As I was sitting, drinking my coffee, and reading Al-Ghazali (whose thought I will be teaching to my undergraduate students later this morning, a phrase of Leon Brunschvicg came to mind: "a way of philosophizing that is not that of philosophers". A beautiful and pregnant expression, worth turning over in one's mind, rather than quickly handling and then setting aside.
Brunschvicg coined that term as part of a tripartite distinction, bearing on the possible relations between Christianity and philosophy. He did so in one of the early discussions that forms part of what we call the "1930s French Christian philosophy debates" - the subject of my first book, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation - in which he argued for the "rationalist" (what we would nowadays call the "secularist") side.
He had the 17th century thinker Blaise Pascal especially in mind. Pascal certainly knows the field of philosophy available at his time. And he uses and considers philosophical means, arguments, starting points, approaches, but he does so in ways intended to lead beyond that very philosophy, into a religious orientation. His famous "wager" about God's existence provides one example of this.
Although they are separated not only by time and language, but also by religion (the one is a Christian, the other a Muslim) Pascal and Al-Ghazali are not unlike each other in this respect. Both of them critically engage with other approaches, perspectives, and traditions that are "philosophy," clearly do so as philosophers themselves, but also attempt to articulate something beyond philosophy. In the process, they inevitably expand the range and scope of philosophy as well, but in ways that are liable to be dismissed or misunderstood by people accustomed to thinking of "philosophy" in other ways.
I'm reminded of a talk I gave to the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, years back, while I was still in process of researching and writing Reason Fulfilled by Revelation, when I was interviewing for a joint-appointment position there. I decided to provide an overview of the various positions in the 1930s debates about the possibility and the nature of Christian philosophy, and that included characterizing just what these Francophone thinkers meant by the term "philosophy".
The talk did not go particularly well, and one reason I realized was that I was addressing an audience that was largely composed of Analytic and Continental philosophers, whose basic approach to and assumptions about what "philosophy" means was quite distant from what the thinkers involved in that 1930s debate understood by "philosophy". Dominant (at least in certain settings) manners and methods of doing and understanding philosophy had diverged sufficiently enough to make what was rather mainstream at one time seem like ways of philosophizing that are not those of (typical, normal, etc.) philosophers.
From those parochial perspectives of the present, Brunschvicg himself is likely to seem and sound like some weird philosophical outlier. What he's doing is philosophy? Are you sure about that? Those are the sorts of things someone unconversant with the history of philosophy, who knows what "philosophy" is or means primarily from what their camp says about it, might well ask. Mainly because they don't know any better.
The irony is that, at the time of those debates - and when both Gilson and Blondel (two major figures in the 1930s debates) were his students, Brunschvicg was the philosophical establishment, or at least a major figure within it. From a vantage point acquired through substantive study of philosophy's deep and rich history - which requires actually spending time systematically studying primary texts, engaging thinkers and schools down through the centuries - what Brunschvicg thinks of as "philosophy" remains in continuity and conversation with those traditions going back through modern and medieval philosophy deep into antiquity.
Older ways of understanding what "philosophy" is and involves maintained a strong and ongoing presence throughout the last century and into the new millennium, despite the predominance of Analytic and "Continental" philosophy within portions of the academy. You can call it "tradition constituted rationality", or certain ways of doing "history of philosophy", or "philosophy as a way of life", or by other names as well - these are not something radically new, and they've been practiced, thought out, and taught continually while many professional philosophers ignored or dismissed them.
There's obviously much more to say about these matters, but I like to keep these posts short, so I'll just end with an image that these morning reflections ended up circling around. Those of us who engage with philosophy's history, making space in our minds to have past thinkers present, not just in their ideas, but their approaches, their concerns, their languages - we maintain, however imperfectly, a vital continuity.
That continuity is something lost to many in the present who do call what they do and study "philosophy" - and it is "philosophy", but just a small portion of it, rather than the whole or the paradigm - but don't seriously and systematically encounter or engage the great thinkers of philosophy's past. Something important goes lacking when a philosopher doesn't develop the capacity to look back at Aristotle, Cicero, Epictetus, Augustine, Descartes, Hume, or Hegel - just to name a few - and draw them in as interlocutors to inform one's own thought.
I imagine to myself what people several hundred years from now might have in mind when they talk about, study, and apply "philosophy". I suspect (and hope) that it may be an integral part of many people's lives, not primarily an academic preserve, but something more readily accessible. I picture this to myself as something like a continual recovery, reinterpretation, and reapplication of "philosophy" available in robust, substantive forms preserved within its living history.
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