In Defense of Philosophy:
Why the “Useless” Science Matters
Man cannot live this way insofar as he is man, but only insofar as something divine dwells in him.–Aristotle1
There seemed nothing particularly “divine” about the first known philosopher Thales of Miletus when he was found by the Thracian slave girl after falling into a well. In fact, the ridiculous nature of the scene is what provoked the most famous laugh in the history of philosophy: the girl laughed. We might think that this was an incident of a starry-eyed philosopher forgetting about the practical affair of walking around and, instead, mulling over in his mind the ultimate nature and constitution of things, so much so that, before he knew it, he was at the bottom of the cistern. Rather, Plato, who comments on the event, says that, “The very same ridicule is awaiting everyone who engages in philosophy.”2
It is the girl’s genuine outburst of ridicule, rather than Thales’ philosophic contributions, which Plato sought to emphasize as an expression of the place that “philosophers” hold in the popular mind. That the man should have come out with the first quotable philosophical thesis, “All is Water”–it is not clear whether he came up with this inductive judgment before or after falling into the well–or that he should have credited to him the accurate prediction of an eclipse of the sun in 585 BC, along with correctly calculating the height of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza by calculating the pyramids’ shadow at the time of day when a man’s shadow is equal to his height, was really beside the point.3
Philosophic Mania: Why Philosophers Are Not Normal
When we look at Jacques Maritain’s definition of “philosophy,” it is difficult to immediately discern why Plato says the philosopher should be characterized by a certain “mania,” as in “maniac.” As Maritain would have it, “Philosophy is the science which by the natural light of reason studies the first causes or highest principles of all things–is, in other words, the science of things in their first causes, insofar as these belong to the natural order.”4 This definition, accurate as it is, does not seem to intimate anything which could remotely be termed “maniacal,” nor does it indicate how ready-at-hand philosophy can be for those who want to attempt it. As a teacher, I find that one can always bring the student to the level of the philosophical by simply asking “why” they do this or that and then keep following up his or her answer with “And why do you do that?” As long as the question is not “Why did you get up this morning?” and the question refers to a school night, to which the normal response is “Because my parents made me,” one can keep asking them “why” they did something until the Socratic cross-examination inevitably leads to ultimate motivations and causes. This should not surprise us, since it was Aristotle who said that “all men seek to know,” meaning by this that “all men seek to know the causes of things.” Rational thought is simply thinking about things through their causes.
So if philosophy can be defined in such a dry and technical way, and it can be no more esoteric than simple answers to the question “Why did you do that?”, why would Plato insist that, at its truest and best, philosophy is motivated by an ecstatic enthousiasmos or mania that is related to the mania of the poet and the whirling dervish of Delphi? Why aren’t philosophers, as the Thracian slave girl at the well knew, completely “normal”?
For the simple reason that they have experienced some passiones animae, some great movement of the mind and desires, which have allowed them to penetrate, perhaps just to catch a glimpse, an aspect of the reality of things, thereby forcing the acknowledgement that “there is more to things than meets the eye.” This “triggering” of the philosophical outlook can happen in many ways. Always, if it involves true philosophical insight, it is a result of an insight into some reality that partially reveals itself as related to that which is of absolute significance. These experiences can be one of an encounter with physical beauty (passio amoris) as is spoken of by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue the Phaedrus or an emptying experience of the death of a loved one, as occurred to St. Augustine when he wrote, after the death of a childhood friend, “My heart was made dark by sorrow, and whatever I looked upon was death” (Quo dolore contenebratum est cor meum et quidquid aspiciebam more erat).5
These are experiences which truly are “heaven sent.” These kind of “life shattering” experiences are called “shattering” for a reason. They cause our persona (literally, our “actor’s mask”) to crack and fall off and our soul, rather than the “face” we put forward to the world, to confront directly the ultimate texture of things as they really are. When it is another’s death that tears off our mask, we can experience an incompleteness within ourselves that is somehow extended on to the starkly real world that we encounter suddenly anew. We experience the fact that we, by our very inner spiritual constitution, are wayfarers who are never really “at home” in this world. Our earthly home is not really “home.” As St. Augustine recalls concerning his outlook after the death of his friend, “My native country was a torture to me, and my father’s house a wondrous unhappiness” (Et erat mihi patria supplicium et paterna domus mira infelicitas).6
The same kind of “self-shattering” experience can occur due to an encounter with the beautiful. Perhaps catching hold of an ideal that has evaded one up until this time, the viewer is “seized” as if by a superior force and “carried away.” This intense appreciation of living color and form, if removed from the selfishness of lust, can also create in us a sense of longing, a longing for that which, we implicitly feel, must be the home of the beautiful–a home in which perfection dwells. Surely, the beautiful that transfixes us cannot emerge solely from the tawdriness of the mundane. Plato, again when speaking through the voice of Socrates in the Phaedrus, speaks of the end of such an ecstatic (i.e., self-forgetting) encounter, says, “When [the philosopher] comes toward the end he will suddenly perceive a beauty of wondrous nature…not fair in the likeness of a face or hands or another part of the bodily frame…but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting.”7 Small “b” beauty points to its ultimate origin in Big “B” Beauty-Itself. For the relatively perfect cannot have as its ultimate origin the certainly imperfect.
The final experience I would like to mention is a personal one. It occurred some 16 years ago when I had not yet truly chosen a concrete path in life. It occurred on a retreat, at St. Ignatius Retreat House in Ridgefield, Connecticut. When sitting out near the pond in the back of the main house, I happened to gaze at a lily pad. I began to weep. Why? It came to me at that moment that even the lily pad was held up in existence by the love of God. Just as I was; just as we all are. Held up in Love, even in sorrow and pain. I know that I was supposed to be bringing to mind an image of the Nativity, but the wellsprings had been opened and metaphysics achieved.
Philosophy as Science of the All
What could possibly be the common element in the experiences mentioned above? The profundity of loss in death, the selfless ecstasy before the beautiful, and the heartening insight into the Will that underlies the existence of all things. The common element, of course, is that all these experiences cause us to question “the all,” the nature of all of being and our place within this totality of things. What the “mania” of the philosophical mindset does is to break us out of narrowing particular and practical concerns and, instead, cause us to consider how things stand as such. While that butcher, baker, and candlestick maker consider their own particular arts and the incumbent problems attached to each, the philosopher considers what are the ultimate conditions which allow butchering, baking, and candlestick making to happen at all? That “John is running” may be interesting to fans of track. That John is at all is interesting to philosophers.
Even though we may not like the answers that he gave to his own question, we can appreciate Martin Heidegger’s formulation of what he considered to be the most basic philosophical question: Why is there something rather than nothing? Here we have brought into consideration the reality of being as a whole, even though, for Heidegger there was no ultimate answer to the question. This is an echo of the old sage Parmenides who stated the most sublimely obvious idea in the history of human thought: Being is and non-Being is not. In this, up to that moment, self-evident principle, Parmenides, whom Plato considered to be the greatest of the metaphysicians, tried to grasp in one concept the whole of things and its opposite. He was reaching, but is not philosophy itself precisely this reaching for the whole?
Here we have what we can call the “formal” difference between what philosophy is and what all the other natural sciences are. There is no other science that poses the question as to the world as a totality.8 Whereas biology has as its object of study living things and botany the study of plants, true philosophy, as opposed to the sophistry taught as “philosophy” in most universities, deals with everything that is given in experience, within the self and outside the self. In this search and investigation, the philosopher does not deal with some different reality; however, unlike the physical scientist, he ponders and questions what is given as to its ultimate reasons. What are the most general causes and, finally, the ultimate cause of everything. This is the philosophical task that must be defended.
This “object” of philosophical thought, general and far-reaching as it is, is the reason why the population does not typically engage in philosophical speculation; the Thracian slave girl laughs, the young college student questions the job potential, the civic engineer thinks about “trees falling in the woods and nobody being there to hear it.” Even though they could be, even though at some point in life they must be, most people at most times are simply not in the mood to reflect on the ultimate meaning of reality as such. To quote Josef Pieper, “We cannot philosophize as long as our interest remains absorbed by the active pursuit of goals, when the ‘lens’ of our soul is focused on a clearly circumscribed sector.”9 Philosophy is not possible unless the mind is peaceful and spacious; even if that means being at the bottom of a well!
Philosophy in the World of Total Work
But how can we achieve this mind that is “peaceful and spacious?” When Josef Pieper wrote his signature work Leisure the Basis of Culture in the post-war Germany of 1948, he spoke of a new society that was emerging that was the consequence of all the forces of modernity: socialism, totalitarianism, democratism, and industrialism. This new social arrangement and the mentality that was a product of the new arrangement completely turned on its head the ancient and traditional mode of human life. The focal point of the difference between the old and the new was the understanding of the relationship between work and leisure.
Whereas for the Greeks and the Romans, certainly for Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, the purpose of work was to achieve those moments of leisure when the soul was perfectly itself and not merely the performer of a useful trade or a cog in an economic wheel. The purpose of work was to make leisure possible. To make us, who are on the other side of the conceptual divide, understand this naturally human mentality, Pieper mentions that the Greek word for the work-a-day world was “not leisure”; they used the negative term a-scolia. Scolia (leisure) is the word from which the Latins derived the word scola, the Germans the word schule, and the English the word “school.” So to be “at leisure” was considered to be the “normal” human state, while work allowed man to achieve the material conditions by which he could fruitfully enjoy leisure.10
I do not believe the word that Pieper looked upon 62 years ago has changed fundamentally in this particular regard. Even though chronic underemployment, fewer working hours, and the permanent disappearance of jobs from many sectors of the American economy has recently altered the shape of the World of Total Work, it seems to me that we can say of this state that it resembles Original Sin. Even though the thing itself is gone, the effects on our modern minds and souls are not easily uprooted. Will true leisure regain its footing in human existence simply because people are unemployed? No. We will still have the anti-traditional notion that the purpose of “leisure” (“weekends off”) is for the purpose of refreshing us so that we can go to work on Monday or keep looking for work on Monday. It is this new mentality that has not only worked to destroy the conditions necessary for the true philosophical thought and contemplation, but has, also, done much to undermine the human personality and, most importantly, human joy in living? Honest joy, authentic personal and spiritual life, and the philosophical attitude seem to stand or fall together.
Acedia (Sloth): Work as Escape from Who We Are
Without question, the most interesting and unexpected aspect of Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture is his consideration of one of the seven capital vices, acedia or sloth. The main reason why Pieper’s analysis is so interesting and unexpected is because he rejects the notion that would equate the vice of “sloth” (acedia) with physical laziness.11 What Pieper says is paradoxical. According to the medieval Catholic scholastics, it was precisely the “inability to be at leisure” that went with true “idleness” or the capital vice of sloth. How can “hard work” be a manifestation of “idleness” and, hence, the vice of sloth?
This can only be the case if our Creator wanted us to be something before He wanted us to be butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. Our Creator, of course, could only want us to become something other than a “professional,” if He had made us that basic thing in the first place. God made Man. Our first occupation must be to perfect ourselves as Man; if baking or candlestick making helps us in this fundamental task, all the better. In this regard, as–excuse the unfortunately outmoded references–butcher, baker, or candlestick maker we cannot philosophize; we must philosophize as men. It is as men that we relate to the whole of things, to the totality of the Created and the Uncreated Order. In this regard, let us quote Pieper in full:
To begin with, it [acedia] meant something other than what we usually mean, when we speak of the “root of all evils.” Idleness, for the older code of behavior, meant especially this: that the human being had given up on the very responsibility that comes with his dignity: that he does not want to be what God wants him to be, and that means that he does not want to be what he really, and in the ultimate sense, is. Acedia is the “despair of weakness,” of which Kierkegaard said, that it consists in someone “despairingly” not wanting “to be oneself.” The metaphysical-theological concept of idleness means, then, that man finally does not agree with his own existence; that behind all his energetic activity, he is not at one with himself; that, as the Middle Ages expressed it, sadness has seized him in the face of the divine Goodness that lives within him–and this sadness is that “sadness of the world” (tristitia saeculi) spoken of in the Bible. [Emphasis mine.]12
The “slothful” man, then, lacks peace of soul, is perpetually restless, fundamentally because he refuses to be the man that God has made him to be. He may be an atheist or agnostic who refuses to acknowledge his metaphysical status as creature or a pusillanimous man, who, because of a false humility, refuses the task, perhaps great, which God has offered to him. The most fundamental task of man is to be the man that God has made and placed within the hierarchy of created reality; the man whose ultimate calling is the supernatural order. Therefore, “the opposite of acedia (sloth) is not the industrious spirit of the daily effort to make a living, but rather the cheerful affirmation by man of his own existence, of the world as a whole, and of God–of Love.”13 As Kierkegaard would have it, the human soul is like a tall palatial edifice that looks out onto a vast panorama; however, rather than occupying the highest, spacious, and scenic rooms, he spends most of his existence in the janitor’s closet in the basement!
Liturgical Celebration as Key to Philosophic Revival
If we ask ourselves how it is that we can recreate the conditions for a revival of philosophical thought, for the asking and answering of the most basic questions concerning God, man, and the world of being, we should not hesitate to advocate a renewed appreciation for the liberal arts. Much misunderstood as the stuff of “Basket Weaving 101”, the liberal arts–those “free studies of the gentleman”14–to paraphrase the Venerable Cardinal Newman in his Idea of a University–are those which seek after the universal truth for its own sake, because truth itself is what our minds are made for.
These “arts” of the mind are contrasted with the servile arts, which have some pragmatic end as the purpose for their study. Surely these arts must be revived. However, the liberal arts do not include philosophy. They are meant to be the preparation for a philosophic mentality and philosophical thought. That these should be considered “useless” and a “waste of time” is simply the consequence of our viewing philosophy as “useless” and “a waste of time.” I would also venture that poetry, the fine arts, and beautiful and powerful music are meant to be a preparation for philosophical reasoning.
I believe that unless we revive an appreciation for philosophy, in the most general sense, all of the liberal and fine Arts will continue to be considered an effete interest meant for those who are “relaxing” or have “time to burn.”
How then can we create a social and cultural milieu in which ultimate questions are common thoughts and really serious questions are discussed and even debated amongst serious men again? Here I would agree with Josef Pieper that our culture–meaning our intellectual and spiritual culture–has so been decimated and banished from the minds of young and old, that only ultimate things can restore the asking of ultimate questions. What are the “ultimate things” which can incite a return to the pursuit of wisdom on the part of some? In this regard, we need only consider the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas, a consummate man of wisdom both human and divine, reminds us that acedia–shall we call it “existential laziness”–is a sin against the third commandment, the commandment which tells us to rest on the Sabbath day; the Sabbath, which can only be properly observed if it is dedicated primarily to the worship of God.15 The opposite of “sloth” is the leisure which dwells in festive unity with God.
The Sabbath rest, for those who truly practice this rest (the Greeks even had a special word for this type of thing: scholen agein–doing leisure), is the perfect day to live out our life as man as we are directly related to Our Creator and share in the creatureliness of all things. Not only can we think of ourselves on that Sabbath as a man rather than a “professional,” but also we can affirm in wonder the goodness and the fittingness of all things. This will do what no amount of “philosophy courses” will do. It will ground us in the very being of things, which true philosophy seeks to understand sub specie aeternitate.
Thankfully, we are well situated for this revival of an appreciation of the divine festival. Many in recent decades, thanks to traditional Catholicism, have rediscovered the liturgical life of the Church as expressed in her feasts and seasons. This enables us to truly live that life, a life by which we participate in the very life of Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, the Divine Logos, the Ultimate Principle, through Whom all things were made. At the heart of this festive living of the divine life, we have the necessary sacrifice, the Mass.
Without the Mass, there is no true festival. It should not surprise us to know that Plato’s Academy was not only a place of philosophical contemplation and learning, but, also, a group of men dedicated to the cultus, the offering of blood sacrifice to the gods.
I am convinced that the True Sacrifice, offered by the priest in persona Christi, and everything which surrounds that free offering by Christ of Himself, is the only possible ground on which we can stand in our attempt to revive true human culture.
I have heard from those who knew him well that, towards the end of his life, Josef Pieper was despairing over the seeming death of real philosophy within our Western society. To this was added his greater sorrow over the depths of the wounds which had been inflicted on the Church during the post-Vatican II period. He saw the loss of the real Catholic liturgical life and the apostasy of many very close to him. Let us pledge not to let go of the strand of philosophical wisdom, which unites us to the sages of old, who have known the wisdom of God and men.
1 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, X, 7 1177b27-28 cited in Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), p.36.
2 Plato, Theaetetus 173c-e) cited in Josef Pieper, In Defense of Philosophy: Classical Wisdom Stands Up to Modern Challenges, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), pp.23-25.
3 Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p.5.
4 Jacques Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy, trans. E.I. Watkins (New York: Sheed & Ward, n.d.), p.108.
5 Cf. Peter Chojnowski, St. Augustine as Educator: The Confessions (Post Falls, ID: Pelican Project, 2005), p.33.
6 Ibid., pp.33-34, note 32.
7 Cited in Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue “Phaedrus,” trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt, Bruce & World, 1964), p.84.
8 Pieper, Defense, p.19.
9 Ibid., pp.23-25.
10 Cf. Pieper, Leisure, pp.4-5.
11 Ibid., p.27.
12 Ibid., pp.27-28.
13 Cited in Ibid., p.29.
14 Ibid., p.25.
15 Ibid., p.30. Cf. Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q.35, Art.3 ad 1. Also, De Malo, Q.11, Art.2 ad 2.
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