To be—That is the Answer

Abstract

TO BE-THAT IS THE ANSWER By EMMANUEL CHAPMAN I. THE STATE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: ITS SICKNESS AND RENEWAL IN the first quarter of this century-the century of progress you will remember-philosophy, and society too, were in quite a moribund condition. Both Scholastic and nonScholastic philosophy, to use a highly convenient but unphilosophical division, were in an ailing state. Among the so-called " neo-Scholastics," notwithstanding the rousing calls of Leo XIII and some of his successors, the ghost of Descartes had not yet been fully exorcised by the real St. Thomas. The Cartesianinfected hybrid, which kept to itself, was not feared by the nonScholastic or, more precisely, the anti-Scholastic philosophers, most of whom were slumbering dogmatically in the shadows still cast by Kant and Comte. Though the bachelor of Koenigsberg had long since gone to his rest convinced that he had succeeded in finally sterilizing metaphysics as positive knowledge and relegating it to the sphere of transcendental illusions, metaphysical monsters continued to be begotten. The acid of Kantian criticism did its damage: instead of digesting experience, criticism was feeding upon itself. Some of Comte's followers, on the other hand, fastened themselves upon the success of the sciences of nature, from the leavings of which they hoped to do a lively business. Others doted on the younger social sciences. These positivists were not content with guarding jealously the sciences of phenomena. Against whom, one wonders. For philosophy could only benefit by being relieved of the task it was not fit to do, and so too could religion. They vehemently sought to destroy any kind of knowing which was not in conformity with that of the empirical sciences. The positivists were so intent upon denying philoso187 ISS EMMANUEL CHAPMAN phy that they failed to perceive the incongruity of how their very denial affirmed it. This could be likened, if it were not for the more serious consequences, to the stock comedy situation from which movie audiences used to get such a laugh, in which someone was pictured blithely denying a danger, say a ferocious bear, while unknown to him it advanced behind his back. A new promise for philosophy, however, was beginning to stir in the early works of Husser! in Germany, and Bergson in France. Across the Atlantic, William James hailed enthusiastically the philosopher of the elan vital for having emancipated him from logic. Such, in brief, was the state of philosophy when Jacques Maritain's first philosophical work, a critical study of Bergson , appeared a year before the outbreak of World War I. By comparing it with his two essays on Bergson in Ransoming the Time, written twenty-seven years later, in the second year of World War IT, the internal development of Maritain's thought can be measured. But tempting as the pleasure would be of tracing this progression in depth and width, it will be sacrificed here. Conscious of the contribution of Maritain and a few others, some of whom are not Scholastics, this essay is concerned with showing how philosophy is restored to health by being brought into living contact with the real, and how, by no longer being separated from every source of life and experience, either above or below it, philosophy becomes again the full intellectual activity of the whole man confronting the whole of experience. II. EMPffiiCISM FEELS ITSELF CHALLENGED BY SCHOLASTICISM The renewal of philosophy, naturally expected in the philosophia perennis, the common philosophy worked out collectively through the centuries, is also affecting those varieties which have diverted themselves from the main stream. Only recently, for example, one of the more enlightened exponents of empiricism called upon his fellow-empiricists to purify their own philosophy in order to meet the challenge of Scholasticism. Anyone concerned with truth ~ll sympathize with the courage- TO BE-THAT IS THE ANSWER 189 ous criticism of Professor Charles W. Morris, who points out that the empiricist "remains his own worst enemy," and shows that " he has not merely himself failed to round out his own life, but he has often seemed to belittle, to restrain, to frustrate those forms of human activity in the arts and religion which, in...