kolloquium %ur Gegenwartsphilosophie, vol. 2: Wahrheitsansprueche der Religionen heute (Muenchen, 1986), pp. 225-70. 27. Cf. R. Spaemann's objections to the functionalistic theory of religion, e.g., in his essay "Funktionale Religionsbegruendung und Religion," in Die religioese Dimension der Gesellschaft, ed. P. Koslowski (Tuebingen, 1985), pp. 9-29. 28. Cf. R. Spaemann, "Ueberzeugungen in einer hypothetischen Zivilisation," in Abschied von Utopia, ed. O. Schatz (Graz, 1977), pp. 311-31.

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is the only conviction that treasures human dignity enough to hope for its fulfillment. This openness to the other, as fostered by the JudeoChristian idea of the person, depends to a large degree on a proper religious identity.29 As Spaemann argues, the resistance of Christianity against its temptation towards assimilating itself to the customs and values of any given age, including our own,30 is the condition for a true proximity to the needs of the age, to its wants and wounds. 31 While Spaemann knows how distant such religious identity might seem to fashionable thought,32 it is his conviction that only here is finally the vision to be found that can help us to grow "nearer" to the reality of our age and to allow us to see and hear the persons struggling through it as our "neighbors."33 In this sense, too, genuine Christian identity provides a unique key for understanding the last hundred years of philosophy. 29. a. R. Spaemann, "Religioese Identitaet," in ldentitaet im Wande~ ed. K. Michalski (Stuttgart, 1995), pp. 61-78. 30. a. R. Spaemann, "Unter welchen Umstaenden kann man noch von Fortschritt sprechen?" in Furtschritt ohne Mass? Eine Ortsbestimmung der wissenschaftlich-technischen Zivilisation, ed. R. Loew, P. Koslowski, and Ph. Kreutzer (Muenchen, 1981), pp. 96-112. 31. a. R. Spaemann, "Ende der Modemitaet?" in Moderne oller Postmoderne? ZUT SignatuT des gegmwaertigen Zeitalters, ed. P. Koslowski, R. Loew, and R. Spaemann (Weinheim, 1986), pp. 19-40. 32. a. R. Spaemann, "Die christliche Religion und das Ende des modemen BewuBtseins," Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift "Communio" 8 (1979): 251-70; R. Spaemann, "'Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn'. Versuch ueber den Fundamentalismus,· Die Zeit, 22 December 1989. 33. a. the interviews with Spaemann in Herder Korrespondem. 45 (1991): 170-79, and Focus (20 November 1995, Nr. 47), 142 sqq.

9

Christianity and Modern Philosophy

ROBERT SPAEMANN 1

Since its beginnings, Christianity has had to define its relationship to philosophy. This necessity results from Christianity's claim to truth. Christianity is not a poetic world-view, not a myth, not a feel for life; rather, Christianity is the faith in a real revelation by God about God's own essence, about the origin and goal of humankind, about the fall from original grace and about salvation. To Pilate's question as to whether or not he was a king (john 18, 33) Christ answers positively by referring to the basis of his claim to sovereignty: "For this reason I was born and have come into the world: that I might bear witness to the truth" (john 18, 37). Conventionally, philosophy is considered responsible for answering Pilate's other question, ''What is truth?" (john 18, 38). Whether it wants to or not, a religion whose core lies in a confession of faith and thus in dogma is confronted with the necessity of dealing with questions of truth, which consist in reflection and in the exchange and exanIination of arguments. Did not Plato's Socrates once say that the philosophical theory of immortality is like a floating plank, on which the shipwrecked can just barely stay afloat in life's rough seas, at least until someone might sail more assuredly upon a divine Logos (cf. Phaidon 85 CD)? Christians entered the ancient world with the message that this divine Logos had become flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and had so entered the history of the world that anyone could and would have to sail upon this ship, called the "Church of Christ," if they wanted to arrive at the port destined for humankind. What role does philosophical reflection about God, the world, and humankind play for the passengers of this ship? Let me begin with a few initial remarks as a background for my theme, "Christianity and modem philosophy." The relationship of Christianity and philosophy in the first centuries of Christianity is ambivalent. On the one hand, philosophers are the only non:Judeo-Christian discussion partners for Christians. Augustine distinguishes three types of religions: the mythical-poetical, the political, and 169

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the natural or philosophical. Jewish-Christian monotheism had to take a negative stand on mythical and political religion: "Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands." With this critique of religions, the Jewish-Christian monotheism has something in common with the philosophical critique of myths from Anaxagoras to Plato. The commonalities are so extensive that several church fathers suspected that Plato had studied the writings of Moses. Augustine taught that the Platonists teach much the same as the Christians about God and human life. Even that teaching most unique to Christianity, the dogma of the Trinity, is articulated with the conceptual help of the distinction between ousia and hyp~ stasis, of essence and person, thus also protecting strict monotheism from harm. And yet Augustine never names himself or other Christians as "Platonists." "Platonists" always meant for Augustine non-Christian philosophers. They are always distinguished from ours, "nostri," even when it is claimed that they teach the very same thing in all those areas that can be thematized by philosophy. Why? Because "philosophy" in late antiquity never refers merely to a scientific discussion or a learned opinion, but rather to a bios, a way of life, a school in the sense of a community onife and world-view. For its part, Christianity is likewise a bios, a way of life, a vita nova. And this new life is defined essentially by entering the community of disciples. "Nostri," these are those who belong to this community, the new Israel, the church, because they believe in salvation through the Logos become human. By this faith they gain the joy of their life and overcome anxiety in the face of death. This community is in rivalry with every other bios that makes total claims, even when Christianity can largely absorb the doctrinal positions passed down by philosophical schools and even when it articulates its own faith with the terminology borrowed. It is only after the schools of philosophy have been dissolved, especially following the closing of the Academy in Athens, that the relationship of rivalry can be replaced by that relationship of surpassing and subsumption characteristic of the Middle Ages. Only in the Middle Ages does philosophy become that which in a sense it still is: a foundational discipline which provides an essential basis for theology as well. One can say that the liberation of philosophy from ideology is the result of Christianity. In the Middle Ages we find philosophy of fine quality, but no "philosophers" in the original sense of the term, that is to say, no thinkers who define their way of life as philosophy. The ultimate questions of humankind are answered by the faith, which the church interprets authentically. Under this protectorate, philosophy develops a remarkable freedom of its own. The shift from Platonism to

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Aristotelianism, for example, occurs with relative ease. Merely among some of the younger religious orders does the view of this or that philosophical school become part of the identity of the order itself. Even those theories that hardly seem compatible with dogma manage to develop, as long as they are presented in the form of hypothesis or history. It is well known that the Inquisition offered to leave Galileo alone if he would characterize his theory as a hypothesis, something a modem physicist would accept as self-understood. Modem physics wants to formulate only hypothetical models. To this degree, Galileo's refusal is more medieval than the demand of the Inquisition. An interesting example for the way in which philosophy could be integrated into a theological context without losing its autonomy is provided by Thomas Aquinas's treatment of the problem of the eternity of the world. Aristode had taught the eternity of the world. Thomas's argument runs something like this: It is possible to demonstrate philosophically the createdness of the world by God but not the temporal beginning of the world. The world could be without a beginning, since God's will to create the world is eternal. Nothing prevents us from the extrapolation of the history of nature infinitely back into the past-except, in Thomas's view, the revelation in which "we" believe. We-"nos"-means for Thomas much the same as Augustine's "nostri": we, that is, Catholic Christians. The nonbeginning of the world is logicallyjust as possible as its beginning. Philosophy teaches us about what is possible and what is necessary. To know what is contingendy real, we have only the sources of experience on the one hand and revelation on the other. This led to consequences for the medieval organization of the sciences. Philosophy is taught in the faculty of arts. The master of arts is allowed to teach only about what is possible, necessary, or impossible, not about what is factically the case. This means that the magister artium can no longer do that which the ancient schools of philosophy did: give synthetic world-views and basic orientations for living. In most cases the masters of arts become in time doctors of theology. John Buridan was the first to intentionally remain a teaching master of arts for life. 2

It was necessary to provide this sketch of the ancient and medieval background in order to see what is unique to the modem understanding of the relation between Christianity and philosophy. This modem relationship is characterized first of all by the emancipation of philosophy from the theological context into which it was integrated. It is characterized, secondly, by the reverse attempt to integrate the content of Christian faith into

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philosophy. It is the attempt to use the means of philosophy to understand faith better than it understands itself. Not to put too fine a point on it, but one could well say that medieval philosophy had been cautious not to try to be Christian philosophy. The masters of arts had not been allowed to deal with themes offaith ex professo. It is modern philosophy that attempts for the first time to do this and to become something like "Christian philosophy." The integration of Christianity into philosophy was preceded by an emancipation of philosophy from Christianity. This emancipation from the theological context had been prepared for by later medieval nominalism. Nominalist philosophy came close to extending infinitely the realm of the contingent, that is to say the realm of what could be thus and thus or otherwise. This implies that the claim was thereby relinquished of being able to make a priori or essential statements about laws of nature. Thus the climate for the rise of modern experimental science was beginning to form. At the same time, philosophy ceased to offer a knowledge that could provide orientation for human life. Ethical norms could no longer be reached by insights into human nature; they could be drawn only from conventions or from divine revelation. The older tradition had taught with Plato that the good is not good because God wills it, but that God wills it because it is good; moreover, reason teaches us what is good. By contrast it was now claimed that hatred could be good, were only it God's pleasure to command hatred instead of love; moreover, we know only from revelation that God in fact has preferred love. This holds all the more true for insights into God's essence. True, theology had always viewed the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystery of faith, but it had followed Anselm's principle: Credo ut intelligam; that is to say, theology had tried to open up by thought the contents of faith in their internal coherence and their illuminating function for humankind. For this purpose theology had needed the conceptual tools that philosophy provided. Now there was a trend towards a positivism of revelation: we can merely note as a fact that God exists in three persons. We would have to believe that it was a matter of seventeen persons, had that been revealed to us. Why do we believe Christian teaching at all rather than another? Now that the internal coherence of the doctrine of faith was questioned, the only alternative answer left was to fall back on the inscrutable grace of God's election. Philosophers took empirical knowledge as their paradigm and discovered that belonging to any given religion is a matter of geography. Descartes declared it reasonable to remain faithful to Catholic Christianity, not because it was the truth, but because it was the religion of the land. The principle, "cuius regio, huius religio," parallels the axiom of Thomas Hobbes: "Non veritas sed auctoritas facit legem." Philosophy

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now considers itself the only place where truth can be found beyond the boundaries of space and time. The attitude of emancipated philosophy toward Christianity assumed three forms. The first one is the skeptical, agnostic form, embodied in David Hume and in the French Enlightenment. Philosophy is seen here as a way oflife, a world-view and explicitly as an alternative to ecclesiastical Christianity. The final form will appear with Schelling. Between these two, a second form takes another route, that of the weightier continental philosophy: rationalism, Rousseau, and transcendental philosophy. They begin with the universal claim of Christianity and attempt at once to strip this claim of its revelatory nature and to catch up philosophically with it, that is to say, they identify this claim with the universal claim of philosophical reason itself. Lessing summarized the critique of revealed religions in the famous phrase: "Chance truths of history can never become proofs for necessary truths of reason." He also spoke of the "ugly trench" that divides the two. As Lessing would have it, reason could never accept that a historically conditioned figure like Jesus of Nazareth could ever be viewed as a real appearance of the unconditioned. Even less in conformity with reason is it to base this claim to unconditional truth on historical documents and their reports of miracles. The philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is characterized by the attempt to remove from Christianity what was called the "positive." "Positive" means here what we mean when we speak of "positive law" as opposed to natural law. Nominalist theology, but also reformation theology, had understood all divine action merely as "positive," as an inexplicable expression of an arbitrary act of will. Now,just conversely, rationalistic philosophy tries to grasp God as the locus of the eternal necessity of reason. God is the creator of the laws of nature, but God never interferes with nature again. God does not reveal himself as the Lord of nature. God transforms himself into a constitutional monarch ruling only by general laws: laws whose reasonableness can be evident to every reasonable person. Far from bearing witness to God's omnipotence, miracles would be quite to the contrary a sign of the imperfection of God's laws. Kant's transcendental philosophy eliminates the possibility of miracles in a way still more radical. For Kant, miracles are not objects of possible experience, since the regularity of events is based in the transcendental conditions of our experience. The regularity articulated in the laws of nature is the transcendental condition for the knowability of events. Events that would fall outside of this context of regular laws could not be distinguished from hallucinations. Whoever wears glasses with blue lenses will be able to know in advance that he or she will encounter no object that is not of blue hue.

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Under such circumstances, what happens to the uniqueness of Christ's claim? For the philosophers of the eighteenth century, this uniqueness is based upon the incomparable purity with which jesus's teaching expresses what can be evident to us all as the common religion of reason. The obligatory quality of this teaching is not founded upon the authority of a unique person, but just the reverse: the uniqueness of the person is rooted in the immanent evidence of the teaching. Lessing's reference to "the proof of the spirit and of power" stands in opposition to the positivistic theory of revelation, which views the miracles of Jesus as the basis of faith. A Christian who was not an eye-witness of the miracles ofJesus does not usually believe Jesus's message because of the miracle ;\ccounts, but these accounts are believed in because of the internal evidence of the gospel. As the fourth gospel says: "If you do what I say, you will realize that I speak the truth." By understanding Jesus simply as the teacher of a truth that in principle could be grasped even without this teacher, both rationalist and idealist philosophy reduced Christianity to its moral message. It eliminates as mythical elements the mystery of sin and salvation and the salvific significance of Jesus's person, his death and his resurrection. As stated at the outset, Christianity had originally considered natural religion, that is to say the philosophical religion of antiquity, as its partner in dialogue. It had integrated this natural religion into a historical context, in whose center stood the incarnation of the divine Logos, his death and resurrection. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the reverse happened: the historical dimension of revelation is reduced to being an explication of natural religion. Natural religion now means a faith in the existence of God as creator of the world, guaranteeing the natural moral law, and a faith in the immortality of the soul with compensatoryjustice after death. Christianity properly understood is nothing else than this religion naturelle, insofar as it relates to its most perfect exponent, Jesus of Nazareth. Whatever is merely "positive," or a matter of "statutes," as Kant put it, is irrelevant in principle. Like the cultic dimension of religion, it only prepares the realm of feelings for the acceptance of eternal truths of reason. It is reasonable for all humans to become Christians, but only because Christianity represents nothing apart from common human reason. This is especially evident in the reverse direction of the integration, that is to say, in the inclusion of theological themes into moral philosophy or philosophical ethics. In medieval thought, philosophical ethics had meant the Aristotelian doctrine of the virtues and the Stoic doctrine of the lex naturae. The doctrine of the most inward motivation justifying human beings belonged to theology, which dealt with the doctrine of charity: that love of God and

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neighbor that was seen as the "form of virtues." The philosophy that early modern times had emancipated from theology now takes up this theme explicitly. Gassendi revives a kind of Epicureanism with his thesis that the increase of pleasure is what is at stake in all human actions. Spinoza re-establishes a certain sense of Stoicism; and yet it is not coincidental that the peak of Spinoza's philosophical ethics lies in the notion of amor Dei, the love of God. This love of God, however, is no longer an amor amicitiae or love of friendship, but the Stoic acceptance of and identification with fate. Kant's ethics reduced itself in fact entirely to the theme of motivation, distinguishing a mere legality of action from morality. Action is moral when it wants to act in accord with obligation for its own sake. Kant distances himself explicitly from the concept of love, which he replaces with the "respect oflaw." In our context, what is decisive here is that the entire thematic range of theological ethics is not only integrated into philosophical ethics, but, in the process, the traditional content of philosophical ethics is suppressed as well. Kantian ethics cannot, therefore, be re-absorbed into theological ethics, since it claims to be itself the ultimate form for integrating both. The doctrine of original sin and salvation proved to be the dogma that could most resist being reduced to and absorbed by philosophy. The doctrine of original sin claims that everyday humans, humans as they normally "walk and balk," to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx, are not truly human, and not natural human beings, but are in fact already the product of a deformation. It is impossible, therefore, to deduce from this factically given humanity what the "true nature" of the human being is. For ancient and medieval philosophy, the treatise on humanity was part of natural philosophy. Just like all other living creatures, the human being had a physis, a nature; and indeed, a nature that can be discovered by looking at average human behavior. Christian doctrine had understood this "natural human being" as that of beings which from the beginning stood in the context of salvific history; of beings which shared in a supernatural calling; of beings born into a web of guilt from which they were first cut free by the death of one who was innocent. The first attempt to absorb this view of humanity into philosophy is found in Rousseau. "The Savoyan vicar's confession offaith," which Rousseau creates in Emile, is in fact of decisive significance for the process of transforming Christianity into a philosophical religion. With this text, Rousseau takes a decisive stand against the anti-Christian encyclopedists. And yet, this text also enunciates clearly for the first time the thesis that basically the Gospel teaches nothing except those truths that the human heart could have taught us anyway. It is because of this that the Gospel speaks so directly to the heart.

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The way in which the Christian doctrine of original sin is taken up and transformed into a theory of cultural history is to be found especially in the second "Discourse" and its text on the inequality of human beings. This is the first text to present a radically historical theory of human being. The story of human beings' departure from paradise is interpreted as hominoids' departure from the state of nature and their entrance into the state of culture proper to a homo sapiens: a condition constituted by language and living in society. The humanization of humanity and its fall into sin are identified with one another. The voice of the ancient tempter is now one with the voice of God, calling human being to a higher vocation. This interpretation of the original fall became a standard for all of German Idealism, and it is still very much present in Karl Marx and his social-historical interpretation of human self-alienation. If the fall into sin is primarily an event of social history, rather than something that involves the human relationship to God, then this fall must also be something that can be remedied within history by human effort. This healing comes about either through revolution or, as in Rousseau's Emik, through a new form of education, which prevents the reproduction of alienation by introducing a new form of individual socialization.

3 I have already mentioned attempts to demote Christianity, so to speak, to the standards of philosophy and to declare it "the natural religion." These attempts have had their affect on Christian theology itself, especially within Protestantism. The Enlightenment religion of reason and the corresponding religiosity of feeling share the renunciation of assigning any particular meaning to the speculative dogmas of theology. The only thing thought to be important for the life of faith is that which is immediately relevant for coming to terms with the pressing practical problems of life. But with that alone the business of integrating Christianity into philosophy was still not finished, since the central mysteries of Christianity remained outside this kind of integration. They thus became a matter of indifference or were to be understood as a mythical cloak for the eternal truths of reason. The most radical attempt to conceptualize philosophically the entire content of Christian orthodoxy is to be found in Hegel. Hegel makes himself the advocate of Protestant orthodoxy against the Enlightenment and against Pietism. At the same time, he also claims to eliminate entirely the difference between theological dogmatics and philosophy. It was Hegel who attempted to comprehensively make the speculative contents of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity fruitful for philosophy.

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What is called the Hegelian dialectics can be understood as the attempt to make universally accessible that form of thought which, until then, had only been available within the Trinitarian speculation of Christian theology. The attempt to appropriate the salvific historical view of humanity for philosophical understanding was supported by the rediscovery of theosophical traditions. These traditions, especiallyJacob Boehme and Saint Martin, were passed on to the philosophers of German Idealism, in particular to Hegel and Schelling, by Franz von Baader. It was not just chance that theosophy experienced a great revival in early modernity. It was an age in which official theology had petrified into a kind of positivism of revelation, which gave up every attempt to penetrate the content of theological statements by understanding. Thus, it is no surprise that at this time a new form of thought arises, in part by going back to cabbalistic traditions. This new form of thought, which eked out its existence more or less outside all official approbation, was situated somewhere between a philosophy neo-Platonic in background and a theology of revelation. This way of thinking now flows into philosophy. In different ways both Franz von Baader and Schelling rejected Hegel's attempt to absorb Christian theology into philosophical logic. Schelling was convinced that Hegel's logicizing had failed to reach both the genuine reality of the pronouncements of revelation and the genuine reality of the contingent processes of nature. Schelling develops what he himself terms "positive philosophy," a counter-position to Hegel's attempts. Philosophy here explicitly ceases to be the science of mere reason, a mere theory of what is possible or necessary. Philosophy now claims to be "positive" in the sense that philosophy has the ability to think contingent reality itself. Philosophy becomes a kind of speculative empiricism. The objection is no longer accepted that the Christian interpretation of history is itself based on contingent events, namely on a revelation that cannot be deduced simply from the thought of God's nature. Schelling developed a subtle theory of how philosophy came to be positive, and I could not even begin to present that theory here in the time allowed. Schelling's positive philosophy had a significant influence on Russian "religious philosophy," where in much the same way there is no more clearly defined boundary between the theology of revelation and this type of the philosophy of religion. Philosophy and theology now appear to be absorbed into a higher tertium. Schelling does not accept as a valid objection the fact that this interpretation is not the only possible interpretation, not a necessary one, but rather one dependent on certain prerequisites of faith. Reflection about what is contingent in the strict sense of the term and about its relation to the absolute will itself also be contingent.

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In the West, Schelling's new starting point for philosophy found no significant successors. Only in the last two decades has there been any serious attempt to confront or appropriate aspects of what he was trying to do. More important in the nineteenth century was Kierkegaard's protest against the reduction of Christian theology to Hegelian logic. In particular, it was Kierkegaard's thesis that faith was a paradox that could not be absorbed by philosophy that proved significant. Kierkegaard set in motion a process that forced theology to reflect again about what was proper to it. Hegel's gigantic attempt to absorb the whole of Christian revelation into philosophical conceptualization somersaulted with Karl Marx into the exact opposite. His attempt at a revolutionary kind of earthy salvific history understood the entire content of Western philosophy only as the misunderstood function and the superfluous addition of upper stories built over the more basic foundations of a process of social history. The business of integrating Christian theology into a kind of a priori philosophy had gone bankrupt. Philosophy retreated back to the line of defense implied in its task as a science of pure reason, giving up the ambition of transforming the content of Christian revelation into something like a necessary truth of reason.

4 Antiquity was characterized by the rivalry of Christianity and philosophy; the Middle Ages, by a hierarchical relationship of theology and philosophy; and early modernity, by the attempt to integrate and to reduce Christian faith to philosophy. The future, it appears to me, must be characterized by leaving the two alongside each other, by the struggle of both theology and philosophy to come to terms with common themes, but now without coordinating their attempts in advance by pre-defined methodological options. What is often called "post-modernity" is just one example of how the two contingent efforts can exist side by side without a preplanned program. Co-existence of this general kind need not, however, take the form of irrationalism or chaos. In the efforts of both theology and philosophy, if in different ways, truth is what is at stake. Philosophy and theology will only flourish if they do not lose sight of each other. Christian theology is more in need of philosophy than ever before, since it needs to appropriate by means of thought the content of what it has to pass on. Only with the help of philosophy can theology hope to escape the dilemma between choosing fundamentalism or tailoring itself to the spirit of the times: that fatally false alternative of scientism or relativism. If theologians in uncritical subservience first let themselves be told by physics, biology, psychology, or sociology what reality is

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and then just attempt to translate the message of the gospel into a reality thus pre-defined and pre-understood, then what is essential to this message will be lost, even if theologians are willing to accept thankfully the tiny space graciously assigned to them by these sciences. Without philosophical reflection upon what these sciences can and cannot achieve, theologians are hopelessly at the mercy and whim of whatever picture of the world is dominant at any given moment. Without philosophy, the only alternative for theologians to such subservience would then be a poor one, a fundamentalist retreat into a scriptural text that purportedly is in need of no further interpretation. Such a retreat is no longer a true act of rationabile obsequium, of rational obedience, but an act of reason's abdication in the midst of a world that must therefore continue to be structured in its very essence by scientific technology. Christianity needs philosophy in order to assert itself in the modem world. To be sure, Christianity is not compatible with every kind of philosophy, but only with those theories, in terms of which the essential contents of revelation can be articulated without serious abbreviation. These are philosophies that do not claim to understand religion better than it understands itself. That is to say, theology must prefer nonreductionistic philosophers, who could accept that saying of Bishop Butler that Wittgenstein chose as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations: "Everything is what it is and not another thing." Theology must be wary of transcendental theories that formulate the a priori conditions of all possible experience in such a way that anything unusual, certainly any miracle, must be rejected in principle as an impossible object of experience capable of being distinguished from a hallucination. In other words, Christianity must prefer realistic philosophers; in ethics, it must develop a preference for theories that avoid the claim that the morality of human actions is no more than the sum of all the consequences of this action. Such a claim is incompatible with the moral intuition of all humanity, articulated so well in the Bible, that certain ways of acting are to be rejected in themselves and can never become acceptable by the added calculation of some desirable consequence. Theology should not go in search of philosophies that claim to know everything better, but rather it should look for philosophers who allow it to express its faith rationally. It is also important for philosophy not to lose sight of theology. The Christian faith makes philosophy think again, and philosophy is well advised to truly consider this food for thought. Religious experience, the experience of faith, is an experience that we cannot eliminate from the realm of what opens up reality for us, unless we want to lose much of that reality itself. The American pragmatist, William James, enunciated this

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clearly one hundred years ago. Philosophy cannot adequately interpret this experience. While every philosophy worthy of the name is a theory of the absolute, philosophy's own theory of the absolute should not be one incompatible with religious experience. The Christian faith understands itself as an ultimate truth. This does not mean a theoretical explanation of all the riddles of the world or of human existence, but rather "a lamp shining in the darkness," as the apostle Peter writes (I Peter 1, 19). It is what the psalmist calls "a lamp for my footsteps." Philosophy cannot claim to grasp faith better than faith understands itself; but philosophy can bring together that which believers believe with that which they otherwise know of the world and themselves. That, however, is something philosophy can do only when it refrains from trying to be a complete and closed system of explaining the world and teaching us how to live. As long as philosophy keeps Socrates as its model, it will not lose Christ from its sight.

10 The Latent Seduction: Marx (and Hegel) in Twentieth-Century German Philosophy NICHOLAS LOBKOWICZ During the last fifty years, no thinker of the nineteenth century has received more attention than Karl Marx. Although much of this literature is biased and there still does not exist a critical edition of his works, we probably know more about his life and his writings than about any other thinker of the past, including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant. Strangely enough, however, there has never been a book or even paper published that tries to summarize Marx's influence on twentieth-century German philosophy.l To try to fill this gap in a short paper would be a very presumptuous undertaking; accordingly, I have to ask the reader to consider my paper nothing more than a series of suggestions for dissertations that have not as yet been written. My first observation amounts to suggesting that around 1900 most German professors of philosophy would have been profoundly puzzled if someone had asked them about Marx's thought. At that time, nobody-including thinkers among German Social Democrats-considered Marx a philosopher. He was known, although mainly in socialist circles, but he was perceived as an economist and a theoretician of the socialist movement. The fact that he occasionally referred to Hegel even in his mature writings counted among philosophers more against than for him;2 for between about 1890 and World War I German philosophers were mainly interested 1. I want to thank Professor H. Kiesewetter of the Catholic University of Eichstiitt for having carefully read my manuscript; concerning the history of German Hegelianism, he suggested a number of additions. 2. Before World War I only very few books competently relating Marx to Hegel were published by non-Marxists. One is the voluminous study by the later first president of Czechoslovakia T. G. Masaryk, Die philosOPhischen und soziologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus (Vienna, 1899); another is]. Plenge, Marx und Hegel (Tiibingen, 1911). Both books are still of some interest today; yet though they criticize Marx, they follow the interpretation of the genesis of Marxism common among German Social Democrats and later characteristic of Soviet philosophy. Plenge's book is one of the earliest to discuss

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in Kant. 3 Even Husserl can be seen in this context: although his teacher Brentano, a former Dominican, was influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, he came to philosophy from mathematics, and his Logical Investigations published in 1900 dealt with the "theory of knowledge." The issues of the time were mainly epistemological: how does knowledge come about, how do we justify science, and by what steps may we overcome the philosophically plebeian materialism characteristic of much of the second half of the nineteenth century? One may object that around that time there were, after all, authors such as Kautsky, Plechanov, and later Lenin. But we should not overlook the fact that before World War I almost no academic philosopher was interested in this kind of writer; the only exception was the neo-Kantian Karl VorHinder, who tried to combine Kantian and socialist ethics. 4 In fact, it was not until World War I that German philosophers truly discovered that Marx might be considered a colleague of theirs. As far as I can tell, this development was due to two and a half events: the Russian October Revolution, which according to our calendar occurred in November 1918, the publication of Marx's early writings and-this is the half event-a renewed interest in Hegel which, among other things, was due to the discovery of his early thought. The impact of the Russian Revolution on Europe's intellectuals has often been described and analyzed. It consisted of a fascination with an event that not only-as in Austria and to a lesser extent in Germany-swept away a quasi-sacred political system with a long tradition, but was also executed in the name of a world-view that had predicted the end of history as one had hitherto known it. As we all know, it took a surprisingly long time for these intellectuals to discover that what Lenin set in motion was not the starting point for the creation of a better new Marx's early writings from a Hegelian point of view; it is one of the examples of the early "Hegel Renaissance." See also P. Barth, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels ... bis auf Marx und Hartmann (originally published in 1890, reprinted Darmstadt, 1967), and the dissertation of L. Lesaine, L'injluence de Hegel sur Marx (Paris, 1907). As late as 1931 Hermann Glockner, the editor of Hegel's Complete Writings (1927), wrote: "It may sound paradoxical: in Germany the question of Hegel is first of all a question of Kant" (Verhandlungen des ErstenHegeOwngresses [Tiibingen, 1931]. p. 79). 3. This does not mean that Hegel's political philosophy was without influence among politicians; see H. Kiesewetter, Von Hegel z;u Hitter (Frankfurt, 1995), pp. 184f. 4. Kant und der Sozialismus unter besonderer Berilcksichtigung der neuesten theoretischen Bewegung innerhalb des Marxismus (Berlin, 1900) (the reference is to Eduard Bernstein's appeal to replace the "dialectical" foundations of Marx's theories by Kantian philosophy; see E. Bernstein, Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Sozialismus [Berlin/Bern, 1901]); also Kant und Marx. Ein Beitrag z;ur Philosophie des Marxismus (Berlin, 1911). Another prominent neoKantian, Hermann Cohen, wrote an introduction to a re-edition ofF. A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus, originally published in 1866; but Lange, though a socialist, was not a Marxist.

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world but rather the beginning of a horror story that lasted over sixty years. As far as philosophy was concerned, however, this impact was mainly due to the fact that an event of seemingly eschatological dimensions that a thinker had predicted now really had happened. It took decades before a careful analysis of both Marx's thought and the events of Ig18 showed that what occurred in Russia actually had very little to do with what Marx believed would happen. 5 In the meantime, and even after Maximilien Rubel published his analysis, philosophers discovered Marx as the theoretician of what in the Ig60s became known as Realutopie, a "pragmatic Utopia." While a "normal" Utopia, to quote The Concise Oxford Dictionary, is an "imaginary place with a perfect social and political system" and an "ideally perfect state of things," a Realutopie is something equally unrealistic which, however, invites us seriously to strive for it, above all by criticizing all cultural phenomena of the given present. The impact of the Russian Revolution consisted in its seeming to suggest that such a striving would not be in vain. At the same time, however, the few thinkers who sympathized with the German Social Democrats had little admiration for what went on in Russia after the revolution. In the course of and after World War I, their number increased since (on the one hand) the German socialists turned out to be as nationalist6 as other Germans (in fact, in the German Parliament they unanimously voted for the German Reich's declaration of war, a decision Lenin never forgave) and, on the other hand, for some time seemed to offer a genuine alternative after the collapse of 5. M. Rubel, Die Russische Knmmune (Miinchen, 1972). See also my introduction to H. Dahm and F. Kool, "Die Technik der Macht" (Dokumente der Weltrevolution V) (Olten/Freiburg, 1974), pp. 9-69. 6. Except K. Hammer, Deutsche Kriegstheologie 1870-1918 (Munich, 1971), little has been written about German philosophers' enthusiasm for war around 1914. It is an embarrassing story: even authors such as Wilhelm Windelband, Werner Sombart, or Max Scheler, not to mention famous writers such as Thomas Mann and ErnstJiinger, were "warlewd." Recently, an Italian author suggested that Heidegger's Sein und Zeit has to be interpreted in this context (D. Losurdo, La communita, la morte, l'Occidente [Rome, 1991]). Authors suggesting that Hegel's writings were in part responsible for Nazism usually give the most honest analysis of this unpleasant aspect of recent German history, see especially H. Kiesewetter's WIn Hegel zu Hitler (Hamburg, 1974), pp. 188ff., 195ff., rev. 2d ed. (Frankfurt, 1995), pp. 191ff. Around 1910, many German thinkers and writers claimed that Germany defends "culture" against "civilization"; they denounced Democracy, especially that of the United States, as well as Liberalism as uncultured because merely "economic." Before World War I and then again in the 1920S many Germans considered Democracy, Capitalism, and Jews three aspects of the same threat to Culture, which in tum was believed to exist only in Germany. One famous author who was palpably influenced by this mentality and therefore succumbed to Nazism for several years was Carl Schmitt, probably Germany's most ingenious twentieth-century political philosopher; see now H. Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts (Stuttgart, 1994).

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the monarchies. But the number of German socialists who subscribed to the course adopted by the Soviet Union was, and always remained, comparatively small. Although they disagreed on many other issues, German Social Democrat leaders such as Karl Kautsky, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg, while hailing the October Revolution as the most important event of the century, were at the same time unanimous in criticizing Lenin's reign of terror. The consequence was (and remained so almost until today) that German philosophers became, on the one hand, increasingly interested in Marx but, on the other hand, were not interested in the Soviet ideology that since Stalin had been called "Marxism-Leninism" and was subdivided into a "dialectical" and a "historical" materialism. 7 In a way, German thinkers were always exclusively interested in what the Soviets called "historical materialism"; the materialist ontology enriched by simplified Hegelian ideas (the "Dialectics") that Engels had proclaimed in his AntiDuhringand in the Dialectics ofNature, first published in Moscow in 1925, was never taken seriously in Germany (except, of course, after 1945 under the Communist regime in East Germany, a facet that I will not take into consideration here). One of the consequences was that German philosophy never cared much for Marx and Engels but all the more for Marx and Hegel, i.e., for a Marx influenced by Hegel and a Hegel interpreted in Marxist terms. This also applies to the famous book History and Class Consciousnes# by the German-speaking Hungarian Georg von Lukacs, published in Berlin in 1923, although it is one of the rare books published in Germany that wholeheartedly supported Lenin. It is said that Lukacs was allowed advance access to Marx's early manuscripts, first published in 1932, and it has occasionally been argued that Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, cannot be fully appreciated without presupposing that Heidegger had read the book. 9 Be that as it may, this treatise (which has a touch of genius while at the same time being so confused as to be almost unintelligible) is one of the first attempts to describe Marxism as a unique 7. The expression "historical materialism" was first used by Engels, the expression "dialectical materialism" by Plechanov. Both of them, however, used these expression to describe Marxism as a whole, not as subdivisions of it. 8. As the original edition is a rarity, one may use the re-edition published by the Hermann Luchterhand Verlag in G. Lulcics, Werke, vol. 2 (1968), as well as a special edition produced by the same publishing house in 1970 (which has the advantage of referring to MEW). An English translation was not published until 1971. 9. Usually one refers to Lulcics's analysis of a Verdinglichung, literally "thingification," which-though in a much more specific context-seems to correspond to Heidegger's criticism of Cartesian ontology, which in tum is an implicit criticism of the notion of oUG(a.

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kind of philosophy. Until then, some were interested in Marx's socialism as an ethical program; others were intrigued by his critique ofbourgeois society and capitalism; and others, e.g., Plechanov and Lenin, claimed that Marx's philosophy was identical with Engels's primitive synthesis of the French materialists and Hegelian tenets. Lukacs was the first to suggest that Marx and Lenin had radically overcome philosophy as it was hitherto known and nevertheless developed something that recalled philosophy-a theory that became a revolutionary driving force as soon as it joined the right kind of agents.l O In a way the success of this book for which Lukacs was severely censured by Moscow (after all, in 1919 he had been Minister of Culture under the short-lived regime of Bela Kun) is due to the fact that the author describes Marx's (and Lenin's) thinking as sufficiently deep and mysterious to be of interest to philosophers. Lukacs's legendary book, however, would have remained a nine days' wonder had it not been followed by the edition of Marx's early writings. Today, it is rarely recalled that not only Marx's Critique of the Hegelian Public Law (over 150 pages in print) and his famous Paris Manuscripts (another 150 pages), but also The German Ideology (over 520 pages in print) were unknown until 1932.11 Virtually nobody knew anything about the Left Hegelians except Ludwig Feuerbach; only very few were familiar with Hegel, who, in addition, was at that time understood from the En~ clopaedia of the Philosophic Disciplines, not in terms of the Phenomenology of Mind, which, as we know today, most influenced Marx. Before the publication of his early writings it was therefore almost impossible to see any connection between Marx's wrangling with his former Left Hegelian friends (who, moreover, seemed to be of no interest to philosophers) and his mature socio-economic doctrines. 10. As is well known, Marx had suggested something of this kind towards the end of his "Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right," published in the Deutsch-Fram.osische jahrlJUcker in 1844; but, apart from the fact that this article was almost completely forgotten, someone not familiar with Hegel and the discussions of the Left Hegelians would have understood this short passage quite simply as claiming that the proletariat would be liberated if it followed Marx. 11. Only two sections of The German Ideology were accessible earlier: passages from the criticism of Max Stirner, published by Eduard Bernstein in 1903, and a short passage on socialism published by G. Mayer in 1921; cf. M. Rubel, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956), pp. 51ff. What nobody had expected was the long introduction claiming to discuss Feuerbach but in fact outlining the premises of a "materialist interpretation of history." For the many meanings of "materialism" and "materialist" cf. my papers "Materialism and Matter in Marxism-Leninism," in The Concept of Matter in Modem Philosophy, ed. E. McMullin (Notre Dame, 1978), pp. 154-88; and (together with H. Ottmann) "Materialismus, Idealismus und christliche Weltanschauung" in Christlicker Glawe in moderner GesellschaJt, ed. F. Bockle et al. (Freiburg, 1981), 9.65-141.

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Curiously enough, in 1932 Marx's early writings were published in two completely different editions: on the one hand, in the never completed, highly elaborate and surprisingly competent Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, the so-called MEGA, edited first by D. Rjazanov and later by V. Adoratskij and published first in Frankfurt/Main, then in Berlin and since the mid-30s in Moscow; and by Siegfried Landshut, a German sociologist who prefaced the two volumes by a lengthy introduction, in Stuttgart,12 As far as Marx's early writings went, both editions were by and large complete; and apart from a large volume of preliminary sketches for Das Kapitalpublished in East Berlin in 1953,13 nothing new or important by Marx has been published since. At the same time, due to Marx's messy handwriting both editions contained a number of quite serious errors, and, as many of the pages were not numbered, there is still today some disagreement about the correct order of a number of passages. I will return in a moment to these texts, which became the foundation of virtually all later philosophical discussions about Marx, for there is the above-mentioned half-event to be dealt with first. Without this half-event, namely the publication in 1907 of Hegel's early notes, the influence of Marx's thought on twentieth-century German philosophy cannot be correctly understood,14 Mter World War I this publication led to what has been called a "spelling out of Hegel," i.e., a sentence-bysentence, often word-by-word commentary on his extremely difficult writings,15 This half-event is important for several reasons. On the one hand, parts of Marx's early writings were commentaries on books by Hegel, above all his Phenomenology of Mind and the third section of the Philosophy ofRight, and it was obvious that Marx's early writings could not be adequately understood except against their Hegelian background. On the other hand, the publication sparked off a highly involved discussion which continues down to the present day about how Hegel's early 12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Histrnisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. D. Rjazanov (and since 1932 in part V. Adoratskij) (Berlin, 1927ff.). Vols. 3 and 5 with the Paris Manuscripts and The German Ideology were published in 1932. Vol. 7 contains articles by Marx and Engels up to the end of 1848. It appeared in print in 1935; no further volume followed. Die Frilhschriften von Karl Marx, ed. Sigfried Landshut, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1932). In the very unreliable East German edition (MEw, 43 vols. [Berlin, 1961£f.]), the Paris Manuscripts were published in a supplement volume in 1968. An attempt to re-organize the texts was made by H.:J. Lieber and P. Furth, eds., Karl Marx, Frilhe Schriften (Darmstadt, 1962 ). 13. Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Berlin, 1953). 14. H. Nohl, ed., Hegets Theologische Jugendschriften nach den Handschriften der Kgl. Bibliothek in Berlin (Tiibingen, 1907). One of the first to point out the importance of the young Hegel was W. Dilthey, DieJugendgeschichte Hegets (Berlin, 1905). 15. Above all T. (L.) Haering, Hegel. Sein Wollen und Werk (Leipzig, 1929 [vol. 1], 1938 [vol. 2], reprint Aaien, 1963)'

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writings should be understood: did they deal mainly with theological or with basically political issues, and what was the connection between the two? This issue became increasingly important for the philosophical discussions on Marx since in the course of time it became more and more obvious that although the splitting of the Hegelians into Right, Left and Center was coached in political terms, it originated in a disagreement about the relationship between Hegel's philosophy and Christian faith. The "early Marx" could not be understood without a detailed knowledge of the passionate discussions among the Hegelians; but, with the exception of Max Stirner, who, together with Nietzsche, received some attention around the turn of the century, the early Hegelians were almost completely forgotten-and in many cases not easy to evaluate since they often published their papers under pseudonyms,16 These two and a half events, then, made of Karl Marx a philosopher who was clearly distinct from Engels and, moreover, had a seductively mysterious quality due to his Hegelian background. Anyone who had even just a limited knowledge of Hegel now became aware that Marx and Engels were not the ideological twins they were perceived to be by the German Social Democrats around the turn of the century and later (even more dogmatically) by Soviet ideologues. Moreover, Marx came to be seen as Hegel's most important follower: his thought could be interpreted in lofty Hegelian terms and Hegel himself could be understood as a thinker who, on the one hand, guaranteed the depth of Marx's thought and, on the other hand, found in Marx his "truth" -just as Hegel himself had claimed that religion finds its ultimate expression in philosophy. It is important to add that all this is, of course, perfect nonsensenonsense, however, that has set much of the tone of German philosophy over the past fifty years. It is nonsense for a number of reasons. First of all, Marx's philosophical writings are a very small fraction of his complete works. Even if one includes the voluminous German Ideology, which Marx wrote together with Engels and with which he believed them to have definitively abandoned what had hitherto been considered philosophy, his early philosophical writings make up at most 15 percent of his 16. This applies in particular to Bruno Bauer, the Left Hegelian closest to Marx. Meanwhile, the literature on the early Hegelians has become too voluminous to quote; but see J. Gebhardt, Politik und Eschatologie. Studien zur Geschichte der Hegelschen Schule in den Jahren I830-I840 (Miinchen, 1963); H. Stuke, Philosophie der Tat. Studien zur Verwirlllichung der Philosophie bei den Junghegelianern und den wahren Sozialisten (Stuttgart, 1963); and, more recently, the masterly study by (my former assistant) H. Ottmann, Individuum und Gemeinschaft bei Hegel (Berlin, 1977), which tries to understand Hegel through the many different interpretations of his thought from the 1840S to the present (the second volume has unfortunately never been published).

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writings. In fact, one of the consequences of the discovery of Marx the philosopher was that from then on his works were interpreted almost exclusively in the light of the Paris Manuscripts and no philosopher ever read anything published by Marx after about 1848. This is comparable to wanting to read the whole of the Corpus Aristotelicum in terms of, say, the De partibus animalium. Actually, it is even more absurd since Aristotle never disclaimed his treatise on the parts of animals whereas Marx did, after 1845, very explicitly reject everything he had written before that date; thus it is not by chance that the vast majority of his early writings were not published until almost a hundred years after they were written. Secondly, even the distinction between the "deep" Marx and the "superficial, indeed primitive" Engels cannot be maintained; after all, Marx never in the least contradicted the half positivist, half pseudo-Hegelian philosophical treatises of his friend and in fact even wrote some parts of the Anti-Diihring. This amounts to saying that, although it is extremely ideological, the Soviet interpretation of Marx and Engels as if they were twins is in this respect historically correct whereas the interpretation of Marx in most Western philosophy is untenable from the point of view of an honest history of philosophy. 17 As far as philosophy goes, the mature Marx was not only a materialist comparable to philosophically untutored scholars such as the German zoologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919) or the father of experimental psychology Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832-1920), but he was also a positivist just like Auguste Comte or, for that matter, Herbert Spencer. There are good reasons for considering Marx one of the founders of sociology and an interesting critic of contemporary culture; nevertheless there is very little reason to consider him an important philosopher. Last but not least, however interesting it may occasionally be, the interpretation of Hegel in Marxist terms is by definition one-sided and, as we shall see, sometimes almost ludicrous. In a word, the fact that much of German twentieth-century philosophy succumbed to Marx is due to a myth that, although the philosophers spoke about it in reference to Marx, has very little to do with who he really was. The reference to Marx became something like a focus of a number of philosophical attitudes and ideas that had in common the notion that almost everything of the modern age was on the wrong track. While the Soviet Union claimed to be the fulfillment of all the genuine dreams of history, conservative thinkers felt that we have to return to some point in the past. Liberal authors were on the whole pleased with 17. The first West Gennan author to spell this out after 1945 was K G. Ballestrem in his article on Engels in the encyclopedia Sowjetsystem und demokratische Gesellschaft (Freiburg, 1966fI.),2.14{fI·

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how everything "was going," and German philosophers who based their thinking on Marx were inclined to believe that the modem age had more or less irreparably betrayed its own ideals. In other words, they criticized the present in the name of an imagined future from the point of view of which the whole history of mankind would be a prehistory of Man with a capital M. We are-in Europe as well as in the United States-so influenced by the aforementioned myth that such ideas sound perfectly Marxian to us. In a way, this view is even correct: Marx was a critic of the modem age in terms of an anticipated future. But Marx was convinced that the birth of this future was governed by "iron laws,"18 whereas none of the twentiethcentury German philosophers were historical determinists. Historical determinism, they felt, was an idea of Engels subscribed to by Lenin and his adherents and therefore could not be imputed to the lofty philosopher Marx. Again, they were right in a way since in his early writings, even in The German Ideology, Marx was a moralist rather than a scientist;19 but the young Marx was talking about what ought to be achieved, not about what would happen. In addition, apart from a few passages of the Paris Manuscripts, Marx's cultural criticism is based on an economic theory; but almost none of the German philosophers were interested in economics; in fact they tended to argue that even the possibility of an analysis of a society in economic terms was a sign of the society's being "alienated." In a book published in 1923, Karl Korsch, a quite subtle Marxist expelled from the Communist Party in 1926, who ten years later emigrated to the United States and there became a little-known sociologist, even entertained the curious idea that the thrust of Marx's historical materialism was the creation of a world in which historical materialism would no longer apply.20 Korsch's book points to an important dimension of Marx's influence on German philosophy between the two world wars. Having been 18. Preface to the first edition of Das Ko,pital; see MEw, 23.12. 19. As far as we can tell, the old Marx would have agreed without hesitation with Engels's claim (see, for example, the sketch of his address at Marx's funeral, MEw, 19.335) that he had achieved for the history of society what Darwin believed himself to have demonstrated for the history of animals. At that time, the theory of evolution was understood in terms as deterministic as a theory of astronomy. The fact that biological or social tendencies are not laws and consequently "laws of a historical development do not exist" was not fully understood until K. Popper's brilliant study The Poverty of Historicism. Incidentally, the title of Popper's book is an allusion to Marx's Misere de la Philosophie (Paris, 1847), which in tum alludes to Proudhon's Philosophic de la Misere (Paris, 1846). 20. cr. K. Korsch, Marxismus und Philosophic (Frankfurt, 1966). The book was originally published in 1923 in the series Archiv fur die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung; it was explicitly condemned as "ultra-leftist" by Zinoviev in 1924 and then again by Stalin in 1926. On Korsch, see L. Kolakowski, Die Hauptstriimungen des Marxismus (Munich, 1979), 3.337-52.

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discovered as a philosopher who was clearly distinct from Engels, Marx in the 1920S and early 1930S influenced German philosophy neither by his economic analyses nor by his historical determinism nor by his vision of a proletarian revolution and an ensuing Socialist and/or Communist society; instead his influence was rooted in a notion of philosophy and science that can be seriously doubted to be one he ever adhered to. This is most visibly the case in the writings of the members of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, a private institution established in 1922. Many of its members later became famous, either because they renounced Marxism and even, like Karl Wittvogel and Franz Borkenau, became passionate critics of it or because, after World War II, they became known as so-called neo-Marxists: 21 Max Horkheimer, Theodor WiesengrundAdorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm. Since it would take too long to discuss even briefly the differences between these influential philosophers, I shall restrict myself to sketching two of their most important tenets, both of which were developed in the 1930s, when all of them, being]ews, had already left Germany. The first tenet was most clearly developed by Horkheimer in a paper published in 1937. 22 It amounted to making a distinction between two kinds of theories, one "traditional" and the other "critical." A traditional theory depicts and therefore also explains reality as it is and is consequendy "positivistic." A critical theory, on the other hand, concentrates on the contradictions inherent in reality and thereby changes it because-to put it in a somewhat flowery way-reality cannot remain the same as soon as it sees itself in a mirror that shows its contradictoriness. Marxist theory is by its very nature "critical": it criticizes reality by articulating its wrongness and thereby changes it. Again, it is of course nonsense to claim that Marx seriously maintained anything of the kind; the idea was developed by Bruno Bauer, and Marx seems to have adopted it for a year or so at the age of twenty-two. It is not by chance that in an article published in Paris in 1937 Marcuse dates the beginning of the "critical theory of society ... to the 30S and 40S of the 19th century";23 when Hegel died in 1831, Marx was thirteen years old-and Marx did not write anything theoretical before his dissertation, which he did not complete until the end of 1841. In other words, Marcuse, who in 1932 had 21. One of the best-infonned books on the neo-Marxists is A. von Weiss, Neoma'TXismus (Freiburg, 1970). The author was a scholar working in the "Amt Gehlen," the Gennan counterpart of the American ClC. 22. M. Horkheimer, Kritische und traditionelle Theorie, first published in ZeitschriJtfor Sozialforschung VI,2 (Paris, 1937), reprinted, e.g., in Kritische Theorie (Frankfurt, 1968), 2.137ff. 23. Philosophie und kritische Theorie, in ZeitschriJt for SozialJorschung VIl3 (1937), reprinted, for example, in H. Marcuse, KuUur und GesellschaJt I (Frankfurt, 1965), pp. 102ff.

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also written one of the very few reviews of the Paris Manuscripts, knew perfectly well that the "critical theory" was not Marxian but quite unambiguously Left Hegelian. The second tenet of the Frankfurt School that I want to mention was best spelled out by Marcuse, too; and again this tenet is Left Hegelian and not present in Marx. It amounts to saying24 that much of art(in particular poetry) and religion unconsciously anticipate what might be the culmination of mankind's history, provided it does not betray the ideals of the Enlightenment (the beginning of which Marcuse occasionally dated back to the Greeks).25 Marx would never have interpreted, for example, religion in such a way.26 If one considers these and similar ideas of the Frankfurt Marxists, one quickly discovers that very little of Marx's central ideas has remained. In particular, the members of the Frankfurt School never speak of the "proletariat" and the "Socialist Revolution"; and what they say about economics boils down to the claim that a barter society is full of deficiencies and contradictions and therefore is evil. Only very occasionally do they refer to the strange chapter on the fetish-character of commodities in the first volume of Das Kapital. 27 It would appear that none of the Frankfurt Marxists ever read more than the first 150 or so of the more than two thousand pages of the three volumes of Das Kapital; the same applies to most German philosophers "influenced by Marx" since the 1930s.28 They referred to Marx without ever seriously studying him and stuck to some subordinate clauses without asking themselves what Marx really had in mind. One can interpret this in two ways: on the one hand, by saying that Marx had become a source of inspiration for highly original ideas; on the other hand, by suggesting that the members of the Frankfurt School read Marx as a Christian reads Holy Writ: each sentence and indeed word must have a deeper meaning-and just as a theologian may start his reflections 24. See, for example, "Uber den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur," in Zeitschrift fur SozialJorschung, VI,1 (Paris, 1937), reprinted H. Marcuse, Kultur und Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt, 1965), pp. 56ff. 25. See, for example, his article on Dialectics written for the encyclopedia Sowjetsystem und demokratische Gesellschaft (Freiburg, 1966ff.), 1.1192-1209. 26. Marx wrote almost nothing on art; an important exception is to be found in the few pages on why we can still appreciate Greek art, .MEw, 13.640ff. (written about 1857-1858). On Marx's notion of religion see my article in N. Lobkowicz, ed., Marx and the Western World (Notre Dame, 1967), pp. 303-35. Also C. Wackenheim, Lafaillite de la religion d'apres Karl Marx (Paris, 1963). 27·.MEW, 23.85-98. 28. Some authors, however, for example, Marcuse, carefully read the Grundrisse (see footnote 11); although these early drafts for Das Kapital contain little philosophy, they do contain numerous analyses that would be considered remarks on "theoretical sociology" today.

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from any passage of the Old or the New Testament without calling his faith into question, a Marxist may forget almost everything in Marx and pick up any sentence he likes as a starting point. The only trouble is that while a Christian believer has reasons to believe that his text is highly consistent, any reader of Marx quickly discovers that although Marx may have had some central intuitions, he is often highly inconsistent (even in one and the same text, for example, in the Paris Manuscripts). Be that as it may, it is time now to remind the reader that after World War II the German discussion of Marx did not set out from the ideas of the Frankfurt Marxists. In fact, since the Nazis took over in 1933, just one year after the publication of the Paris Manuscripts, only the small circle in Frankfurt had read this text; and the now famous papers by Horkheimer or Marcuse were first published outside of Germany and not rediscovered for a wider public before about 1960.29 Therefore, contrary to what one might expect, the discussion of Marx the philosopher did not truly gather momentum in Germany until after 1945, and then started under the influence of Existentialism, in particular Sartre, not of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer and Adorno did not return to Germany until the winter of 1949 -1950). The intellectual atmosphere was now quite different from that of the 1920S and early 1930s. On the one hand, Germany had not only lost the war but was also forced to realize that it was guilty of unimaginable crimes; on the other hand, the Soviet Union, which after 1918 had been far away, now occupied half of the former German Reic-a substantial part of which became a region of Poland (Silesia). Many prominent philosophers, among them Heidegger and famous Hegel scholars such as Theodor Haering, Hermann Glockner, and Johannes Hoffmeister30 had collaborated with the Nazis. It is therefore not surprising that in the beginning the mainstream of the philosophical reflection on Marx was moulded by Christians: although some of them had been collaborators as well, they could argue that they had been persecuted by Hitler's regime. Thus, strangely enough, the philosophical discussion about the "young Marx" started among Protestants and Catholics: in the Frankfurter Hefte edited by Eugen Kogon and Walter Dirks,31 in the Department of 29. For reasons unknown to me the two most important books published by Horkheimer and Adorno in the United States (M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment [New York, 1944]; T. W. Adorno et al., Studies in Prejudice [New York, 1950]) never much influenced the German discussion (although both were translated in the early 1950s). One reason may be that when Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany, they immediately got involved in the discussion about the right kind of Wissenschaft. 30. See H. Kiesewetter, op. cit., pp. 231ff. 31. W. Dirks, Das Abendland und der Sozialismus, Frankfurter Hefte 1946, 3, 12-21; Marxismus in christlicher Sicht, Frankfurter Hejte 1947, 2, 123-43.

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Catholic Theology of the University of Tiibingen32 and in the Protestant Academy in Lochum (a small town east of Bonn) .33 At first, this discussion was simply an effort to catch up on what had been missed during the twelve years of the Nazi regime, but very soon it also clearly became slanted towards saving Marx from the Soviet interpretation that had meanwhile become well known through the books by Wetter and Bochenski. 34 Since such studies were of some importance for the Western World's effort to immunize its citizens against Soviet propaganda, this kind of research was supported by the Allies and later by the German government. 35 As I said, these early interpretations were influenced by Existentialism. The result was that the Paris Manuscripts were read as if the young Marx had been an atheist brother of Kierkegaard. 36 One spoke of Marx's "real Humanism" as opposed to the "abstract Humanism" of classical philosophy. Although he must have presupposed some kind of "human nature," it was said, what concerned Marx was that in the present time man was "homeless and alienated from himself."37 The starting point of his thought was seen in his effort to find a way for man to be able to agree with, and thus really be, himself, a striving that such writers as Herder, Schiller, and the German Romantics had shared. 38 He was understood as 32. Especially Theodor Steinbiichel; see his Christentum und Sozialismus (Tiibingen, 1950). 33. See the volumes Marxismusstudien in the Schriftenreihe der Studiengemeinschaft der Evangelischen Akademie (especially 3 and 5-7); the first was published in 1954, but was based on seminars that began before 1950. The volumes contain some of the most important papers on Marx prior to about 1960. One of the co-editors was Iring Fetscher, who later became one of the best-known German specialists on the history of Marxism. 34. G. A. Wetter, II materialismo dialettico sovietico (Torino, 1948); Der dialektische Materialismus (Freiburg, 1952); Dialectical Materialism (New York, 1958) (each of these three edition improves on the previous one). I. M. Bochenski, Der sowjetrussische dialektische Materialismus (Diamat) (Munich, 1950). Before these two books, the only systematic analysis of Soviet philosophy in the West was a book published in Russian: N. O. Loskij, Dialekticeskij materializm v SSSR (Paris, 1934). 35. An example of such government-supported studies is the Handbuch des Weltkommunismus, edited by J. M. Bochenski and G. Niemeyer in 1958; in 1953, when the German government sought to have the German Communist Party declared an unconstitutional organization by the Federal Constitutional Court, Bochenski was the government's main expert-a rare example of a philosopher giving an expert opinion in a court of law. See I. M. Bochenski, Die kommunistische Ideologie und die Wurde, Freiheit und Gleichheit des Menschen etc. (Bonn, 1956) (Schriftenreihe der Bundesz.entrale fur Heimatdienst 2 1). 36. This was first suggested by Karl Uiwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, originally published in Ziirich in 1941. This important and influential book was completed in Japan early in 1939; Lowith was a pupil of Heidegger yet after World War II became one of his most vehement critics. 37. E. Thier, Das Menschenbild des jungen Marx (GOttingen, 1957). 38. H. Popitz, Der entfremdete Mensch (Basel, 1953)'

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someone anticipating, for example, Heidegger's criticism of a technological culture;39 one was interested in his attempt at understanding the coming into being of man as something due to man's (or, as Engels later trivialized it, an ape's) labor.4o One of the culminations of this discussion was a book by a French Jesuit who tried to describe the whole of Marx's thought as a theory of how to overcome human alienation. 41 Actually, this discussion was strongly influenced by what was going on in France. Marx was read in connection with Sartre,42 Merleau-Ponty,43 and very soon with Alexandre Kojeve, who in a series of lectures held during World War 1144 had not only submitted an ingenious quasiMarxist interpretation of the passage on the Master and the Slave in the Phenomenology of Mind but also argued that Hegel, like Marx, had been thinking in terms of an "end of history."45 The influence of French authors was all the stronger because France had, a long time before the United States, developed a surprisingly high level of competence in "spelling out Hegel."46 Curiously enough, Sidney Hook's extremely well informed book on Marx's intellectual development, which had pointed out as early as the 1930S the importance of studying the Left Hegelians, went unnoticed in Germany for a long time. 47 The reason was probably 39. J. Hommes, Der technische Eros. Das Wesen tier materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung (Freiburg,1955)· 40. H. Weinstock, Arbeit und Bildung. Die Rolle tier Arbeit im ProzejJ um unsere Menschwerdung (Heidelberg, 1954). 41.J.-Y Calvez, La pensee de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956). 42.J. P. Sartre, Materialisme et Revolution in Situation II (Paris, 1949). 43. M. Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et Terreur (Paris, 1947). 44. Among his audience were not only Same and Raymond Aron but also the Jesuit Gaston Fessard, later one of the most ingenious Christian critics of Marxism; see his De l'actualite historique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959). 45. A Kojeve, Introduction Ii la lecture de Hegel (Paris, 1947). Kojeve's importance was first pointed out to German readers by Iring Fetscher in a long article published in Marxismusstudien (1954) on "Marxismus im Spiegel der franzosischen Philosophie." The fact that F. Fukuyama's The End of History (New York, 1992) met with such great interest in the English-speaking world was mainly due to Kojeve's being unknown in the United States. In contrast to Kojeve, Fukuyama admits that the interpretation he relies on may have no roots in what Hegel really meant; cf. chapter 13. For a critical analysis of Kojeve's interpretation see, for example, H. Ottmann (see footnote 13), pp. 93-99. The main objection against Kojeve's and Fukuyama's reading of the "Dialectics of Master and Slave" amounts to saying that Hegel-although he disguised it as a "story"-had in mind not a socio-historical event but a dimension ofa person's "constitution." 46. See especially H. Niel, De la mediation dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris, 1945); J. Hyppolite, Genese et structure de la Phenomenologie de I'Esprit de Hegel, 2 vols. (Paris, 1946); E. Weil, Hegel et litat (Paris, 1950); J. Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris, 1951); F. Gregoire, Etudes Hegeliennes (Louvain, 1958). These meticulous analyses were accompanied by similarly competent studies on Marx's biography; see especially A Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, 3 vols. (Paris, 1955); M. Rubel, Karl Marx. Essai de biograPhie intellectuelle (Paris, 1957). 47. S. Hook, From Hegel to Marx (1936; reprint, Ann Arbor, 1962).

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that Hook was not interested in one of the many theoretical constructions through which-if one was not interested in proper history-a "philosophical connection" could be construed between Hegel and Marx. Kojeve had presented such a construction; it was ingenious in its misunderstanding of Hegel yet it influenced some important German works on the author of the Phenomenology.48 Moreover, Kojeve's book provoked a number of authors to discover parallels between the young Hegel and the early Marx, since both of them seemed concerned about the state of early nineteenth-century society.49 During the Ig60s Germany rediscovered the Frankfurt School. While Horkheimer became less and less Marxist50 and later, like many German Jews since Heinrich Heine, even began to rediscover the Jewish faith of his forefathers,51 Adorno and after him Jiirgen Habermas became the spokesmen of a post-war version of "critical theory." In the mid-lg6os the German Society of Sociology witnessed a now legendary discussion between Adorno and Sir Karl Popper on the nature of Wissenschaft.52 Since that discussion, for a number of years many Germans regarded Popper on the one hand as a positivist, on the other hand as the leading Anglo-American philosopher of science-both views being, of course, false and indicators of how long it took for German philosophers to take Analytic Philosophy seriously. 53 Since the history of the Frankfurt School is quite well known in the United States,54 I will not dwell on it here. The worldwide influence it has exercised was mainly due to Habermas, who in the late Ig60s and early Ig70s became Germany's best-known philosopher. To what extent 48. E.g., M. Riedel, Theurie und Praxis im Denken Hegels (Frankfurt, 1965); R. K Maurer, Hegel und das Ende der Geschichte (Frankfurt, 1965). 49. An example is G. Lukacs, Der junge Hegel und die Probleme der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft (Ziirich, 1948; 2d ed., 1954). According to the preface, the manuscript was completed in 1938. Although it presents Hegel as a thinker who, while remaining a bourgeois, became a Leninist before Lenin was born, this book is important since it drew attention to the economic and political dimensions of Hegel's early writings, which up to that time had been treated as being almost exclusively "theological." 50. See esp. Zur Kritik der instrumentelien Vernunft (Frankfurt, 1967), originally published in English: Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1947); now see M. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Werl!e (Frankfurt, 1987),6.21-186. 51. See his 1962 lecture at the Deutsches Institut fiir Bildung und Wissen, Die Krise des Zeitalters der Wissenschaften (Frankfurt, 1963), and H. Staudinger, Die Frankfurter Schule. Menetekel der Gegenwart und Herausforderung an die christliche Theologie (Wiirzburg, 1982). 52. See T. W. Adorno, ed., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie (Neuwied, 1969). 53. The most influential group consisted of Wolfgang Stegmiiller (Munich) and his collaborators, for example, E. von Savigny, Die Philosophie der normalen Sprache (Frankfurt, 1969), and Hans Albert (Mannheim). 54. This is mainly due to Thomas McCarthy (who incidentally was a student of mine at Notre Dame in the 1960s and then in the 1970S my assistant in Munich); see, for example,

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Adorno's post-war philosophy and then especially the many writings of Habermas and his former students55 may still be considered Marxist is not easy to say. On the one hand, these authors drew-and still continue to draw-on certain basic assumptions made by Marx concerning, for example, the relevance of the history of labor and technology for the understanding of the history of philosophy and therefore, more generally, also of sociology for philosophy, or the idea that man is above all a being of needs. On the other hand, such ideas were developed by American Pragmatists as well. 56 Moreover, both Adorno and then especially Habermas, while hailing Marx as one of the greatest thinkers of modem times, became increasingly critical of some of Marx's most basic tenets. This is no doubt why Horkheimer and Adorno in their study on the "Dialectics of the Enlightenment," which was first published in Holland in 1947,57 already abandoned Marx's idea that nature is nothing more than a substratum of the human labor that shapes it. In their almost conservative criticism of the Modem Enlightenment's path, nature became something like a garden asking to be cultivated. While this book, written partly in the United States, first and foremost constituted a desperate inquiry into how progress could culminate in the horror of the Nazi regime, Habermas, who was and remained strongly influenced by, for example, Gadamer, realized that Marx had completely overlooked the role of symbolic, above all linguistic, interaction and thereby also the fundamental phenomenon of culture. As much as one may argue that "Critical Theory" was originally inspired by Marxism, and although in a very elementary sense all adherents of this school have remained "Leftists," this philosophical school ceased to be Marxist in any palpable sense very soon after World War II. Nevertheless, the influence this school exercised in Germany led to an intensified interest in Marx and, indeed, all kinds of Marxism. This is particularly true of the German version of the Student Revolution that started in Berlin in 1967 and was initially influenced above all by Herbert Marcuse. Again, it was not the famous book on Hegel and the Revohis The Critical Theory ofJilrgen Habermas (MIT, 1978). See also M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London, 1973), and more recently the 6 volumes edited by J. Bernstein, The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments (London, 1994). 55. For example, A. Wellmer, Kritische Gesellschaftstheurie und Positivismus (Frankfurt, 1969). 56. It is not by chance that in the 1960s Habermas was very much interested in Peirce; see, e.g., his Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt, 1968), pp. 92ff. The notion that man is a being that owes its intelligence to its needs was quite common among thinkers and poets such as Herder and Schiller; cf. Popitz (footnote 37); it was taken up by the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen; see his Der Mensch (Bonn, 1950). 57. Dialektik der Aujkliirung (Amsterdam, 1947; rev. ed., Frankfurt, 1969).

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lution written by Marcuse in the United States during World War II58 that had the greatest influence, but rather two of his less well-known texts: an article written in the mid-1930s and lectures he gave at Berlin University in 1967. In the article 59 Marcuse had tried to show that Nazism (which by now almost everybody called "Fascism") 60 was something like an inevitable proliferation of fully developed Capitalism. Since about this time a few members of the German neo-Nazi Party were elected members of one or two German state parliaments, many students felt that while Capitalism still was thriving, soon "Fascism" would return. In his Berlin lectures61 Marcuse (whose services to the American secret service during World War II remained largely unknown) enlarged upon his claim that as the proletariat had failed in its historical role, the Socialist Revolution had to be taken care of by intellectuals. 62 Marcuse was obviously still a Marxist and remained one until his death; although he argued that Marx was mistaken about the role of the proletariat, he saw the solution of all contemporary problems in a Socialist Revolution overthrowing Capitalism. Habermas, on the contrary, always insisted that a victory of Socialism cannot mean a disappearance of the liberal democratic state;63 in this respect he was closer to Engels after Marx's death than to Marx himself. The young leftist radicals loved Marcuse because he encouraged 58. H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (New York, 1941); in the re-edition of 1960 Marcuse added a "Note on Dialectic." 59. Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der totalitaren Staatsauffassung, originally published in Zeitschrift fUr Sozialforschung III/2 (Paris, 1934), now, for example, in H. Marcuse, Kulturund GesellschajtI(Frankfurt/M., 1965). Foran analysis of this point of view see H. Kiesewetter, 2d ed., pp. 467fI. 60. It is little known that the (bad) habit of subsuming "Nazism" under "Fascism" is Soviet in origin; it was first developed in an article published in Pod :tnamenem Mamsiz.ma (German edition: Unter dem Banner des Marxismus) in 1926. 61. The lectures were in part published in H. Marcuse, Psychoanalyse und Politik (Frankfurt-Wien, 1968); see also An Essay on Liberation (New York, 1969), published almost simultaneously in German as VeT.5uch wer die Befreiung (Frankfurt, 1969). The latter essay was written before the events in France in May-June 1968, but Marcuse clearly considered himself a theoretician of this event as well. 62. In this as in some other respects Marcuse exemplifies a curious feature of Marxism that reminds one of a fundamental feature of religions. The latter show a powerful ability to re-interpret data that seem to contradict their claims; therefore, it is almost impossible to "falsify" them. Similarly Marxism, whenever one of its predictions did not come true, looked for an explanation of "this development" instead of admitting that its predictions were wrong. Marcuse even granted that Marx's trust in the proletariat was unreasonable: how could the least cultured part of society create a "better new world"? Marcuse's desperate distaste for modem "bourgeois society" often reminds one of an Old Testament prophet praying against all hope that the Messiah shall not keep us waiting. A variation of Marcuse's theory of the proletariat's failure is the theory developed, for exanlple, by the French author (and one time advisor of Fidel Castro) Regis Debray according to which the role of the proletariat is taken over by underdeveloped nations. 63. See especially Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt, 1969)'

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them to overthrow the existing order; and they did not like Habermas, since his writings were too subtle and he issued too many warnings (in fact he even spoke of a "leftist Fascism"). Again, it would take too much time to analyze the many ways in which the German Student Revolution developed and was influenced by quite different, often even contradictory, ideas advanced by Marxists. I have to restrict myself to mentioning an aspect that relates not to students but to publishers. In the 1970S the latter discovered that they could make a lot of money by printing and reprinting everything Marxists had written; even traditional Catholic publishing houses such as Herder or Kosel began to publish Marxist writings. It was as if they wanted to thrive on digging their own grave; or perhaps it is more correct to suggest that they did not worry about the future at all as long as they could make money out of a fad-as it turned out, an accurate line of thinking, since both the Student Revolution and its interest in Marxism was over by the mid197°s. Whatever the case, this enormous flood of publications and re-editions had a curious side effect. Whereas up to the mid-1960s one had to search in libraries to find older Marxist writings (discovering in the process that there are, on the one hand, many kinds of Marxism, and that, on the other hand, there is such a thing as a history of Marxist ideas), now suddenly the writings of Habermas and Mao, of Engels and Marcuse, of Korsch and Garaudy, not to mention Marx and Lenin were to be found side by side in the windows of bookstores. Students devoured all these books as one reads detective novels; university lecturers who tried to offer their students a critical analysis of the historical Marx found it difficult to keep up with all these publications, most of which confused their audiences-and constantly seduced the latter into reading interpretations of Marx instead of Marx himself. In the Winter Term of 1968, arriving from Notre Dame, I gave a weekly five-hour course at the University of Munich on Marx and Marx alone-probably the first systematic course on this subject ever offered in West Germany; in the following semesters (up to 1971) almost all my Munich seminars dealt with Marxist subjects: the History of the Ideas of German Social Democrats, Soviet Ideology, the Marxist Notions of Science and of History. Mter each lecture I was confronted with objections taken from the current wealth of publications on Marx and Marxism and, as the intellectual atmosphere was very heated, every class risked turning into a bear garden. Even at that time, however, hardly anyone read Marx himself-with the exception of the Paris Manuscripts and, in the case of particularly keen students, the first volume of Das KapitaL Most students were interested in

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"Marxist ideas," not in Marx. The situation was complicated by the influence of the ideas of the protagonists of "critical theory": Did Marx believe in the objectivity of science or was he thinking along the lines of Habermas's theory of crkenntnisleitende Intcressen, i.e., interests guiding cognition?64 And what had Habermas meant? Were the students right when, in the name of Habermas, they urged their professors to reveal their "interests," or was Habermas thinking of something like "transcendental interests?" And what would this exactly mean?65 Had the Czechs with their "socialism with a human face" betrayed Marxism? Were the Soviets right in occupying Czechoslovakia? All these questions were asked as if they were of the same order; and solid scholarship became extremely difficult to maintain. Let me just mention a couple of amusing examples: in one of my seminars an endless discussion arouse about whether a Socialist Revolution was likely to occur in present-day Bavaria, and one of my students wanted to write a dissertation evaluating the early Vienna School in the light of Das Kapital (in fact, it turned out to be a quite interesting piece of work). 66 All this of course belongs to the past today. In the 1980s the interest in Marxism and Marx gradually died away (among students, and consequently also in bookstores, it was replaced by New Age thinking); the great Marxists-first Adorno, then Marcuse-were dead; those who were left drifted farther and farther away from Marxist orthodoxy, and no new Marxist ideas were produced. All the same, the half-century since World War II had significantly changed the face of philosophy in Germany-and Marxism played a significant part in this process. Although British and American Analytic Philosophies67 including a highly technical kind of Philosophy of Science began to assert themselves 64. See Habermas's inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt in 1965: "Erkenntnis und Interesse," in J. Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt, 1968), as well as his book Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt, 1968). 65. See my paper in Die politische Herausfurderung der Wissenschajt, ed. K. Hubner et al. (Hamburg, 1976), and my article "Interesse," in Lexikon zur Wissenschaftstheurie, ed. H. Seiffert and F. Radnitzky (Munich, 1989). 66. While I was teaching in Munich, I had to supervise several dissertations written by "faithful Marxists"; the criterion I used in evaluating them was whether they contained anything that could be construed as progress in Marxist theory. 67. Most Christians did not realize that during the Marx-Renaissance the so-called Positivists were their natural allies in criticizing Marxism. Just as before World War II German Catholics considered Liberalism their main enemy, after the War they passibnately opposed Positivists of all kinds. The consequence was that often they succumbed to Marxist ideas just as they had succumbed to many Nazi ideas before 1933. Occasionally, one is reminded of Nietzsche's statement about Germans: "Sie glauben, sie sind tief, aber sie sind nur unklar" (They consider themselves profound, but are merely confused); see his letter to Heinrich von Stein of October 10, 1885, in Werlce, ed. K. Schlechta (Darmstadt, 1960),3.1237.

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in Gennany, many Gennan teachers of philosophy began again to pursue what, since Dilthey, they had considered philosophy's main task, namely to reflect upon the development of past philosophies. 68 Many of them, however, realized that the history of ideas is not independent of rrpaeLS, i.e., the social and political framework within which philosophers think. In Gennany, as in other countries, the consequence is that sociology has become something like a foundation of philosophy and-as seems much more problematic-even of theology. In fact, if any significant influence of Marx's and Marxist ideas still exists in Germany today, it is to be found among theologians rather than among philosophers. For example, Latin American Liberation Theology has indeed been strongly influenced by German writers, it was a German Catholic theologian who first suggested that Marxist Historical Materialism and Christian beliefs might be mutually compatible,69 and last but not least, some of the leading Liberation theologians, for example Eduardo Boff, had completed a large part of their studies in Gennany.70 However, it seems important for me to conclude this paper by pointing out that since about the late-1950s it has become increasingly difficult to speak of Gennan-and for that matter French or British or American-philosophy. Until about 1955, with the exception of Sartre and, to a lesser extent, of Merleau-Ponty, philosophers outside Gennany had very little influence on philosophers inside Gennany. Even if one leaves out of consideration authors who-like Popper or Wittgenstein-came from a Gennan-speaking country but later became completely British, it was Gennan philosophy that had a growing influence on philosophy, in the United States for example, not the other way around. This has radically changed since the late-1950s and early68. In a way, even German Marxists never did anything else either; however, they also reflected on history in general, not only on the history of philosophy, and they did it with the Marxist idea in mind that history must have a "meaning," i.e., lead to something different from what history has hitherto been. How influential this strange notion is can be inferred from Fukuyama's book; although he seems to feel close to some neo-conservative authors, his whole book is based upon the assumption that history leads somewhere. Of course the "end of history" he speaks ofis only "the final point of the ideological evolution of mankind"; see the preface of his book. 69. Marcel Reding in a lecture, "Marxismus und Atheismus," around 1960; see Universitiitstage I96I (Berlin, 1961), reprinted in M. Reding, Die Glaubensfreiheit im Marxismus (Vienna, 1967). Reding was a Professor of Moral Theology of the Free University of Berlin. On the influence of Germans on Latin American Liberation theology see, for example, G. Fessard, Chritiens marxistes et theologie de la liberation (Paris, 1978); the link was the Italian Salesian Father Jules Girardi. 70. It is a joke of history that Boff was a pupil of Cardinal Ratzinger, who taught Dogmatics at the University of Regensburg before he became Archbishop of Munich.

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Ig60s; philosophy has now become a very international enterprise, and this should inevitably influence the way in which we study and write about its history. 71 71. This should be understood as an exhortation, not as a statement of fact. Even recent large encyclopedias of philosophy tend to be severely limited by national biases. Thus the monumental Historisches Wiirterbuch der Philosophie, edited since its inception in 1971 by Joachim Ritter and, since his death, by Karlfried Griinder, which has meanwhile progressed as far as the tenth volume (1998, ending with the article "Tyrannis"), contains infinitely more about German than French, British, American, not to mention East European philosophy. A first version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, U.S. Naulwuij Ziz.nik, vol. 4, in 1999.

11

Phenomenology in the Last Hundred Years ROBERT SOKOLOWSKI

In providing this review of phenomenology in the last century, I will give both a historical survey and a brief philosophical analysis. I will call to mind a number of significant facts concerning the phenomenological movement and as I do so I will try to discuss some philosophical doctrines of phenomenology and the interpretation we can make of them. 1

The phenomenological movement fits very neatly, almost exactly, into the twentieth century. The work that is generally considered to be the first true phenomenological work, Husserl's Logical Investigations, appeared in two parts in the years 1900 and 1901, so the new movement began precisely with the dawning of the twentieth century. Moreover, this date was literally a new beginning, because Husserl was so truly an original philosopher. He cannot be considered as continuing a tradition that had taken shape before him; even Heidegger, as strong a philosopher as he was, can be understood only in the tradition opened up by Husserl, but Husserl did not have any such overshadowing predecessors. He drew on the work of Franz Brentano and the psychologist Carl Stumpf, but he greatly exceeded them. His theory of intentionality, for example, is far superior to that of Brentano. Husserl's written work before 1900 (his Philosophy of Arithmetic, which appeared in 1891, and the few essays that followed the book), although it foreshadows some of his later thought, is justly considered to be prephenomenological, in the way that Kant's writings before the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 are taken to be precritical. So now, as we stand at the end of the twentieth century, we can look back at the philosophical movement that began in the year 1900 and attempt to survey it. Husserl had been a Privatdozent at Halle for fourteen years when, because of the success of Logical Investigations, he was invited to become 202

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professor at GOttingen. He was at GOttingen from 1901 to 1916, when he moved to Freiburg, where he taught from 1916 to his retirement in 1928. He remained at Freiburg another ten years until his death in 1938 at the age of seventy-nine. Husserl published only six books during his lifetime: Philosophy ofArithrTU!tic ( 1891 ) , Logical Investigations ( 1900 -190 1 ) , Ideas I (1913), Lectures on Inner TirTU!-Consciousness (1928), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), and Cartesian Meditations (1931), which appeared in French. However, he composed a lot of material, in preparation of possible manuscripts, in course lectures, and in philosophical sketches that he worked out for himself; he philosophized by writing. All these materials were collected in the Husserl Archives and many volumes were published posthumously in the series Husserliana, which now numbers twenty-nine titles and is still counting. A total of about forty volumes is planned. Elizabeth Stroker has observed that Husserl always remained something of a natural scientist even when he turned to philosophy; he had begun his studies and written his doctoral thesis in mathematics, and also studied astronomy and psychology before entering philosophy. As a natural scientist, he was, Stroker says, more inclined to the experiment than to the monograph, and his many philosophical compositions were like so many empirical studies or experiments. Even his larger books were more like collections of small studies rather than architectonically structured compositions. Through his teaching and writings, Husserl stimulated the growth of several branches of phenomenology during his lifetime. Another important way in which he exercised influence was through his editorial work on the Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phiinomenologische Forschung, which he founded in 1913. Many important German monographs appeared in that yearbook, including Heidegger's Being and TirTU!, Husserl's own Ideas I and Formal and Transcendental Logic, Scheler's Formalism in Ethics, and works by Adolf Reinach, Alexander Ptander, Oskar Becker, and Moritz Geiger. A total of eleven volumes, some of which contained more than one work, were published in this series between 1913 and 1930. The last was a study by Eugen Fink entitled Vergegenwiirtigung und Bild, Representation and Image. Two philosophical groups were influenced by Husserl during his teaching period, one at GOttingen and one at Munich. The one at Munich arose spontaneously through the reading of Logical Investigations. At the University of Munich, students of Theodor Lipps had organized a philosophical group around the tum of the century; the group, including such figures as Alexander Ptander and Johannes Daubert at the beginning, and later Adolf Reinach, Theodor Conrad, Hedwig Conrad-Martius,

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Moritz Geiger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Max Scheler, was influenced by Hussed's written work and gradually became an independent center of phenomenology. Members met frequently with Hussed at Gottingen, they invited him to lecture at Munich, and some transferred to GOttingen to study with him. What interested the Munich philosophers was Hussed's overcoming of psychologism and his restoration of realism in philosophy. They disliked his later development of a transcendental philosophy, however, thinking it to be a relapse into idealism, and they thought of their own work as phenomenology without the reduction. At GOttingen, subsequently, another group was formed, the COttinger Philosophische Gesellschaft. Some members came from Munich, such as Reinach, Daubert, Conrad, Conrad-Martius, and von Hildebrand, and were joined by such figures as Alexander Koyre and Jean Hering. Roman Ingarden and Edith Stein became members of this group and later went with Hussed to Freiburg. When Hussed moved to Freiburg in 1916, no formal circle of phenomenology was established there, but many prominent figures worked with him: Stein, Ingarden, Fink, Ludwig Landgrebe, and especially Martin Heidegger. Others who were influenced by him while studying elsewhere in the 1920S were Jacob Klein and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who were at Marburg and were more directly influenced by Heidegger. 2

During the 1920S Husserl's philosophical movement, as a cultural phenomenon, was somewhat derailed by the appearance of Heidegger on the academic and intellectual scene. Heidegger made a tremendous impression on the philosophical wodd in Germany and stole Hussed's thunder. Hussed and Heidegger form one of the great pairs of thinkers in the history of philosophy, and to understand their relationship let us move back a few years to 1907, when Heidegger read Brentano's book on the many senses of being in Aristotle. Two years later as a student at Freiburg he read Husserl's LogicalInvestigations. He completed his doctoral dissertation under the neokantian Heinrich Rickert in 1913, wrote his habilitation in 1915, and then began teaching at Freiburg, just as Hussed was coming there. As a young teacher, Heidegger lectured on Greek philosophers and on phenomenology, and also on the philosophy of religion. He was invited to teach at Marburg and left Freiburg in 1923. In the winter of 1923-1924 he composed the first draft of Being and Time and began teaching at Marburg in 1924. Being and Time was published in 1927. Heidegger was invited to succeed Hussed in Freiburg on his retirement in 1928. Heidegger had remained at Marburg for four years, 1924

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to 1928, but his lectures, both there and earlier at Freiburg, had already made him famous and had revealed his own independent philosophical position. Heidegger read about Aristotle when he was seventeen years old and he read Husserl's Logical Investigations when he was nineteen. It was the combination of these two sources that deeply shaped him philosophically. In Being and Time §7 he asserts that the method of his analysis will be phenomenological, and he provides a lucid explanation of what phenomenology means, but despite the influence Husserl exercised on him, there are a number of obvious differences between the two philosophers. First, Heidegger formulates his task in classical terms and shows a great knowledge of the history of philosophy. Husserl was a mathematician who came to philosophy, while Heidegger was educated as a philosopher from the beginning. Being and Time quotes such sources as Aristotle, Augustine, St. Thomas, Suarez, Descartes, Kant, and other philosophers and theologians, as well as the Book of Genesis, Calvin, Zwingli, and Aesop, and it sets as its goal the rejuvenation of the issue of being. Heidegger was able to make use of what Husserl accomplished by applying it to more classical philosophical issues. He was also better able than Husserl to use a classical philosophical vocabulary. Second, Husserl is very much a rationalist in the style and content of his work, while the style and content of Heidegger's writing and teaching engages the reader and puts existential questions to him. This is both good and bad. It is good in that it brings out explicitly the fact that philosophy is not merely unconcerned or carefree speculation but a way of life and a great good for those who practice it. However, it is bad in that when pursuing his philosophical project, Heidegger did not distinguish adequately between the theoretical and the practical life, between philosophy and prudence; he also did not distinguish clearly between the theoretic life and religion. He wanted to be a prophet and moral leader as much as a thinker, and the oscillation between these two forms of life confused his own work and affected the thought of those who were influenced by him. The main purpose of Heidegger's analysis of beingtoward-death, or of anxiety, or of authenticity, is not primarily to give us grounds for worry or make us earnest about life or get us out to vote; rather, he is using these phenomena as approaches to the question of being. They have an analytic function, not an exhortative one. They are to show that the question of being is disclosed not only in speculative metaphysics but in all the varieties of human existence. However, even in Heidegger's own writings, the analytical purpose does blend with a religious and moral exhortation. There is something prophetic about them. One can be a prophet, awaiting the new coming of the gods, and one can

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be a philosopher, but it is misleading to try to be both at the same time and under the same formality. Another way of expressing this difference between Husserl and Heidegger is to say that Husserl began with the impulse of a scientist and a mathematician and transformed it into philosophy, while Heidegger began with the religious impulse and blended it into the philosophical one. Husserl, the rationalist, thought of himself as a free, nondoctrinal and non dogmatic Christian, but he used religious categories very sparingly in his work. He was intent on philosophy as a rigorous science. He respected religion, but was somewhat distanced from it. Heidegger, in contrast, seemed to present his philosophy as a resolution of the religious problem. It has been observed that several followers of Husserl converted to Catholicism or Protestantism; this occurred not because Husserl encouraged such a move (indeed, he seemed somewhat embarrassed by it), but because his work restored respectability to various domains of experience and thus allowed people to cultivate their own religious development without hindrance. Such conversions were not common among Heidegger's followers, however, and I would suggest that in the human context that Heidegger formed, the opposite of a conversion would be more likely to take place. People would be inclined to turn from religious faith to philosophy as a way of dealing with the religious impulse. Questions of mortality, authenticity, decisiveness, the hermeneutics of human existence, and temporality and eternity would be treated by philosophical analysis and exhortation rather than by religious dedication in its traditional form. The philosophical response would even be taken as the more authentic of the two. No one tried to interpret away the New Testament in Husserlian categories, but Rudolf Bultmann tried to do so with the categories of Heidegger, and one might claim that others did something in regard to Catholic belief. What was it in Husserl that most influenced Heidegger? I would suggest that it was the fact that in Husserl the Cartesian or the modern epistemological problem had been dissolved and overcome. The notion of a solitary, self-enclosed consciousness, aware only of itself and its own sensations and thoughts, was disposed of by Husserl's concept of intentionality. Indeed, the epistemological problem is ridiculed in Being and Time § 13. We experience and perceive things, not just the appearances or impacts or impressions that things make on us. Things appear to us through a manifold of presentations. Husserl presented this realism not only by pointing out the self-contradictions of the Cartesian and Lockean position, of the way of ideas, but also by working out detailed descriptive analyses of various forms of intentionality, analyses that proved

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themselves by virtue of their precision and convincingness. One does not prove realism; how could one do so? What premises could one use? One displays it. More particularly, this breakthrough in the doctrine of intentionality expressed itself in two more particular doctrines of Husserl: first, his analysis of categorial articulation, and second his insistence that we truly do intend things in their absence. Both of these teachings are vividly present in the early Heidegger. In his doctrine of categoriality, Husserl shows that when we articulate things, when we judge or relate or compose or structure things, we do not merely arrange our own internal concepts or ideas or impressions; rather, we articulate things in the world. We bring out parts within wholes. Our judgments, for example, are not internal compositions that we try to match against some sort of "external" world; they are, in their most elementary form, the assertive articulation of the things we experience; we articulate the presence of things, the manner in which they are given to us. Thus, Husserl's doctrine ofintentionality should not be taken only in regard to perception, in which we are told that the things we perceive do immediately present themselves to us. It should be taken especially in regard to the categorial articulation that is built upon perception. The doctrine of categorial presentation in Husserl, as given in the sixth of the Logical Investigations, was crucial for Heidegger's formulation of the question of being. Also, through the doctrine of intentionality Husserl is able to say that we actually intend things that are absent. It is not the case that we always deal only with immediate presences; it is not the case that when we refer to something absent, we are really talking about an image or a concept we have of the thing. Human thinking is such that it transcends the present and intends the absent; the absent, what is not there, is given to us as such. There are, furthermore, different kinds of absence, corresponding to the different kinds of empty intendings our intentionality can take on: the absence of the other side of things we perceive, the absence of things meant only through words, the absence of things being remembered, the absence of things only depicted, the absence of those who are far away as opposed to the absence of those who have died, the absence of the past and that of the future, the absence of the divine. Another important kind of absence Husserl described is that of vagueness, in which things are given to us, but only indistinctly, in need of further articulation and possession. This theme of absence was, I believe, a stimulus to Heidegger's notion of unconcealed ness as involved in truth. Heidegger saw the philosophical possibilities in Husserl's discovery of intentionality and exploited them with a vengeance. Other philosophers had been impressed by what Husserl opened up. The Munich and

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GOttingen schools, for example, rejoiced in the "realism" that was made possible by Hussed's discoveries. None of them, however, had the depth and originality and philosophical energy of Heidegger, as well as the seductive charm of his religious tonality. I would like to mention one more difference between Heidegger and Husserl. Hussed is very skimpy in his use of the history of philosophy. He does provide occasional surveys of that history, and he uses Descartes, Galileo, Locke, Hume, and Kant, but he does so with an obviously limited knowledge of these writers. He makes some incisive comments about them, and usually gets to the heart of issues in their philosophy, but he has a rather simplified, textbook knowledge of their work. On the other hand, the content of what Hussed proposes for philosophical analysis is rich and wide-ranging. He opens up issues in the structure of language, perception, time in its various forms, memory, anticipation, living things, mathematics, numbers, causality, and so on. He proposes many regions of being as subjects for analysis. Hussed, then, is oversimplified in his treatment of authors but rich in his treatment of speculative topics. Heidegger is the opposite of this. He seems concerned with only one issue, the question of being and its implications. It is true that in Being and Time he introduces a number of what could be taken as "regional" issues,'such as instrumentality and speech and death, but all of them are subordinated to the one question of being. He does not spread out various regional tasks before us, various domains to be analyzed; he is philosophically a monomaniac, always on the way to the first principles, while Hussed both moves towards the first principles and then spends much time moving away from them and embodying them in the various things we experience. As regards content, Hussed seems variegated while Heidegger seems oversimplified. As regards authors, however, Heidegger is positively exuberant in his variety. He discusses in great detail and in sophisticated interpretations the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, medieval thinkers, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, as well as poets such as Holderin and Rilke and religious writers such as Angelus Silesius and Luther. All of these writers, however, are examined in regard to how the question of being is raised in them. I would also like to mention the importance Heidegger had for a new approach to Greek philosophy, for the interpretation of the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle, especially in Germany and France during the rich period of the last hundred years. Before closing this survey of the German phase of phenomenology, I should say a word about Max Scheler. Scheler cannot be placed as cleady within the phenomenological movement as Hussed and Heidegger can; he was an independent thinker who at some times developed

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and commented on phenomenological themes, at other times would criticize and distance himself from that form of philosophy. What makes him seem like a phenomenologist is that he pays attention to concrete, specific issues, especially human issues such as religion, sympathy, love, hate, emotions, and moral values, and he analyzes them in detail. His marginal affiliation with phenomenology helped popularize the movement, but he also moved freely outside it. After a dramatic and turbulen t life, Scheler died in 1928 at the age of fifty-four. It would be an understatement to say that political and historical events intruded on the phenomenological movement in the 1930s. With the rise to power of the National Socialists, Heidegger became involved with the party and acted and spoke accordingly as rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933. Husserl in tum suffered many indignities and dangers. Events among European nations led to a deep separation between German and continental philosophy on the one hand, and the British and American world on the other. Just before the outbreak of war, the Franciscan Herman Leo Van Breda of Louvain came to Freiburg to study phenomenology, and seeing the situation there acted to save Husserl's written materials and library, having them shipped to Louvain in fall 1938, some six months after HusserI's death. He also rescued and protected Husserl's widow, Malvine, who was sheltered in a convent at Louvain for the duration of the war. Van Breda's actions led to the establishment of the Husserl Archives at the University of Louvain after the war. The Archives became an important international center for publication, edition, and research into HusserI's thought. Affiliated archives were later established at Cologne, Freiburg, Paris, and New York.

3 After the German, it was certainly the French branch that was of greatest significance for the phenomenological movement. Emmanuel Levinas studied with Husserl and Heidegger in the 1920S, wrote a thesis on the concept of intuition in Husserl's thought, which was published in 1930, and co-translated Carlesian Meditations, which appeared in 1931. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) spent two years in Germany in 19331935, in Berlin and Freiburg. His early works show the strong influence of Husserl, but transformed into an existentialist humanism. In fact, many of Sartre's early works are excellent phenomenological analyses that develop important themes in Husserl. I would mention especially The Imagination (1936), "The Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions (1939), The Imaginary (1940), and Being and

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Nothingness (1943). What strikes one in reading these works is how well Sartre grasped the concept of intentionality and saw its philosophical potential, and how effectively he used the element of absence as a philosophical theme, both in his descriptions of various kinds of human experience and in his analyses of the ego. Sartre's respect for Husserl certainly helped greatly in making Husserl's thought accessible and interesting to a wider public after the war. In particular, Sartre has excellent descriptions of how we actually perceive or experience nonbeing, the absence of things; negation is not merely a feature of our judgments but is given in the intuitive experience that precedes judgment. The transforming power of the various emotions, as well as the lively movement and projection of imagination, are described in ways that complement Husserl's own descriptions. He speaks of imagination, for example, as "perception renaissante" and describes prereflexive consciousness in great detail. He also stresses the acting self, showing the distinction between abstract possibilities and possibilities that are there for an agent as his own possibilities, those that would not come about without his own presence in a situation. He describes the difference between facticity and transcendence, and provides a remarkable analysis of determinism as a form of avoiding the anxieties that freedom brings. His style is fluid and engaging. However, Sartre consciously incorporated phenomenological themes into his own philosophical project of existential humanism, which involved elements from many other sources, especially Descartes and Hegel. He even criticizes Husserl for a kind of philosophical timidity; he says Husserl restricted himself to neutral analysis and avoided existential and ontological commitments ("he remained fearfully [craintivement] on the level of functional description"). I believe, incidentally, that Sartre misinterprets Husserl on the concept of noema and the nature of appearance, when he claims that the noema is like the Stoic lekton and when he claims that Husserl remained a phenomenalist rather than a phenomenologist, always tottering on the brink of Kantian idealism. Sartre's radical contrast between the "in itself" and the "for itself" overlooks intermediate distinctions that should be respected, such as those that occur in animal awareness. In particular, when speaking of the phenomenon of nothingness, le neant, as being founded in human consciousness, he so stresses difference and otherness as to overlook elements of identity that always come along with these negatives. His description of le rien as permitting the ego to become alien to itself in consciousness anticipates Derrida's introduction of difftrance and "traces," but both French thinkers seem to neglect the corresponding sameness and identity that Husserl would recognize in such phenomena. Sartre made use of phenomenology within a

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philosophy that was not only analytic but also exhortative, a kind of dramatic humanism, and in such rhetorical writing one always emphasizes some aspects of things to the neglect of others. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1908 -I 961) development followed a few years after that of Sartre. Merleau-Ponty never studied in Germany, but among other influences in his studies he was helped in his understanding of both phenomenology and Gestalt psychology in the early I 930S by Aron Gurwitsch, who had fled Germany and taught in Paris before coming to the United States, where he became an important figure representing phenomenology at the New School for Social Research in the 1960s and 197os. Merleau-Ponty's first major writings, and perhaps his most enduring, were The Structure ofBehavior (1942) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Both were criticisms of positivist psychology. MerleauPonty stresses the prereflexive, the prepredicative, the perceptual, the temporal, the lived body, and the lifeworld. The richness and complexity of his descriptions match the quality of Sartre's work and remain as important phenomenological achievements. Merleau-Ponty appealed mostly to Husserl's later work and made use of unedited materials in the Husserl Archives. Perhaps because of his criticism of positivist science, but also because of the excellence of his work, Merleau-Ponty exercised a great influence in the United States during the 1950S and I 960s. Many found his work more accessible than the rigorous, almost mathematical writing of Husserl himself. I should also mention Paul Ricoeur (b. 1913) as a member of the French branch of the phenomenological movement. He translated Husserl's Ideas /, commented extensively on him, and carried out independent philosophical analyses of human freedom, religion, symbolism, myth, and psychoanalysis. It is interesting that his study of human freedom, The Voluntary and the Involuntary, was very much influenced by Alexander Pfander, one of the Munich phenomenologists.

4 The German root and French branch of phenomenology were certainly the main parts of this movement, but other significant parts arose in other countries. In the United States, William Ernest Hocking had studied with Husserl for a semester in 1902, and so did Dorion Cairns in the late 1920S and early 1930s. Cairns wrote a Harvard thesis on Husserl in 1933 and became a superb translator of Husserl's works. Marvin Farber wrote a dissertation on Husserl at Buffalo in 1928 and later wrote about his thought and founded the review, Philosophy and Phenomenological &search, but he remained more of a naturalist philosopher than a

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phenomenologist. The main impact of phenomenology in the United States occurred in the 1950S and 1960s, when it became established as one of the major schools of philosophy in this country, even though it was very much overshadowed by other more native and more anglican forms. In the North American philosophical world, phenomenology has always been something like Apple Computer in the world of electronics: it enjoys a durable presence, but is restricted to a relatively small (though enthusiastic) market share in comparison with the huge numbers of those who follow the philosophical analogue of IBM and DOS, viz. analytic philosophy and its various clones. Significant centers of phenomenology have been present in many universities, and several associations and journals dedicated to it have been established. Phenomenology was never very prominent in England, although through the work of Wolfe Mays at Manchester and his followers, Barry Smith, Kevin Mulligan, and Peter Simons, a vigorous group of scholars was founded about twenty years ago with the intent of exploring the early period of phenomenology and showing the relationships between it and the origins of analytic philosophy in Frege and other thinkers in Austria in the early part of this century. Ortega y Gasset was an independent philosopher who both represented and criticized Husserl and Heidegger in Spain; Xavier Zubiri could also be mentioned as involved in phenomenology. In Poland, Roman Ingarden, who studied with Husserl in 1912-1918 and remained in close contact with him later, initiated a branch of the phenomenological movement and wrote several important phenomenological works on aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics. He taught at Lwow in the 1930S and after the war at Cracow. This tradition was later continued as a partial influence on the work of Karol Wojtyla and the work of the Lublin school ofThomism. There were also prerevolutionary influences in Russia. LogicalInvestigationswas translated into Russian in 1909 and exercised an indirect influence on structuralism and formalism in literary theory through the work of Roman Jakobson, who always referred to HusserI's theory of parts and wholes as an important philosophical doctrine. Gustav Shpet is mentioned as a representative of phenomenology in Russia at that time, but World War I and the Communist Revolution prevented any development of these beginnings. Efforts are now being made to translate Husserl into Russian.

5 After this geographic survey of what came after the main period of phenomenology, I could mention two further metamorphic forms that

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have followed and are somewhat on the margins of phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction. Hermeneutics began as a specifically German movement, with Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and especially Dilthey (1833-1911), who was a senior contemporary of Husserl. Hermeneutics originally stressed the structures of reading and interpreting texts from the past and presented its work as a philosophy of biblical and literary interpretation and of historical research. Heidegger expanded the notion of hermeneutics from the study of texts and records to the self-interpretation of human existence as such. The person primarily associated with hermeneutics is, of course, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was not only a student of Heidegger but also a learned interpreter of Plato, Aristotle, and poetic texts. He has also been a living Boswell of the phenomenological movement, able to represent it to other countries and to younger generations; he does so as an independent witness of its major figures and events, and as a person whose congeniality and vivacious lecturing have helped him establish contacts all over the world. Gadamer was influenced by Heidegger, under whom he studied at Marburg, but less influenced by Husserl, with whom he also studied for a while at Freiburg. Some concepts of Husserl are helpful in hermeneutics, such as the concepts of ideal meanings, sedimentation, and language, but they playa relatively small role in Gadamer's thought. I think it is regrettable that hermeneutics is often taken as a license for relativism, a use that Gadamer would certainly dispute. The fact that there can be multiple interpretations of a text does not destroy the identity of a text, nor does it exclude erroneous or totally inappropriate readings, those that destroy the text. Deconstruction should also be mentioned in a survey of the phenomenological movement, albeit with some embarrassment, the way a family might be forced to speak about an eccentric uncle whose antics are known to everyone but whom one tries to avoid mentioning in polite society. Jacques Derrida's first writings were translations and interpretations (highly questionable interpretations, to be sure) of short works by Husserl, but he soon abandoned Husserl and moved into wider philosophical fields. Deconstruction is more strongly influenced by figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Lacan, and in a deeper sense by Nietzsche and Freud. I would also claim that Husserl has a much more subtle treatment of absence and difference than Derrida gives him credit for, one that recognizes these phenomena but does not fall into the extremes of deconstruction. One of the most appropriate comments I have heard about deconstruction was made in a lecture by the Scottish literary theorist Alastair Fowler; he observed that deconstruction in moderate sips provides a welcome correction to traditional literary theory, which

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might have become a bit too tidy and rationalist, but in the United States it became absorbed into a political ideology and hence developed beyond all proportion.

6 Phenomenology still continues in a somewhat less spectacular way as one of the major traditions in philosophy. Its leading works will continue to be read as classics, and time will tell how high the stars will rise. The thinkers in the first part of this century will certainly stand among the significant figures in the history of thought, and they will inspire philosophical thinking as the best writers of the past have done. Phenomenology's strength as a movement is evidenced by the fact that it presents to us not only obvious major figures but also a wide range of minor writers, those who fill out the possibilities in the niches and corners of the phenomenological style of philosophy. Furthermore, a great deal of scholarly work continues to be accomplished in this tradition, such as the edition of texts (with Louvain and Cologne as especially important centers), commentaries on major works and major thinkers, and controversies about the meaning of various terms and concepts. Although the edition of Husserl's work is arriving at the point at which one might well say "enough," some important materials, such as his later manuscripts on the consciousness of inner time, still await publication. The edition of Heidegger's lectures has shed much light on the development of his thought and provided us with texts that are of great philosophical value. One of the great deficiencies of the phenomenological movement is its total lack of any political philosophy. This is clearly an area in which a supplement is needed. Indeed, one might say that the lack of political acumen was not only a speculative but also a practical catastrophe in the case of Heidegger. Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), who taught at the New School and commented in part on Husserl's thought, had been most influenced by Weber and Scheler and did important work in social philosophy and a humanistic sociology, but he too did not really develop a political philosophy. I would also say that its established terminology is a handicap for the phenomenological movement. Words like noesis and noema, reduction, lifeworld, and transcendental ego tend to become fossilized and provoke artificial problems. They substantialize what should be an aspect of being and of the activity of philosophy. The very name "phenomenology" is misleading and clumsy. The terminology translates badly into English and seems pompous; English writers in phenome-

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nology ought to learn from authors like John Findlay, Michael Oakeshott, and Gilbert Ryle. There are important theoretical resources in phenomenology that are still unexploited, mineral deposits, so to speak, that still remain to be mined. I believe that Husserl made a decisive breakthrough in modern thought; he showed the possibility of avoiding the Cartesian, Lockean concept of consciousness as an enclosed sphere, he restored the understanding of mind as public and as present to things. He opens the way to a philosophical realism and ontology that can replace the primacy of epistemology. I also think that the instincts of people like Edith Stein and Dietrich von Hildebrand were correct, that classical phenomenology provides a fertile context for theological reflection and that it allows a more sacramental understanding of the world to be developed. I would like to mention that the work of Edith Stein continues to attract much attention. A recent meeting of the German society for phenomenology was devoted to her work and issued in a volume of Phiinomenologische Forschungen. Unfortunately, these positive possibilities in Husserl's thought have not been appreciated, even by many of his commentators, because the Cartesian grip-Ia main morte de Descartes-is so strong on most philosophers and scholars. All too frequently, everything in Husserl is reinterpreted according to the very positions he rejected. The way of ideas, the idea of the isolated consciousness, still holds many of us captive, and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge people from their way of thinking once it has taken root, once they have become used to a certain set of problems and a certain way of reasoning. But much is still there in phenomenology for those who want it. I believe that the phenomenological movement, with its origins in Husserl at the beginning of this century and its rich history in the past hundred years, furnishes many resources for an authentic philosophical life. * *This article first appeared in print in :1000, as the Appendix to my Introduction to Phenomenology. The publishers of that volume, Cambridge University Press, have graciously given permission for its reprinting here.

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The Ascendancy of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Discipline DANIEL DAHLSTROM

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