The Slenderest Knowledge of the Highest Things
'Those who seek the direct road to truth', Descartes argued, 'should not bother with any object of which they cannot have a certainty equal to the demonstrations of arithmetic and geometry.' Only such objects should engage our attention ‘to the sure and indubitable knowledge of which our mental powers seem to be adequate.’
Thus Descartes limits his interest to knowledge and ideas that are precise and certain beyond any possibility of doubt, since his primary interest is that we should become 'masters and possessors of nature.' Nothing can be precise unless it can be quantified in one way or another. The problem with reducing the world to that which can be measured and quantified is that it leaves most of that which makes life meaningful and worth living out. And such quantification also makes the world and its 'resources' available to control and commodification.
Jacques Maritain comments here:
"The mathematical knowledge of nature, for Descartes, is not what it is in reality, a certain interpretation of phenomena ... which does not answer questions bearing upon the first principles of things. This knowledge is, for him, the revelation of the very essence of things. These are analysed exhaustively by geometric extension and local movement. The whole of physics, that is, the whole of the philosophy of nature, is nothing but geometry. Thus Cartesian evidence goes straight to mechanism. It mechanises nature; it does violence to it; it annihilates everything which causes things to symbolise with the spirit, to partake of the genius of the Creator, to speak to us. The universe becomes dumb."
Maritain, The Dream of Descartes 1946; see further on this Founding the Modern Project: Cartesian Doubt
Descartes broke with tradition, declared ancient knowledge useless, and determined to make a clean sweep, undertaking to start afresh and find out everything by himself. This kind of independence - which some will see as having the courage to use one's own understanding (in line with Kant's motto of Enlightenment), others as arrogance - became the characteristic 'style' of modern European philosophy. As Maritain comments, 'every modern philosopher is a Cartesian in the sense that he looks upon himself as starting off in the absolute, and as having the mission of bringing men a new conception of the world.'
I nearly wrote that this was a bold, ambitious, and noble vision. I have, after all, affirmed some such thing in my work on Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. In truth, however, it's the opposite. The approach is reductive and narrowing, lowering our sights from 'higher truths' deemed 'nonsense' on account of lying outside of our conceptual reach and settling them on certainties in inanimate matter - a dead world, a flatland. Here, certainty is attained by way of a 'withdrawal from wisdom' and the exclusive concentration on knowledge as firm and indubitable as mathematics and geometry.
There is much more to human life than this. To reduce life to that which can be measured is to miss all that makes life meaningful and worth living. The direction is wrong, lowering sights instead of raising them.
While traditional wisdom had considered the human mind as weak but open-ended in being capable of reaching beyond itself towards higher and higher levels, modern thought after Descartes took it as axiomatic that the mind's reach had fixed and narrow limits, which could be clearly determined, but possessing virtually unlimited powers within these limits. The possession, control, and manipulation of the world under what Boyle called 'the empire of man' ceased to be a vague utopia and instead became a programme within practical reach. But there is a price to be paid for the narrowing of vision and the enclosure of the world within a totalizing Reason. Precision and certainty is gained only by reducing vision and narrowing focus on a physical world that is conceived as dead, meaningless, mechanical and purposeless. This extension of mastery amounts to an extension of means and a diminution of meaning; it leaves unanswered all the questions that really matter. How is anyone to resist the pressure of the statements made in the name of objective science, unless, like Maurice Nicoll, s/he suddenly receives 'this inner revelation' of knowing that the men and women who say such things know nothing about anything that really matters, whatever their particular expertise.
I may be doing Descartes a disservice here. I have a book here which claims that the Descartes considered as reductionist and mechanicist is a caricature. It's an image that crops up in the many books I have written by environmental philosophers, individuals who are environmentalists first and last, and philosophers hardly at all. The popular view of Descartes as a mechanicist hamstrung by abstraction and dualism may be overstated. I know that when I read Descartes in the raw, he has an admirably clear and lucid style. And he was addressing a real problem with respect to an old metaphysics that had come to seem indefensible and implausible in light of the advance of natural science. I think that Descartes was trying to rescue ethical truths by placing them on a more secure, scientific, footing. That Kant was attempting some such thing a century later with respect to rationality suggests that Descartes' attempt was less than successful.
It doesn't work for me. I wrote at length on Kant, but still saw the dangers of dissolution into subjectivism and relativism, once the grounding in ontology is lost.
The moderate realism of St. Thomas Aquinas is more cogent. I argued this at length in 2013. Aquinas, Morality, and Modernity
Raising the sights in search of higher truths is a riskier approach and is more ambitious, and involves all manner of dangers of misplaced concreteness and false claims - but the direction is right. In raising our sights, we expand our being within this purposeful, meaningful, valuable, and participatory universe. I'll risk error in going in this direction - and acknowledge the capacity for error to check against dangers of false fixity and ossification, the bane of all religious, ethical, and intellectual systems - rather than settle for truths so trite as to leave one and all unmoved within a mechanics of external stimuli, bereft of emotional content and moral concern.
The point is that without the qualitative concepts of 'higher' and 'lower' it is impossible to even think of guidelines for living that lead to a world beyond individual or collective utilitarianism and selfishness.
I don't understand this hankering after certainty. Truths that are certain are so simple as to make no difference in the areas of living which matter. Matters that are beyond doubt are dead and do not constitute a challenge to the living. Moral agency involves choices, decisions and relations to others that are never certain. The same with respect to politics. The temper of living is judicious, and making the right choices is a matter of character and modes of conduct, not just truth, still less certainty. The forming of character in the first place makes the informing of heads fruitful. Where truth and knowledge is rootless, their application will be fruitless.
In limiting ourselves to a knowledge that we consider to be true beyond doubt, we may succeed in minimizing the risk of error but only by maximizing the risk of missing out on what may well be the most subtle, sublime, meaningful, and rewarding things in life. Following Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that 'the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.' Knowledge and certainty are two different things (which scientists, of course, understand, see Bronowski The Ascent of Man). 'Slender' knowledge stands at the opposite pole to 'certain' knowledge, and denotes uncertainty. It may well be necessarily the case that the 'highest things' cannot be known with the same degree of certainty as the lesser things, but it would be a very great loss to humankind if knowledge came to be restricted to only those things that are beyond the possibility of doubt. These things are the most obvious, and focus upon them, to the neglect of higher truths, serves only to enslave us to the immediacy of the world of sense and appearance.
I intend to liven my Dante book up with a metaphysical reconstruction along these lines, affirming that both science and ethics require metaphysical supports in order to first encourage and then buttress their truth-seeking.
At risk of blunt speaking causing outrage, attaining knowledge of the physical universe is a piece of cake (OK, I shall rephrase and say that such knowledge is possible, to the extent that the universe is accessible to intelligent beings), and to set this up as the only true and the whole of knowledge, as a materialistic scientism does, betrays us all to a narrow understanding. I'm interested in the more complicated stuff, the living aspect of the universe, which includes that really complicated stuff which is humanity, and not merely the 'dead' aspect of the universe. In 'following the science' we need to do two things, identify which science in particular, and be clear with respect to the object of study. We live in a ceaselessly creative universe in which human agency, will, and consciousness is built-in as an integral part. There is a need, then, to engage with living material. The real problems of life have to be grappled with, and that requires that the gap between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, the world of fact) and practical reason (ethics and politics, the world of value) be bridged.
To repeat the quotation from St. Thomas Aquinas, 'The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things'; and 'grappling' with the help of slender knowledge is the real stuff of life, whereas solving problems—which, to be soluble, must be convergent—with the help of 'the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things 'is merely one of many useful and perfectly honourable human activities designed to save labour.
This view is integral to the metaphysical reconstruction which E.F. Schumacher made the condition of enduring and effective environmental restoration. The sense I get from all the anti-metaphysics pretensions of modern thought and action - which ultimately reduce to logical positivism - is that we end up not with no metaphysics, leaving us unable to answer the big questions, dismissing them as nonsense and meaningless, but a bad metaphysics in which knowledge of the trivial, the obvious, and the unimportant (or lesser) is put in their place, on the mistaken assumption that an expansion of knowledge and know-how suffices to satisfy the cosmic longing for meaning and the deep need for belonging. They do not.
My contrarian ways tell me that Descartes can't be as bad as he always seems to be in certain accounts. At the same time, I think it's probably a good idea to go back to identify and ponder the problem with which he was dealing. He just doesn't seem fruitful to me. I can spot lots of errors in St Thomas and the pre-modern philosophers, natural science has made enormous strides since the seventeenth century. But the interesting thing for me is that the direction of St Thomas is fruitful and expansive. I affirm that opening out as against the narrowing down of the moderns. I did get a book back in 2006 when it was published, but not had time to read it (or it's not been on the agenda), which casts Descartes in more positive light. Descartes and the Passionate Mind by Deborah Brown (2006). There's even a chapter on "wonder and love." She writes:
"I want in this book to establish some distance from these 'Cartesian' conceptions of mind and self. I do not intend to offer a panegyric to substance dualism, or to rewrite Descartes as some kind of closet materialist. There is no getting around the dualism, or the autonomy he perceives the mind as having. But it is our failure to set the Cartesian mind in the wider context of Descartes' thought that exacerbates the problems associated with this notion. What it is like to be a Cartesian mind is not the same as what it is like to be a spectator watching a private performance, someone who is left wondering about what is going on outside the theatre or backstage. When we look at those texts in which the union of mind and body is under discussion, what we find is not an inward-looking mind reflecting its metaphysical distinction from the body, but a kind of phenomenological monism — an experience of being one unified and embodied substance. This book is an attempt to explore why it is important to Descartes that our experience is like this... Descartes' account of the embodied mind is present in the Sixth Meditation, but its presence tends to be eclipsed by the emaciated notion . of the mind that dominates the early parts of the Meditations. ... Among Descartes' chief opponents, the 'Scholastics' (by and large, commentators on Aristotle), the immateriality and immortality of the soul were largely uncontested doctrines. Descartes' way of arriving at the conclusion of the soul's immateriality - through the application of hyperbolic doubt — certainly differed from preceding approaches, but the conclusion was much the same. Yet no one would have accused an Aristotelian, for example, Aquinas, of identifying the self with the immaterial and intellectual part of the soul, or with anything less than the whole human being."
So I reserve judgment on Descartes until I have properly engaged with him. I am very much a supporter of "the good books" approach at Thomas Aquinas College in California, where you have to read philosophers first hand and engage them directly in relation to their problems, rather than read them through interpreters and commentators (whose concerns are very often different). I have a feeling that the advance of natural science encouraged the mentality of the cocky teenager in the moderns, who, in knowing an awful lot, came to think that they suddenly knew everything, or one day could come to know everything. This unnerved a lot of people, who set about working on a more rational (scientific) defence of ethical positions (Kant). As a result, ontological questions came to be displaced in favour of epistemological concerns, leading to a lot of reinvented wheels on much less secure foundations. In retrospect, it is easy to see how the intellectual austerity and imperialism of logical positivism could in time incite the postmodernist reaction. The loss of reality as a check, however, is not a postmodern sin, but is present in the ideas that the truth of science lies in the fact it 'works' and that our knowledge of the world is bound up with our conceptual apparatus. The anthropocentrism lies in the epistemological turn away from the notion of ontological nature and an objectively valuable and meaningful world.
Both scientism and naturalism are bad metaphysics rather than an anti-metaphysics. Neither offer firm foundations for truth and truth-seeking. I refuse to base ethics on the latest fashion in physics or any other science. Even today, it is less than clear which is the dominant/best/most reliable physics - parallel universes, multiverses, string theory, and did anyone ever know what "M theory" ever was? Study any of these, and sooner rather than later you are confronted by what can only be described as metaphysical questions concerning the nature of life, truth, nature, and humanity. Metaphysics doesn't cease to be metaphysics because it comes out of the mouth of a scientist. It just seems to be a bad metaphysics to me, footloose and fruitless.
That said, I am inclined to avoid being too critical with respect to Descartes, because: a) everyone does it; b) he can't be as bad as the critical accounts say he us; and c) I feel a little sorry for him. That said, I did write a little sketch a few years ago that argued that Anne Conway from the same time period is infinitely superior.
My best bet here, I think, is to avoid the 'scholastic' approach - lots of top of the range Dante scholars have studied the man for decades, so it is pointless competing with them - but instead introduce a lot of live and lively themes into the text I have already written.
I like this quote I was given in discussing these questions:
‘The eating of the Word. Making spirit part of the body, science will never be able to prove how that's done, yet it's the pillar of a lived ethics.’ (Helene Domon).
I think a number of the scientists know this, hence the obsessive hounding on their part of any hint of it, spirit, purpose etc. Rupert Sheldrake published an interesting book called The Science Delusion that examined this. The son of Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, stated at his father's funeral that his father's great mission was to destroy teleology. That struck me as no mission at all. I just thought - why on Earth this great negativity and fear on the part of some undeniably clever people? The merest hint of something that was beyond science to explain frightens them rigid and sends them into a rage against religion, against those who affirm an ultimate reality that lies beyond cognitive reach. I can certainly understand a rage against false claims to certainty. I have no problem with that. But it really doesn't have to be this way. There is no contradiction between science and religion. I see both as based on a metaphysics of truth-seeking in relation to different aspects of the same reality. Some of the greatest scientists were and are religious thinkers - Robert Winston, one of the world's leading fertility experts is a practising Jew. It is just a daft war that drains time and energy
The biggest source of our ills is a reductionism that explains some things by taking them apart, only to forget to put them all back together and see that true meaning and explanation comes with respect to proper relations within the whole. I am not sure why that's so difficult; I know for a fact that that's how St. Thomas Aquinas explained things, and argued that position at length in my Aquinas book.
It's amazing how little is known, and how much our knowledge of what we think we know changes. Whilst this often leads to scepticism, it shouldn't. It should lead to a metaphysical reconstruction by way of recognizing that science as the pursuit of knowledge needs metaphysical supports, as does ethics; we then become Rousseau's truth-seekers, putting Aristotle's 'desire to know' (the opening lines of his Metaphysics) on a more humble and less arrogant basis. It is not the possession of truth but its pursuit that matters, and understanding why that pursuit matters is the key thing. It is the same in ethics. We can never ultimately be happy with an endless game of football on a field which lacks goal posts at either end. At some point someone will ask 'what's the point?' and we will find that no-one will be able to answer.
The solution is to ensure right relations between knowledge and know-how on the one hand and will, appetite, and agency on the other. Will, appetite, and agency perfectly translates love or charity as movement.
That's my feeling on grace. For St. Thomas Aquinas, grace does not destroy nature, but fulfils its potential. He is building on Aristotle here, of course. He writes: Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit, which translates as 'Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it', or 'grace does not remove nature but fulfils it.’ (Summa Theologiae (ST), I, I, 8 ad 2). St. Thomas holds that the truth of human nature finds total fulfilment through sanctifying grace, since this is "perfectio naturae rationalis creatae" (Quaestiones quodlibetales, 4, 6). For him, grace does not contradict nature. The Creation could never be totally corrupted by human sin; grace heals the incomplete natural notion of God. I could never see how the Creation could be so bleak as I read in some presentations of Pascal. (And I don't see Pascal as arguing this, he argues in different guises and we need to understand the guise).
Nietzsche argues something I argue with respect to the dangers of fetishizing and freezing truths, systematizing them so as to lose their vitality and movement. In ossifying the mythos, we separate ourselves not only from God/nature/others/self but also from the power that myths possess to alert us to the danger of our own excesses:
“For it is the lot of all myths to creep gradually into the confines of a supposedly historical reality, and to be treated by some later age as unique fact with claims to historical truth . . . this is how religions tend to die: the mythic premises of a religion are systematized, beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events; one begins nervously defending the veracity of myths, at the same time resisting their continuing life and growth. The feeling for myth dies and is replaced by religious claims to foundation in history.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Penguin Classics, London 1993, p. 53
In losing the feeling for myth, displacing Mythos by an exclusive focus on the Logos, we lose the movement and the expansiveness of the potentials of life and their creative unfolding and replaced it with the fraudulent veracity of claims to truth and reality. I think this explains the wretchedness and irrelevance of the wars over the existence or non-existence of God, since neither the theists nor the atheists who lock horns so regularly and so resolutely here have any sense of the creative power of metaphor. This goes back to that notion of science - or any discipline - attempting to eat the Word. By literalizing that power we get the dogmatic orthodoxies of religion and the dismissive orthodoxies of a science centred on fact, both severing us from the real power of myth to hold a mirror before us, illuminating the tensions deep in our souls in order to feed the hunger and quench the thirst, for meaning, for belonging, for fulfilment. Like the ultimate reality we seek, truth is whole and wholesome.
And that whole and wholesome truth requires not just reason but the use of all our faculties in tandem.
"That is why I believe that we should all be grateful to Ennio Morricone, believers and non-believers alike, but above all the believers to whom he belonged, for having been able to express the ineffable and the invisible at the same time, which are the soul of religion."
“Music is definitely close to God,” the maestro responds. “Music is the one true art that truly draws near to the eternal Father and to eternity.” If the eyes are the window of the soul, for Morricone his music was also the window – it revealed much about him.
I love what Ennio Morricone once said in an interview:“It’s key that the music says what isn’t said and what you cannot see.”
The unsaid and the unseen are the intangibles, and are more rather than less real in being that. Life is a constant drama and interplay of the tangible and the intangible. If you stick to the tangible, then you are missing the richer part of life, the whole point, in fact.
What is it that enables us to know anything at all about the world around us? Plotinus argued 'knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.’ Knowing requires the existence of an appropriate 'instrument' in the makeup of the knower. This is the truth of adaequatio (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adaequatio rei et intellectus: the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.
Since human beings comprise the four great Levels of Being, there is some degree of correspondence or 'connaturality' between the structure of humanity and the structure of the world.
The reason that some people fail to grasp and appreciate a given piece of music is not because they are deaf, but because of a lack of adaequatio in the mind. Music is easily grasped by way of the senses, but as such is no more than a succession of notes accessible to hearing. That in itself is not music; music as such is grasped by intellectual powers. Some possess these powers to such a high degree that they can grasp an entire symphony on the strength of one hearing or one reading of the score and hold it in their memory; others may be so weakly endowed with these powers that they are unable to absorb a symphony at all, no matter how many times they hear it. The symphony is real to the form in a way it is not to the latter; the former hear music, the latter only a succession of notes, which may be more or less agreeable but are no more than meaningless noises. The mind of the former is adequate to the symphony and therefore appreciative, the mind of the latter inadequate, and therefore unappreciative. The former is capable of recognizing the symphony as music in a way that the latter is not. That point applies generally across the entire range of possible and actual human experiences. It is significant that Max Weber declared himself ‘unmusical’ when it came to religion.
Whilst the senses pick up physical facts easily enough, much less easy to detect are non-physical facts. These non-physical facts are the great intangibles of life and remain undetected unless the work of the senses comes to be guided and completed by certain 'higher' faculties of the mind.
Some of these non-physical facts represent 'grades of significance.' Not the eye, as sense experience, but only the mind, can determine the 'grade of significance'. When people declare that we should let the facts speak for themselves, they forget that the speech of facts is real in the sense of being existentially meaningful only if it is both heard and understood. Whilst it is considered to be an easy matter to distinguish between fact and value/theory (between sense perception and interpretation), it is in truth extremely difficult. It is, indeed, so difficult that many claiming knowledge and truth prefer to remain within the realm of one half of the whole truth, and the easiest, more tangible, more sensible half.
It never ceases to amaze me how many still don't actually 'see,' but instead proceed directly to the physical and remain at the level of appearances, accepting as the whole truth the world as given to the senses by inanimate matter. I actually had this argument with a mathematician once, who challenged my view by describing nothing but physical processes. When I told him that maths is all about relations between things, and not things themselves, he sat sullenly and looked at me as if trying to drop the penny.
“On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essential est invisible pour les yeux.” (“Le Petit Prince”)
“One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.”
In fine, we 'see' not simply with our eyes, as some physical process, but with a mental equipment which integrates mind, soul, and heart, This equipment varies from person to person; some people can 'see' some things that others cannot see at all; which is to say that some people have adequacy and others do not.
The level of the knower has to be adequate to the level (or grade of significance) of the object of knowledge for the appreciate of truth. When this is not the case, the result is not merely factual error but an inadequate and impoverished view of reality that has serious practical consequences.
Hence the wisdom of the phrase “Credo ut intelligam,” "I believe so that I may understand." This was the maxim of St. Anselm of Canterbury (Proslogion, 1), which was based on a saying of St. Augustine of Hippo, crede ut intellegas, "believe so that you may understand." The saying draws faith and reason into relation. We choose our level of investigation by an act of faith. Here we see clearly the damage that has been done in a modern age that has not only separated reason and faith, but held the former to be self-sufficient and the latter to be of no importance whatsoever. I have faith so as to be able to understand. If faith is lacking, and as a result we choose an inadequate level of significance for our investigation, then no degree of 'objectivity' in yielding however great a quantity of factual knowledge will save us from having missed the entire point; we have lost the very possibility of understanding.
This is why I speak to them in parables: "Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”
Matthew 13:13
The hardest thing of all is to develop a critical and conscious awareness of the presuppositions which lie behind one's thought. An immense effort of self-reflexivity is required involving thought recoiling upon itself. It is this power that makes human beings both human and as capable of transcending their humanity. This power lies in what the Psalms call the ‘innermost being’ and ‘secret’ part or place deep within each and all.
Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.
Psalm 51: 6, English Standard Version
Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being, And in the hidden part You will make me know wisdom.
Psalm 51: 6, New American Standard Bible
‘Inward’ and ‘innermost’ here contrast with the outward instruments of the senses, as ‘higher’ contrast with ‘lower.’ When "though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand,” the fault lies not with the senses but with the inward or innermost parts.
For the hearts of these people are hardened, and their ears cannot hear, and they have closed their eyes— so their eyes cannot see, and their ears cannot hear, and their hearts cannot understand, and they cannot turn to me and let me heal them.
Matthew 13:15
Contact be made with the higher grades of significance and Levels of Being only through the heart.
Those attached to the sensualist scientism and naturalism of the age (the latest incarnations of positivism) will find such a statement meaningless and nonsensical. Which is to say that they are incapable of understanding anything that transcends physical reductionism. For such a person, truth is yielded by the senses and is discovered only by the head, not by the heart. The idea of 'understanding with one's heart' has no meaning to such a person, since the higher levels of reality beyond that which is yielded by sense experience do not exist. Which is to say that such a person’s ‘faith’ excludes the possible existence of such levels.
There is no conflict between faith and reason and it is only the modern separation and dualism of the two which makes it appear that there is. When either one takes the place of the other all manner of errors issue. Faith is indispensable in choosing the grade of significance or Level of Being at which the pursuit of knowledge and understanding is to aim. To seek meaning and purpose at the level of inanimate matter would seem to be an act of bad faith, given that it is known that meaning and purpose are not to be found at this level.
Over the course of centuries, prophets, sages, and saints of all faiths and religions have declared, in different languages but one voice, that this world is not merely an assemblage of different shapes, sounds, and sizes but an expression of inherent purpose and meaning; that the anthropocentrism inherent in a scientism that limits knowledge of reality to our conceptual reach is inadmissible since there are Levels of Being above that of humanity; and that these higher levels are accessible to the extent that human beings allow their reason to be guided by faith.
This comes back to the point I made to my mathematics friend, who lectured me on neurons, claiming human reality to be no more than the packing and firing of neurons. For him, reality was nothing more than that revealed by the senses. The fact is, however, that we can see things through the eye of the mind – to quote William Blake - which are invisible to our bodily senses. Mathematical and geometrical truths are 'seen’ in precisely this way. The world is not merely composed of ‘things’ but also, and most importantly, of relations.
There are things which go beyond mathematics and geometry and which we can apprehend by the light of reason and intellect. We can ‘see’ what another person means, even when they struggle to express themselves adequately. ‘I see what you mean,’ we will say having grasped the point a person has sought to make, but made very poorly by way of words. Our everyday communication with others is a continuing testimony to the power of ‘seeing’ or understanding the ideas and meanings of others, which is quite distinct from the processes of thinking and forming views.
Faith is at the heart of the matter. Reason cannot go it alone and people will be mired in all manner of problems if they rely on reason alone.
The truth is expressed in “Le Petit Prince,” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
“On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essential est invisible pour les yeux.” (Le Petit Prince).
Which translates as "One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.”
I hold this to be profoundly true, and make it central to my own view. Because it moves people deeply from within by going direct to the ecology of the human heart. It tells a truth that goes straight to the inward parts, the innermost being. Without that connection, a truth is passive, sterile, frozen, and immobile. It is also fruitless.
Going back to the 1990’s, I have sought an integral and engaged philosophy, one that reunifies the material and the spiritual and, in the process, bridges the gap between the field of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, the realm of fact, understanding technological know-how as a branch of such knowledge) and practical reason (ethics and politics, the realm of values, understanding economics as a branch). Such a view seeks to overcome any theoretico-elitist tendencies to rule by philosopher kings (environmental or otherwise), revaluing the knowledgeable moral agency of individuals as citizens in a public life. And much more. It can be a lonely path to chart, since so much goes against dominant conceptions, not only those of the status quo but also, and especially, of those who think they are offering an alternative. I say ‘especially’ here because in taking the view I take, I fall out of kilter with many whose aims and ideals I share. But I think they are closer to reproducing and reinforcing the very modes of thought, action, and organisation they claim to be superseding than they know.
The truth of ideas is not something that is to be tested or demonstrated by mind and the senses alone but by way of 'the eye of the heart,' that innate something which enables all of us recognize truth whenever we come into contact with it. The idea is expressed across many different faiths and religions, different languages speaking with one voice. Buddhists refer to opening 'the eye of truth', which is also 'the Eye of the Heart' or 'the Eye of the Soul.’ The Sufi poet, Rumi (1207-73), wrote of 'the eye of the heart, which is seventy-fold and of which these two sensible eyes are only the gleaners'. St Augustine argued that 'our whole business in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.' The Platonist John Smith holds: 'We must shut the eyes of sense, and open that brighter eye of our understandings, that other eye of the soul, as the philosopher calls our intellectual faculty, "which indeed all have, but few make use of it".' Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173), says: 'For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible. One of my favourite philosophers, Rousseau, wrote continually about the truths engraved on the human heart.
“Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to be satisfied with that.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1st Discourse) and Polemics
For Rousseau, ethics was 'the sublime science of simple souls.' Rousseau, in my view, was one of the greatest Platonists of the modern age, and what made him so is that he was a Platonist of the heart. Philosophers need to penetrate beyond the intellect to identify the principles which were ‘engraved in the human heart in indelible characters’ and thus find truth in the comprehension of the depths of being.
It is the 'eye of the heart’ which produces insight, and its power is infinitely superior to the power of thought.
St Augustine’s view that ‘I believe in order to understand’ restores faith to its central place at the heart of the matter. Faith tells us that there is truth and that we should seek truth; it tells us what there is to understand. In purifying the heart, faith enables reason to profit from discussion, arriving at an understanding of God's revelation. For St Augustine, understanding emerges as the result of a rational activity for which faith prepares the way.
The power of the 'eye of the heart’ in generating insight is infinitely superior to the power of thought, which produces only different views. Developing the instrument which is capable of ‘seeing’ the truth is the process of gaining adaequatio, the process of not merely knowing the truth but understanding it with all your heart, liberating the soul as well as informing the mind.
‘Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’
John 8:32
In fine, the truth of ideas is not something that can be seen by way of the senses alone but only by way of ‘the eye of the heart,’ that special instrument which is capable of ‘seeing’ the intangible and the invisible as well as the tangible and the visible.