Why the Philosopher and the Catholic College Need Each Other

Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D.

As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown, human knowledge is both tradition-constituted and
tradition-dependent, as well as tradition-transcendent. And as he suggests in his latest
book, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition,
that institution most indispensable for the preservation, sustenance, and development of human
knowledge, or, in MacIntyrean terms, an intellectual tradition, is the college or university. For, as
MacIntyre writes,
Philosophy is not just a matter of propositions affirmed or denied and of arguments
advanced and critically evaluated, but of philosophers in particular social and cultural
situations interacting with each other in their affirmations and denials, in their
argumentative wrangling, so that the social forms and institutionalizations of their
interactions are important and none more so than those university settings that have
shaped philosophical conversation, both to its benefit and to its detriment. (1)
The philosopher is created, nourished, and perfected in and by the college or university,
for the college, and the college alone, can effectively preserve, sustain, develop, revise, and
transform a philosophical tradition; the college is its institutional embodiment and the primary
locus of philosophical practice, with the individual philosopher serving as the traditions personal
embodiment, as well as apprentice, interlocutor, and custodian. In short, Catholic colleges and
universities have since the middle ages served as the philosophical guilds in which the Catholic
philosophical tradition has been passed on from masters to apprentices, for it is only through, in,
and by colleges that apprentices become masters. It is no different today, except for the fact that
the typical modern university has become a guild for careerism and sophistry, not philosophy,
and the guild-character of the university is, of course, denied by both its so-called masters and
apprentices. Nevertheless, todays Catholic philosopher requires good Catholic colleges for not
only his philosophical flourishing, but also for his very existence qua philosopher; and,
conversely, the Catholic college requires good Catholic philosophers, for no institution can
survive, let alone flourish, absent the personal influence, participation, and oversight of its
personal practitioners.

I. Openness to the Other

Well, putting aside the good-philosopher/good Catholic college, chicken/egg paradox for
now, we turn to the characteristics of the good Catholic philosopher. As Cardinal Newman
taught, the fullest embodiment, the culminating fruit of the liberal-arts college is the philosopher
not necessarily the academic or professional philosopher, but that humble lover of wisdom
with a properly enlarged intellectual vista and a distinctly philosophical cast of mind. He is
also, as MacIntyre insists, first and foremost a servant of the plain person, translating the nonphilosophers commonsensical and informalthough still vital and profoundphilosophical
questions into formal and rigorously examined philosophical questions, giving these questions

philosophically rigorous answers; and then translating these philosophically purified questions
and answers back into that commonsensical and informal, vital and profound, and existentially
satisfying and intellectually intelligible discourse appropriate for the vast majority of nonphilosophers in the world (thank God!).
So, exactly how does one become this sort of philosopher? Indispensable, of course, is an
apprenticeship to a master philosopher, as Plato was to Socrates, St. Augustine to Plato, St.
Thomas Aquinas to St. Augustine and Aristotle, the whole Church to St. Thomas Aquinas,
Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Alasdair MacIntyre to St. Thomas Aquinas, and we to
them. But, as important are the erudition, skill, modeling, and experience only personal guidance
can impart to the philosopher, it is to no avail apart from a certain philosophically indispensable
existential attitude or condition: what might be called metaphysical courage, or existential
openness. The good philosopher must possess a radical existential openness to the
incompleteness, myopia, and errors in his present philosophical understanding, and a
metaphysically courageous orientation of the soul towards all aspects of being, and one that
evokes and sustains a perpetual desire for further inquiry, revision, and even conversion. He
must cultivate a deliberate, relentless, and lifelong vulnerability to refutation, and an
unquenchable passion for dialectical exchange with and enrichment by the philosophical other.
As David Walsh puts it in his stunning new book, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The
Luminosity of Existence, Socratic wisdom is indeed the deepest available to us, only now
grasped as an existential condition rather than simply an attitude toward existence. It is because,
we now recognize, that reason cannot contain itself that it possesses an openness toward
being.[1] For, as he writes, Speculation is not a separate avenue toward what is, but rather the
result of a prior existential awareness. Philosophy is, above all, an ethical way of life.
The identity of this other, for the aspirant good Catholic philosopher, is not necessarily
someone outside the Catholic philosophical tradition, but it is precisely that person, idea,
argument, or tradition of argument most resistant to becoming merely a confirmatory mirror
image of ones present philosophical understanding, that which is eminently immune to being
narcissistically assimilated and sophistically manipulated by the philosopher. Now, while this
openness is bound up with a perpetual readiness to be corrected, it in no way excludes a robust
confidence in the truth of ones present understandingas long as truth is secured and justified
by rigorous and humble philosophical inquiry. This confidence goes especially for the truths of
nature, of which the Aristotelian corpus presents, by far, the most accurate expression, and about
which one can safely is the truth.
This needs to be expounded a bit further, lest we seem, in speaking of being open to the
other, to be promoting eclecticism or skepticism. Authentically Catholic liberal-arts colleges
and universities accept the harmony of faith and reason, and the capacity for reason to know
reality as it is, period. With regard to the philosophy of nature and science, this means, as
opposed to nominalist, scientistic, materialist, and fideist rationalities, that secondary causes are
truly causal, and that God likes to do things in the world through them, even giving them truly
creative power. In other words, nature exists, can be known as it is, and is distinct from God (yet
never separate from Him, for, through created esse, He is closer to all beings than they are to
themselves), and she possesses a relative autonomy and real causal power that does not require
Gods perpetual interventions. (Natures seeming full autonomy, after all, is the pretext and the

source of the prima facie credibility for many of scientific and philosophical atheism). Natures
causal structures, material, efficient, formal, and final, can be known through mans unaided
reason, and the effects of these causes, such as biological phenomena, can be explained without
the use of Revelation, though, of course, not explained exhaustively, for all things possess a
certain unfathomableness due to their having been created and sustained in existence and activity
by an ultimately unfathomable, transcendent, and mysterious God.
II. Partial truth, relative absoluteness
But with the level or precision and certainty that an Aristotelian natural philosophy, for
example, has achieved about the natural world, why be so open to this so-called other? Why
seek to be in a state of perpetual, potential refutation? Does not such an attitude, taken to the
extreme, amount to mere neurotic vacillation and intellectually cowardly skepticism? And
wouldnt such openness lead the Thomistic philosopher, for example, to go outside his robust
and more-than-adequate Catholic philosophical tradition to encounter this elusive other? Why
should a Thomist, someone blessed to be a member of the true philosophical tradition, act in
such an ungrateful, foolish, and even traitorous fashion? Well, it is, of course, not that the
fullness of truth is anywhere but right here in our Thomistic Catholic philosophical and
theological tradition, but I think encounters with the other can often help us best obtain the
personal existential depth that is required clearly to see and effectively to appropriate the truth
we have in our tradition to the fullest possible extent, to know it in all its myriad facets, elusive
embodiments, and subtle implications. Pace the anti-modern traditionalist, such salutary
encounters with other traditions have been rendered vastly more accessible and intellectually
fruitful precisely in virtue of our modern, secularist, pluralistic modern culture, notwithstanding
the grave intellectual spiritual dangers such pluralism can also involve. As we all know, the deep
pluralism of modernity, with its sectarian, gnostic, and solipsistic spirit, can also, in its
practically atheistic structure, become a virtually impenetrable bulwark towards the salutary
other, for our culture, while providing the opportunity of stepping out of our intellectual
shoes, so to speak, so as to make a better fit of our own, it also permits many to hide out
indefinitely in safe, same-thinking enclaves, precluding the experience of existentially mindstretching encounters and turning ones personal grasp of reality into a hall of soul-mirrors. In
this sense, modernity is both the disease and the cure for the aspirant good philosopher.
III. Holistic Thinking
In addition to existential openness and metaphysical courage, the good Catholic
philosopher, notwithstanding his quite warranted and robust confidence in the truth the Catholic
philosophical tradition embodies and proclaims, and in his eminent ability to find and know truth
through this tradition, must be eminently aware of the ineluctable partial thinking in his and
others present understanding of the truth. For our inveterate tendency, and perhaps St. Thomas
Aquinas was alone spared from this, is to construe a partial truth as the whole truth. Because the
good philosopher realizes this tendency, he recognizes the indispensability of engagingand
sometimes even embracing, at least provisionallyradically alternative perspectives that are
often existentially uncomfortable and even quite painful to inhabit. For he knows that sometimes
only this kind of philosophical ascesis can effectively render his partial perspective a holistic
one. MacIntyre writes:

In philosophy the most that we are all of us entitled to claim for any conclusion or
argument is that it is the best supported conclusion so far or the best argument so far
We have to remain open to possible correction even by those with whom we are in
fundamental disagreement.[2]
The particular beliefs we hold to be absolutely true, the ideas we consider indisputable,
the facts we deem self-evident, the allegiances to which we are unwaveringly committed, the
traditions we solemnly revere, the authorities we unquestioningly obey, the customs we most
cherish, the attitudes we have long-ago adoptedin short, the overall picture we possess of God,
man, and the world and the practices that embody this picture, although perhaps quite true and
good in an absolute and universal, objective sense, are, nevertheless, ineluctably relative and
particularthat is, partialin a subjective sense. As the postmodernists have taught us, in spite
of the insanity that undergirds much of their project, our beliefs, even if universally true beliefs,
are, in their genealogy and intelligibility, inevitably bound to a particular historical and cultural
tradition. We do not discover our beliefs, on our own, as much as we inherit and receive them
from and through others in community. We do not obtain knowledge autonomously, as isolated
individuals, and in abstraction from that which is relative and particular in our lives, but in
solidarity with others, as members of concrete communities, and as embedded members of
relative and particular histories and cultures, that is, traditions. Contra the Enlightenment, there
is no view-from-nowhere to which we can climb, no tradition-independent rationality we
can exercise, no universal reason we can access to enable us fully to escape the relative and
particular character of human knowledge. We are historical and social, as well as rational and
spiritual beings; we are tradition-transcending in virtue of our spirits, yet we are tradition-bound
in virtue of our bodies, and our bodies and spirits are inextricably integrated and unified in our
knowing persons.
So, if the philosopher were to see the tradition-constituted nature of his ideas and beliefs,
his hold on his particular picture of God, the world, and man might, of course, become weaker,
but this is a good thing!because it is a weakness that it actually a great strength, because
prompted by and resulting in intellectual humility. The good philosopher, then, is willing to let
his opinions go, as it were, perhaps just provisionally, and even those opinions the truth of which
he is firmly and justifiably convinced, in order to subject them to public, dialectical enquiry. It is
not because he thinks they will be shown to be false, but because he knows that it is highly likely
that his understanding of their truth leaves something to be desired. Thus, the good philosopher
becomes very interested in discovering whether those from whom he inherited his present picture
of the universe are indeed trustworthy benefactors, whether the picture with which he has been
interpreting reality for decades is indeed still adequate to reality. He takes a step back from his
mind, as it were, without any fear that in doing so he must become a skeptic, relativist, or
historicist. The good philosopher thus places himself, as often as he can, in the best position to
enable grace to convert him more fully to the Truth he loves, and of which he is perpetually in
search of a deeper understanding.
Paradoxically, then, in becoming a temporary relativist with respect to the genealogy of
his own ideas and beliefs, the good philosopher enables these ideas and beliefs to become truly
absolute with respect to their truth in his soul. For, from a perspective of
the absolute absoluteness of truth, it would seem philosophical suicide to do anything that might

render our ideas and beliefs vulnerable to refutation; thus, we would tend to avoid those
dialectically vulnerable discussions and arguments that might reveal to us errors in our
understanding of those true beliefs. And from a perspective of the absolute relativity of truth, it
would appear pointless even to search for the truth at all. But as MacIntyre writes, It is only
insofar as someone satisfies the conditions for rendering him or herself vulnerable to dialectical
refutation that that person can come to know whether and what he or she knows.[3]
III. The Catholic College: The Philosopher Institutionalized
Well, perhaps philosophers do need most of all to be institutionalized, especially the
good ones, at least to protect the emotional well-being of everyone else! But thats neither here
nor there. The qualities of the good Catholic college are analogous, as I say, to the qualities of the
good Catholic philosopher. Just as the good philosopher needs to be a master of the Catholic
philosophical tradition and adept at the dialectical, analytical, synthetic, and imaginative skills
with which his trade is plied, the good Catholic college also requires a rigorous and sophisticated
curriculum and pedagogy firmly rooted in the Catholic philosophical tradition. Taught without
sufficient rigor, the liberal arts become jejune exercises in sentimentalism or self-expression,
philosophy becomes sophistry, and theology becomes soft-blasphemy. But just as ones
commitment to Catholicism, philosophical erudition, and dialectical skill, without the proper
philosophical attitude of metaphysical courage and existential openness cannot render a
philosopher a good one, so a Catholic college cannot be good without the right institutional ethos
and telos. The perfection of the intellect, in that Catholic sacramental and virtuous culture in
which alone the emotions and the spirit can be effectively perfected, is the proper telos for which
college disciplines should be taught, around which they are hierarchically integrated, and in the
light of which pedagogy is ordered. Taught without the right telos, philosophical disciplines
become sophistical and rhetorical linguistic skills to gain power for oneself and over others. If
the college is Catholic and orthodox, but if its telos has an exclusively spiritual or moral
orientation and focus on moral formation, at the expense of a robust intellectual life, then one
ends up with a suffocating Catholic moralism, a world-contemptuous and suspicious Jansenism,
or an anti-philosophical fundamentalism. If the college is secularist in foundation, this same
misguided telos results in something like secular fundamentalism or political fanaticism. St.
Thomas Aquinas himself forbade a religiously fundamentalist notion of education, as MacIntyre
points out:
Intellectual enquiry, like all other secular pursuits, is taken to have no worth whatsoever
in itself, but to be worthwhile only as a means to salvation. Contrast Aquinas, for whom
many secular pursuits and, notably, intellectual enquiry are worthwhile in themselves and
as such to be offered to God as part of that offering that is the path to our salvation.[4]
The ability to think clearly, accurately, deeply, and comprehensively about reality so as to come
to a knowledge, and continue to do so throughout ones life, of the essential truths about the
universe in both their unity and diversity is the point and purpose of a Catholic college or
university. The Catholic college is not meant to destroy souls!, as it would appear to be the case
when observing many contemporary Catholic colleges and universities, but the proper antidote to
its soul-destroying tendency is not to react by turning the college into a retreat center or piety and
moral training ground, even though moral and spiritual formation are higher goals than

intellectual formation. For, when the primarily intellectual end of the Catholic college is
eclipsed, ignored, or denied, through religious fanaticism or power-pragmatism, the liberal arts
lose their character as true arts, philosophy becomes sophistry, and theology becomes something
unholy.
A philosophically good attitude with respect to curriculum is also essential to the good
Catholic college. The liberal arts are ends in themselves, surely, and should be taught as such,
with literature taught in a primarily poetic, not philosophical, mode, but not all liberal arts are
equal, and this should also manifest itself pedagogically: grammar must be ordered to logic,
grammar and logic to rhetoric, the trivium to the quadrivium, all seven liberal arts to philosophy,
and philosophy ordered to and practiced in the light of revealed theology. In turn, theology must
be fecundated, enlivened, purified, and penetrated by philosophy and dialecticsindeed by all
the liberal arts else the queen of the sciences become rigid, dogmatic, graceless,
fundamentalist, anti-liberal, and enslaving. That which is lower than theology should not be
glossed over and given short shrift due to immoderate religious zeal or an orthodoxy-at-all-costs
mentality, for this suggests a fanatical, and eminently unphilosophical mindset. If either Socrates
or Christ is banished from the curriculum and pedagogy of the Catholic college or the soul of the
philosopher, the result is theological totalitarianism or a dictatorship of relativism, on the one
hand, and fanaticism or dilettantism, on the other. Both extremes display an anti-dialectical,
reactionary, answers without questions ethos, whether the answers are the true ones of Divine
Revelation or false ones of secular ideology. Such a college, if Catholic in affiliation and
confession, may offer true answers to its students, but at the expense of the necessary dialectical
questioning and Socratic ethos that is indispensable to render true answers the answers to real
questions in their hearts. Similarly, on the personal level, such a philosophical answer-man
might possess true answers, but they would be poisonous to his soul, a bulwark for his spiritual
pride and Gnostic, inner circle certainty. Neil Postman suggests the right balance:
Knowledge is produced in response to questions; and new knowledge results from the
asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the
point: Once you have learned how to ask questionsrelevant and appropriate and
substantial questionsyou have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from
learning whatever you want or need to know.[5]
Just as philosophy and theology must be held in the right balance, the curriculum must
also hold in fruitful tension the poetic and the philosophical. The liberal arts must neither become
mere poetic fodder for the real intellectual food of, for example, Aristotelian natural, logical,
and ethical philosophy, or Thomistic theology, nor must poetic knowledge become hegemonic
and all-encompassing, with philosophy dismissed as so much useless and pride-inducing abstract
speculation, only good for the poetic meat one can glean from its otherwise scanty bones. To
secure the right balance of the poetic and the philosophical is a complex matter, as Platos ironic
yet unassumingly sophisticated and nuanced treatment of it in the Republic reveals, but, as Dr.
Peter Redpath has suggested, without the right balance, philosophy becomes neo-Protagorean,
mytho-poetic sophistry under the aegis of political ideology, and poetry fails its charge to keep
both systematic philosophy and theology in touch with the earthly realities of mans senses,
through which all human knowledge has its origin and in the absence of which the human
intellect becomes unmoored, delusional, and dangerous.

Lastly, the pedagogy of the college must be properly ordered and balanced, with pride of
place being given to Socratic tutorial over lecture and seminar. The lecture and seminar modes of
teaching, though appropriate and even necessary on certain occasions and with certain subjects,
must never be the primary mode of teaching for the liberal-arts and philosophy in general. When
lecture predominates the class becomes one of teacher-derived-and-promulgated questions,
answers, and arguments, with the students serving as mere passive receptacles of catechetical
knowledge, completely bypassing and repressing the vital student-derived and initiated questions
and aporias that must precede and evoke any definitive answer or resolution. Of course,
excessive and impertinent seminar teaching can result in an educational ethos of questions
without answers, resulting in misology and skepticism, and a false sense of intellectual
sophistication and self-sufficiency in the students.
In conclusion, what our anti-philosophical culture of death needs most, besides mass
conversion and spiritual healing, is the reappropriation, rejuvenation, and rearticulation of the
Catholic philosophical tradition, which both presupposes and requires a refounding of our
Catholic colleges and universities firmly and integrally on this tradition. As we have discussed,
our Catholic philosophical tradition cannot flourish without integrally Catholic and Thomistic,
that is, good colleges. But such colleges, in turn, require an already flourishing Catholic
philosophical tradition to inform them and render them good! Its quite a paradox, yes, but it is
one that should not leave us without hope, as long as there are a few good Catholic philosophers
in the world!

[1]

David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of

Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 16
[2]

MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 11.

[3]

Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia,

Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 200.
[4]

MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 127.

[5]

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York:
Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), 23.