I taught at Gray in the French provinces for a year.  At the end of the winter of 1972, on the road from Dijon to gray, I was forced to stop, brought to my senses after an overdose of reductionism.  A Christian loves a God who is capable of reducing the world to himself because he created it.  A Catholic confines the world to the history of the Roman salvation.  An astronomer looks for the origins of the universe by deducing its evolution from the Big Bang.  A mathematician seeks axioms that imply all the others as corollaries and consequences.  A philosopher hopes to find the radical foundation which makes all the rest epiphenomenal.  A Hegelian wishes to squeeze from events something already inherent in them.  A Kantian reduces things to grains of dust and then reassembles them with synthetic a-priori judgments that are as fecund as a mule.  A French engineer attributes potency to calculations, though these come from the practice of an old-boy network.  An administrator never tires of looking for officers, followers, and subjects.  An intellectual strives to make the “simple” practices and opinions of the vulgar explicit and conscious.  A son of the bourgeoisie sees the simple stages of an abstract cycle of wealth in the vine growers, cellarmen, and bookkeepers.  A Westerner never tires of shrinking the evolution of species and empires to Cleopatra’s nose, Achilles’ heel, and Nelson’s blind eye.  A writer tries to recreate daily life and imitate nature.  A painter is obsessed by the desire to render feelings into colors.  A follower of Roland Barthes tries to turn everything not only into texts but into signifiers alone.  A man likes to use the term “he” in place of humanity.  A militant hopes that revolution will wrench the future from the past.  A philosopher sharpens the “epistemological break” to guillotine those who have not yet “found the sure path of a science.”  An alchemist would like to hold the philosopher’s stone in his hand.

To put everything into nothing, to deduce everything from almost nothing, to put into hierarchies, to command and to obey, to be profound or superior, to collect objects and force them into a tiny space, whether they be subjects, signifiers, classes, Gods, axioms—to have for companions, like those of my caste, only the Dragon of Nothingness and the Dragon of Totality.  Tired and weary, suddenly I felt that everything was still left out.  Christian, philosopher, intellectual, bourgeois, male, provincial, and French, I decided to make space and allow the things which I spoke about the room that they needed to “stand at arm’s length.”  I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself:  “Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.”  This was like an exorcism that defeated demons one by one.  It was a wintry sky, and a very  blue.  I no longer needed to prop it up with a cosmology, put it in a picture, render it in writing, measure it in a meteorological article, or place it on a Titan to prevent it falling on my head.  I added it to other skies in other places and reduced none of them to it, and it to none of them.  It “stood at arm’s length,” fled, and established itself where it alone defined its place and its aims, neither knowable nor unknowable.  It and me, them and us, we mutually define ourselves.  And for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free.

From “Irreductions” in The Pasteurization of France, pp, 162-163. [1988]

Caputo’s estimation of all this?  He finds neither Žižek nor Milbank to be really interested in matter…i.e, matter doesn’t really matter for them.  Milbank denigrates matter by seeing it as a moment or a stage to be passed through on the way to the resurrected body (which, if matter, is no matter we’re familiar with)—his not-so-radical orthodoxy.  For Žižek, it is not so much matter that matters but our ability to embrace our fantasies and to give ourselves over to a Cause even though we know there is nothing more to what is than matter, despite the utter despair this produces.  The “matter” that matters to Žižek is “spectral” or virtual matter that is the result of our pursuit of desires, fantasies, causes.

In the end, Caputo thinks this debate on matter doesn’t really matter at all.  Why be forced to choose if presented by a false dilemma?

Why do we need the notion that at the metaphysical base of things there lies either a primordial peace or a primordial violence — or a primordial anything, at least one that we could ever get our hands on? Why do the multiple repetitions of which our lives are woven need to be cast either as a downbeat and futile search that will be always frustrated or as underwritten by an uplifting metaphysics of participation? Why inscribe either absolute contradiction or absolute peace at the heart of things instead of ambience and ambiguity? Why chaos instead of the unsteady chaosmotic process of unprogrammed becoming? Why not see life as a joyful but risky business that may turn out well or badly, a repetition forwards in which I produce what I am repeating, in which I invent what I am discovering, but in which I am divested of any assurances about what lies up ahead — let alone deep down at the metaphysical base of things? Žižek’s notion of the contingency of necessity is close to this insight, but he insists on treating the Deep Trauma like some Metaphysical Meteor that cratered downtown Ljubljana. Is this not just the search for a transcendental signifier all over again? Why do we have to believe that something deep is out there but alas it is lost and we are hopelessly searching for it?…

Why not adopt the post-metaphysical idea that gives up searching for all such primordial underlying somethings or other? Why must we posit either a primordial loss or a primordial gain? Is there some reason we get only two choices, either God as an illusion spun by the objet petit a or God as the Alpha and Omega, the really real and really Big A? Is this not simply metaphysics spinning its wheels all over again, a point Milbank supports when he says neither of these views can be proven (153)? All that is truly given is a promise/risk, what Derrida calls a “perhaps” not reducible to one or the other. Why must we believe that underneath it all is something profoundly productive or destructive? Why not simply confess that the “matter” that really matters is the risky matter of life, life marked by an unknowable and fundamental undecidability, an ineradicable secret or mystery which reminds us that we do not know who we are, that we do not know what is (deeply) what or what we truly want, yet to make this confession without nostalgia and without despair and without theological triumphalism but with a joyful sense of discovery?

To put this set of questions my own way:  Why not try to feel our way through [phronesis] that space between idolatry (a set-in-stone guarantee that it will all work out in the end and I know what “work out” means precisely; i.e., that I know God as the god-that-I-know, and the god-that-I-know is the One True God) and foolishness (that nothing matters, not even matter, and that what is is just what I say and nothing more, i.e., nothing more than nothing at all)?

My only reservations with Caputo’s review is the tendency that bubbles up here and there of the pot calling the kettle black.  Caputo doesn’t like Žižek’s nasty criticism of Derrida (whom Caputo loves), but then lays into G.K. Chesterton in a manner equally unfair—he “mocks mercilessly,” just as Žižek does Derrida.  Sometimes Caputo himself has, in his own words directed at Milbank, “a disturbing and dogmatic theological dismissiveness of anyone who disagrees with him.”  I risk this comment under the dictum, “he without sin cast the first stone….”  We all do this, I suppose.  But I do want to point out that Caputo’s is not the only (or best) way to read Chesterton….

I prefaced this review-of-a-review with a qualifier:  If you are one of those people for whom these kinds of things matter….  You don’t have to be.  As Caputo asks:

Does anyone really think the Sermon on the Mount has anything to do with any of this bombastic metaphysical tilting and jousting?

Jack’s message is this:  The matter that really matters is the flesh of your neighbor.  Just go take care of it….

What will also be needed…is an uncanny sense of the requirments of that ‘subtle and delicate’ art which consists in distinguishing in order to unite. [...] I will simply note that the sciences of nature, all of them, have a hold on the real insofar only as it can be observed (or within the limits of the observable).  [The natural sciences] are all, therefore, equally dependent upon an intellection of an ‘empiriological’ order….  They are ‘sciences of phenomena.’  The philosophy of nature, by contrast, is dependent upon a type of intellection which, through the observable, or through signs apprehended in experience, attains the real in its very being, and must be called an intellection of an ontological order (the most natural kind of intellection, to tell the truth; the other kind requires a more particular sort of mental training and discipline).  The functioning of thought, and the conceptual vocabulary, then, are typically different in the sciences of nature and in the philosophy of nature.  The error of antiquity was to believe that the functioning of thought and the conceptual lexicon proper to the philosophy of nature extended to the sciences of nature.  The error of certain modern scientists, insofar as they are in serach of a philosophy, is to believe that the kind of thinking and conceptual vocabulary proper to the sciences of nature can serve to build a philosophy of nature.  We are faced here with two different keyboards.  [...] It is first and foremost through such an awareness [of this distinction] [...] that [...] a philosophy of nature [could be] entirely renewed…. In the team which will work as such a renewal, each man must be able to use (with relative ease) two typewriters, one equipped with a certain keyboard, the other with a quite different keyboard–one that his discipline has made familiar to him, and the other which, as a man of good will, he will have to learn how to use rather late in the day.  The philosophers should know how to use, at least as amateurs, the machine equipped with the scientific keyboard, and the scientists the one equipped with the philosophic keyboard.  May the angels of true knowledge be there to help them!

But what about a theological keyboard (if there really is such a thing)?  Do we actually need three typewriters?  If so, we’ll definitely need each other to act as the “team” Maritain is envisioning.  I am not so sure the “unity of knowledge” is something I can have, but it may be something we can have.

If only our angels would lend us a hand….

We philosophers ask for bread, and what stones are we handed?  Commentaries on commentaries on commentaries….  What is the matter itself?…

I think that a philosopher is a seeker, and that any genuine philosophy is an adventure in thought.  As an adventure, it cannot be judged before the search has begun.  There will be many who scoff on the dockside as the ship heaves off.  They will congratulate themselves on their prudence in valuing the security of safe harbor, and the solid land.  They will even feel superior to those who launch out into the unknown, those who risk their thinking.  They feel sure in advace it will come to shipwreck.  But perhaps these wise homebodies are the already defeated.  How dare you do metaphysics?  I do dare.  But you must also dare, if you want an answer to your question.

And if we philosophers took to heart these prudent discouragements, we might never stir from the spot.  Alas, we too seek for home, but we must seek for home to be at home.  We are fools, no doubt, to dream of something more.  But since the world is so wise, and since the standing army of its sages is always swelled with new recruits, the stray folly of metaphysical adventuring will perhaps be excused in us.  We have been told not even to try, so we will not blame the fashionable commentators for the outcome–be it what it may.

Sound like we might have an interesting book here?  Want to read it?  Better get ready, because this is who Desmond wants for a reader:

Let the wise read as the philosopher writes.  I do not ask for uncritical readers, but I do ask for disciplined readers–readers who have studied hard and long, who can take their time to think; readers who have not shunned solitude; readers suspicious of themselves before being suspicious of others; readers patient when demands are made on them; readers themselves adventurers; readers who ask for more than the rhetorics fashionable in academic philosophy, and who hate the substitution of ‘relevant’ ideology for the seriousness of truth; readers with souls full of an intellectual, indeed spiritual generosity, beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion; readers who desire to hear fundamental questions addressed with a genuine intellectual, not to say, spiritual seriousness; readers philosophically rich enough in themselves as to be able to laugh at the pretensions of what sometimes passes for ‘philosophy’; readers who long for a simple human voice to speak again about the essential issues that perennially perplex us.  I do not ask for the impossible.  I do ask for what now is rare.

I’d like to be worthy to read this book (yes…some books we might just have to merit the privilege of reading, and maybe this is such a book…. Who knows?)

Not many of us would want the federal government to leave military procurement to defense contractors, Medicare reimbursement to doctors or banking regulation to Citigroup. But President Obama says when it comes to allocating federal funds for scientific studies, we should defer to scientists.

Chapman reports that

Harold Varmus, co-chairman of the president’s scientific advisory council, said [the decision to loosen restrictions on embryonic stem cell research] showed the president would rely on “sound scientific practice … instead of dogma in developing federal policy.”

Chapman rightly notes, however:

But one person’s dogma is another one’s ethical imperative or moral principle. Science can tell us how to build a nuclear weapon. But science can’t tell us whether we should use it.

You can read the rest of this piece here. [Big thanks to Paul Sracic for drawing my attention to this piece.]

The editorial by Thomas McGlaughlin, Jr., which appeared in the Philadelphia Bulletin, also sounds the alarm (in fine Peripatetic fashion, I might add):

But what is most perilous about President Obama’s self-satisfied oration about separating politics and ideology from science is the intellectual laziness that fails to reckon with the very nature of science.

For this, one might refer the President to the discussion on tekne in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. There, Aristotle distinguishes tekne (skill) from arete (virtue). A skill may be used for good or evil, but only virtue orders the skills and capacities of the human individual to goodness.

Science is a tekne. It can say nothing about morality. Moral philosophy – which the President disparagingly lumps together with ‘ideology’ – is uniquely qualified to speak on goodness.

Modern science invented the atomic bomb. Only the branch of philosophy that deals with morality can tell us not to use the bomb. Thus, the idea there is any scientific standpoint which should not be subject to the constraints of morality is itself an ideology or philosophy.

Now, McGlaughlin goes on to name that ideology “pragmatism” and to call Hitler, Stalin, and Mao “its most famous practitioners.”  Let’s call that overselling the point.  Neither Hitler, Stalin, nor Mao were pragmatists in the philosophical sense of the term.  All were thorough idealogues, who, by the way, are never immune from making expedient choices in the service of their ideology.  It is arguable that pragmatism is necessarily amoral (let alone immoral).  I chose Mengele and Kevorkian as my provocations because they specifically used the same line of “reasoning” as the President:  science is immune from moral assessment.  Thus the essence of McGlaughlin’s complaint is on target.

No wonder true metaphysicians are rare.  Common sense does not rise above the level of imaginable realities, and , when it is a question of metaphysics, the vulgus includes many a mind eminent in other fields. Scientists, artists of genius, great statesmen–all those who like to proclaim:  ”I only know what I can see and touch,” even though in other respects they may be eminent specimens of the human kind, are nevertheless unfit for metaphysical speculation.  Let us add, for their consolation, that they are perfectly normal men.  Anyone who says, “I understand nothing of what you call metaphysics,” is quite justified, and there is for him nothing to feel ashamed of.  But he should stop there.  That one does not see any light, may be a fact; to infer from it that there is no light, is a non sequitur.

–Etienne Gilson, The Spirt of Thomism, 1964

If we ask what sort of thing an X is (a right act, a law of nature…) then either we know what an X is, or we do not.   If we know, then there is no need to ask the question.   If we do not know, then there is no way to begin the investigation.   The enquiry is either pointless or impossible.

Armstrong answers by saying,

The orthodox, and I think correct, solution of this puzzle is that we do not start with blank ignorance of what an X is.   Instead, we start with an unreflective, unselfconscious or merely practical grasp of the thing.  The philosophical object is to pass from this to an articulate, explicit and reasoned grasp of what an X is.  We do not go from black night to daylight, but from twilight to daylight.

But first we’ve got to make sure there is at least some twilight.  Armstrong again:

In such investigations it is a great advantage, to say the least, if we can securely identify instances of X.  Given such paradigms, we can to some extent tie the enquiry down.  An account of what it is to be an X is suggested by a philosopher.  If we can be sure that a is an X, then we can use other things which we know or believe about a to check the proposed account of X.  But without paradigms the whole business of testing the proposal becomes very much more difficult.

I think a problem for transdisciplinarity is that we are not sure what paradigm cases of transdisciplinary work look like, and so we are unsure how to explicate the methodology (or methodologies) that will reap the benefits of transdisciplinary approaches to research and education.  We may need to triangulate in on a clearer understanding of transdisciplinarity by working back and forth from cases and examples to the “principles” and “theories” we use to explain or “judge” the cases and examples.  As at the ancient Greek-style racetrack that Aristotle refers to in his Nicomachean Ethics, sometimes we run towards the judges and sometimes we run starting out from the judges.

Among the most important “judges”–those working to define the idea of transdisciplinarity–is the group at the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET).  You can read the Charter of Transdisciplinarity or an excerpt from physicist and CIRET founder Basarab Nicolescu‘s Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (SUNY Press, 2002).  At CIRET, there is also a statement of the “moral project” of transdisciplinarity.  A key feature of transdisciplinarity is that it does contain a moral component, which claim itself raises issues for defining and pursuing transdisciplinarity.

But as much as we need the guidance and direction of manifestos, vision statements, and moral imperatives, we need to see the concrete examples of transdisciplinary work bearing fruit.  I believe there are such examples, but the work done under this banner tends to run on “intuition” and “feel”–not necessarily a bad way to go, mind you, but we need to be able to codify to the extent possible how solid transdisciplinary work gets done.  We need to run towards the “first principles” of transdisciplinarity in order to then set out running from them towards profound questions and significant challenges.

Because, to paraphrase Aristotle again, the ultimate point is not to know about transdisciplinarity; it is to research, to teach, and to formulate policies by applying transdisciplinary approaches.

Why is it important to do one’s own autobiography?  The answer lies in what it means to be a person in the peculiarly human mode.  To be is to be one, as St. Thomas and indeed all great metaphysicians tell us.  And to be a person, he tells us again in what I consider one of the simplest and deepest of all definitions of the person, is to take conscious self-possession of one’s own being, to be master of oneself (dominus sui).  But our incarnate human mode of being a person necessarily involves living in a body whose life unfolds successively across time, whose life is therefore inevitably dispersed across time.  Time is the mode of a being that is not totally present to its whole self.  Hence we have a problem in fully being ourselves, in taking full self-conscious possession of our own being, that is so essentially a history, a story.  If we let our own past slip behind us, drift away downstream unretrieved, save for occasional vivid episodes that stand out like isolated islands above the flow, then we have lost hold of a part, an ever-growing part, of our very selves.  If we wish to know in full self-consciousness who we are, we must assimilate and integrate–self-consciously and deliberately, I think–at least the key moments and phases of our own past, so that the meaningful pattern hidden within them emerges into our self-consciousness, so that our lives reveal themselves as a meaningful story, and not just a collection of unconnected slides about our past, stored up in more or less accurate memory. [...] For, unlikely as it may seem to some, there always is some pattern to be discerned, even if so many of the moments seem to be negative, shadow-filled, making a step backwards rather than forwards.  It is not necessary to write down this autobiography, though it certainly helps.  It is enough to reenact it within one’s own inner consciousness–it can even be done quite briefly and still quite fruitfully–but it must be done consciously and reflectively, looking always for the pattern, the connected weave, of the story.

Fr. Norrie wrote much and eloquently on the nature of the human person.  For him, the human person is an “embodied spirit” that is essentially self-possessing, self-communicating and relational, and receptive.  Thus the human person always is who (and not just what) she or he is in relation to others and to the world.  For Fr. Norrie, it is no accident, for instance, that he had such a love of high places.  It was he who helped me discover the relationship between metaphysical inclinations and physical heights and expansive vistas.  In his Medalist’s Address, he relates one of my favorite stories about himself:

Some German philosopher, whose name I have long forgotten, many years ago drew up an impressive list of the correlation between some experience of high places, mountains, etc., and the lives of great metaphysicians.  E.g., St. Thomas was taken at the age of six to live at the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, perched, as many of you know, on the edge of a mountain with a vast perspective over the surrounding countryside.  For myself, I remember with the utmost clarity how I used to love to climb the highest trees I could find, perch myself securely in the crotch of a branch, and look out over the surrounding territory, with a wonderful feeling of expansion of consciousness.

Most exciting was when, at about 14 or 15, I would climb up the great towers of the George Washington Bridge from the river shore to the roadway, some 300 feet above.  It was not really that difficult or dangerous if one had rubbersoled shoes and cool nerves.  I had a sufficient supply of both, and the expansion of consciousness was tremendous.  Even better was to climb up the sheer five-hundred-foot-high cliffs of the Palisades on the other side of the river, finding a niche two thirds of the way up, and sitting there quiet and all alone–I did my serious climbing alone–contemplating the vast panorama of the river, and feeling somehow intuitively  and inarticulately the vast hidden forces of nature supporting me and making the whole world pulse with life, and then hidden behind these and woven somehow through everything some still vaster mysterious unifying Presence, which I thought dimly must be something like God.

This particular climb, as I realized later and perhaps even then, was really quite a dangerous one, requiring considerable skill and a large supply of cool nerves.  When I first tried it, at a place I discovered to be the best, just abouve a large sign, “No Climbing Here,” I had made it two thirds of the way up and then got stuck, and could move neither up nor down.  Looking down, I saw the traffic all stopped on the river below, motorists shouting and gesticulating at me to come down, then a contingent of police yelling they were going to arrest me.  I shouted back.  ”Come and get me; I would love to get arrested; anything to get out of here.”  But I knew they would be afraid to climb up after me.  Then they said they would get a rope and pull me up from above, and departed.  I realized that if they did rescue me I would promptly end up in the local cooler, a disgrace to my family, etc.  On studying my situation more carefully I discovered there was a bulge of rock to my right and I could see only that there was a niche for my foot beyond it.  If there was one for my hand higher up, which I could not see, I could swing around and from there on it was easier going and I could get away.  A decision had to be made at once.  With a prayer and a hope, literally not knowing whether death or life awaited me, I gathered up my courage and swung around the rock into space.  Luckily, as you can see, there was a handhold.  I caught on, quickly snaked up the rest of the cliff and fled into the bushes to watch just as the cops arrived with ropes to pull me up and arrest me.  But something mementous happened to me as I swung out into space, suspended between being and non-being.  At that moment I suddenly broke through to the felt awareness of existence as such; I felt the bitter-sweet but extraordinarily exhilarating taste of actual existence in my mouth, the taste of its infinite preciousness and yet precariousness and of its unspeakable difference from non-existence.  I felt I had somehow broken through to a new level of consciousness, and this indescribable taste of existence still lingers in my mouth today, almost as clear as it was then, fifty years ago.  It still nourishes my metaphysical intuition.

Fr. Norrie now has the highest possible vantage point for seeing the truth, beauty, and goodness of what is.

As a Libran, I operate under the sign of the balance scales, and so I am given to being an “on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other” type of guy.  Sometimes I find myself drawn to the highest heights (despite the lingering remnants of youthful acrophobia).  Sometimes I like to keep low to the ground.  As I reflect on my own life, as I try to find the patterns and the key moments, I know that the couple of years I spent at Villanova in the mid-eighties  made a lasting impression.  That’s where I met Fr. Norrie (and St. Thomas) and that’s where I met Jack Caputo (and everything that seems to slip away from a Thomistic approach to philosophy).  Since then, these two teachers have been (unbeknownst to them) riding on my shoulders everywhere I philosophically go.  Fr. Norrie is always somehow whispering in my right ear (definitely the right ear), while Jack whispers in my left (definitely my left ear).  Fr. Norrie seemed to me a Romans 8:28 kind of guy: He seems to be whispering to me: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”).  Jack is more like a Philippians 2:12 kind of guy (sort of).  He seems to be whispering:  ”Work out your salvation (s’il y a…if such there be…) with fear and trembling.” Fr. Norrie always knew there was a “pattern,” a “connected weave,” a coherent “story.”  Jack “hopes against hope.”  I am most grateful for this stereophonic education.  (You can get a little taste of what it’s like being in the middle of this conversation in a book edited by Gerald McCool, S.J.,  entitled, The Universe as Journey:  Conversations with W. Norris Clarke, S.J., published by Fordham University Press, 1988.)

Wish I could have said thanks one last time….

Requiescat in pace.

All knowledge, however limited or “scientific,” presupposes a horizon, a comprehensive view within which knowledge is possible.  All understanding presupposes a fundamental awareness of the whole:  prior to any perception of particular things, the human soul must have had a vision of the ideas, a vision of the articulated whole.  However much the comprehensive visions which animate the various societies may differ, they all are visions of the same–of the whole.  Therefore, they do not merely differ from, but contradict, one another.  This very fact forces man to realize that each of those visions, taken by itself, is merely an opinion about the whole or an inadequate articulation of the fundamental awareness of the whole and thus points beyond itself toward an adequate articulation.  There is no guaranty that the quest for adequate articulation will ever lead beyond an understanding of the fundamental alternatives or that philosophy will ever legitimately go beyond the stage of discussion or disputation and will ever reach the stage of decision.  The unfinishable character of the quest for adequate articulation of the whole does not entitle one, however, to limit philosophy to the understanding of a part, however important.  For the meaning of a part depends on the meaning of the whole.  In particular, such interpretation of a part as is based on fundamental experiences alone, without recourse to hypothetical assumptions about the whole, is ultimately not superior to other interpretations of that part which are frankly based on such hypothetical assumptions.

–Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 125-126.