Charles Victor on Religion

Philosophy and theology have anciently exhibited a difficulty in harmonizing the temporal and eternal, the ideal and real, the phenomenal and noumenal. The rationalists and empiricists of early modern thought intensified the bifurcation of reality with Kant providing a compromise, an experience based epistemology with an ideal based morality. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, et al. seized upon his idea of ego in transcendence, abstracted it, and elevated it to the prime principle of reality. The pragmatists deflated it to the level of the merely utilitarian. Man became again the measure of all things, soon however, man himself was lost to the mere act of measuring with science and logical analysis, technology and mathematical order excoriating both practicality and artistry. But there was concomitant with nineteenth century transcendental idealism and pragmatism other visionary forces: existentialism and evolution, both of which would prove the invigoration of the artistry of philosophy. Continue reading →

From Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through to the great scholastics and on to the modern masters, all philosophers of note have been at pains to proceed logically, and to begin by defining their terms as clearly as possible. That is not to say words have not been used ambiguously or inconsistently, or understood by all in like manner. But, in general, the great scholars have done as best might be expected of their day and academics to not speak willy-nilly. The truth of the matter is this: language is an art. Our sounds may be more precise than the strokes of a brush full of paint or a twirl of the body, but still they are tools to convey an image, and the less tangible the entity denoted, the less precise the tool and its usage. We do not speak to one another in mathematical equations, we speak in words, sonic pictures, verbalized ideas, entities saturated in nuance–personal, cultural, historical. Continue reading →

Existentialism arises in response to the abstractness proffered by the post-Kantian infatuation with an absolute creative ego as spun out in the works of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, et al., and it contrarily posits the individual as the ultimate point of interest and meaning. It is not the lone response. Some looked to ground humanity in something more certifiable than the individual. They set their foundations on positive fact and pragmatic action, on science and society. Continue reading →

Schleiermacher is not customarily set among the existentialists, however, his investigation into man as rudimentally aware of the contingency of his being makes him, in my assessment, the radix of this movement that surrenders the speculative search for man’s nature and settles upon something more concrete: a considered description of man’s being. Indeed, “existentialist” was a prolapsed appellation for both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Continue reading →

Aristotle attempted the great synthesis of the Greek world, and there followed him lesser lights, each capturing the stage with some bit of theory or insight, and spreading it out as if a whole. The same lack of acuity plays itself out after Aquinas. After Kant, his system is shredded in search of the noumenal. This is not something completely in the hands of individuals. We are all, in one way or another, pawns of the great tides of thought and attitude that drift across the consciousness of the species, caught up in the endless seething to illuminate our boundaries, our whence, why and whereto, to assure ourselves their intellectual integrity, to continuously refine our understanding of our finitude within a cosmic infinitude. The Enlightenment had extinguished itself. While contributive to our journey, its discounting of the past, its celebrating of the “natural” and “common sense” proved failed experiments. Now all things past become the treasured, and individual creativity is elevated to divine status. Novalis writes: “the world is a dream and the dream becomes the world”.  The new age, the age of Romanticism, weaves its dreams. It is no less impassioned or emotional than was the Enlightenment, but its reveries exude a mystical brume, a gouache of the aesthetic, erotic, and intuitive, the edges blurring as the infinite everywhere distils the finite. The dreamers are the likes of Goethe, Schlegel, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelly, Turner, Constable, Goya, Delacroix, Beethoven, Bellini, Weber von Weber, Donazetti, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and their oneirocritics are Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Herbert, Beneke, Weiss, Schleiermacher.   Continue reading →

Every morning I make my dog breakfast, the same breakfast, and as it is prepared, he jumps up and down in front of the kitchen counter—undistractedly fixated on the process–until the bowl is set in the accustomed place. The epistemologists of the eighteenth century, like the metaphysicians of the fourteenth, were likewise fixated with a process, the same old process, and were unable to break away from it. They were, forgive the change of metaphor, akin to being stuck in traffic, moving at best incrementally, fundamentally going nowhere. Evolution had not yet devised an off-ramp, some intellectual stimulus powerful enough to break the fixed-ness, the habitude, the fixation, of the situation. In 1781, Immanuel Kant, professor of philosophy at Konigsberg, created, not simply an off-ramp, but a clover leaf. He published the first part of his trilogy on how and what we know, the Critique of Pure Reason, a critical examination of theoretical reasoning. Some may argue a clover-leaf opens the possibility of simply going in a circle and getting back on the same road. This is true–potentially. Some may argue a clover-leaf allows one to turn around and go backwards. This is true–potentially. All, however, must admit it allows traffic, and here the traffic is intellectual, to move. It did—vigourously. Continue reading →