Clear Philosophy
The Unity of Philosophical Experience
by Etienne Gilson
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999
(269 pages; $17.95, paper)
by Eric Scheske
In his story, “The Gifts of the Child Christ,” George MacDonald describes the quietly unhappy marriage of a serious middle-aged man and his frivolous young wife. The man was discouraged by his wife’s simple-minded joys. He wanted her to take an interest in serious topics, like poetry and science, but his efforts to instruct her always failed because he didn’t approach the task properly. Instead of trying to teach her poetry from Milton, the narrator points out, “He ought to have read with her the books she did like, for by them only could he make her think, and from them alone could he lead her to better.”
This is what Etienne Gilson has done in The Unity of Philosophical Experience by using an easier discipline (history) to help explain a more difficult discipline (philosophy1). Through a 900-year jaunt from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, Gilson has used historical narrative to illuminate deep philosophical issues and explain with clarity the systems of the last millennium’s most profound philosophers, especially Abelard, William of Ockham, St. Bonaventure, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Kant, and Comte. Gilson also provides a fair amount of insight into the philosophies of a host of other thinkers, including Moses Maimonides, Petrarch, Nicholas of Cusa, Montaigne, Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Newton, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. In short, the book provides a heavy dose of philosophical knowledge for anyone who wants to expand his knowledge in that area.
But that’s not the purpose of the book.
Just as history is a backdrop to Unity’s analysis of the last millennium’s greatest minds, the analysis itself serves as a backdrop to Gilson’s life work. In his other books, Gilson defends Christian philosophy; in Unity, Gilson goes on the offensive, striking deep (and, I think, commonsense and therefore mortal) blows at the fathers of modern thought. And in the process he makes the thoughts of these philosophers clear.
This is somewhat unusual for a philosophical history. Other philosophical histories tend to strive for “objectivity,” with the result that the different philosophers get bogged down in the muddle of relativity. Gilson’s narrative, on the other hand, quietly throws the modern philosophers against the screen of truths perceived by Christian philosophy, thereby revealing the philosophers’ hollowness. Though he only indirectly refers to Christian philosophy, the implication is there: The modern errors are difficult to avoid without resort to Christian philosophy and, ultimately, to divine revelation, which works with human reason to fulfill it.2 Gilson never says this (though he seems to point at it in the last chapter), but by toppling the trees of modern thought, he clears the path for anyone who wants to pursue it.
Degenerate Skepticism
The theme of this book is summed up in the last chapter: “Theology, logic, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, are fully competent to solve their own problems by their own methods; on the other hand . . . as metaphysics aims at transcending all particular knowledge, no particular science is competent either to solve metaphysical problems, or to judge their metaphysical solutions” (p. 249). When a branch of knowledge purports to do this, it degenerates into an “ism.”
Unity describes a series of these “isms,” such as the logicism of Abelard, the theologism of St. Bonaventure, the physicism of Kant, the mathematicism of Descartes, and the sociologism of Comte.
In Chapter III, for instance, Gilson explores the psychologism of William of Ockham. Ockham taught that knowledge is attainable only by intuition—that which our senses directly show us. Ockham’s reliance on intuition was combined with his famous “razor,” which taught that we should never presume the existence of anything else if it is not absolutely necessary to explain a thing or occurrence. So, for example, intuition shows us hand puppets, but the razor tells us we cannot automatically presume the existence of hands, since the puppets could be supported without hands. Most notably, they could be supported by the will of God, which was Ockham’s favorite possibility (he thought references to things beyond the razor detracted from God’s powerful glory).3
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