Way Toward Wisdom, The

An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics

Benedict M. Ashley

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780268045654
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Metafísica filosófica

Once thought to be the task of metaphysics, the synthesis of knowledge has been discounted by many philosophers today. Benedict Ashley, a leading Thomistic scholar, argues that it remains a valid and intellectually fruitful pursuit by situating metaphysics as an endeavor that must cross disciplinary and cultural boundaries.

Working from a realist Thomistic epistemology, Ashley asserts that we must begin our search for wisdom in the natural sciences; only then, he believes, can we ensure that our claims about immaterial and invisible things are rooted in reliable experience of the material. Any attempt to share wisdom, he insists, must derive from a context that is both interdisciplinary and intercultural.

Ashley offers an ambitious analysis and synthesis of major historical contributions to the unification of knowledge, including non-Western traditions. Beginning with the question "Metaphysics: Nonsense or Wisdom?" Ashley moves from a critical examination of the foundations of modern science to quantum physics and the Big Bang; from Aristotle's theory of being and change, through Aquinas's five ways, to a critical analysis of modern and postmodern thought. Ashley is able to interweave the approaches of the great philosophers by demonstrating their contributions to philosophical thought in a concrete, specific manner. In the process, he accounts for a contemporary culture overwhelmed by the fragmentation of data and thirsting for an utterly transcendent yet personal God. The capstone of a remarkable career, The Way Toward Wisdom will be welcomed by students in philosophy and theology.

Part 1

Metaphysics:
Nonsense or Wisdom?

|Chapter 1|

The Problem of the Unification of Knowledge

A.THE INFORMATION EXPLOSION AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY

1.The Fragmentation of Knowledge Today

Today students at the college or university level are faced with the serious difficulties of a knowledge explosion. This explosion has resulted in an extreme fragmentation of knowledge. It is increasingly difficult to use all this information to obtain a consistent worldview or, as J. Ian H. McDonald calls it, a “cosmic vision.”¹ Yet how can we make even ordinary decisions without some sense of what is and is not important? We cannot make decisions in a consistent and informed way without a freely chosen value system. Without some ranking of values, choice would be blind. During a lifetime each person’s value system gets modified as a result of experiences and influences. Yet without a stable commitment to some definite value system, life becomes a series of contradictory choices that gets nowhere.

A value system also implies a worldview. We cannot decide what is important for our lives except in terms of what we truly think are the choices realistically open to us, what our world, our own potentialities, and our situation in the world make possible. We know we must distinguish between dreams and reality, or our decisions are made in vain. Because a value system must be grounded in a worldview, I will in this book use the single term “worldview” to include the value system it grounds.

Therefore, a worldview, since it includes a value system, also implies that we live in a community or expanding circles of communities from local to global, each with its own history and traditions. We are, as Aristotle said, “political animals”²—we need others who share our views to help us make and carry out decisions, but we also need others with whom we can share our gifts and achievements. The Desert Fathers of Egypt, seeing the halfheartedness of so many Christians, became hermits to live the Christian worldview without compromise. Yet the hermits soon gathered into communities of other committed persons to strengthen each others’ resolve. So did the Buddhist monks. Recently in the United States, the Unabomber became a hermit to perfect his ecological fanaticism, but then sent letter bombs to get his extremist views socially disseminated in the New York Times. Thus, because we are human, we cannot arrive at a satisfactory worldview except by participating in a community and its culture. The notion of lone, “creative” genius can only be a half-truth, since geniuses always long for immortality in the public regard for their work.

Therefore, however original we may be, we all need some kind of wisdom, our own and that derived from others wiser than we are, that takes account of all the information accessible to us and unifies it in a useable way. This process of achieving a synthesizing wisdom has recently been given the name of interdisciplinarity and defined as follows:

Approaches vary and disputes over terminology continue. Broadly speaking though, interdisciplinary studies may be defined as a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession.³

Thus, interdisciplinarity concerns how different fields and resources of knowledge, each with its own language and mentality, communicate with one another.

2.Interculturality and Contextualization

A second kind of difficulty for students today is another type of fragmentation that affects not only kinds of knowledge but also total ways of life. It is the fragmentation of the multiculturalism or pluralism of an emerging global civilization. Students today work side-by-side with students from every continent. Yet as J. Ian H. McDonald writes concerning the situation of early Christianity: “Pluralism is by no means the prerogative of the modern or postmodern age. Many ancient cultures were acutely aware of pluralism in some form or other and adopted attitudes to it—whether positive, tolerant and inclusive or hostile, intolerant and exclusive.”⁴

But this is now intensified because our universities have become centers where Americans, Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics study together, yet often have difficulty in communicating with each other. If there is to be dialogue and meeting of minds in such a multicultural milieu, we must recognize the contextuality of the truth embodied in any worldview. By this term “contextuality” I mean that no element of the thought or speech or behavior of a person can really be understood unless serious account is taken of its cultural context.⁵ If one is really to understand Native American ideas and attitudes, they must not be interpreted apart from the context of the culture and worldview in which Native Americans are reared and in which they live. Likewise if I do not recognize the cultural context of my own worldview, I will misunderstand myself and those of other cultures with whom I wish to communicate.

Recognition of the contextuality of our thinking does not necessarily imply that we are forever imprisoned in our own culture and worldview. Rather, by the very act of recognizing this contextuality we find the possibility of liberation from its limitations. Such emancipation from ethnocentrism is especially urgent today when so many cultures confront each other inescapably. If it is difficult for one modern discipline to communicate with another in interdisciplinarity, how much more difficult it is for diverse cultures, some with very long histories and built on very different foundations, to find common ground!

The modern university has always been troubled by such problems of fragmentation into competing worldviews.⁶ Thus the great German thinker Immanuel Kant wrote an important essay, The Conflict of the Faculties, as did Johann Fichte,⁷ and F. W. J. von Schelling;⁸ from a quite different perspective, Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote The Idea of a University; more recently, Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago wrote The Higher Learning in America; and later Alan D. Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Now, at the beginning of this twenty-first century, we must face these same problems that have become ever more urgent.

B.THE COMMON HUMAN SEARCH FOR MEANING

1.Older Worldviews

A starting point for meeting these challenges of interdisciplinarity and interculturalism is the recognition that all cultures share at least a yearning for “wisdom.” They seek a unified worldview that can guide their individual and communal lives and give them meaning or purpose, a goal or goals worth living for. Hence, because we must live with others, we must seek some common ground, some meaning that we all share, even if incompletely. I do not claim that everyone feels this need for meaning constantly or with equal intensity, but only that at times this fundamental human desire for meaning and understanding inevitably emerges. We experience this when we explore world literature and find in it people and life situations that are, in spite of differences, those of our own times and place. When I read in the Iliad⁹ how the aged Trojan men sunning on the walls murmur to each other as Helen walks by, “Such a woman is worth this awful war!” I might be viewing a scene in a modern movie about life today.

From these considerations it is evident why every culture from the simplest to the most complex includes a notion of “wisdom” as the summit of human knowledge about how to live well. A denial of the possibility of such wisdom is really a claim that cynicism is the true wisdom that alone can make life bearable, since by having no illusions it can prevent the disastrous pain of disillusionment. Yet wisdom about life not only guides judgment about how to live but flows from a deep understanding of the world and our place in it. It is what Socrates meant in his famous saying reported in Plato’s Apology: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”¹⁰ To examine life and find it meaningful is to be wise. In every culture the paradigm of this wisdom is located in certain persons: the elders, the shamans, the priests, the gurus, the philosophers, the scientists, the media pundits. These leaders are supposed to embody the wisdom of the people of their culture and its traditions and to exemplify and lead its creative progress.

The wisdom of prehistoric humanity seems lost to us and is only hinted at by such few relics as archaeologists have uncovered. Yet prehistoric wisdom is no doubt preserved somehow in the traditions of the preliterate, tribal, and indigenous cultures of the world. These survive today mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and in largely marginalized situations in Asia, Japan, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and among the indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South America.

In his famous and controversial work, A Study in History, Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) identified some twenty-one civilizations, exclusive of less advanced cultures. He listed: (1) Sumerian, (2) Egyptian, (3) Minoan, (4) Hittite, (5) Babylonian, (6) Hellenic, i.e., Greek-Roman, (7) Syriac, (8) Orthodox-Byzantine, (9) Islamic-Arabian, (10) Islamic-Iranian, (11) Western, (12) Orthodox-Russian, (13) Ottoman, (14) Indian, (15) Chinese, (16) Korean, (17) Japanese, (18) Mayan, (19), Andean, (20) Yucatec, and (21) Mexican civilizations. In a more recent work, World Philosophies, Ninian Smart discusses fourteen worldviews, including the traditional philosophies of (1) South Asia, (2) China, (3) Japan, (4) Korea, (5) Greece-Rome–Near East, (6) Islam, (7) Judaism, (8) European, (9) North American, (10) Latin American, (11) African, and the considerably changed cultures of (12) Modern Islam, (13) Modern South and Southeast Asian, and (14) Modern China-Korea-Japan. These classifications are of course somewhat arbitrary, but they give some idea of the historical richness of human culture. A visit to any large art museum will illustrate the rich variety of this precious heritage.

In his brilliant The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, William H. McNeill uses the term “ecumene,” from the Greek for a “household,” now more familiar as a religious term, to designate the major portion of the human race that, at any point in history, enjoys a community of important cultural interchanges. Of course very broad classifications, such as those of Toynbee and Smart, or the discussion of ecumenical interchange provided by McNeill, give no more than a general notion of the complex web of human culture. First, a distinction must be made between these great cultures centered in cities and many more older or marginal cultures that were not “civilized,” that is, citified, some of which survive but only marginally today.

According to recent DNA studies, our human race, Homo sapiens sapiens, originated probably in east Africa about 150,000 years ago. It probably numbered only a few thousand when it began to spread into the Near East and thence into Asia 73,000 years ago, and into Europe 51,000 years ago. It was, however, so needy and so adventurous that it soon began to occupy the whole globe. It reached Australia and the Pacific Islands in several waves, beginning about 40,000 to 33,000 years ago, Japan perhaps only 30,000 to 10,000 years ago, and Hawaii perhaps not until 300 CE. It spread through the Americas beginning perhaps 30,000 years ago.¹¹ Humankind was then still so widely scattered that each tribe, probably originally of a few thousand at most, quickly became isolated. They survived on a simple economy of hunting and food gathering. Yet, as the famous paintings of the cave of Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc from 31,000 years ago and other sites demonstrate,¹² these scattered people already had remarkable cultures, as do many of the marginal people at this same level of economy today, such as the natives of Australia.

The transition to economies of food production through agriculture and the domestication of animals made possible the rise of villages, then of cities and of the invention of writing, which enabled humanity to pass from its prehistory to its history. This process began in the Near East around 6000 BCE and resulted, about 3000 BCE, in the great civilizations of Mesopotamia (Sumeria, Akkadia, Assyria, etc.) and Egypt. It then spread west into Europe and east into India. In Europe, it produced the civilizations of Crete and Greece and Rome. The influences of the Magi of Iran are evident in the first Greek philosophers.¹³ Thus McNeill argues that Toynbee’s Sumeric, Babylonic, Egyptiac, Hellenic, Orthodox, and Western civilizations eventually mixed and are preserved as the true Western Ecumene.¹⁴ This is plausible, as is evident from the fact that even today the achievements of Mesopotamia and Egypt are included in the living memory in the West through their monumental remains and through the Bible.

On the other hand, major cultures were not a part of this Western Ecumene. The culture of India, though it was in contact with Hellenistic Greece in the 300s BCE and with Rome between 100 BCE and 200 CE, was gradually cut off from the Western Ecumene. China had, from about 1500 BCE, developed its own independent culture that influenced Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia, though it was perhaps stimulated to do so by influences from the distant Near East.¹⁵ Like the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India, Chinese culture was centered on the valley of a great watercourse, the Yellow River, where irrigation made necessary major social cooperation. It favored a hoe-cultivated garden agriculture, rather than one of plowed fields prepared for cereals (as in Egypt and Mesopotamia), and it developed its own system of writing. Humans entered the Americas, probably through the Bering Straits land bridge, in about either 36,000 or 17,000 BCE and eventually reached the tip of South America by about 11,000 BCE. They reached the level of city dwelling in Central America with the Olmecs between 1300–400 BCE. A prime example can be found in Mexico with the city of Teotihuacan, which by 350 BCE was probably larger than any other city in the world. Other peoples, such as the Toltecs, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and especially the Mayas, enjoyed what is called their Classic Period, 250 BCE–900 CE. In 1325 CE the Aztecs, invading from the north, founded Mexico City, which finally fell in turn to European invaders in 1521. The other American civilization was in Peru with the first kingdom of Chavín from about 950–450 BCE, succeeded by other cultures until the rise of the Incas in the 1200s CE, who reigned until invaded by Europeans in 1531. Whether these cultures were influenced at any time by Eurasian culture before the sixteenth-century European invasions remains controversial. Yet they created remarkable art and architectural works and, some of them, forms of hieroglyphic writing. Some al...