Gilson on philosophy and its history

You mightsuppose from the title of Etienne Gilson’s TheUnity of Philosophical Experience that it is a book about philosophyin general.  And ultimately it is.  But its bulk is devoted to detailed accountsof the ideas of thinkers Gilson regards as having gotten things badly wrong,such as Abelard, Ockham, Descartes, Malebranche, Kant, and Comte.  There is relatively little about thinkersGilson regards as having gotten things largely right, such as Aristotle andAquinas.  This might seem odd.  For the sympathetic reader might suppose thatthe experience of philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas should surely countas least as much as (indeed, more than) that of more wayward thinkers, whenelucidating the nature of philosophy.

But such areaction would reflect a misunderstanding of the book’s title.  “Philosophical experience,” as Gilson usesthe phrase, has nothing to do with some way of life or psychological profile thatphilosophers share in common.  He’s notconcerned with “what it’s like to be a philosopher,” as Thomas Nagel might say.  A clue to what he does mean is provided by the titles he gives the book’s first threeparts, viz. “The Medieval Experiment,” “The Cartesian Experiment,” and “TheModern Experiment.”  The “experience” referredto in Gilson’s title is analogous to the experience on which empirical sciencerests.  It has to do with a kind of experimentation to which certainphilosophical ideas have, in a way, been put.

What way isthat?  Gilson holds that “the history of philosophyis to the philosopher what his laboratory is to the scientist” (p. 95).  The theories of empirical science entailpredictions which can be tested by observation. By contrast, metaphysical theories, which concern matters that transcendwhat can be observed, cannot be tested that way.  All the same, such theories also have theirentailments, and if a metaphysical theory leads to conclusions that areincoherent or otherwise known to be false, then we have grounds for rejectingit.  Now, given the limitations of theindividual human intellect, not all the implications of a metaphysical theoryare ever worked out or understood by the individual thinker who came up withit.  We need to look to what hissuccessors had to say in developing further the thinker’s premises, taking themin new directions, criticizing them, and so on. Hence it is to the history of philosophy, rather than to the laboratory,that we must look in order to test metaphysical theories.  The “experiments” to which such a theory is putare, essentially, embodied in the historical record of what happened as thetheory was developed and criticized in this way.

What aboutthe “unity” referred to by Gilson in his title? Gilson is speaking here of the way that, as he argues, a number ofphilosophical theories from the Middle Ages to the present have made a similartype of opening move and been led thereby into the same problematicoutcome.  The opening move in question isessentially that of trying to transform metaphysical questions into questionsof some other type.  The problematicoutcome is skepticism about metaphysics. But this skepticism always turns out to be intellectuallyunsatisfactory, so that it is always followed by a renewed attempt atmetaphysics – but often one that makes a new opening move of the same generaltype, so that the cycle begins again.  Thelesson this series of experiments teaches us is that it is a mistake to make anopening move of the type in question.

Examples ofthis sort of move that are discussed by Gilson include the attempt to reducemetaphysical questions to questions of logic, which Gilson associates withPeter Abelard.  There is also the attemptto resolve metaphysical questions by way of theology, which Gilson associateswith thinkers like Bonaventure.  Ockham,Gilson argues, essentially tries to resolve metaphysical questions by appeal tohuman psychology.  Descartes does so bymodeling all knowledge on mathematics. Kant, Gilson says, modeled it on Newtonian physics, and Comte on sociology.  Such views (which Gilson calls logicism, theologism, psychologism,mathematicism, physicism, and sociologism,respectively) essentially try to turn metaphysics into something else.  They do so by taking one part of reality (such as mathematical truth, or physical reality,or the human mind) and modeling the wholeof reality on it. 

Butmetaphysics by its nature is concerned precisely with the whole – with being qua being – so that attempts to makeit about a part of the whole, thereby distorting it, will inevitably fail.  Critics of metaphysics conclude from thisseries of failures that there is something wrong with metaphysics itself, butthis is a non sequitur.  For the failuresreflect the distortion of metaphysics rather than anything in the nature of metaphysicsitself.  And that metaphysical inquirykeeps reviving even in the wake of these failures reflects the fact that thereare real questions that it alone can address – questions that go deeper thanthose addressed by the other branches of human knowledge that too manymetaphysicians have mistakenly tried to model metaphysics on.

This is thecontext in which Gilson makes his famous remark that “philosophy always buriesits undertakers” (p. 246).  This, hesuggests, is a “law” established by the philosophical “experiments” he hasdescribed in the book (in a way analogous to the manner in which physical lawsare established by physical experiment). And there are further laws that are so established, such as the law that“by his very nature, man is a metaphysical animal” (p. 248) and the law that “asmetaphysics aims at transcending all particular knowledge, no particularscience is competent either to solve metaphysical problems, or to judge theirmetaphysical solutions” (p. 249).  Hetakes “philosophical experience” thereby to have vindicated the approach ofthinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas (though he emphasizes that this does notentail that they have given us the last word).

Gilson’saccount suggests the following analogy (mine, not his).  Heresy, in the strict theological sense,involves plucking some element of Christian doctrine out from its largerdogmatic context and thereby distorting it. (The word “heresy” comes from the Greek hairesis, which connotes “taking” or “choice.”)  For example, monophysitism so emphasizesChrist’s divinity that it destroys his humanity, thereby distorting the thesisthat Jesus is God.  Modalism soemphasizes divine unity that it destroys the distinctness of the three divinePersons, thereby distorting the doctrine of the Trinity.  And so on. The metaphysical errors Gilson describes are analogous to this, insofaras they involve “taking” or “choosing” some part of reality (mathematics,physics, mind, or whatever) and erroneously modeling the whole on it, therebydistorting both the whole and the part. 

We canextend the analogy further.  Pope St.Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, famouslycharacterized modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.”  Philosophy since the time of Ockham has hadan analogous character, so that it is no accident that most (though, admittedly,not all) of what Gilson recounts in TheUnity of Philosophical Experience occurred after his time, and during thepost-medieval period especially.  Modernphilosophy can therefore be characterized as a kind of “synthesis of all metaphysicalerrors.”  It has recapitulated errorsseen previously in the history of philosophy (such as in the Pre-Socraticperiod) but ramified and exacerbated them, and in a relatively short historicalperiod.  And because the moral andpolitical errors characteristic of the modern world have followed from these metaphysicalerrors, Gilson’s book is a key text for understanding not just modernphilosophy, but modernity in general.