Philosophy

PHILOSOPHY. - The term ph. ("love of wisdom"), which according to Plutarch is traced back to Pythagoras (H. Diels, Doxographi Graeci, 2nd ed., Berlin and Leipzig 1929, 280 b 18-28; a 2), has oscillated, both in classical culture and in ancient and medieval Christian culture, among the most varied meanings, and only with modern thought has it assumed an exclusive meaning. Ph. indicates the search that man carries out with his reason for the ultimate truth of being, and thus ph. is par excellence the "science of truth": φιλοσορία ἀπαντήρη τῆς ἀληθείας (Aristotle, Met., II, 1, 993 b 20).

I. NATURE

The truth that philosophy seeks is the knowledge of being "as being" (ὃν ᾖ ὃν), such that it can provide the criterion and the ultimate foundation of the relation of the reality of the world and of the subject (which is man) to the twofold unfolding of being in space (nature) and in time (history). Man, therefore, in philosophy moves toward the search for the ultimate structures of being insofar as he wishes to find the orientation for an answer to the first origin and the ultimate destiny of his "own" being: indeed, man would not seek if he already possessed what he wants, but neither could he seek, or feel the sting of lack, if at the same time he were not driven by a primordial impulse toward that which constitutes the immanent goal of his rational nature, namely the truth that satisfies the search and closes the circle of the many "ways" of human knowing and acting. In this first moment, that is, understood as the essential orientation of the human reason upon being, philosophy belongs to every man: this is its absolute claim, and in this first moment every philosophy is true because it identifies itself with the innate thirst for knowledge that moves every consciousness to its opening upon the world, as indicated by Aristotle at the beginning of the Metaphysics: πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει (I, 1, 980 a 21).

Philosophy, then, is, or at least wishes to be, the pure path of the human spirit toward having that "truth" of being as such, upon the attainment of which depends the truth of the being of the one who seeks: for man cannot be said to be complete in himself and perfect, unless from the manifold and varied appearances of the world, from the tangle of the errors of culture, from the ceaseless expansion of science and history, he manages in some way - which is nonetheless for him ultimate and definitive - to "tear away the veil" of the being that surrounds him (truth is ἀλήθεια = non-concealment, as M. Heidegger has often emphasized: Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, Frankfurt am Main 1949, p. 19 ff.).

Therefore the initial determination of the philosophical consciousness, that is, the beginning of pure thinking, was rightly placed by Plato and Aristotle in "wonder" (Theaet., 155 D; Met., I, 2, 99, b 12: Διὰ τὸ θαυμάζειν ἤρξαντο οἱ ἄνθρωποι φιλοσοφεῖν. Cf. Rhet., I, 11, 1321 a 32). Indeed, if knowing is becoming aware of the presence of being, wonder is the awareness of a divergence between the repeated presentations of being to consciousness or of consciousness to being; hence the awareness of a lack of immediate and complete identity, or of an incommensurability between appearing and being as such, from which is born the question about "what is being as being." Wonder therefore stimulates the awakening of the spirit from the immediate experience of lived life to the concept, and thus determines the first step of reflection and consequently of philosophy itself: as a theoretical moment, wonder contains within itself and satisfies, insofar as it is to be satisfied, the demand for "doubt" or an "absolute" beginning, advanced by modern thought starting from Descartes. That is, one wishes to give philosophy, as Hegel observed (Gesch. der Philos., III, 11; Italian trans. by E. Codignola and G. Sanna, Florence 1943, p. 74), an absolute conviction such that philosophy, precisely because it has as its object being as being, must present itself "without presuppositions" (voraussetzungslos) so as to be able to make within itself the first affirmation about being and obtain the first certainty. The "wonder" of the Greeks fulfills this task through its dialectical structure, which on the other hand is lacking in the Cartesian doubt and in the developments it had in transcendental idealism, especially Hegelian, which culminates in the identity of being and knowing. Indeed, the Cartesian methodical doubt entails the total elimination of previous knowledge without any possibility of recovery on the part of the object; in the Hegelian dialectic all immediate knowledge is relegated to the sphere of "opinion" (das Meinen: cf. Phän. d. G., sec. A) which must be "sublated," that is, removed in order to obtain the "absolute knowledge" of the pure concept. Wonder, on the other hand, is a dynamic synthesis of positive and negative; it arises insofar as, on the one hand, the actuality of being, of the reality of its existence and of the multiplicity of its forms, is held firm; on the other hand, through it consciousness becomes aware that the being of such existence, or the multiplicity and becoming of its forms, no longer "show" but rather "veil" and indeed conflict with that unity and necessity of being in which alone truth can be given. It is in this negative moment that the demand for philosophy arises as the search for the absolute truth of being: but such a negative moment cannot be given and "operate" except alongside and in function of the positive to which it is opposed and which therefore must be preserved (as Hegel himself recognized in his Aufheben: Logik, I, ch. 1, sec. C, § 3, note; ed. Lasson, Leipzig 1932, p. 93 ff.). Certainly the positive moment, within which the negative moment arises and "wonder" is born as the beginning of philosophizing, can well be recognized in its order "without presuppositions," insofar as its positivity relates to the "totality" of being, both of the object and of the subject. But since the positive moment is a dialectical and not a real presupposition of the negative one, it becomes one with it in the expression of the original presentation that being obtains in reflection. Thus philosophy begins as an absolute question, about the absolute truth of being, insofar as it sets forth being in its universality and totality.

II. OBJECT

The object of philosophy is precisely this determination of "being as being," on which in the end all philosophies agree, which then diverge and oppose one another in the second moment, that of the content and of the respective structure that this being obtains in reflection.

Being as being, which for Aristotle forms the proper object of "first philosophy" or metaphysics (Met., IV, 1, 1003 a 21-32; cf. XI, 3, 1061 b 31 ff. and especially 4, 1061 b 26-27; ἡ φιλοσοφία... περὶ τὸ ὄν, ἢ δὲ τῶν τοπούντων ἕκαστον, θεωρεῖ) is being in its consistency or definitive determination by which it truly exists. It is this being "grounded in itself" as being, which philosophy has always sought and still seeks, for example Hegel, when in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (A, 1; ed. Hoffmeister, Leipzig 1937, p. 79 ff.) he effects the passage from the abstract and improper being of the first stage of immediate consciousness to being in the proper sense, which is that of self-consciousness, up to the completed form of "absolute knowledge" (cf., for a comparison in this sense between these two summits of Western thought: M. Heidegger, Holzwege, Frankfurt a. M. 1950: Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung, pp. 103-94, especially pp. 117, 121, 134, 170 f.).

The problem of philosophy can in fact be viewed in the direction of a twofold convergence or demand; either insofar as, starting from the diversity and multiplicity in which consciousness moves, one seeks to find the unity that is its foundation or intrinsic principle, or insofar as, starting from the unity in which the spirit finds itself, one wishes to proceed from it in order to embrace multiplicity and diversity and to recognize them as intrinsic to that same unity. It is therefore in the determination of the content and structure of this unity that the various philosophies struggle among themselves, namely whether it is a unity as a point of arrival or as a point of departure. The object of philosophy is therefore being in this its unity within the manifold and the varied, and this object must evidently manifest itself as awareness and hence also as "presence" in some way of that unity which is comprehensive and definitive of being as being, without further references. This object of philosophy cannot, in its own ultimate determination, be anything but absolute, and therefore it is but one and ultimate: to determine how the Absolute relates to the being that presents itself as manifold and varied is what constitutes the "test" to which every philosophy must subject itself and in which the value of its method and the "truth" of its object are deduced. Only in this way is that "truth of being" attained, outside of which all the forms of experience become mute and are reduced to mere insignificant occurrences, incapable of emerging from the flux of existence that makes them vanish. Rightly therefore St. Thomas defends the rational structure of being as the foundation of man's very salvation: "Oportet ultimum finem totius universi, esse bonum intellectus: hic autem est veritas. Oportet igitur veritatem esse ultimum finem totius universi et circa eius finem et considerationem principaliter sapientiam insistere" (C. Gent., I, 1: with reference to Aristotle, Met., II, 1, 993 b 31). Not otherwise — on this point of the essence of the pure theory of being — does Hegel express himself when he affirms that the Absolute in the supreme science that is philosophy must present itself in knowledge as such and not as though knowledge were its "instrument" or means, and the absolute True remained outside of common truth (cf. Phänomenologie des Geistes, Einleitung; ed. J. Hoffmeister, Leipzig 1937, p. 63 ff.). The object of philosophy is this absolute true, which has the meaning of "ground" (Grund) both on the side of being and on the side of knowing; because every thing and every appearance of things takes from the Absolute its intimate reality, and because every knowledge is expressive of being as being, insofar as it precisely "reveals" its absolute constitutive element and its relation to the Absolute. At this point realist philosophies have specified that being, as such, is not resolved into knowing and that the forms of knowing can indeed correspond to but do not identify themselves with being; because knowing in man "encircles" being with gradual approaches and does not grasp it all at once: in realism, therefore, it is being that grounds knowing and consequently offers the criterion of truth. Phenomenist philosophies (of the empiricist or idealist type) affirm instead the identity of being with the forms of appearing or of consciousness or of knowing: thus being is within knowing and the forms of being are determined as a function of knowing. For this reason D. Hume placed in impression the character of reality both for the external world ("impressions of sensation") and for the internal world ("impressions of reflection") and attributed the criterion of reality to the feeling of vivacity (feeling) or conviction (belief) as the source of our persuasion of reality (cf. Treatise on human nature, I, 1, sec. 7; and especially III, sec. 14, ed. Selby-Bigge, Oxford 1928, p. 169 f.).

III. METHOD AND DIVISION

Being presents itself in its truth when it becomes accessible in its structure: the method of philosophy is the itinerary that reflection follows in order to grasp and determine the value of truth of being as being. Such a method evidently corresponds to the type of object upon which a philosophy causes the reality of being to converge; for the method is nothing other than the moving of being itself and its articulating itself in forms, in the manner in which these forms present themselves in philosophical reflection.

The "intuitive method" predominates in those philosophies in which being as absolute is immediately given, apprehended or posited, in a particular form of knowledge: this may be intellectual intuition as in systems with a rationalist background (Platonism, Augustinian illumination, the rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, Schelling's intuition of the Absolute, Schleiermacher's "feeling of dependence" [Abhängigkeitgefühl], etc.). Other, more recent intuitive philosophies have recourse to vital intuition (Bergson's "durée", Maine de Biran's "volo ergo sum", the German Lebensphilosophie of Nietzsche, Simmel, Spranger, Klages, the emotional Wesenschau understood as Sinnfühlung of Max Scheler, etc.). On the other hand, non-intuitive philosophies may be called "rational"; these therefore do not begin immediately with the Absolute, but place the possession of or contact with the Absolute at the end of the path of philosophy, so that the determination of the truths of being comes about by way of a "process" or development of human reason: this takes as its starting point a "demand" for the truth of being that must be satisfied by the very course of the inquiry. To this type of philosophy belong Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysical realism, in which sense collaborates with intellect and the affirmation of the Absolute requires a demonstrative process (e.g., proofs of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God, etc.). Hegelian idealism too, insofar as (at least from the methodological point of view) it admits as the first beginning of thought the phenomenological stage of immediate perception, from which consciousness must raise itself up to absolute Knowledge, falls within this type of philosophy rational in the strong sense. Contemporary existentialism makes use of a method that might be called "phenomenological-dialectical analysis," insofar as it seeks the structures that human freedom assumes with respect to the objects it encounters in its situation (e.g., anguish is the being of human consciousness before the empty finitude that offers no support; choice is the breaking or overcoming of anguish on the part of freedom, etc.). Empiricism has claimed to subject philosophy to the method of experimental science or to mathematical precision, reducing philosophy either to a kind of logic of the sciences or to the compendium of their general results; of this error even Kant himself remained a prisoner, at least in part, when in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Introduction: the problem of synthetic a priori judgments) he imposes upon philosophy the requirements proper to science, and thus philosophy loses in advance its autonomy and originality. The distinction of method into a priori and a posteriori is less proper than the one adopted here, because intuitive philosophies can start either from an a priori beginning or from an a posteriori datum, and the same may be said of rational philosophies. A requirement of the rational method is the constitution of a precise scheme of laws regulating the exercise of thought, and it is this that forms Logic (a distinguished example being Aristotle's Organon), considered as propaedeutic to philosophy and to scientific thought in general. A requirement common to every philosophical method is the process of "reduction," by which, from the various aspects of a problem, one determines which is the principal one and, with respect to this, proceeds to determine the meaning of the secondary aspects. Nevertheless, in philosophy every method has no value in itself and for itself, prior to its concrete application, but lives, so to speak, and "proves itself" continually in the application to its object, which is precisely being in its ultimate instance of truth and in function of the original movement of human consciousness.

The division of philosophy varies from school to school and from system to system, insofar as it concerns the forms according to which, in the various types of philosophy, the search for the truth of being can be conducted. As to the nature of the object in general, there are spiritualist philosophies and materialist philosophies. As to method, as has been said, there are intuitive philosophies and rational philosophies. As to the modality of the object, there are the various parts or branches of philosophy: whereas the Platonic dialogues dwell upon arguments or aporias concerning the principal problems, Aristotle gave philosophy a rigorous scientific arrangement that was the model of the systematic philosophies of the following centuries, modern philosophy and Hegel included. The principal parts of philosophy in Aristotelianism are: logic, philosophy of nature, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics and politics. Among the Stoics and the Epicureans the principal parts were logic, natural philosophy and ethics; while the Neoplatonists developed above all metaphysics and mathematics (Proclus). But, for Aristotle, the principal division of philosophy is into theoretical and practical (Eth. Nic., VI, 3, 1130 b 16 ff.): the former seeks the structures of the real, the latter determines the principles of human action. For the Neo-Kantians, adversaries of metaphysics, philosophy is divided into aesthetics, logic, ethics (Windelband, Cohen).

IV. OUTLINE OF HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

1. Greek philosophy

Western thought had its origin and its principal nucleus in Greek philosophy: it is its merit to have conceived the truth of being in terms of rationality and concept, and thus to have secured the presuppositions of a valid conception of man and of his freedom against the Oriental invasion of mysticism and cosmic pantheism, on which the religions of idols and the politics of tyranny feed. And Greek philosophy, from its very beginnings, appeared as an "education of man" toward the freedom of the spirit: therefore, just as it has its center in a metaphysical interpretation of reality, so it shows its summit and its fulfillment in an ethics intended to give rational structure to human action according to virtue. Greek philosophy, with the variety and richness of its problems and with the very discord of its schools, displayed the most imposing unfolding of natural reason to clarify the enigma of existence, and in this sense Greek philosophy, by asserting the genuine nature of man, prepared Christianity and responded to the acceptance of Revelation and Grace as the fulfillment and salvation of nature. The commonly accepted division of Greek philosophy into three epochs, namely the Presocratics, the great Socratic systems (Plato, Aristotle), and the post-Socratic systems (Stoicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism, Neoplatonism), seeks to grasp the most relevant forms of the determination of the "concept" (λόγος), which, if it had in Socrates its polemical champion, was also glimpsed by earlier philosophers. Indeed, the fervor that animates the study of the fragments of Presocratic philosophy in our own day has its reason in the intimate richness of those distinguished relics, which often show not a mere beginning but a notable degree of maturity of reason. The dawn of Greek philosophy can already be glimpsed in Hesiod's declarations at the beginning of his poem, where he has the Muses, symbol of human genius, say: "We know how to tell many lies that have every appearance of truth. But we can also, when we wish, tell the truth" (Works and Days, 26-33). Against Homer, who manipulates "myth," Hesiod sets out to tell the "true" and not to be satisfied with the "probable": a protest that is taken up with renewed energy by Parmenides in the prologue to his poem, when the goddess (wisdom) warns him that not ill fortune but justice and the love of truth must impel him to seek it: therefore "he must know all things in order to discern the sincere truth from the fallacious opinions of men in which there is no truth": χρέω δὲ σε πάντα πύθεσθαι - ἡμῖν Ἀληθεῖνς κύκλικος ἀτρεμὴν ἦτορ - ἠδὲ βροτῶν δόξας ταῖς οὐκ ἔν πίστις ἀληθῆς (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Diels-Kranz, I, 230 B, 22 ff.).

With the Ionian school (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) philosophy becomes a specific search for the true, and there appear in it the first writings of Western philosophy, which have as their subject and title nature (φύσις) but as their demand the determination of the "principle" (ἀρχή) of being as such. The metaphysical demand is presented in its purity in the first fragment of Anaximander (12 B, 1), proclaimed by Heidegger the "oldest text of Western philosophy," but whose exact rendering (beginning with Nietzsche, who studied it in 1873) is still controversial in its details. It says in any case: "From where things have their origin, there too they must find their end according to necessity" (κατὰ τὸ χρεών), since they must give one another punishment and atonement according to the disposition of time. With a figurative language taken from the sphere of ethics, the text suggests a rational interpretation of the "becoming" of nature that is immanent to it (W. Jaeger). This text — in its logical nucleus — can set in motion both the metaphysics of becoming of the Socratic systems and that of the "eternal return" of Heraclitus, of certain forms of Neoplatonism and of Nietzsche: that first metaphysics sought a formal structure of that rationality, whereas absolute becoming accepted it in the immediacy of its making. Greek philosophy oscillated between these two possibilities without being able to reach the definitive solution: the solution was given life by Platonism and Aristotelianism, inasmuch as in these systems the problem of being was oriented toward the transcendence of the supreme principle, but the meaning of this transcendence was clarified only with the advent of Christianity.

2. Christian philosophy

The Greek ideal of life was speculation, that θεωρητικός βίος which placed the philosopher outside the common ranks of men in order to contemplate the ultimate nature of things, and this was also the supreme "virtue" (ἀρετή) and the true wisdom of which disse St. Paul: "Iudaei signa petunt et Graeci sapientiam quaerunt" (I Cor. 1:22). With Christianity, the possession of the truth that conferred salvation and beatitude is not limited to an intellectual elite reserved for a few privileged individuals, but demands a radical purification of personal feeling and action that is at the same time accessible to all and must be, for each person — even the most gifted — sustained by supernatural help. Thus, by combining with the evangelical message aspects and tasks that are absolutely new for man, such as the notions of sin, perdition, Redemption, Grace, Incarnation of the Word of God, individual responsibility and personal immortality...: all these determinations presuppose a new concept of freedom, both on God's part and on man's part, to which no philosophy had hitherto attained. In the patristic age, [there is] the greatness of God's gift to man which the Doctors defend against the survival of classical philosophy, both in direct opposition (Porphyry, Celsus, Julian the Apostate, Neoplatonism, etc.), and in the fragmentation of dogma by heresies in its cardinal points (Trinity, Incarnation, Grace...). Philosophy is not sought by the Fathers of the Church in and for itself as a guide to the truth of nature as such, but only as an "instrument" to illustrate the meaning of dogma and to defend it from adversarial attacks: the majority of the Fathers therefore attribute a positive value to pre-Christian thought (though not conclusive) because original sin had attenuated, yes, but not extinguished the light of natural reason. From this reflection on dogma, which is mostly provoked by polemical contingencies, was born the admirable expansion of patristic theology by which we still live today. Apart from some sporadic rejection by exaggerated fideists (Tatian, Hermias...), philosophy therefore obtains its legitimate recognition in Christianity: thus even the sages of the East and West could accept the new Faith not as simple contrast but as the fulfillment of the truth they already sought in philosophy. Symptomatic is the attitude of St. Justin. In the Dialogue with the Jew Trypho, he gives a definition of philosophy in direct continuity with classical thought: "science of being and knowledge of the true; happiness, privilege of this science and wisdom" — ἐπιστήμη ἐστι τοῦ ὄντος καὶ τοῦ ἀληθοῦς ἐπίγνωσις εὐθαυτοῦν δὲ ταύτης τῆς ἐπιστήμης καὶ σοφίας γέρας (PG 5, 481 A). In the prologue of the Cohortatio ad Graecos, he observes that the religion of the prophets gives the answer to that problem of the ultimate end on which agree, not only the poets... "but also the philosophers who have communicated to us the true and divine knowledge": ἀλλὰ καὶ φιλοσοφία οἱ τὴν ἀληθῆν καὶ θεῖαν ἐπαγγελόμενοι παρ' ὑμῖν εἰδέναι γνῶσιν (PG 5, 241 AC) and among all he recommends Orpheus: "Follow Orpheus and all those who have written on the unity of God" — Ὀρφεί πείσθητε... καὶ τοῖς λοιποῖς καὶ τοῖς τὰ αὐτὰ περὶ ἑνὰς θεοῦ γεγράφοσι πείσθητε (loc. cit., 36, 305 CD). In the Apology he has recourse to the method of the philosophers of rejecting erroneous traditions and exhorts not to follow the timid but those who deserve to be recognized as cultivators of piety and philosophy: εὐσεβεῖς καὶ φιλοσοφίᾳ ἀκολουθώντας (vol. V, col. 329; cf. Apologia II, ch. 13, 460 A): in ch. 6 he defends the philosophers from the accusation of atheism (cf. loc. cit., 335, and ch. 13, 345. Identical defense in: Athenagoras, Legatio pro Christianis, chs. 5-6, PG 6, 899-903). However, both Justin and Athenagoras recognize that the philosophers have often fallen into errors: Plato (who read the Books of Moses in Egypt!) if he posited the soul as immortal, he also called it "uncreated" (ἐγένετο); Aristotle, by making it the "act" (ἐντελέγεια) of the body, declared it mortal (Apol. I, ch. 6, 253; cf. Dialog. cum Tryph., ch. 5. Also Athenagoras, Leg. pro Chr., ch. 4, 697 ff.). This attitude of positive encounter between philosophy and faith is affirmed and developed by the Alexandrian school: Greek philosophy is called by Clement of Alexandria "co-cause and collaborator of true knowledge, because it is a search for truth, preparation of the faithful" — συνάκτως καὶ συνεργὸς τῆς ἀληθοῦς κατὰ λήψεως. ζήτησις οὖσα ἀληθείας, προπαύθεια τοῦ γνωστικοῦ (Stromata, II, 63, 8; Werke, ed. O. Stählin, Berlin 1939; cf., for other texts, the Register, IV, 791b-792a).

The first Christian thought therefore recognizes in human reason and in philosophy, although they cannot give certain knowledge of the truth that saves, a sphere of its own research and considers it a normal propaedeutic on the path toward faith: in explaining the relations between reason and faith, the schools of voluntarist orientation (St. Augustine, nominalism, Scotism, Pascal, Laberthonnière, Blondel) tend to lower the cognitive moment; while the intellectualist schools (Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Thomas, Leibniz) accentuate the rational one, while respecting the originality and absolute transcendence of the content of Revelation and of the act of faith. Put in these terms, the recently debated problem of the existence of a specific "Christian philosophy" can only have an affirmative answer, but the content and meaning of such an answer is different in the two orientations: in the voluntarist one, "Christian philosophy" is the only philosophy of the believer and springs solely as reflection on the content of divine truth; in the intellectualist tendency, "Christian philosophy" is the prolongation or consolidation, under the impulse and guidance of faith, of rational philosophy, already in act, in the most arduous points such as the problems of the first origin and ultimate end of beings as well as the origin, life and destiny of the individual human soul.

3. Modern and contemporary philosophy

A characteristic proper to modern thought is the affirmation of the autonomy of human reason (radical humanism) for which it is impossible to recognize a domain of knowledge and a criterion of truth that in whole or in part transcends its sphere and its powers: its tendency or "cadence" as a method of research is immanentism (gnoseological or ontological) and as content of being it is pantheism. In G. Bruno, Telesio and Campanella the immanentist tendency is predominantly centered on "nature" with contempt for a radical critical foundation (the cogito of Campanella). The demand for absolute criticism claims to consider knowledge itself as truth in and for itself, as a circle closed in the identity of object-subject-act within knowing: the main stages of this absolutization of knowing are the cogito of Descartes, the Bewusstsein überhaupt ("das Ich denke") of Kant, the pure I of Fichte, the Absolute of Schelling and the Geist, as absolute synthesis of subjective and objective, of Hegel.

If in the field of Protestant theology both Kant and Hegel found followers who believed themselves convinced that they were not betraying Christianity, Catholic theology has always opposed a clear rejection to modern philosophy because of the subjectivity of the criterion of truth and because of the Spinozistic content of the new metaphysics that Jacobi himself had denounced in Lessing's Enlightenment, by which Hegel was inspired (cf. Jacobi, Werke, IV, 1, Leipzig 1819, p. 217 ff.: critique of Lessing). Hegel, in the completeness of his system, in the vastness of his inquiry and in his understanding of the method of immanence, represents the summit of modern philosophy as the most audacious attempt in the whole history of thought to take possession, by human reason, of the Absolute itself and to surprise it, as Hegel himself declared, in the intimacy of its eternal essence before its creative process (cf. Legib, ed. Lasson, I, Berlin 1932, p. 31). Therefore philosophy is above all and first of all (as for Aristotle and for St. Thomas, but in a very different context) "theology" (indeed theogony) insofar as the Infinite identifies itself, in its dialectical becoming, with the finite (cf. on the object of philosophy: Die Philosophie der Gesch., I, Einleitung; Die Vernunft in der Gesch., 3rd ed. by O. Lasson, Leipzig 1930, p. 18 ff.), and the infinite becomes the "reality" of the finite (dialectical Absolute). Hegel therefore apparently accepts all the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, but transfers them to the plane of the ontological immanence of human consciousness, and has therefore been able to pass for a champion of Christian philosophy, while he demolished its foundations, as Kierkegaard energetically denounced against the compromises of the Hegelian "right" (cf. Papirer, 1857 X⁴ A 429; Ital. trans. by C. Fabro, II, Brescia 1950, p. 527). Hegel's influence was paralyzed in the second half of the nineteenth century by the advance of scientific positivism, of the irrationalism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and by neo-Kantianism; but more than to Italian neo-Hegelianism (Spaventa, Croce, Gentile), French and English, contemporary culture now turns to the problematic of the dissolution of Hegelianism. First of all, existentialism claims the consistency and freedom of the individual; Marxism defends the reality and priority of nature and of material values (man as Naturoder Gattungswesen); neo-positivism, which develops the modern semantic instruments of logistics, disperses every trace of metaphysics from language and from philosophical logic in order to stop at the sign or pure symbol (cf. R. Carnap, Studies in semantics, I: Introduction to semantics, § 38, 3rd ed., Cambridge Mass. 1948, p. 242-289. Carnap, however, is more reserved with regard to the philosophy of other neo-positivists). Alongside these philosophies, determined to conclude on truth and to organize themselves into schools, more radical tendencies assert themselves, according to which philosophy presents itself as pure research, as the affirmation of the limit of every answer that human thought has given to the problem of truth (relativism). If this does not exclude the possibility of a definitive solution of the problem, it is admitted that human consciousness must seek it by another way and derive it from another source than pure philosophical reason (problematism, e.g. of U. Spirito). Then returns the integral "doubt" of philosophy, to which Pascal and Kierkegaard opposed as the only salvation the existential truth through the "risk" of Faith.

V. PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Man, who finds himself in the world, has at the outset nothing but the data of internal and external experience upon which he exercises his reflection: when this succeeds in formulating laws and principles of universal value, we have science. Science seeks, through deduction from principles and through the artifice of experiment, to establish the necessary sequences of phenomena, and whatever pronouncements it makes upon their nature are always a function of the appearing of those phenomena themselves within the limits of the coordinates of space and time. The task of religion, on the other hand, in its noetic moment, is to pass beyond the sequence of phenomena in order to carry itself beyond all spatial and temporal determinations, and thus to envisage the first origin and the ultimate destiny of both the world and man. Philosophy, as it is distinct from the one and the other, is nevertheless indispensable to both if they are to obtain recognition of a universal value. If the scientist can grasp the laws of physical becoming through the exercise of the method proper to his field of inquiry alone, the real meaning of those laws depends upon an absolute reference that can be made of becoming itself, that is, only insofar as it is understood as a process for the actualization of structures of absolute value in their order. Here philosophy intervenes, which (unlike much classical and modern philosophy: one need only think of the "philosophies of nature" of Schelling and Hegel!) does not command the development of physics, but rather constitutes the completion for a consciousness that, moving from the manifold and varied data of experience, seeks the unity of being.

Religion, understood in its elementary meaning as an "aspiration" of human consciousness toward the Absolute, stands in a certain sense at the opposite pole from science and beyond philosophy. This ineffable aspiration that is religious consciousness arises for a convergence of the demand from all spheres of experience, external and internal, not in the sense of having its laws in order to contemplate the becoming of phenomena, but in order to satisfy that thirst for certainty about one's own destiny which the succession of phenomena does not satisfy and which no science can give. Philosophy, if it can be absent in the first manifestations of religion, is indispensable when it comes to defining its authentic object (against the mystification both of science and of politics, as well as of false religions!) and of defending its exigency in its original moment (against the rapacity of false philosophies!) as the essential aspiration of justice and truth of the common man.

Per ciò giustamente ha scritto s. Tommaso che «fere totia philosophiae consideratio ad Dei cognitionem ordinatur » (C. Gent., I, 4). — Vedi tav. LXXXVII.

BIBLI: E. Zeller, Über die Aufgabe der Philosophie und ihre Stellung zu den übrigen Wissenschaften, in Vorträge u. Abhandlungen, II, Lipsia 1877, pp. 415-62; F. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie, Berlino 1892; trad. it. di L. Gentilini, Torino 1911; W. Windelband, Was ist Philosophie? Über Begriff und Gesch. der Philosophie, in Praetudien, 2^ ed., Tubinga e Lipsia 1903, pp. 1-57; id., Einleitung in die Philosophie, 2^ ed., Tubinga 1920; id., Lehrbuch der Gesch. der Philosophie, ed. H. Heismann, ivi 1915 (Einleitung: §§ 1-2, p. 1-52a); W. Wundt, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 3^ ed., Lipsia 1904; W. Dührer, Das Wesen der Philosophie, in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, I, vi, Berlino e Lipsia 1907, pp. 1-72; Fr. Jodl, Aus der Werkstatt der Philosophie, Vienna 1911; P. Natorp, Philosophie: Ihr Problem und ihre Probleme, Gottinca 1911; A. Mariv, Was ist Philosophie, in Ges. Schr., I, Halle u. S. 1916, pp. 69-94; M. Wetscher, Einführung in die Philosophie, Berlino e Lipsia 1920; K. Vorländer, Einführung in die Philosophie, Lipsia 1920; H. Reckert, Die Philosophie des Lebens (Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modetrömungen unserer Zeit), 2^ ed., Tubinga 1922; M. Schefer, Vom Wesen der Philosophie und der moralischen Bedeutung der Philosophischen Erkenntnis, in Vom Essern im Menschen, 2^ ed., I, Berlino 1923, pp. 38-133; F. De Sarlo, Introduzione alla f., Milano 1928; R. Eisler, Philosophie, in Würtsch. d. phil. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B. B.

Sui rapporti fra f. e cristianesimo: Fr. Brentano, Die vier Phasen der Philosophie und ihr augenblicklicher Stand, Stoccarda 1895; A. J. Festugiere, L'idéal religieux des Grecs et l'Evangile, Parigi 1932; R. Jolivet, La philosophie chrétienne et la philosophie contemporaine, ivi 1932; H. Eibl, Die Grundlegung der abendländischen Philosophie, Griechische u. christlich-griechische Philosophie, Bonn 1934; J. Soufflé, La philosophie chrétienne de Descartes à nos jours, 2 voll., Parigi 1934; Bl. Remeyer, La philosophie chrétienne jusqu'à Descartes, 2 voll., ivi 1935; C. Fabro, La religiosité de la f., in Problemi dell'esistenzialismo, Roma 1945, pp. 106-133; id., Coscienza filosofica e coscienza religiosa, in Archivio di filosofia, 1945, pp. 73-91; R. Frank, Philosophical understanding and religious truth, Londra 1945; M. Müller, Das christliche Menschenbild und die Weltanschauungen der Neuzeit, Friburgo in Br. 1945; A. Sarrillanges, Le christianisme et les philosophes, 2 voll., Parigi 1946; trad. it. di P. Sartori Treves, Brescia 1948; E. Gilson, L'esprit de la philosophie médiévale, 2^ ed., Parigi 1947; trad. it., di P. Sartori Treves, Brescia 1948 (cf. id., Christianisme et Philosophie, Parigi 1936); Ph. Wendel und R. Hofmann, Der Mensch vor Gott, Düsseldorf 1948; J. Boissot, E. Rochefort, P. Arbousse-Bastide, I, Bois, P. Ricœur, M. Nacart, Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne, Parigi 1949.

Per un orientamento sui rapporti fra f. e le scienze: W. Wundt, Philosophie und Wissenschaft, in Essays, Lipsia 1885, pp. 1-23; H. Reichenbach, Ziele und Wege der physikalischen Erkenntnis, in Handbuch der Physik, IV, Berlino 1900, pp. 1-80; A. Wenzl, Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung, Lipsia 1936; M. Planck, Religion und Naturwissenschaft, ivi 1938; K. Janens,

Philosophie und Wissenschaft, in Wondling, 3 (1947), pp. 721-33; W. Hoffmann, Physik und Metaphysik, in Symposium, II, Friburgo in Br. 1949, pp. 351-82.

Sul senso del Frammento di Anassimandro (B 1: H. Dieckranz, Die Fragmente der Forsshratiker, I, 1ª ed., Berlino 1934, p. 89, 12 sgs.), cf.; W. Jaeger, Paideia, Die Formung des griechischen Menschen, I, 2ª ed., Berlino e Lipsia 1936, p. 217 sgs.; O. Gigon, Der Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie von Hesiod bis Parmenides, Basilea 1945, p. 81 sgs.; E. Wolf, Grundlagen des adenofäadischen Rechtsgedanken bei Anassimander und Heredith, I, Friburgo in Br. 1948, p. 42 sgs. (bild. aggiornata); M. Heidegger, Holzwerg, Francoforte s. M. 1950: Der Spruch des Anassimander, pp. 206-343.

Cornelio Fabro