The Need For a "Modern Philosophical Revolution"

Einstein said (somewhere): “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”[1] From my scant grasp of the “new” physics, Einstein exercised this epistemological revolution in his theory of relativity by readjusting the perception that he was simply “outside” the universe looking on and into it, to being “within” it.

Commenting on David Walsh’s new book “The Modern Philosophical Revolution,” Fr. James Schall, S.J. commented: “Walsh reminds us that we are ourselves within Being. None of us stands outside it in some ideological thought-world. The thinking being already participates in what is. Walsh reminds the reader constantly that he, the reader, is within being as it goes on. He is himself not outside of being, nor is his thought apart from the reality about which it thinks or knows. Knowing is itself a form of being. Walsh does not allow the thinker to assume that he is somehow superior to the being he finds himself already involved in because he already exists.revolution in his theory of relativity by readjusting the perception that he was simply “outside” the universe looking on and into it, to being “within” it.

Commenting on David Walsh’s new book “The Modern Philosophical Revolution,” Fr. James Schall, S.J. commented: “Walsh reminds us that we are ourselves within Being. None of us stands outside it in some ideological thought-world. The thinking being already participates in what is. Walsh reminds the reader constantly that he, the reader, is within being as it goes on. He is himself not outside of being, nor is his thought apart from the reality about which it thinks or knows. Knowing is itself a form of being. Walsh does not allow the thinker to assume that he is The search for the ‘ground’ of being is in every soul. (I would add: ‘Nay, it is the very self.’) It arises from within its own experience. (I would add: ‘and creates “experience.” Experience is the perception of ourselves perceiving the being in which we are immersed. We create the conditions of the reception which we call “experience,” and therefore perceive ourselves as at the center. For example: is the tingling in the foot, the red in the dress, the pain in the tooth, the blue in the sky? – or are the tingling, the red, the pain, the blue the conditions of my way of receiving the reality that is taking place outside my subjectivity?

This is not Cartesian idealism. In fact, the way we can get to the “thing-in-itself” through the mediation of sense perception and concept formation is to perceive through consciousness that there is a real “I” that is doing the sensing and the thinking. I experience myself without mediation as acting person, and therefore as “Being.” I have a direct unmediated experience of myself as Being. This is rock hard realism and the point of John Paul II in Fides et ratio #83: “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry”). It is not apart from what keeps being in being in the first place. If we already are, we do not need to look further for what is.”

I am fascinated with Walsh’s book because it turns the defensive critique of modern philosophy upside down from the presumed source of idealism and relativism into a granite hard realism that – if further purified and elaborated - will be able to give an account of Christian revelation as the “I Am” of Jesus Christ.

We have been laboring for centuries under the burden of the dualisms of supernatural/natural, faith/reason, grace/nature, truth/freedom, Church/State, priest/layman. These dualisms are the result of working only on the level of first order epistemology: sensation, abstraction, proposition-formation, return to sensation, judgment of conformity, etc. The main point is that this is a mediated realism. It is not immediate access and experience of Being. It is mediated through our mode of reception which is “distorted” precisely by the media of reception, be it sensation or symbolization by concept (the latter being the root of rendering reality as “object”). As Einstein, Newman, Voegelin, Ratzinger, Wojtyla, Walsh, Percy, Terruwe, Baars, Taylor, Polanyi, Schmitz, etc., we must move (without giving up the other) to a second level where the "I" is situated. If we can find our way to the "I" as ontological ground and defining center, we will be able to establish a new culture that will necessarily be global in reach - replacing the ideological objectifications of Socialism and Capitalism. The method can be none other than living Christian faith which is Benedict's “broadening of reason.” Only that will give us purchase on a true humanism that will be dynamized by the working person living out the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the street.

[1] Cited by Richard Rohr, “Adams Return” Crossroad (2004) xii.