The final pages of the chapter, at the top of the following page: “Their failure is
bound to be our failure if we repeat their mistake by resorting to a false first principle.
The most tempting of first principles is that thought, and not being, is involved in all
of my representations.”
That, we can recognize that now, as the Cartesian, and also the Kantian, assumption in different forms.
That… What is it that all beings possess, but no beings possess… that all experiences possess
but that no experiences possess in precisely the same way?
Well, it's they’re all objects of thought.
So if we give a coherent account of thought, as Kant attempts to, the principles that generate
our experience, then we'll be able to give the only kind of metaphysics that is really
possible for beings such as us.
Gilson rejects this, of course.
He says the first principle is being.
And we can have an intuition of being.
That seems to me to be the linchpin upon which our entire judgment of modernity will turn.
Is it possible for human beings to have an intuition of being?
If it's not possible, then perhaps Kant is the best that we can do.
If it is possible, then we need to show how it's possible, and call attention to the fact
that it is possible, because a huge number of people are convinced that it is not.
We also need a story to account for how we have come to this pass, that people have forgotten
what should be easier to recognize.
We have to account for its difficulty and its rarity.
In some ways those are rhetorical problems as well as philosophical problems.
Gilson in the middle of the page: “Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows
other beings as true, who loves them as good, and who enjoys them as beautiful.”
We have the transcendentals.
We also have here a turn toward human identity.
What is this philosophizing being that is man?
Well he is not a mind, so the reduction of the self to the mind, the treatment of the
body as being something sort of consequent to the mind, that needs to be arrived at by
accounting for the reliable sense impressions of it, Gilson will reject.
He says, on the contrary, man not a mind but a being.
That is, to conceive of oneself as a being, a being who philosophizes, but a being also
who knows the truth, who loves the good, and who delights in the beautiful.
That’s a fund… that’s getting right down here to a fundamental philosophical anthropology,
to go along with this vision of philosophical man.
He mentions, at the bottom of this page, he talks about systems of metaphysics, of existence,
cannot be a system wherewith to get rid of philosophy, it is always an open inquiry.
I come back here to a point that I usually make when I am teaching… bless you.
I come back here to a point that I usually make when I'm teaching Fides et Ratio.
John Paul talks about the need of every philosophical system to respect the primacy of philosophical inquiry.
Every system is an open system because every question is a further exploration of the depths of being.
So to say that philosophy is over now, as we've seen multiple thinkers say: I've solved
it, it's over.
It's like completing a game, and there's no more levels to unlock, there's no more to
do, there's no more mystery about it.
This is a mistake.
“Its conclusions are both always the same and always new.”
The final page, the final two pages…
We’ve talked about perennial philosophy and about the escape from historicism.
I think this is important because Gilson is an historian of philosophy and he's taken
us through a book on the history of philosophy.
To take the history of philosophy seriously as history seems to lead many philosophers
in the direction of historicism, of saying, “well, there are different historical reactions
conditioned by the assumptions and nature of different historical periods.”
Gilson says in the middle of page 256: “If properly understood, the history of philosophy
can help us to realize… it,” (metaphysics as a science) “for it is the privilege of
a truly philosophical history of philosophy that in its light not only philosophical truth,
but even philosophical error, becomes intelligible, and to understand error as such is also to
be free from it.”
He's offering us a kind of history of philosophy which is not simply a record of who said what
when and who thought what and why, under what historical conditions and influences.
He wants to do a philosophical philosophy of history, a philosophical history of philosophy,
in which the account we give is linked up with the attempt of each of these thinkers,
from a certain set of first principles, to deduce its necessary consequences, and to
judge its sufficiency as a philosophy that can account for the whole in a lived human life.
Each of these experiments we've looked at so far has failed.
Descartes tried and failed. Kant failed.
Comte tried and failed; positivism didn't achieve liftoff, or didn’t reach orbital velocity.
For whatever reason it's not doing it.
On the final page, though, he talks about overcoming historicism, and it seems to me
that that's the big danger for anybody who takes the history of philosophy seriously,
is not getting enough traction to be able to come to true conclusions, not just about
history and who said what, but about philosophy itself, and the objects of philosophy.
How do we begin in history and take history seriously, without neglecting it or relegating
it to the cave, to Plato's cave, how do we take it seriously and still arrive at transhistorical conclusions?
He says in the final paragraph: “To learn this from history is also to solve the problem
of a whole… of how to overcome historicism.”
What is he referring to previously?
He says in the previous paragraph: “All philosophical knowledge ultimately depends
on metaphysics.”
He quotes Aquinas and Edwards: “the consent of being to being.
In both cases, metaphysics remains the knowledge of the first principle and all the rest in
light of that principle.
Thus grounded on existence, as on the most universal object of intellect, it is its permanent
duty to order and to regulate an ever wider area scientific knowledge and to judge ever
more complex problems of human conduct.”
He goes through a few more of its tasks.
What is the solution then, here?
How is it that philosophy, with an awareness of its history, escapes from historicism?
Can you sum that up for me?
What has he just said here?
(Student: Can you repeat the question?)
Yeah, what is… what is the answer?
How do we escape from historicism?
We've got two minutes.
We have to do this or the whole semester will have been wasted.
Yes sir?
(Student: We avoid historicism by not just regurgitating what other people have said,
but actually looking at them critically, to see where they did things well and where they
kind of missed the point.)
We want the critical method, but we could do that while still being embedded in history ourselves.
That is, we could say: “This is a 1930s attempt to grapple with a 1790s philosophy in Kant.
But we are 20-teens or 2020s people, so it may or may not be relevant for us.”
I want to find a way of breaking out of the whole decades matrix that this… this is
a plus for this place and time.
And I think Gilson has given us, in what I've just read, at least the beginning of a hint
for what the right method is going to be.
Yes sir?
(Student: We need to stick with the first principles of philosophy that he’s just articulated.)
Right. So we always go back to first principles, but they have to be the right first principles,
and we have to defend them as first principles, which means we can't argue for them.
But that's tricky, we'll talk about that later on.
Was there a hand up back here?
(Student: That what I was going to say.
Looking at all the philosophers in light of their first principles.)
We begin by looking at first principles, and the deduction from them.
We judge a correct set of first principles.
And a major question for this course and for the next one in epistemology: How do we choose
first principles?
Is it arbitrary?
It can't be argued.
How do you show that one set of first principles is superior to another?
Perhaps by showing that one…
some sets of first principles lead to an unsatisfactory conclusion, to a failed experiment.
I think the other element that’s in this, and we'll talk about this later on if we if
we can, is his statement that metaphysics…
I'm sorry, all other philosophical knowledge ultimately depends on metaphysics.
It's getting the metaphysics right that allows you to have the rest of this knowledge.
That's the way in which everything is going to follow from this.
That's going to give us the kind of transhistorical nature of philosophical conclusions that we require.