Josef Pieper - For Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy

FOR THE LOVE OF WISDOM

JOSEF PIEPER

For the Love of Wisdom

Essays on the Nature of Philosophy

Edited by Berthold Wald
Translated by Roger Wasserman

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Title of the German original:
Schriften zum Philosophiebegriff , Band 3 (2d ed.)
1995, 2004 by Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg

Cover art: Bernard Buffet (1928-1999)
The Holy Spirit (1961)
Collezione dArte Religiosa Moderna
Vatican Museums, Vatican State
Scala / Art Resource, New York

Cover design by Riz Boncan Marsella

2006 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-087-5
ISBN 1-58617-087-2
Library of Congress Control Number 2006922686

CONTENTS

TRANSLATORS NOTE

It is only fair and meet in a volume of this length, where ready access may be had to Piepers own formulations and which already inc ludes an extended postscript by one of Piepers most distinguished exegetes, that the first-time reader of Piepers works be granted, so far as possible, the opportunity to discover the authors meaning for himself, with all adulterating commentary held to a minimum. This notwithstanding, it may not be considered entirely inappropriate for the translator to insert himself briefly in that interpretational divide separating author and reader, if only to provide the orientation necessary for distinctly American sensibilities to wend their way unhindered through the text.

In particular, there are two fundamental assumptions, taken by Pieper as a matter of course, which threaten from the outset to alienate the sympathies of todays philosophically informed reader: the one derives directly from Saint Thomas Aquinas, to whose basic ontological tenets Pieper remains faithful; the other underlies Piepers apocalyptic vision of a future where academic philosophy, now long since reduced to an empty seriousness, is superseded by theology in accordance with biblical prophecy. Both assumptions bear directly on the issue of the feasibility of the traditional metaphysical quest for ultimate causes, and insofar as postmodern thought has rejected them as unlikely, their repudiation has encouraged talk of what Wittgenstein once dubbed the heir to the subject that used to be called philosophy and what Heidegger has called the task of thinking after the end of philosophy.

Piepers underlying realist (and in its provenance ultimately Platonic) assumption that there is a plan, a design to the world, a complete fact, which corresponds to the totality of the real, is on view intermittently throughout this work but particularly in those chapters on Sartre, on the defense of philosophy, and on the possible future of philosophy (the fifth, third, and twelfth chapters, respectively). There is no doubt that Pieper, to the extent that he identifies philosophy with the knowledge of ultimate causeswith the search for a final and comprehensive definition of reality, albeit knowable perhaps only a limine is committed to some kind of world-structure and to the possibility of epistemic access to that structure through causal theories based on law-like relations among theoretical entities. Still, it would be a mistake to believe that Pieper, who is here riding piggy-back on Aquinas notion of cause, attributes to that structurerealitythe sort of determinateness which is typically associated with causality in the classical and non-probabilistic sense and which has since been rendered problematic by the discovery of the phenomenon of non-locality in quantum mechanics. The reader should bear in mind that when Pieper, following Aquinas, speaks of causality, he is referring not to a cause in the efficient or material sense but rather to cause in the sense of an explanatory scheme, a mode of explanation, such as might be embodied in a revolutionary, new physical theory. In this sense, as Kuhn has most recently observed, one is tempted to say... that the term cause functions primarily in the meta-scientific, not the scientific, vocabulary of physicists.

And yet there is, in fact, a sense in which the reader would be correct to point to a difference between the strictly scientific notion of causality, which is roughly equivalent to that of physical law, and the peculiarly Thomist notion of final cause, which Pieper regards as the only proper object of philosophical inquiry. The difference is perhaps best brought out by Piepers remark that science comes to an end at the limits of knowledge whereas philosophy begins with those very limits. To buttress the conception of science he is here endorsing, Pieper goes on to cite a passage from one of Albert Einsteins letters, composed only a few weeks before his death: If I have learned anything from the ruminations of a long lifetime, Einstein writes, it is that we are much farther away from acquiring a deeper insight into the elementary processes than most of our contemporaries believe. This deeper insight, Pieper feels, can be achieved only by bringing a uniquely philosophical interest to bear on these selfsame elementary processes; insofar as elementary particle physicists continue to neglect final causes, which reflect the role these processes play in the totality of what is experienced, even the exact sciences find themselves increasingly running up against their own limits. This prognosis has been startlingly corroborated by one of the leading physicists of our age, Richard Feynman, who foresees, as one of physics ultimate prospects, an endless and tiresome repetition of the same, with scientific experimentation continually uncovering new layers of physical lawfulness or causality, limits continually giving way to new limits, without the scientific enterprise ever coming to an actual end:

In Hegelian terms, we stand here in the presence of the bad infinite, and before the concomitant ennui of a limit or barrier [ Schranke ] that, once overcome, is continually reasserting itself. What, by contrast, enables the philosophers notion of an ultimate cause to escape these limitations and to lead scientific explanation to the good or true infinite is that it is not restricted to the notion of cause and effect per se but carries in itself a reference to the totality of Being to which the cause qua being belongs: What an agent doeshow it acts, the peculiar mode of its causalityreflects what it is ( omne agens agit sibi simile ). Causes involve not simply a doing or bringing-about ( poesis in the Aristotelian sense) but also a showing or reflecting. As Davies has Aquinas say in his revealing and suggestive paraphrase, all of Gods creatures show us what God issomehow. Philosophy (literally, philo + sophia , the love of wisdom), as the perhaps never-ending but infinitely variegated search for ultimate causes, is charged with the task of investigating just this somehowof discovering how individual causes fit into a unified design or plan, the world conceived as a rich, differentiated totality. This is not to say, however, that the final causes which form the object of the philosophers search are essentially at variance with those causes identified by the elementary particle physicist; on the contrary, these elementary processes, when properly understood, gesture toward something beyond themselves, opening up new and previously unanticipated vistas for the interpretation of nature. There are thus indications that the position which Pieper here adopts is not so far removed from those views on the philosophy of science which have come to be identified with the name of the American philosopher, Willard V. Quine: For Pieper, as for Quine, metaphysicsto the extent that it may be said to constitute a legitimate enterprise at allmust be coterminous with that ongoing epistemological endeavor which we call natural science.