A Few More Thoughts...

If in fact we are beings whose mode of knowing is born from contact with the sensible, then one should expect all philosophical thought to analogously employ relations of the imagination. And it seems to me that very interesting ways of imagining traditional metaphysical concepts crop up all across the history of Western thought, especially in the rather dramatic narratives documenting where philosophy and theology have gone wrong and where they need to go from now on. But after reading even a fraction of the most well known pre-modern thinkers with a hermeneutic of generosity and a little sensitivity to historical context, I've come to wonder: how many of these narratives accurately draw out the real implications of what they critique? How many are based on "pictures" of the philosophical concepts that are actually contrary to the ways they were imagined before?

I tend to follow MacIntyre (loosely) in determining precisely what it means for any tradition of enquiry to progress and develop: crisis---the tradition lacks the intellectual resources to provide answers---draws from other traditions, expanding the tradition beyond its former borders; such a process would reasonably mark the way forward. So it seems that the grand narratives of metaphysical failure either accurately point out the real weakness of certain concepts or systems, allowing us to look beyond them and advance the tradition; or the weaknesses are imagined, based on relations the concepts themselves do not essentially imply, in which case a move away from such concepts could mark the regression of the tradition and the consequential rebirth of problems the concepts in question formerly solved.

It’s obvious that really bad imagining stems from some fundamental conceptual errors, and it may be that the failure to grasp the concepts in the first place leads to the perpetuation of a distorted metaphysical “picture.” But we are part of a tradition of enquiry. We are also embodied beings, encultured beings, and our intellectual development is influenced by so many aesthetic and non-conceptual elements. It is thus beyond doubt that the resources of our imagination form an essential part of what governs our proper reception of concepts from our philosophical forefathers. And it seems before any real conceptual agreement is reached, the first thing that becomes clear in discussion with others is the difference in how our imaginations are influencing our ideas.

So perhaps we should only offer our damning genealogies once we have, as a part of our thinking, done the proper hermeneutical step of regaining the ways in which our concepts are truly meant to be imagined. We may in fact expose fundamental disharmonies on the conceptual and imaginary planes, revealing that in fact our pictures do not match up with a rotten philosophical core. But the generosity has to be there, the waters have to be tested.

So many examples of the tales come to mind which I now view as hermeneutical failures, working with distorted metaphysical imaginations. I can list some rapid-fire (in no real order). Much of Descartes' legacy seems to provide a context in which the Scholasticism it inherited becomes literally unimaginable in the proper sense. There are the radical differences between Locke and Aquinas on divine nomination, and how radically different a vision of God results. There is the nature/grace extrinsicism that de Lubac critiques (though arguably without sufficient nuance) and its vision of a "layer-cake," "two-tier" order or Providence. There is Nietzsche and the reduction to the "will-to-power": the real man-behind-the curtain of metaphysics. When power enters the picture as a principle, suddenly metaphysical knowledge takes on a shade of staggering greed and possessiveness. The mind no longer gazes but now grabs, takes, and imposes.

Heidegger and those after him stand out as big ones, with the framing of "metaphysics" as stemming from an isolating, alienating, theoretical perspective abstracted from the real and the proper window of Being's revelation; the claim that underlying the notions of substance is a conception of false, timeless presence which creates a kind of "frozen" picture of being; the reduction of metaphysics and its talk of God under causal formality to "onto-theology" is a big one, and one that countless philosophers (and theologians) of the past century have accepted without question and spilled much ink to overcome; his dialectical and seemingly tragic vision of the ontological difference with its phenomenological lens of presence and absence; and of course the overall nihilistic destiny of metaphysics. And on top of this the folks like Derrida who seem to radicalize the tendencies and group a whole slew of traditional metaphysical concepts into one grand conspiracy of "presence" illegitimately dominating difference; with the "centre" imposing itself as a kind of inherently unwelcome god donning many masks and an insecure vantage point on which truth-claims struggle to balance themselves. In this line, and with figures like Gianni Vattimo, the traditional metaphysical concepts are inherently violent. The minds ascent to first principles is recast as the dislodging of truths from their true home in the Heraclitian flux of the real. It is an attempt to impose, to master the unmasterable, and is doomed to failure.

How far from the Fathers and the Scholastics! I do wonder if any of them, or Aristotle or Plato or countless others, would even recognize the metaphysical monsters these later thinkers are describing as their progeny!

I now take it as axiomatic that any decent philosopher or theologian simply must address the place of the metaphysical imagination in these narratives and their claims. And he must examine the concepts to see whether or not such images really do express them. So far in my own research I have found much of what these later ontologies attempt to overcome is actually sufficiently addressed by the theories they diagnose as flawed. I have found so very much that can be imagined in ways that are not only profoundly beautiful, but also address our modern philosophical concerns in ways that the via moderna claims to have sole dominion over. Perhaps what we need, and what we are largely missing, is an attempt not just to reclaim more traditional philosophical approaches, but to integrate them with modern ways of imagining. What life and vibrancy could come from theories and concepts thought to be long dead and buried! I say let the phoenix rise from the ashes if it may; and let us not be so quick to stamp it out before it does.

I am also far more convinced now of the absolute centrality of beauty for attaining truth (natural and supernatural). It is simply the kind of being that we are. If our imaginations are deformed, and we cannot recognize beauty in the harmonies of the bodily, the phenomenological, the sensible; then how can we hope to develop the resources to recognize true relations of the concepts our intellect attains to? Balthasar seems to be vindicated, at least in a general sense: with the loss of the Beautiful, the loss of the True and the Good follow. Theology as a whole, and Revelation itself, are thereby fundamentally hindered.

I also wonder, as Balthasar did: how many of the major problems in modern theology are due to the crises of the metaphysical imagination witnessed to in the narratives of modern philosophers?

Pax Christi,