The Problem with Philosophy

The Lenten period is a time for many things, but for the religious intellectual, as much as for anyone, one of these important tasks is that of reflection, which is accompanied by earnest prayer. Thanks be to God, the past few weeks of reflection has caused the author to reflect upon his years spent at university, and this essay is the result of an extended mental critique of both the sort of topics taught at universities and the methods by which they are taught. The author himself spent three years studying for the degree of Baccalaureus Artium in Philosophy and Theology, followed by a Magister Philosophiae in Theology and Philosophy of Religion. He decided against completing a doctorate. 

Contemporary philosophical study in the Anglo-Saxon world is dominated by the analytic school. This would not be such a bad thing were it not for the fact that it seems to not only have stifled creativity in philosophy, but its influence appears to have infected most other branches of academic learning as well. The analytic school is remarkable for its desire to approach philosophy as though it were a science: with a slavish devotion to Bertrand Russell's "first order logic", rather than traditional forms of classical logic such as Aristotle's Organon, as well as a deference to science and mathematics rather than literature or the arts. Natural science has its place, but in the modern Western university, academia seems to have come to epitomise the Enlightened clique rather than the hub of practical discussion and preparation for what used to be the Western world's most respected end—the study of Divinity, or theology; and by theology we do not mean the contemporary academic discipline marred by the same analytic sterility of other fields.

Even in the United States, where it is still possible to take a degree in the "liberal arts", the traditional liberal arts are barely to be seen. The students of European academies of the middle ages, academies governed by the glorious synthesis of Christian theology and ancient Greek learning, were required to study seven liberal arts: the trivium, defined by the tripartite understanding of 1.) the natural reasoning of classical logic, more often than not, Aristotle's form described above (see also the Summa of Duns Scotus); 2.) the workings of grammar, which aided the student not only in understanding the syntax and semantics of their own language, but also the very real intellectual exercise of understanding the complexities of Greek and Latin; and 3.) the art of rhetoric, the essential means for crafting persuasive arguments. With these three skills together, the student was ready to essay his way into the more complex quadrivium, which was composed of 1.) arithmetic, itself a logical extension of the study of classical logic, operating by axiomatic rules and providing the groundwork necessary to complement 2.) geometry, which in simple terms equated to the measurement of both natural and speculative phenomena; 3.) music may seem like an odd addition, but its purpose is just as important as the study of music is today. In the medieval period, the study of music involved the understanding of musical rhythm, tone, harmony, poetics, and as such related to both the logical and aesthetic studies necessary for philosophical enquiry; stage 4.) astronomy involved the application of principles from the 1st and 2nd parts of the quadrivium to observance of the heavens, the separation of stars from planets etc. etc. Once both of these viae had been studied, the graduate bachelor was considered ready to engage in philosophical and theological studies of his own, a successful first year or two in which could grant him the status of teacher at his academy, a title which has since been translated into modern Masters' degrees, the Magister.

An understanding of God and his universe involved the study of the tools He has given us which we may use to understand His revelations. The traditional course of study in these academies allowed for both this very real intellectual challenge and graduation to the heights of respect and academic study. In answer to the objections of those who will use the moot counter-argument that "medieval philosophy, natural or otherwise, was mostly flawed", or even better "blinded by religious dogma" this is actually rather fallacious. It is to be expected that a civilisation at such a stage of development as was the case for Europe in the middle ages, without the technological capabilities of modern science, would make the odd blunder. There is no historical fact which would suggest that rational scientific understanding of the natural world would not have improved had the Enlightenment not reversed the prevailing academic tide of its age. In fact, science may even have been in a better state than it is today—since the empirical discoveries of "natural philosophy" were not seen as evidence against the Divine, but rather, further proof of His reality. Many medieval philosophers, such as Aquinas and Scotus, remain of great interest to contemporary thinkers, even if they are taught in an exceedingly dry and boring way. Yet still, the Enlightenment came, with its secular morality and logic which did not need God to exist, nay, it required the human mind alone! With that, the Academy of God and its disciplines were killed with a heavy death-blow, leaving the Church which had sustained it for so long with a deep-set anxiety about its truth-value, and its future. 

“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the dark ages which are already upon us. ... This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been among us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.” 

—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 263

The liberalism which grew out of the Academy of Enlightenment, which replaced God, is identified here by Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, as the instigator of our own moral dark age. With the rise of the bourgeois intellectual, the sinful obsession with individual autonomy began to become the first and only aim of any kind of philosophical justification. Even philosophers such as Kant, who was manifestly a genius, became so troubled with the problem of having to justify moral behaviour within the tides of secularism that at times he appeared to compromise his own professed belief in the Christian God. Even in the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, the works of theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (see esp. his famous dialogue Weihnachtsfier, "Christmas Eve") demonstrate that for the developing middle class man, scepticism about the existence of God was not merely commonplace, but fashionable as a demonstration of one's social development. Whilst the failings of mainstream conservatism as an ideology is a story for another time, its failure begins to manifest here: conservatives such as Burke and his Victorian successors paid lip service to traditional values, and identified many problems with the Enlightenment, but defended traditionalist positions using the methods and rhetoric of the Enlightenment itself, rather than defending pre-Enlightenment dogma. Only de Maistre arguably came closest to success in the latter, but even he occasionally fell foul of social contracts and quasi-republican language in his description of government and religion.

When the Romantics began their quest for something beyond the self, they looked not for God, but for abstraction. The infamous school of German idealism, embodied by Hegel and his terrifying dialectical style, did not place God as the ultimate source of perfection, but the elusive concept of the Absolute. To this day no one quite knows what it is. Whilst Hegel's political philosophy bore some good fruit in the form of the Hegelian Right's early reactions to liberalism in the first half of the 1800s, the ambiguity of Romantic transcendentalism inevitably gave birth to Marxism, and the materialist worldview which accompanied it. From Marx was born a whole new culture of continental thought, and ultimately remains the source of many of the modern West's cultural, social, political, moral—cumulatively, civilisational crises. 

To this day, one either sides with analytic philosophers, most of whom are left-leaning centrist liberals, or with continental philosophers, almost all of whom are Marxists or left-Hegelians of some description. As many have pointed out, we have reached a stage where liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism are in fact two sides of the same coin:

“The historian, novelist, and Fabian socialist H. G. Wells explained the kinship between Big Business and Communism in 1920. Wells described himself not as a Marxist or as a Communist but as a Collectivist...Wells comments on the situation [in Bolshevik Russia] he would like to see developing with Collectivist capitalism propping up Collectivist communism"

—Dr. Kerry Bolton, Revolution from Above (Arktos Media, 2011), pp. 16-17

Other philosophers, such as Julius Evola, state the reality more starkly, correctly identifying the materialism of both capitalism and communism. What is perhaps most tragic about all of this is that it has led to the politicisation of the academy. If you are not a good way left-of-centre, wave goodbye to your happiness at university, if not your career. It is not even worth picking a side. If you do not study the technical sciences, which unlike the arts, focus on the nature of the world and how we might harness it, rather than its telos, then you enter a world where academic exegesis and critical analysis is applied only for the shoring-up of preconceived biases and quasi-religious dogmatic ideologies. Liberalism, feminism, Marxism, queer studies, you name it—their purpose in the modern academy is not to examine history, mankind, or any real questions of existence and purpose, it is rather to warp, or indeed malleate the truths of history into soft, amenable falsehoods which can be used to justify the modern left's agenda: complete moral and social destruction. 

Those who enter academia in good faith, with genuine hopes of advancing humanity's understanding, are only useful idiots. All branches of philosophy—from philosophy proper, to divinity, to natural science—have been taken over by those who care little for truth and understanding. All but one of the author's many supervisors during his time studying theology at university were atheists. Yet, we are expected to believe that such people have a genuine interest in understanding the nature of the Divine? If a philosopher worth his salt wants to contribute to the intellectual world, his best bet is to leave the modern academy, and with his own pen, create new ones. 

We could do with a revival of the traditional liberal arts and genuinely rigorous preparation for academic study. The contemporary notion that university is a prerequisite for admission to the workplace is only a perverse extension of the Marxist idea that the people must be trained in leftist philosophy before they can be allowed out into the world to put any kind of left-wing philosophy into praxis. Most of the hordes of BA students who leave university today have no idea about the legacy of the institutions they proudly walk out of, and the offering of Bachelor's degrees in Photography certainly won't go far to revive that legacy. It will take some effort to revive the seven liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) and two higher disciplines (philosophy and theology) which European civilisation once thrived on, but it is possible, if dedicated teachers can find dedicated students willing to face some proper educational rigour, and explore in detail the true nature of this world which God has entrusted to us. 

Holy John Damascene, pray for us!

Holy Augustine, pray for us!