Christianity and Postmodernism V

Richard Rorty and John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Fides et Ratio on Philosophy
  3. Rorty on the Task of Philosophy
    1. Remaking, not Discovering, the “True” Self
    2. Not Objectivity but Solidarity
    3. Knowledge is Hermeneutical, a Matter of Understanding
    4. Contingency
    5. Rorty’s Commitment to Western, Liberal Democracy and Pragmatism
    6. Moral and Political Terminology, Not Metaphysics
  4. Richard Rorty and Fides et Ratio
    1. The Vocation of Philosophy
    2. The Question of Truth
    3. Proving the Existence of God
    4. The Freedom and Autonomy of Philosophy
  5. Conclusion
  6. References

Introduction

This essay continues a series on Christianity and Postmodernism.[1]  In this essay, I confront traditional Roman Catholic teaching on philosophy with that of a Postmodern philosopher, Richard Rorty. The two main resources are   Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical Fides et Ratio and Richard Rorty’s essay, “Solidarity or Objectivity.”  Adapting the title of James Huntington’s modern political classic, these two documents are a  “clash of civilizations.”  This essay’s basic premise is that understanding this clash better is valuable for contemporary Christians.

This essay presents readers with the views of a prominent representative of Postmodern philosophy.   Thoughtful Christians should try to understand philosophical developments today, especially those that break with “the classic tradition” of the nature and role of philosophy.  Richard Rorty’s vision of philosophy’s vocation, determined by a form of American Pragmatism, and rejecting the metaphysics supporting Patristic, Medieval and modern Roman Catholic theology, certainly meets this criterion.

Secondly, this essay offers Christian readers a way to engage Rorty’s Postmodern philosophy.  Juxtaposing Fides et Ratio and “Objectivity or Solidarity” allows educated Christians to compare and contrast this Postmodern philosopher with Christian tradition.  The main theme this essay is the vocation of philosophy, a central them of Fides et Ratio and of Rorty’s essay.  In this confrontation, I bring out some basic issues and problems that Postmodern philosophy has with traditional philosophy in the western, Christian tradition.[2]

A third value of this essay is an  introduction to  John Paul II’s Encyclical Fides et Ratio. [3] Christian and non-Christian readers, interested in philosophy, should know Roman Catholic official teaching on philosophy’s vocation.  Fides et Ratio is the Roman Catholic’s Magisterium’s latest statement on this subject.

I write as a theologian formed by the Anglican Christian tradition. Anglicanism shares with Roman Catholicism a deep commitment to  the western tradition’s understanding of  “reason.” Theologians formed by the Renaissance and its recovery of classical Greek and Latin thought shaped Anglicanism’s “Reformed Catholicism.”   Anglicanism’s appropriation of classical Greek philosophy is obvious from reading its original sources.  Such labels as “Cambridge Platonists” are obvious clues; but deeper lie the uses of Aristotle by Richard Hooker in Book I of The Ecclesiastical Polity, and by Anglican moral theologians Robert Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor in the seventeenth-century.  Anglican theology, ethics and spirituality developed within the participation ontology of Platonic and Neo-platonic thought.  This participation ontology traditional Anglicanism shares with the Roman Catholic tradition. [4] Therefore, Anglicans should be interested with the clash between Roman Catholic official teaching about philosophy and the self-understandings of Modern and Postmodern philosophy.

First we provide a brief introduction to the author of Fides et Ratio, John Paul II. [5]

Pope John Paul II
Figure 1 Pope John Paul II

Karol Józef Wojtyła, known as John Paul II since his October 1978 election to the papacy, was born in the Polish town of Wadowice, a small city 50 kilometers from Krakow, on May 18, 1920. He was the youngest of three children born to Karol Wojtyła and Emilia Kaczorowska. His mother died in 1929. His eldest brother Edmund, a doctor, died in 1932 and his father, a non-commissioned army officer died in 1941. A sister, Olga, had died before he was born.

Upon graduation from Marcin Wadowita high school in Wadowice, he enrolled in Krakow’s Jagiellonian University in 1938 and in a school for drama. The Nazi occupation forces closed the university in 1939 and young Karol had to work in a quarry (1940-1944) and then in the Solvay chemical factory to earn his living and to avoid being deported to Germany.

In 1942, aware of his call to the priesthood, he began courses in the clandestine seminary of Krakow, run by Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha, archbishop of Krakow. At the same time, Karol Wojtyła was one of the pioneers of the “Rhapsodic Theatre,” also clandestine. After the Second World War, he continued his studies in the major seminary of Krakow, once it had re-opened, and in the faculty of theology of the Jagiellonian University. He was ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop Sapieha in Krakow on November 1, 1946.

Shortly afterwards, Cardinal Sapieha sent him to Rome where he worked under the guidance of the French Dominican, Garrigou-Lagrange. He finished his doctorate in theology in 1948 with a thesis on the subject of faith in the works of St. John of the Cross (Doctrina de fide apud Sanctum Ioannem a Cruce). At that time, during his vacations, he exercised his pastoral ministry among the Polish immigrants of France, Belgium and Holland.
In 1948 he returned to Poland and was vicar of various parishes in Krakow as well as chaplain to university students. This period lasted until 1951 when he again took up his studies in philosophy and theology. In 1953 he defended a thesis on “evaluation of the possibility of founding a Catholic ethic on the ethical system of Max Scheler” at Lublin Catholic University. Later he became professor of moral theology and social ethics in the major seminary of Krakow and in the Faculty of Theology of Lublin.

His love for young people brought him to establish the World Youth Days. The 19 WYDs celebrated during his pontificate brought together millions of young people from all over the world. At the same time his care for the family was expressed in the World Meetings of Families, which he initiated in 1994.
His most important Documents include 14 Encyclicals, 15 Apostolic Exhortations, 11 Apostolic Constitutions, 45 Apostolic Letters.
He promulgated the Catechism of the Catholic Church in the light of Tradition as authoritatively interpreted by the Second Vatican Council. He also reformed the Eastern and Western Codes of Canon Law, created new Institutions and reorganized the Roman Curia.

As a private Doctor he also published five books of his own: “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” (October 1994), “Gift and Mystery, on the fiftieth anniversary of my ordination as priest” (November 1996), “Roman Triptych” poetic meditations (March 2003), “Arise, Let us Be Going” (May 2004) and “Memory and Identity” (February 2005). [6]

At least three features of John Paul II’s biography are relevant for this essay.  First, John Paul had a direct and intensive exposure to the life of ordinary modern people.  Forced to work in a quarry and a factory as a young man, John Paul II may have a more authentic experience of the life of working people than a many a cleric who moves from a parochial high school to seminary and then on to work in other ecclesiastical institutions.  People all over the world, within and outside the Roman Catholic Church, perceived in John Paul II deep and wide human warmth.

Second, John Paul II had a personal encounter with two modern totalitarian philosophies, Fascism and Communism.  The destruction and cruelty which atheistic ,  secular reason can support Pope John Paul II knew well.  He certainly would have shared Pope Benedikt XVI’s recent critique of the vanity and destructiveness of these secular hopes. [7]

Third, John Paul II had a trained and informed mind.  He earned a degree in philosophical ethics and was a professor of moral theology and social ethics.  He developed his own philosophical anthropology in the tradition of modern personalism.  In addition,  he was aware of and open to the arts, as his youthful involvement with theater and his later writing of poetry show.    Though theologically conservative, John Paul was intellectually informed and his  mind open to the modern world.  

Fides et Ratio on Philosophy

This Encyclical’s theme is not the task of philosophy in general or per se but the relationship between faith and reason, fides et ratio.  More precisely,  John Paul II  wrote this Encyclical because he believes theology and philosophy, faith and reason today have lost their right relation to each other.  Thus, his purpose is diagnosis and therapeutic prescription. He wanted “to state principles and criteria which in my judgment are necessary in order to restore a harmonious and creative relationship between theology and philosophy.” 

The Encyclical consists of an Introduction and Conclusion and seven chapters.

Introduction: “Know Thyself”
1. The Revelation of God’s Wisdom
2. Credo Ut Intelligam
3. Intellego Ut Credam
4. The Relation between Faith and Reason
5. The Mysterium’s Interventions in Philosophical Matters
6. The Interaction Between Philosophy and Theology
7. Current Requirements and Tasks
Conclusion

In Fides et Ratio, John Paul II makes the following major claims about the tasks, purposes and goals of philosophy.

  1. Philosophy and the Search for Human Meaning. Philosophy is a disciplined (logical, critical) expression of the universal human quest for ultimate meaning and for ultimate truth.  This is philosophy’s unique vocation: the love and pursuit of wisdom. (1, 15, 26, 33)
  2. Philosophy’s Proper Form and Limits: Philosophy can and should engage human reason’s capacity for speculation and should aim for universal elements of knowledge.  Reason should strive to bring these universal elements into an organic whole.  Philosophy’s goal is the first principles of being and ethical norms corresponding to these philosophical truths. Right reason teaches that ultimate truth transcends human life and reason itself.  Ultimate meaning and truth are transcendent.  Therefore, reason/philosophy can only lead humans toward and open them to ultimate truth and meaning. Only divine Revelation, received by faith, can attain to this ultimate meaning.  Revelation’s origin and goal are different from those of reason.  Revelation’s origin and goal is God; Reason’s origin is the human intellect and its goal is knowledge of self and world.  Revelation’s dignity, therefore,  surpasses that of Reason.  Right reason and philosophy will recognize their limits and respect the transcendent authority of God’s revelation.  (4, 5, 14, 27, 30, 83, 97).)
  3. Modern and Postmodern Philosophy have lost sight of philosophy’s proper vocation. Much modern and contemporary philosophy has lost sight of philosophy’s  original vocation.  Today, much philosophy is focused on the human subject, not on an objective truth that transcends human life. Much modern and postmodern philosophy even doubts the existence of or the possibility of discovering ultimate truth.  Overly impressed by human temporality, much contemporary philosophy tends to relativism, scientism and even to nihilism. (6, 46-49, 55, 56, 61, 81)
  4. Philosophy can prove God’s existence. Philosophy, i.e., unaided human reason, can discover and prove with certainty that God exists. [8]  This is important for leading nonbelievers toward faith.  But philosophy also has an important role within the life of faith. Theology needs philosophy to help demonstrate the intrinsic coherence and reasonableness of Christian beliefs and to intellectually refine theological ideas. (8, 53, 57, 60, 62)
  5. Revelation sets the limits of philosophy. God’s revelation is not the product of human reasoning. The ultimate truth of Revelation, i.e., the final purpose of personal existence, is receivable only by faith.  Both reason and revelation have the question of the ultimate meaning of human existence as their essential theme. But philosophy must be open to the truth that God has revealed. Philosophy  “must respect the demands of data of revealed truth.”   God’s revelation introduces a universal and ultimate truth that draws the power of reason to its limits. The truths of philosophy find their full meaning only if “they are set within the larger horizon of faith.”  “The mysteries of faith transcend and have precedence over the findings of philosophy.” (13,14, 20,21, 32-34)
  6. The Harmony between Reason and Faith; Philosophy and Theology. Nevertheless, the truths of faith and of reason do not conflict” (53) “The truth which God reveals to us in Jesus Christ, is not opposed to the truths which philosophy perceives. On the contrary, the modes of knowledge lead to truth in all its fullness.” Faith and Reason, theology and philosophy, relate to each other as a correlation.  The larger framework of this correlation is the relation of nature to super-nature.  In this correlation, faith and theology are the controlling figures, but they do not contradict reason and philosophy.  Rather, faith (grace/revelation) supports, heals and perfects natural reason and philosophy. (13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 34, 42, 43, 49, 53, 63, 71)
  7. The Living Magisterium’s role in relation to philosophy is to protect the Faith. The Church’s teaching is responsibility is to  identify and denounce philosophical principles that contradict the truths of revelation. The Magisterium must also discern and promote philosophical thinking that is consonant with Christian faith. The Living Magisterium performs this task not to deny philosophy’s freedom and autonomy but to fulfill the Church’s responsibility of presenting and protecting divine truth which God gave the Church as a gift. (2, 49, 50, 63)
  8. Theology’s Requirements of Philosophy. Theology places three demands on philosophy: i. acknowledging  that truth is one; philosophy must be consonant with the word of God; recover its search for ultimate and overarching meaning of life and be guided by the truths of faith; ii. Show the convergence of philosophy’s search for truth and wisdom with God’s revelation, and therefore,  iii. Recover its metaphysical goal. (80-85,97, 106)

Richard Rorty on Philosophy

Richard Rorty
Figure 2 Richard Rorty

Biographical Information

Richard Rorty was born in New York City in 1931. His mother, Winifred, was the daughter of Walter Rauschenbusch, the most influential of the American, Protestant Social Gospel theologians. He was brought up, as he says in Achieving our Country, “on the anti-communist reformist Left in mid-century.“  “In that circle, American patriotism, redistributionist economics, anticommunism, and Deweyan pragmatism went together easily and naturally,” Rorty wrote.

Rorty’s undergraduate degree was earned at the University of Chicago, whose undergraduate program he started at the age of 14.  Chicago’s philosophy department included important representatives of logical positivism (e.g., Rudolph Carnap); of process philosophy (e.g., Charles Hartshorne) and of Aristotle’s philosophy (e.g., Richard McKeon), all of whom were Rorty’s teachers.  Rorty remained at the University of Chicago to earn his Master’s Degree, writing a thesis on Whitehead, the foundational figure for Process philosophy, under the direction of Charles Hartshorne.  Rorty earned his Ph.D. at Yale, writing a dissertation on the concept of potentiality, under the direction of the notable philosopher, Paul Weiss. 

After completing his Ph.D., Rorty spent two years in the US army.  His first academic appointment was at Wellesley College. After three years at Wellesley, Rorty went to Princeton University where he taught from 1961 through 1982. From Princeton, Rorty went to the University of Virginia as Kenan Professor of the Humanities. Then he moved Stanford University, intentionally joining the department of Comparative Literature, rather than the philosophy department. Among the academic awards Rorty received during his teaching career were a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Rorty was married and had three children, two sons and a daughter. He died at age 75 of stomach cancer in June,  2007.

Three aspects of his biography are important for understanding Rorty’s views on philosophy. 

The pragmatic effects of ideas are important.  This conviction of Rorty’s could have been informed by the socially engaged and reformist context of his family environment and upbringing.  Additionally, as a an American trained and teaching philosopher, Rorty had direct access to the American tradition of Pragmatism, especially as presented in the works of John Dewey.  The test of philosophical ideas, according to both family context and Dewey’s pragmatism, was how they “pay for themselves” in relation to human practices in a modern, pluralistic and democratic society. 

A second important facet of Rorty’s views on philosophy his intense exposure to the lives of ordinary Americans, including his young male and female students at three major American academic institutions.  He also served two years in the US army; he was married and he helped raised three children; he supported himself and his family in the secular and often hard-nosed, rough and tumble of at least three major, elite, academic institutions.  As an academic, Rorty, compared to most ordinary, working Americans may have lived a relatively sheltered life. But in comparison to celibate Roman Catholic cleric-academics, whose clothes are washed, meals cooked, rooms cleaned by nuns and whose housing and food are earned by others, Rorty had a much wider exposure to the ordinary life of contemporary people.

Third, and perhaps most obvious, Rorty was a teaching and writing philosopher. His thought deserves the respect owed to any professional in relation to his or her field.  Reading Rorty gives one the sense of a philosopher who wanted to engage his contemporaries, to practice what my theological mentor, Owen Thomas, called a hermeneutics of generosity. His extensive replies to his criticis shows that he wanted to take seriously objections to his own ideas.  

Rorty on the Task of Philosophy [9]

The following section aims not to provide a complete summary of Richard Rorty’s philosophical ideas.  I use Rorty’s essay “Solidarity or Objectivity” as my central source to select ideas which correspond to central themes in Fides et Ratio.

A. Remaking, not Discovering, the “True” Self

Philosophy’s task, Rorty holds, is to serve a particular society’s solidarity, i.e., its common effort to promote human self-development.  Thus, most generally, philosophy is to promote the practice of being human.  Philosophy’s task is less theoretical and certainly not to map “the nature of things” or “objective” reality by a system of true statements, i.e., statement “mirroring”  “nature.” Rorty’s general word of philosophy’s proper style is “Pragmatism” drawn from the American school of Philosophical Pragmatism associated especially with Dewey.

Rorty follows Friedrich Nietzsche to the extent that Nietzsche also sets for philosophy the practical task of human “self-creation.”  Not the theoretical intellect, the mind seeking statements that mirror objective reality or nature, but the practical intellect, the mind serving human self renewal, stands at the center of both Nietzsche’s and Rorty’s philosophical agenda.  “We see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature.” [10]

Rorty considers himself, with some differences, in the company of major Modern and Postmodern philosophers, like John Paul Sartre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson, Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault. Like them he rejects the impossible ideal of objectivity in favor of the practical task of the human project, both social and individual.  Rorty rejects Nietzsche’s resentment against Christianity and his obsession with “will to power.” Rorty also does not share Michel Foucault’s advocacy of anarchism.  But he does share Postmodernism’s general commitment to the human project of on-going social and individual, self-creation.  Philosophy’s vocation is to help human beings, in their given society and historical context, to remodel themselves according to norms which appear good to them and their contemporaries in their own historical situation.  Rorty’s summarizes this vision of philosophy’s task with the word “Solidarity.”  Philosophy’s task is to promote human solidarity, so far as that is possible in any given time and place. Solidarity means, among other things, enlarging the reach of the idea of “we” as far as possible in the human project of self-definition and self-development.

B. Not Objectivity but Solidarity

Rorty contrasts his vision of philosophy’s vocation by contrasting his vision to the traditional western alternative vision. This traditional vision, Rorty labels “Objectivity.” By “Objectivity” Rorty means the western view of philosophy’s task since the Greeks, through medieval Christian theology and through the Enlightenment, up to and including early modern natural science.   At the center of this vision stands the “ascetic priest” [11] who abstracts himself/herself from the opinions and biases of his or her society to use reason to discover statements that correspond to objective reality, to the “ultimate natures of things.” 

This traditional vision of philosophy’s vocation had two aspects. One was the goal of an abstract, ultimate rational mapping of Being, i.e., philosophy as metaphysics and ontology. The lofty goal was statements that mirrored Being and beings as they are independently of the human mind.  With Being as the object of philosophy, came a second aspect: epistemology.  To attain truth, i.e., statements that mirrored the nature of things, philosophy also needed to identify the criteria of valid knowledge. These criteria defined “science” as a distinct species of knowing in contrast to opinion, the defective knowledge of the masses.   Ontology as the final goal of philosophy went hand in hand with epistemology as the account of what can count as true knowledge.

Implicit in this traditional vision of philosophy were the assumptions that human beings and every existing thing have a “nature” or “essence,” and that reason’s task is to discover and name this essence.  Moral direction, identifying moral virtues and practices must correspond to this objective knowledge of being.  Both Plato and Aristotle, the two great fountainheads of western metaphysics, shared this assumption.

By advocating an alternative purpose for philosophy Rorty challenges this basic assumption.    Rorty is not sure such as thing as “the nature of human being,” some essence common to every past, present and future member of the human species actually exists.  So embedded in contingency, time, change, and history is everything in the world, as well as our experience of it, that “the nature of things” may be a figment.   Therefore, Rorty also rejects Aristotle’s notion of human nature having a single end proper to its “nature” that this “nature” should actualize or achieve through its actions.  Rorty rejects the philosophical schema of essence/telos or the notion of entelechy, the built -in formal cause that directs an entity’s essence to its proper actualization and unfolding. [12]

Rorty breaks decisively and emphatically from this vision of philosophy’s vocation or goal.  Rorty argues, in an essay on Freud,  that Freud’s discovery of the Id, Superego and Unconscious demonstrates that no single, universal “essence” of human nature exists which awaits discovery by philosophers.[13] Rather, says Rorty, Freud has shown us that “the self” is not unified, or universal.  Freud has shown that the ego is not master of its own house. Rather, in “the self” are at least three semi-autonomous or fully autonomous centers, — ego, superego and id. Each of these centers has its own “story” in the development of a person’s life in a particular place and time.   The self, Rorty holds, is not a single, universal and unitary  “substance” to be discovered by reason and nurtured toward its nature-defined, full realization or end.  Rather, the “self” is like a “Rube Goldberg machine, which one must tinker with.” [14] Thus, Rorty disowns classical Greek and Christian philosophy’s “essences” and “human nature.”   Humans don’t have a fixed and finished essence to be discovered and actualized; humans are a project, a work in the making.  Philosophy’s vocation is part of this project and is to serve this project.

C. Knowledge is Hermeneutical, a Matter of Understanding

In another essay [15], Rorty says that modern social science no longer works with the idea of an a-historical human essence.  Ethnologist and historians assume that distinguishing between a universal human reason and the results of upbringing and education is impossible. A “natural reason” unaffected by education, a society’s myths, world-view, and the contingencies of individual biography is impossible to find; it is a figment.  Philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Han-Georg Gadamer have argued that human nature is through and through historical; that a timeless “reason” or “soul” cannot be discovered unaffected by time and place.   Consequently, both Heidegger and Gadamer break with the traditional metaphysical description of true knowledge or understanding as the reason’s grasp of eternal natures or essences expressed in judgments and statements that “mirror” reality.  Postmodern philosophers, typically, abandon the correspondence theory of truth. 

Rather, every human act of knowing is hermeneutical, i.e., a result of interpretation.  Interpretation is, for Gadamer and for Rorty, appropriating the ideas and data of the past into the interpreter’s own frame of reference. This frame of reference, itself, changes.  Here the key idea is that of Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts.” Knowledge is relative to world-view paradigms, to plausibility structures.  These change through time.  Paradigm shifts can be so radical that they are incommensurate with one another.  You cannot be both a Ptolemaic astronomer and a Copernican astronomer at the same time and in the same sense.  The worldviews of the western scientist and the Amazonian aborigine are not commensurate.  They are so different that rational discourse attempting consensus is impossible.  Thus, knowledge understands, i.e., appropriates one plausibility structure into that of one who seeks to understand, so far as this appropriation is possible.

Knowing as understanding in this sense Gadamer has described as a fusion of horizons—the horizon of past ideas and events and our own horizon of plausibility, shared in our culture and by like-minded people.  Rorty goes on to observe that philosophers like Donald Davidson and Willard Van Orman Quine have called into doubt the traditional distinction between timeless truths of reason and time-bound “facts.”  Further, Psychoanalysis has blurred the distinction between the feelings of love, hate and anxiety, between moral norms and prudence.  Thus, the “I-image” common to Greek classical philosophy, Christian theology and Enlightenment rationalism has been dissolved. 

Losing this notion of a timeless human nature, essence or self also breaks, for Rorty, the traditional link between “truth” and epistemology, i.e., between statements supposedly corresponding to reality with the attendant claim that only certain ways of knowing are valid.  Therefore, gone also for Rorty and many Postmodern philosophers, is the notion of “the one and only” true political order, corresponding to the one true nature of human being.

For the Pragmatic approach, truth –whether about the world or about moral norms –is relative to one’s own social group in a particular place in history.  “Truth” and “good” mean: what works for what and us we would commend to as many as possible.  The Pragmatist sees his or her own social context to be the framework for moral suasion.  He or she sees no point in trying to persuade a South American tribesman that cannibalism violates universal human rights of the victim.  The Pragmatist will at most offer the example of a society, free of the anxiety and chaos of intertribal warfare, as a more satisfying way to manage life together.  Human existence is embedded in history and is essentially historically contingent and temporal.  Philosophy’s job is to serve people in their specific histories.   Philosophy can propose and critically test ideas of forms of human life which individuals, in their specific communities, can perceive as helpful, useful, and meaningful to them individually and socially.

D.   Contingency

So fundamental to human self-creation is time and history that Rorty insists that philosophy must grant the realities of contingency and accident a major place in philosophical understanding of human existence.   Indeed, this insistence is a major accent and distinctive feature to Rorty’s philosophical thought. [16]

Here, again, we should note the break with traditional western metaphysics.  Basic to Aristotle’s metaphysics and Scholastic theology and philosophy was the distinction between essence and accidents. [17]  Bread consists of the essential nature of bread and accidental features, such as color, taste, texture, smell, and density.  Likewise, each individual person possesses, Aristotle taught, a single, common human nature. What distinguished Socrates from Plato and from each other person is not this shared human nature but accidental features, such as hair color, body shape, etc.  Although Aristotle’s teaching that the human essence informs the material body, and is less dualistic than Plato’s view of the soul/body relation, Rorty’s view is even more holistic than Aristotle’s.   The contingent, accidental aspects of a person’s existence are as constitutive of that person’s identity (s) as an alleged “human nature.”  Thus, Rorty urges philosophy to admit the philosophical significance of contingency and accident.

Contingency and accident condition, for example, the vocabulary of the different philosophical traditions. [18]  The philosophical vocabulary of, say, Indian philosophy is deeply influenced by the contingent fact that this philosophy developed in the context of Indian religion, with its notions of reincarnation, atman, Brahman, and karma.  Ways that philosophies incorporate ideas from non-philosophical traditions is also marked by contingency and accident.   For example, later Daoism incorporated elements of Buddhist thinking.  These changes in Daoism were caused by the contingent fact of Chinese rulers’ acceptance of Buddhism during the Han Dynasty and Buddhism’s popularity among the Chinese masses. [19]

Contingency and accident also marks the development of western philosophy.  Only by historical accident and contingency did Hindu philosophical concepts come relatively late to western attention. Western Christian philosophy was little influenced by Aristotle until the contingent fact of Latin translations of Aristotle’s metaphysics, politics and ethics by through Arab translators. 

Contingency and accident are needed, Rorty also claims, to provide a fully plausible account of why some philosophical convictions seem common sense to us but not to others.  To western people the idea that human individuals have one and the same human nature, and that this “nature” abides through a whole human life seems, or at least for two thousand years, seemed common sense.  But this “common sense” was contingently dependent on classical Greek ideas of the soul being inherited by Christian theology and appropriated in part by Enlightenment Rationalism.  This idea is contingently western.  Buddhist philosophy, by contrast, denies that individuals have an abiding nature; for Buddhism the ideas of an immortal human soul  is not a common sense truth. On the contrary, Buddhist philosophy teaches that human beings have no abiding nature at all.   Giving up the pursuit of eternal unchanging “natures” for human being or for society, or the pursuit of truth as the goal of philosophy, may seem radical and traumatic in relation to western intellectual tradition.  But Asian philosophical traditions would not find them so alien.

E. Rorty’s Commitment to Western, Liberal Democracy and Pragmatism

Rorty is very aware that his commitment to Pragmatism puts him on an entirely different ground from philosophy in the western metaphysical tradition.  This is clear when Rorty contrasts his notions of “truth” and “moral goodness” with that of the western philosophical and theological tradition.   Traditional philosophy understood truth as the correspondence between the intellect and what is known. The moral good corresponded to the full realization of a universal, unchanging human essence. Rorty, we have seen, rejects the idea of a human nature; therefore, he cannot defend norms on the grounds that they accord with or help actualize “real, human nature.”

Rorty’s fundamental option for the tradition of American Pragmatism is not based on a metaphysical argument against the possibility of traditional ontology and metaphysics.  That is, Rorty is not defending his Pragmatic view of philosophy’s tasks on the basis of an alleged philosophical demonstration that traditional metaphysics and ontology are false, impossible or wrong in some sense. [20]  His reason for not defending his Pragmatic approach this way is obvious and logical.  Were he to mount a metaphysical attack on traditional metaphysics or ontology, he would be accepting the plausibility framework of traditional western philosophy.  Any philosophical argument that traditional ontology and metaphysics are false would itself require a metaphysical argument, an alternative vision of the ultimate nature of Being.  Working within the plausibility framework of traditional metaphysics,  a philosopher can, at the most,  offer an alternative metaphysics, an alternative view of the nature of being, or of epistemology to the main metaphysical tradition.  But this alternative would itself be a metaphysical and/or epistemological proposal. 

Therefore, Rorty is explicit that his version of Pragmatism is based on a thesis that metaphysics, ontology or epistemology or natural theology or natural law is invalid or that we can’t know Truth or The Good.  Rather, his most powerful argument against what he calls Realism or Objectivism (i.e., traditional western metaphysics and epistemology) is that these philosophical traditions simply can’t and don’t function any more to “support our habits.”  

His meaning here, I think, is that post-Enlightenment, democratic societies have relegated ultimate truth claims—whether philosophical or theological or otherwise religious—to the private sphere of individual judgment.  No such metaphysical or theological theory is usable to support the moral practice of common, public life in democratic societies.   The horrors of the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth century convinced western political thinkers that no theological or metaphysical theory could be the basis of common, social life.  Or, as Rorty approvingly quotes fellow philosopher, John Rawls: “questions about an independent metaphysical and moral order can have no use as a common basis for a political concept of justice in a democratic society.”  If philosophy is to serve a particular society’s self-governed, self-development, only Pragmatic notions of the Good and the True, will work. Modern and Postmodern people, especially those committed to democratic freedoms and institutions know that the common life cannot be built on attempts to institutionalize Ultimate Truth.  The history of religious and ideological terror, past and present,  has convinced the majority of people of the validity of Rorty’s  vision of philosophy’s vocation.

F. Moral and Political Terminology, Not Metaphysics

Philosophers, Rorty thinks, should give up the goal of defining metaphysical questions like “truth”; rationality”; knowledge” or “philosophy.”  Serving human being’s self-creation, philosophical terminology instead should be moral and political.  The goal of philosophers should be to identify how our society should look and be. 

So, for example, philosophers should pursue the promotion and defense of practices and conventions associated with European, Enlightenment values of democratic government and individual rights.  These values include tolerance, freedom of inquiry, striving for un-coerced and undistorted communication.  The Pragmatist philosopher can defend these post-Enlightenment European values only by comparing how this society compares and contrasts with societies in which these values, practices and social norms don’t exist.  The pragmatist expects that anyone who has experienced both kinds of society will prefer a society organized around the values of western, Enlightenment democracy (e.g., limited government, rule of law, balance of powers in the government, individual civil rights, freedom of inquiry, separation of church and state).  To commend these civil and political norms and practices for a democratic society, on the basis of some metaphysical foundation, the Pragmatist philosopher cannot do.  All the Pragmatist can do is to let these values ‘speak for themselves”, i.e., “to pay their own way”; to be self-persuasive.  Rorty sees Winston Churchill’s famous justification of democratic government as a showcase example of the Pragmatist thinking. Churchill said that democracy was the worst possible form of government that one could imagine, except for all the other forms that have been tried. [21]

Rorty grants that Pragmatism’s defense and promotion of these moral and political values involves the Pragmatist philosopher arguing in a circle, and that, in a sense, the Pragmatist philosopher is a relativist and is ethnocentric.   The Pragmatist’s final defense for these values is that these values should be defended. But Rorty thinks that the “Objectivist”, i.e., western metaphysical tradition also, in the final analysis, can defend its definitions of truth, rationality, etc. with circular arguments. For this metaphysical tradition designates criteria and or methods for determining truth, rationality, knowledge, etc., which in the end presuppose these definitions of truth, rationality and knowledge. [22] Or, as Rorty elsewhere states, those who give theological warrant as the final foundation for definitions of truth, knowledge, rationality, goodness, etc., in the end declare themselves to be the ones to whom God has revealed these truths.  This sort of metaphysical rationality is as transparently circular as all claimants to speak for absolute truth who then go on to say that they happen to be the only ones to whom God has chosen to reveal ultimate truths. 

G. The Question of Truth

Rorty describes the vocation of philosophy he rejects as the pursuit of objective truth. Classical philosophy ascribes to the philosopher to ability and duty to abstract himself or herself as much as possible from his or her own society, place and time and to search for statements that are “made true by reality.”  That is, the “intellectual” or the “philosopher,” unlike the uneducated or non- intellectual, separates himself or herself from what Roger Bacon called the Idols of the Cave, the Marketplace, etc. and calls truth only statements corresponding to objective reality, undistorted by the biases, assumptions, conventions and opinions of the philosopher’s society.  This classical rationalist conception of truth as statements made true by reality continued into, Rorty observes, early Modern natural science.  The ideal of experimental truth was its objectivity, its capacity to state a real law of nature.  The repeatability of the experiment was the guarantee that others competent to do so could reproduce the experimental results in the field.  This repeatability was the guarantee that the scientific hypothesis in question was not the biased or falsified opinion or merely the finding of an individual scientist but was objectively true, confirmed by nature itself.

Rorty rejects the distinction between true statements that are made true by reality and true statements that are made true by us. [23]  Basically, no difference exists between these two notions of truth.  For in both cases, we humans ourselves decide a priori the plausibility structure within which we declare statements true. [24]

Rorty asks, with Nietzsche[25], speculatively, why the Pragmatism he advocates is so unsettling to others—evoking charges of relativism and nihilism.  Following Nietzsche, Rorty identifies two reasons for this discomfort and hostility.

One reason is that the traditional Greek, Christian and Enlightenment metaphysical tradition assumed that humans differ from “lower” animals by possessing some essential characteristic that links them ontologically to the gods or to eternity.  This essential characteristic is ‘the rational soul” or “imago dei” or Reason.   When the Pragmatist turns his back on this tradition and follows another path in philosophy, the “deity” of human beings is called into question. 

When humanity is thus “relocated” in full continuity with the physical world, a second anxiety arises.  If the human race is “just” another part of nature, the human race, with all its achievements in art, philosophy, politics will probably sometime end and simply no longer by remembered by anyone.  But if humans do have the capacity for knowing and loving “the essential, eternal natures of things”, they can hope that eventually every destroyed or forgotten vision of truth, beauty and goodness can be rediscovered by a future generation.  Pragmatism seems, in fact does, rob humanity of these two “consolations of philosophy.”

Rorty shares Nietzsche’s view that humanity should simply accept that the search for “truth” will not be a development toward agreement and convergence, but one of ever greater divergence.  Thus, Rorty agrees with Nietzsche that “truth” is “nothing more than a moving army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphism, i.e., a totality of human relations, which, poetically and rhetorically intensified, handed on and decorated, and after long use, are thought to be canonical and binding by a particular people.”  Thus, Rorty wants to throw overboard any notion of a trans-cultural rationality.

But, Rorty views his Pragmatist position positively, not as a destructive attack on traditional values.  Rorty has a basic commitment: human solidarity.  Rorty distances himself from Nietzsche and post-Nietzschean philosophers, like Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger or Michel Foucault, who share Nietzsche’s aggressive resentment against the metaphysical tradition, against bourgeois respectability, against Christian love and against the nineteenth century belief in progress through education and science.  Rorty’s basic value is solidarity. Therefore, in the Socratic disinterest in “the gods” [26] in Christian advocacy of neighbor love; in Bacon’s advocacy of “science” as directed to improving the human condition, Rorty sees development toward the sort of commitment to human solidarity he advocates.  With Rawls, he thinks that ultimate truth claims—whether of a metaphysical or theological sort— cannot serve as a required common basis for a democratic society.  However, he advocates the widest possible freedom in democratic societies be granted to private beliefs or convictions of a metaphysical or theological form. 

Richard Rorty and Fides et Ratio

In this final section, we identify four themes about which Rorty’s philosophy and Fides et Ratio clash. These are the Vocation of Philosophy, the Question of Truth, Proving God’s Existence and The Autonomy of Philosophy.  Comments made are the author’s opinions, not those of Rorty.  

1. The Vocation of Philosophy

We have noted that the Encyclical claims that philosophy’s essential vocation is wisdom.   Wisdom, the Encyclical explains, means the ultimate truth and understanding about the meaning of human existence (“directly concerned with asking the question of life’s meaning”) (3) .  This quest shows that “the desire for truth is part of human nature itself. “  Yet, the Encyclical slides quite quickly away from this decidedly human-centered, indeed subjective view of philosophy’s vocation. Already in the Introduction itself, Fides et Ratio promptly moves to define philosophy as speculation, as aimed as acquiring “universal elements of knowledge, ” leading, by means of “logical coherence of the affirmations made and the organic unity of their content” to a “systematic body of knowledge.” In the end, Fides et Ratio declares that philosophy is to attain to “the first principles of being”. Thus, in very short order, the Encyclical moves from a rather existential, personal statement of philosophy’s vocation —-wisdom, i.e., understanding the purpose and meaning of human life—- to a very objective, abstract, systematic vocation ————-an organically coherent metaphysics of being.

Rorty would agree that Philosophy should serve humankind, socially and individually. Rorty’s might interpret Philosophy as “Love of Wisdom” to correspond to his notion of philosophy serving human solidarity This service, however, is not best met, he believed, by “locating” “human nature” within a totalizing system of Being.  Indeed, he would question whether we,  as contingent and temporaral beings within the cosmos of beings could ever “locate” ourselves.  Rather, philosophy is less a mirror of an alledged “objective reality” than a lamp which lights our way along the path of social and individual self-formation.

Why, Rorty might well ask, does the Encyclical moves so quickly from defining philosophy’s goal to be wisdom (as seeking the meaning of human existence) to defining philosophy’s goal as ontology, defining the general principles of Being.  What interest, Rorty would ask with Nietzsche and Postmodern philosophers,  was served for philosophers who defines this as philosophy’s goal and designate themselves as exclusively competent for this task?   Rorty would surely miss in Fides et Ratio’s definition of philosophy’s vocations a fundamental insight of modern and postmodern philosophy:  a critical inquiry into the motives of those making alleged claims to “objective truth.”

Rorty certainly knew that the Plato and Aristotle  used by Scholastic and Protestant Christianity did include ontology (e.g., Aristotle’s Metaphysics).  Therefore, he would suspect that in Fides et Ratio Roman Catholic teaching  wants to validate as quickly as possible general ontology as  philosophy’s goal. 
Rorty would also lament  in  Fides et Ratio’s  any genuine and respectful response with Modern and Postmodern philosophyer’s problems with metaphysics and ontology.  All Rorty would find in Fides et Ratio is lament and dismissal of philosophy that does not accept traditional ontology as philosophy’s goal.    Rorty’s philosophy is a cardinal example of Postmodern rejection of traditional metaphysics.  His critique is sweeping, since the Objectivism Rorty rejects includes not only traditional ontology but also Enlightenment Rationalism and twentieth-century logical positivism and scientism. [27]  Since Roman Catholic teaching also criticizes some forms of modern rationalism and scientism, Rorty could wonder why Fides et Ratio so easily and lightly dismisses his views of philosophy’s vocation.

2. The Question of Truth

Closely related to the question of philosophy’s vocation is the question of the nature of reason and of truth. In confronting Fides et Ratio’s vision of philosophy with that of Rorty’s, we see how deep down is the clash between these philosophical worlds.  Rorty’s view of philosophy’s task is the quintessence of what the Encyclical describes as the sickness of much contemporary philosophy.  Rorty denies that philosophy can or should make the search for “ultimate truth” its object.  For Fides et Ratio,  ultimate truth for human existence not only exists but its discovery human life should be the primary goal of philosophy. Further, the Encyclical says, the human mind is capable of “truth.”

Granted, the Encyclical discusses the meaning of truth with some nuances and qualifications.  God is the ultimate truth, and the vision of God is possible only at the end of history.  Truth’s source is also not in human control; it is a gift given by God.  Truth, as revealed in Jesus Christ is personal and enmeshed in the finitude and contingency of history.  But these nuanced distinctions don’t prevent Fides et Ratio from declaring  that this ultimate truth has been entrusted to the Church.  And Rorty knew that for the Living Magisterium this claim means, “entrusted to the Roman Catholic Church” and entails that the right to explain and express this Truth is possessed exclusively by itself. 

As a Postmodern philosopher was heir to Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as daring to think for oneself and to Nietzsche’s conviction that truth claims were masks for the will to power.   Fides et Ratio defines its access to Truth to include the right to define the limits of philosophy’s competence.  Rorty would hold that no earthly authority is immune from critical questioning.  And he would hold that any claim to competence, especially sole competence, over Truth especially requires a hermeneutic of suspicion.   

Rorty would deeply wonder about Fides et Ratio’s repeated, though unsupported, declarations that humans are capable of Truth in some absolute sense.  Here Rorty is especially representative of Postmodern philosophers.  Characteristically Postmodern philosophers have a radical sense that human existence is thorough and through conditioned by time and history.  This leads them to the insight that humans are capable only of a perspectival, relative view of reality.  That is, the plausibility framework of its own time and place conditions a society’s knowledge irretrievably.  Thus, Postmodern philosophers find the Encyclical’s kind of appeals to  “ultimate truth” or to “the nature of things” as naïve or self-serving. Again, we have a clash of worlds.

Fides et Ratio does evince a much greater awareness of Postmodern questions about appeals to Truth and essential natures.  The Encyclical acknowledges the historicity of human existence and the consequent challenge to human understanding historicity entails. Fides et Ratio acknowledges that God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is personal and was thoroughly enmeshed in history.  Fides et Ratio even acknowledges the insight about human temporality and historicity as one of the  valuable contribution of modern philosophy.   But this acknowledgement affects not at all the Encyclicals insistence that absolute, eternal, ultimate truth is accessible to humans, or at least to the Teaching Magisterium. [28]

3. Proving the Existence of God

We have noted that the Encyclical reiterates the claim made at the First Vatican Council that reason alone could with certitude prove the existence of God.   By reiterating this claim the Encyclical presents philosophy with a direct and massive challenge.  One aspect of the challenge is that this claim amounts to a directive, a norm or task that any and every philosopher should fulfill.  The Encyclical is telling philosophers what their philosophical reflection should accomplish.  

Another aspect of this challenge is that it can elicit the question of why this assertion about philosophy need to be made a dogma? If philosophy can achieve the certain knowledge and proof of God’s existence, why don’t all philosophers acknowledge this as true?  The obvious answer is that many philosophers, at least beginning with Immanuel Kant, have questioned the viability of proofs for God’s existence at least as they have been presented in traditional Christian theology.[29]  Indeed, as Paul Griffith says, hardly anyone today acknowledges the validity of this kind of argument. Indeed, only a tiny handful of specially trained people can even participate in the debates about the cogency of such arguments.  Does this mean that Christian and non-Christian philosophers who doubt the probity of these proofs are incompetent or morally perverse?  Does it mean that Roman Catholic philosophers who cannot convince their non-believing colleagues of their probity are incompetent? 

Further Fides et Ratio’s discussion of proving God’s existence ignores or is not cognizant of Modern and Postmodern philosophy’s deep critique of the notion of “Reason.”  What is “natural reason”? Can reason be discussed apart from catechesis, the education of reason?  If not,  reason is deeply intertwined by culture, and thus by change and contingency. So Rorty holds.  Again, a clash of worlds.

A Postmodern philosopher like Rorty might well ask why a Christian would want to “prove God’s existence.”  A Postmodern philosopher would ask this question because characteristically he or she asks critically about the interests and motives of philosophical ideas.  A Christian believer might also be critical not just of claims to be able to prove God’s existence by the motives for such an attempt.  

Everyday experience tells us that establishing “what is the case” has morally questionable motives. The intrusiveness of paparazzi and of gossips is an obvious example.  But from the standpoint of Christian spirituality one can question motives for wanting to prove God’s existence.  Every act of knowing is a kind of taking possession of, a laying hold on, indeed, a kind of bringing under control of what is known.  Why doesn’t Roman Catholic official teaching about proving God’s existence raise some questions about this enterprise?  Proving God’s existence, or the attempts to do so, may be proper from a Christian point of view. But a self-critical Christian will wonder whether the attempt to prove God’s experience is an unwarranted assault on God’s independence, freedom and transcendence.  Christians should ask whether the desire to prove God’s existence is a way humans want to chain God to the human mind,  an unwarranted intellectual appropriation of God?  Fides et Ratio lacks any sense of this appropriate spiritual discomfort; a discomfort the Living Magisterium could have learned from Rorty’s kind of Postmodern philosophy.

4. The Freedom and Autonomy of Philosophy

We noted that Fides et Ratio repeatedly affirms that philosophy is autonomous, free and independent.  The Church, the Encyclical claims, does not canonize any particular kind of philosophy or philosopher. [30]  The Magisterium intervenes only to warn against philosophies whose basic assumptions contradict the fundamentals of Christian faith. 

Here opens up perhaps the deepest chasm between Rorty’s Postmodernism and the plausibility framework of Fides et Ratio.  For Rorty,  philosophy should be free to question everything, and certainly every human, institutional authority.  The closer an institution equates itself with ultimate truth, Rorty would say, the more wary a philosopher should be.  Claims to possess ultimate truth logically imply the right to obtain the political power required to protect and promote that truth. This both Fascism and Communism did in the twentieth century. So also did the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Churches from the Constantinian Settlement through the seventeenth century. [31]   The horrors of the Thirty-Years War convinced Western Europe that Religious institutions and the power of the State must be separated; otherwise religious people would continue to kill those who disagreed with them, even within the same religion.   The democratic institutions which, according to Rorty, philosophy should serve, have accomplished this separation, often against the resistance of the Roman Catholic Church.

At the level of individual teachers within the Roman Catholic Church,
Rorty will have known of Papal demands for “childlike obedience” [32] to the Magisterium.  He will know how the Living Magisterium caused theologians whose did not display this obedience to lose their jobs and places their works on the Index of Forbidden Books.  It would be hard for him to believe the Encyclical’s affirmation of the freedom and autonomy of philosophy.  Again, a clash of worlds.

Conclusion

We have confronted two perspectives on the vocation of philosophy:  Postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty’s and Roman Catholic official teaching in the Encyclical Fides et Ratio.  We have shown that these two perspectives diverge radically.    While affirming “the transcendent capacity of human reason” (Fides et Ratio 60) Roman Catholic teaching claims the right to “point out the misperceptions and mistakes of philosophical theories.” (Fides et Ratio 56), and expects that reason “acknowledges that it cannot do without what faith represents. (Fides et Ratio 42).  Granted the finitude of human reason, who has the right to define reason’s limits?  This is a major issue separating these two visions of philosophy. 

This right can only be vested in an institution or individual who believes it or himself to transcend reason’s finitude. Rorty believes no human or human institution transcends reason’s finitude, contingency and temporality.  At the least, all claims to transcend reason’s finitude must be subject to criticism and question.  This assumption is a given for Modern and Postmodern philosophy and this assumption is made in the name of protecting humans from absolute truth claims, especially when supported by political power. 

The Roman Catholic Teaching Office claims for itself the right and the competence to define the limits of reason. This,  on the grounds that God has given it, and it alone, the responsibility to teach and protect the gift of ultimate truth, divine revelation.    Therefore, Fides et Ratio teaches that the truths of faith transcend the reach of reason and do not derive from reason.  But also Fides et Ratio teaches that the truths of revelation cannot be irrational because they come from God who is the Truth.  Indeed, therefore, the truths of faith are compatible with reason and in themselves are inherently intellectually coherent. 

The faith/reason correlation is one aspect of the comprehensive nature/supernature (grace) correlation developed during the Middle Ages and which was legitimated by Vatican I. [33] Supernature (grace) does not destroy nature but heals and perfects nature, to use Thomas Aquinas’s famous phrase.  Accordingly, faith and reason, rightly understood and exercised, constitute a duality within unity. In this unity, faith, as grounded in the supremacy of God over creation, plays the leading role. In this reason/faith theological correlation, faith corrects reason, encourages reason and opens reason to a supernatural realm of truth which itself cannot reach.  Within this realm, faith then asks reason to serve it by displaying faith’s inherent coherence and arguing for the truths of faith in relation to the non-believing world. 

Roman Catholic official theology uses the doctrine of the Incarnation to legitimate its institutional right to represent faith in relation to reason.  As the divine Word assumed the person Jesus, so the Risen Christ relates to the Roman Catholic Church (alone, in the truest sense) as His Body.   Within the Body of Christ, so understood, the Living Magisterium, culminating in the Bishop of Rome, who is Christ’s representative on earth, speaks for faith in relation to reason.   Theologically seen, therefore, the relation of faith and reason directly concerns the doctrine of the Church.  Fides et Ratio does not thematize this directly, but behind its theme of faith and reason stands this larger theological issue.

Given the Roman Catholic Church’s self-understanding, how should it respond when philosophy and Christian theology go different ways?  In the Postmodern age, the divergence between these two worlds is so great that Roman Catholic truth claims are not so much disputed by philosophy as ignored.   Postmodern philosophy’s disinterest in the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching about philosophy and reason challenges this teaching even more than active opposition.  According to  the nature/supernature paradigm, philosophy should, by its inherent nature,  be open to and receptive of the claims of faith.  Fides et Ratio repeatedly teaches this.   Thus Postmodern philosophy’s ignoring of Roman Catholic official teaching on this matter is especially traumatic.

Between the lines of Fides et Ratio readers will easily discern a deep worry about this aspect of philosophy’s Postmodern infidelity.   Modern and Postmodern philosophy have passed, perhaps irretrievably, beyond the embrace, not to say the control, of the Roman Catholic Church.  One must wonder whether Pope John Paul II or the Congregation for the Faith or the other organs of the Living Magisterium really expect philosophy will ever again become the “handmaid” of theology.   Fides et Ratio laments Modern and Postmodern philosophy’s aberrations.  It reaches out to “the secular citadel of reason” [34] while reiterating traditional Roman Catholic teaching about philosophy’s proper relation to “faith”, i.e., its subordination to the Living Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.  For all of its apparent pastoral tone[35], its encouragement of “right” philosophy, its acknowledgements of some valued contributions by some modern philosophy, Ratio et Fides ‘s tone is paternalistic. 

The Encyclical’s tone is also monologist; Fides et Ratio addresses itself to Roman Catholic bishops in their teaching office, not to philosophers as such. Thus, in this Encyclical the Living Magisterium is talking once more to itself, not to those about whose work the Encyclical writes.  Does this mean that the Roman Catholic Church has lost its ability to speak to philosophers outside its own walls?  Rather than engaging the problems postmodern philosophers have with Christian philosophical tradition, and instead of seeking a way to serve modern philosophy in a friendly, supportive way, Fides et Ratio’s main purpose is to tell philosophers how reason should relate to Christian faith, as defined by the Roman Catholic Church’s Living Magesterium.  

As noted, Fides et Ratio’s answer to the question of philosophy’s vocation and its relation to faith is controlled by the nature/supernature correlation.  Theologically, the major problem with this theological construct is that it logically defines the supernatural dimension in terms of nature, as “nature/supernature” says.  The prefix “super” of “super-nature” means that God is beyond nature.  But the “nature” of “supernature” logically implies that God’s nature is in some sense continuous with “nature.”  That is why Roman Catholic theology’s understanding of language for God (theological predication) is irretrievably committed to the analogy of being (analogia entis) between creation and God.   Despite the protests and even the will of its defenders, the nature/supernature correlation inevitably defines God in terms of God’s creation—for example as creation’s Cause or Telos.  The reason is inherent in the correlation itself.  To the degree “ supernature”  has any positive meaning in this correlation, that meaning is defined in part by “nature”, i.e., creation.  

Thus, God is “chained” to nature and to human reason.   Against this chaining of God to the world inherent in the nature/supernature correlation and the analogy of being concept, Protestant theology, including the Protestant strand of Anglicanism, has and should raise a friendly but warning hand. At stake is God’s uniqueness and God’s absolute freedom and independence of the world.  This Protestant warning hand should not be made as an attack on the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, the warning hand should be raised on behalf of God’s freedom, i.e., the freedom of God to be gracious in Jesus Christ.  This freedom of God, God’s capacity to be gracious, is the pearl of great price at the heart of the Christian Gospel.  God’s freedom to be gracious and God’s grace in his freedom [36] should be central, not marginal, in any discussion of faith and reason and their relationship.

The Rev. David Scott, Ph. D.
December, 2007
Murnau, Germany

References

[1] The Rev. Dr. Leander Harding has graciously posted these essays on his website: http://www.leanderharding.com.

[2] Not dialogue but clash is the basic image underlying this essay.  The two views of philosophy’s vocation studied here are worlds apart.  Fides et Ratio explicitly criticizes philosophical views that Rorty defends.  And, the philosophy of “Objectivity” that Rorty rejects clearly fits traditional theology and philosophy and he lists traditional Christian theology as an example of philosophical goals which he has abandoned.

[3] Henceforth, to spare the reader, and myself, unnecessary toil, references to Fides et Ratio are by the number assigned in the document to each paragraph or group of paragraphs.

[4] One exploration of this participation ontology in Anglican tradition is offered by Edmund Newey, “The Form of Reason: Participation in the work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor.” Modern Theology (10. 1 January 2002)

[5] Fides et Ratio was published in 1998.  The text can be found on the Internet at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-iienc_151.

[6] This biographical material is drawn directly from the following website

[7] See Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) most recent Encyclical: Spe Salvi.

[8] That unaided human reason can prove with intellectual certitude that God exists is the dogmatic teaching of Vatican I (1870).  “Eadem sancta mater Ecclesia tenet et docet, Deum, rerum omnium princiium et finem, naturali humanae rationis lumine e rebus creatis certo cognosci posse” Vatican I, Constitutio dogmatica de fide catholica, Ch. 2 Romans 1,20 is cited as biblical warrant for this teaching.  Consequently, Vatican I holds: si quis dixerit, Deum, unum et rerum creatorem et Dominum nostrum, per ea, quae facta sunt, naturali rationis humanae lumino certo cognosci non posse, anathema est.  Henricus Dennziger Enchiridion Symbolorum (Barcelona: Editorial Herder, 1956): 1785; 1806

[9] See Richard Rorty “Solidarity or Objectivity” in John Rajchman/Cornel West, Eds Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 3-19.

[10] Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979): 171.

[11] See, for Rorty’s description of the ideal of philosopher as “ascetic priest,”  his essay Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens” in Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991):66-82.

[12] Throughout his essay “Solidarity or Objectivity,” Rorty contrasts these two visions of philosophy’s vocation.

[13] Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection” in Joseph H. Smith/William Kerrigan Eds. Pragmatism’s Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) 1-27.

[14] Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection.”

[15] Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” Unpublished manuscript, printed in German translation in Richard Rorty Solidaritaet oder Objektivitaet: Drei phiosohische Essays  Translated by Joachim Schulte (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, jr., 1988): 82-125.

[16] See, for example, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

[17] The Scholastic theology of transubstantiation in Eucharistic doctrine built on the distinction between the essence and accidents of bread, wine and Jesus’ Body and Blood.

[18] Rorty,  “Solidarity or Objectivity.”

[19] These examples from Hindu, Buddhist and Daoism are not Rorty’s but are the author’s, used to illustrate Rorty’s claims about the philosophical relevance of contingency in human life.

[20] However, Rorty does refer to modern social science assumptions to point out that these sciences simply ignore traditional Greek and Christian notions of “human nature.”

[21] In contemporary terms Rorty could ask a philosopher who insists that a society must be based on a foundation of “absolute truth” or “the essential nature of human beings” or “God’s will” whether they prefer to live in France, the US or Germany, for example, or would prefer to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban or in North Korea under a communist dictator, each of whom claims to represent absolute truth.

[22] Here, Rorty might mean that modern natural science (the most modern expression of the “objectivist” rationalist tradition) defines “valid scientific knowledge” in terms of the methods of modern natural science.  But these methods themselves predetermine what can count as valid scientific truth.  For example, modern natural scientific methodology a priori excludes any appeal to final causes or to a cause that transcends this- worldly causality.  In this way, modern natural science rules out, by definition, identifying a god or angel or devil as a cause of any natural phenomenon.  Hence, the criteria of natural scientific method predetermine what can count as a truth of natural science.   Natural scientific method and the “valid” results of natural scientific method presuppose each other circularly.

[23] Solidarity or Objectivity, footnote 13.  Here Rorty mentions the philosopher, Donald Davidson, as holding a view similar to his own.

[24] Rorty refers to differences of opinions between liberal western democrats, like himself, and Nazis or Amazon Indians.  Nazis declare statements,  say about racial purity, as objectively true.  Amazon Indians hold other views, e.g., ,  that the Amazon River originates in a turtle’s egg.  The plausibility structure of western people, defined my modern natural and social science can make no sense of these views.  Their plausibility structure is so different that westerners can hardly even engage them in rational dispute. The plausibility structures, i.e., the mental frames of references between western, liberal democrats on the one hand and Nazis or Amazon Indians is so radically different that no real intellectual dialogue about what is true is possible.  In this sense, Rorty acknowledges that the Pragmatist is ethnocentric. That is, the meaning of truth is relative to the plausibility structure of one’s own culture.  But Rorty rejects the label of relativism for the Pragmatist,  if that means that any statement about moral or political norms is a true or good as another.   That meaning of relativism, Rorty states, is obviously self-contradictory.

[25] Rorty refers to Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ueber Wahrheit und Luege in aussermoralischen Sinn.” 1873 in Werke, hrsg. Von Karl Schlechta, Bd. 3 Muenchen: Hanser Verlag, 1966, p. 314.

[26] Confucius also had little interest in theological questions; like Socrates, his focus was on the conditions of human life in this world.

[27] Questioning epistemological  objectivism was the main theme of Rorty’s first major book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

[28] As a Christian theologian I wonder why the Encyclical’s discussion of truth did not build more on the biblical word for truth (Emeth).  “Emeth”, truth, means fidelity. God’s Truth is God’s “being true to” His promises to the people of Israel.  Christ as the Truth then means  God’s fidelity to God’s purposes in Israel and for  all humanity in  the birth, life, death and resurrection of the Savior and the sending of the Holy Spirit.  Strangely, the biblical theme of truth as “being true to” is hardly mentioned in the Encyclical in the context of its claims about Truth.

[29] In his review of Deny Turner’s Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Paul J. Griffiths points out that: “ every constituent of the claim [viz. that God’s existence can be rationally proved] requires much analysis in order to be made clear, and any particular interpretation of any one of its constituents is unavoidably controversial.” Further,  Griffith correctly points out that some philosophers believe that the so-called ontological proof of God’s existence (associated with St. Anseln) is cogent, but other philosophers do not.  Problems Griffith has with Turner’s reasoning could be applied also to the claim that God’s existence is rationally demonstrable.  One can speak of “reason alone” as one can speak of “the digestive system alone.” But in reality reason, like the digestive system, is part of massively complicated,  larger systems.  What, then, does it mean that “reason alone” can demonstrate God’s existence?  A further problem, not discussed by Griffith, but often discussed by theologians, is what “god” does the traditional cosmological argument “prove”?  The Father of Jesus Christ, as made known by Christ, is not obviously identical with the cosmological argument’s  esse ipsum and prima causa.  Also, was Thomas Aquinas’s theology speaking of “proofs” that obligate the mind to a particular conclusion , as a mathematical proof does, or was did he mean five “ways” the world points beyond itself to  a cause?  Has Newthomism, reflected in Encyclicals since Vatican II  accurately continued Thomas Aquinas’ intention in his discussion. Griffiths’ major objection to Turner’s argumentation is that Turner “collapses the distinction between what an argument is, formally speaking, and what it is recognized or recognizable as.” That is, Griffiths claims that Turner’s discussion of the rational proof argument for God is crippled by Turner’s conflating of the distinct acts of constructing a valid argument and knowing the argument to be valid.  See Paul J. Griffiths “On the Mistake of Thinking Reason’s Products Transparent to Its Gaze: Denys Turner on Arguments for the Existence of God” in Pro Ecclesia Fall 2006 XV: 472-482.

[30] One must say, however, that these statements are hard to reconcile with Leo XIII’s 1879 Encyclical Aeterni Patrris, subtitle “On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy”.  Sections 17-23 effusively praise Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy, section 24 complains about “deviations from scholastic philosophy” and urges “the restoration of the ancient philosophy” (29) and “the golden wisdom of St. Thomas.” (31).

[31] Victor Lee Austin’s “John Paul II’s Ironic Legacy in Political Theology” in Pro Ecclesia XVI, (No. 2. Spring 2007): 165-194, demonstrates how this Pope’s teaching swerved strongly away from earlier Roman Catholic claims of political sovereignty over every other political power. Such claims were made explicitly, for example, in Pius XI Encyclical Quas Primas.  The irony is that John Paul II, a Polish Pope, deeply influenced Poland’s repudiation of the Soviet Union’s control, an important factor in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

[32] A phrase used by Eugenio Pacelli in relation to theologians before becoming Pope Pius XII.

[33] See Fides et Ratio 8-9, for the language of supernature and nature.

[34]  John R. Betz uses this phrase in his “Review Essay” of Paul Griffiths & Reinhard Huetter, Eds. Reason and the Reasons of Faith (New York & London: T & T Clark, 2005.) in Pro Ecclesia XVI No. 2 (Spring 2007) 226ff.  This volume is in part a response to Fides et Ratio.

[35] Fides et Ratio’s tone lacks the self-satisfied complacency of Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879),  the only other Encyclical devoted to the subject of philosophy.

[36] These phrases theologian Karl Barth used to express his deepest platform principles.