Philosophy as schooled memory
by
Calvin Seerveld
Once
upon a time, to separate Reformational thinkers from ideologues, Hart took to
speaking of philosophy as a tool. I heard H. Evan Runner use this terminology a
couple times, hesitatingly, back in the 50s too. One still comes across this
perspective occasionally, which is saying something like this:
The
Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee is the best tool Christians doing philosophy have at
present; so we should use it. When a better mousetrap is built, then we will
use that. We are not wedded to Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven’s philosophical
method as Charles Saunders Peirce professed he was to his bride of Scientific
Reason…! We follow Christ and are committed within his body; we do not believe
in a manmade, systematic philosophy. Just as Barth thanked God he was not bound
to Luther and Calvin the way Thomists were tied to Thomas, we nay be thankful
we can use Dooyeweerd’s philosophy only as a good tool of the trade.
This
position feels comfortable also to those who suffer from the “once bitten,
twice shy” syndrome (cf Augustine after he was fooled by the Manichees). Once
one is cured from having been an ideologue, one is tempted to curry a kind of
“ecumenical tolerance” toward differing philosophies.
I
honour the intent to keep our philosophical pattern of thinking humbled to
continuing reform. Party-line scholastics are a burden to an original thinker’s
legacy because they are essentially Philistine, one-party disciples of a human
thinker. And it is true that when any real community of
philosophers (“the Amsterdam school”) - rather than an eclectic assortment of
diverse thinkers doing their thing under an assumed, common name (“Society of
Christian Philosophers”) - try to establish their Identity, the marks which
distinguish their identity come at first to be hotly held. Given the factional
infighting among professional philosophers, it doesn’t take much to push deeply
held convictions and years of training in a certain philosophical mold to the
status of non-negotiables. And young students of such a philosophy can push it
into surrogate gospel. “Ideology” is a word for thought-idolatry. “Tool”
relativizes such passion.
But
if philosophy is thought of as a tool, such thinking is liable to occasion
error in conception and judgment that can greatly damage the edificatory power
(=building durance) of Christian philosophical activity. Philosophy is not like
a hammer or saw or forklift to pile things up into a corner. Philosophy has an
instrumental side to it, but the “tool” bit of philosophic task is more like
the FBI (under-cover critique) or Peace Corps (exploratory, agricultural
service in foreign territory), than like the work of a mechanic, a tool
diemaker, or an expert who repairs people’s thoughts, cleans up their talk, or
gives them a program to build the Great or a Marxist Society. Such use of
philosophy, I think, denatures its gift to specialized interests, no matter how
legitimate the interests. If philosophy as “tool” were to connote
“architectural firm” that the special sciences like biology and psychology and
political science and economic or literary theory call in when they want to
think out a joint plan to help them all think under one roof, fine. Or, if
philosophy as “tool” casts the philosopher into the role of janitor to the
sciences (instead of “king” to replace the ‘queen’), a kind of ancilla
scientiarum, one may have a fairly accurate, partial picture of things. But
philosophy is much more of a pace-setter among the many sciences than “tool” suggests.
Philosophy is more like the basement of a building or its architecture than
being the “tool” of a front door or fire escape to get in or out of a house.
Perhaps
it would be better, however, to let the dead metaphor of “tool” go, and try to
formulate the matter exactly. A philosophy is a categorical framework that is
conceptually in place in someone’s consciousness and acts as a schooled memory
in which one’s theoretic activity is embedded. A given person’s philosophy is
always becoming and be-going, unless one settles into it like a rut. But the
philosophy one “works” with is not something you have. The philosophy has you
as theorist and scientist. Much as your mother-tongue, which you learn even
before you can speak, determines your world of conversation, so one’s
philosophy, veritably functioning as a schooled memory, becomes the reservoir
shaping your idea and conceptual world.
Dozens
of distinctions need to be made, and many supplementary points should be
articulated, but right now I am after only one corrective, central point:
philosophy is not a tool, it is not am instrument of thought, because
philosophy is the fundamental thought-framework within which scientific
thinking takes place. (My tentative position on this defining point harks back
to the tradition of both Western and Eastern reflection of wisdom, before
European positivism denied conceptual frameworks as committed-patterns and
American pragmatism instrumentalized everything it touched.) Therefore a
philosophy is much more deeply entrenched in one’s subconscious makeup, if one
is Philosophically literate, than “tool” would make one think. Augustine’s
insight on “willing,” that the more deeply the whole person is involved, the
harder it is to will “freely”, is pertinent too, I think. To change one’s
philosophy is almost as difficult, deep-going, and traumatic, as altering one’s
personality through years of psychotherapy. A philosophy is not disposable or
fixable or replaceable like a diaper or getting a new lawn-mower. A philosophy
is one’s habit of schooled consciousness, the natural underwear or skin of very
scientist and academic.
Let
me make one terminological precision. In my book not everybody is
philosophically active. Every human creature, I believe, lives out of some faith
or other, existentially attached by commitment to the true God revealed
in Jesus Christ and witnessed to by the Holy Spirit, or to a nogod. Every
faith-committed human creature who is sane shows a way-of-life. Oftentimes
one’s way-of-life may remain unconsciously operative, determining the
(relative) cohesion of choices, priorities, and routine of daily activities one
lives out. (This is so for isolated tribes of yesteryear and also applicable
for many citizens of today’s secular society who have lost much conscious sense
of the fact that their “normal” life-pattern is quite parochial, really, in the
light of millennia of history, rather than universally valid, as they dumbly
assume.)
Sometimes
people become aware of their way-of-life which can be held but not expressed. I
am willing to call such consciousness of (one’s) way-of-life a
world-and-life-view, a Weltanschauung, a “vision” one is ready to “confess” in
words or stories (cf myth), pictures and liturgy (cf rites), that one
selfconsciously recognizes is relative to others and believes to be true (or
“better” than others). You don’t correct a crooked way-of-life by adopting a
straight world-and-life-view.
A
philosophy, as I understand it, is similar to a way-of-life and to a
world-and-life-view (1) in its encyclopaedic, systematic compass, and (2) in
its being a out-working of one’s underlying faith-commitment. But philosophy
has an analytically defined consistency. Philosophy marks an educated
consciousness trained in making careful distinctions and in identifying precise
relationships. A philosophy takes a very conscious, considered stand on the
interrelated meaning of things.
You
don’t need a philosophy to be a Christian. You don’t even need a Weltanschauung
to be a disciple of Christ. You need a walk with the LORD, the Way-of-life the
Scriptures teach, for example, in Micah 6:6-8, Matthew 5-7, Romans 13:8-10. But
if you have a confessional vision or Weltanschauung with your way-of-life, a
Christian must make earnest in having them both biblically in line. (When one’s
way-of-life and Weltanschauung happen to be at odds, one lives a troubled
existence, for good or bad, depending on whether their coming in line follows
the shalom of Christ’s Rule.)
Every
academic and practising scientist - and that includes college and university
students coming to think for themselves - are in the throes of being formed
within, of firming up, or of altering a philosophical stance in their
particular studies. The reason for this is that academic study is done within a
categorical framework because one’s professional concepts and ideas are loaded
by their assumed interconnection. For christian theory in any discipline a
Christian philosophy is necessary. This is the rationale for the Institute for Christian
Studies to exist in its task. A given philosophy is a result of certain
philosophical thinking. But a philosophy is not inert, a residue. It may hang
around a thinker’s neck like a dead albatross, but a philosophy serves more
responsibly as a halo around one’s thinking. Like a schooled memory, I
proposed, philosophy is the hidden reservoir one taps before one knows it when
you reflect with scientific precision: the fund of experienced, ordered
knowledge which orients one’s ongoing, controlled perception; the structured a
priori foci one has adopted for tying definite thoughts together.
That
is, while a philosophy is “a definite body of thought,” its substance is
categories rather than concepts; and categories order analysis but are not
themselves conceptual “answers”. Categories make answers possible. And a
specific framework of categories limits the theoretical questions one asks to
which one goes to find scientific answers. While admitting to thinking out of a
categorical framework seems restrictive to a thinker proud of his tolerance,
unless one has philosophic cohesion as a professional thinker, I dare say, you
are eclectic, uncritical, or muddled.
The
fashionable term since the 1960s has become “paradigm” or “model”. An
insightful dissertation by J.H.Santema, which deserves more attention than it
has received, distinguishes “knowledge models” and “manufacturing models”, and
shows the pitfalls of confusing “technical diagrams that serve as blue-print
instruments for making something” (MM) and “analytic constructs that teach one
to identify key features of something” (KM). In my judgment a “categorical
framework” is more part of a scientist’s human consciousness than either a
“knowledge model” or “manufacturing model”, and is even more fundamental a girder
in advanced theory and scientific conception than what Kuhn argues for.
We
all know how hard it is to talk across “paradigms” in philosophical debates.
That difficulty is evidence of how deeply engrained a categorical framework is
in one’s consciousness. That’s not bad, in my judgment. That is the nature of
philosophy. But one should not avoid that trouble of communicating on theories
of art or knowledge or dogma or historiography by playing down one’s philosophy
as merely an (important) “tool”. No more than one should solve the problem by
becoming a scholastic ideologue. Or be a candle-holder looking on by observing
that philosophies are societally and historically conditioned and you,
particular individual, have a particular societal history. Of course, but once
one has come of age philosophically he or she stands with his or her
philosophical conception as a working categorical embodiment of the truth, so
help you God, or Reason or Utility. That’s why the clash between philosophers
is bound to be as passionate as a vow - Peirce saw that correctly.
When
one believes philosophy acts like a schooled memory, one will be less ready to
try to turn it in for a new model to cut one’s conceptual grass. Teachers and
students of philosophy of different fields will be extremely wary of the
traditional philosophies of men come down to us from unbiblical sources, as
living options today. And Christians will be more thankful for the categorical
framework formed in the generation of Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd, Zuidema,
Mekkes, K.J. Popma, van Riessen and sundry other saints. A reformation in cultural
direction did happen historically once upon a time; Luther and Calvin were not
just reformist. The same is true in philosophy, it seems to me: the neck of
“reason” was radically broken, at heart, in the philosophy of the cosmonomic
idea. Its categorical framework is biblically directed, humbled enough to be
rich in philosophical blessing, breathing a Reformed christian tradition that
is still too little known in scholarly circles.
We
can keep this schooled memory a diaconal ministry best by continuing reform of
its Neo-idealist, phenomenological setting, and by giving away, in translation,
its wisdom to our neighbour, recalling its key insights for giving conceptual direction
that honours the Lord in issues of our day.
Many to Many Issue 3 February 1993