Notes From the Underground: Who is to say what truths lie below the surface or how many escape, transcending our field of vision? Fides et Ratio rejects the idea that philosophy finds its end, all answers, in Revelation. If that were not the case then thought would be essentially redundant, superfluous. But what is also rejected is the idea that there can always be definitive answers. In the face of ultimate mysteries what use is thought? In this sense, philosophy is only a necessary prologue.
Revelation impels reason continually to extend the range of its knowledge. Our habitual patterns of thought are in no way able to express the wisdom of Revelation in its fullness. Faith illuminates reason, and faith is the basis of reason (Anselm). Is it not a corruption of one's self to believe that we can attain self-knowledge (He who know himself knows his Lord)? Might it not be the case that there is a higher knowledge which knows the limits of thought, that there will be whole realms of reality that remain unknown and perhaps unknowable?
To acknowledge our dependence on that law of which God is the author.
Questioning is so central to our nature ('man was created restless') that even when nature is transformed by grace it does not or should not cease from asking questions (The Allama: even if God reveals His Face I'll still take 'maybe' and 'perhaps'). Ceaseless Reward.
Truth is the adequacy of things and intellect. (Isaac Israeli). Do we assume this? Is it the infinite that is placed in us that allows such a thought in the first place? Can philosophy know this or is it itself imitated, commanded by Revelation? The question then becomes what type of questioning:
What is it to live?
or 'What is it to live well?'
No, the first question.
But this is a question that cannot be answered.
What are we compelled to ask what we cannot know? The Tree.
Who knows who I am?
To think is a curse, takes us away from the Tree of Life.
To think is a blessing, a gift.
Shall I think about this?
Do I think about it.
Pascal: we conceal from ourselves how desperate our true condition is by diversions , 'entertainments'. Court and culture. Is thought one such diversion? The philosopher protects himself from singular and the particular in favour of the abstract and the general. When we want to 'speak the answer in kind'. Can there be a philosophy that is completely autonomous? Blake: he who sees Ratio sees only himself. Philosophy must be a dialogue.
But neither in life nor in enquiry is it possible to encounter the particular except as an instance of the universal and general. As we should have learnt from Aristotle, every 'this' that we encounter is a 'thus-such'.
The finite is only finite against the invisible background of the infinite; the singular against the multiple: unity in diversity.
----borrowed from A. Macintyre, the Task of Philosophy
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