Philosophia perennis
Listening to Reality: On the Idea of the “Perennial Philosophy”
Daniel Zöllner (Baden-Württemberg)
Medieval stone archive with scrolls beside a modern laboratory with glass walls and equipment.
Realism and the order of being versus constructivism and nominalism; truth as correspondence versus criticism and perspectivism; meaningfulness and entelechy versus mechanism and functionalism; embeddedness and essential nature versus autonomy and self-creation; the common good and natural law versus procedural ethics and positivism — the contrast between a traditional and a modern understanding of the world.
If philosophy exhausts itself in ever-new, mutually contradictory constructions of autonomous systems, there is no hope of recognizing and retaining, through philosophical inquiry, a stable body of eternally valid truths. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant described metaphysics as a “battleground”:
“On which no combatant has ever yet been able to gain the smallest territory and establish a lasting possession through his victory.” (B XV)
The situation is different when philosophizing means taking objective reality as one’s measure, listening attentively to that reality, and allowing oneself to be guided by it. In that case, philosophical inquiry has a direction and a point of reference, and a philosophy is true when it succeeds in corresponding to objective reality as extensively and completely as possible.
The first conception of philosophy — namely, that it consists in the autonomous construction of systems — has dominated large parts of the intellectual history of modernity. Opposed to it are the witnesses, found in antiquity and the Middle Ages, but also occasionally in more recent times, of the philosophia perennis, the perennial or everlasting philosophy. They maintain that the human intellect ought to conform itself to objective reality and is, in principle, capable of doing so. Ernst Commer writes on this subject:
“If philosophy is truly to be philosophy, as a genuine science, it must also be capable of actually attaining its object, the object towards which it alone is directed and which, among all the other sciences, it alone comprehends. In its universality, however, this object is none other than truth. … Philosophy must therefore acknowledge the truth, or the truths, that are genuinely grounded in things. According to what is generally understood by truth, the correct philosophy, if it wishes to claim this name, must communicate to us knowledge of what is, in such a way that a conformity comes about between our thinking and what is.”¹
The significance of the philosophia perennis
Differences and disagreements in particular details should not obscure the fundamental consensus and shared insights that unite the representatives of the philosophia perennis across different periods and places.
The most important witnesses to the philosophia perennis are Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. Plato himself explicitly draws upon even older sources of an enduring philosophy, such as the traditions of the Pythagoreans or simply those of “the Ancients.” Here we should think not only of inherited insights of reason but also of a “sacred tradition” in which a divine discourse addressed to human beings has been preserved.
As Josef Pieper has shown, Plato recognizes in such a “sacred tradition” central truths concerning the origin of the world, life after death, and the primordial fall of humanity — truths that human reason ought to reflect upon, but which it cannot attain by its own resources alone.² After the beginning of the Christian era, reference to Christian revelation acquires central importance for the philosophia perennis.
Returning to what has been handed down — and here this means both the body of “sacred tradition” and the tradition of wisdom arising from human reflection and experience — is an essential characteristic of the philosophia perennis.
From the standpoint of the “new” and the “contemporary,” one is inclined to regard this return to inherited tradition as an impairment of the autonomy of reason, perhaps even as a form of subservience to tradition, associated with an inability to think independently and pursue truth decisively.
But anyone who has genuinely familiarized themselves with the great representatives of the philosophia perennis will recognize how far their philosophical activity is from being equated with an uncritical acceptance of inherited traditions. This applies equally, and especially, to medieval Scholasticism, so often disparaged out of ignorance, and to its greatest representative, Thomas Aquinas.
The philosophical inquiry of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas does not begin from a zero point. Rather, it begins with a silent attentiveness to reality and to what their predecessors have already been able to discover about it through experience.
The inherited body of teachings is examined, tested, and sometimes rejected. But the philosopher can never dispense with allowing predecessors to teach him, for otherwise he would simply ignore important statements about reality.
Commer observes:
“The philosophical tradition of firmly established truths that have been securely demonstrated must not be interrupted. Philosophy cannot begin anew; if it attempts to do so, it abolishes itself, for by denying the existence of eternal and unchanging truths, it simultaneously denies its own very possibility and justification as a science. For this reason, the great antiquity of truths that have been securely discovered already serves as an indication of their intrinsic value. And for this reason, too, the authority of the philosophical tradition — which is not itself a source of philosophy, since it cannot in itself replace the rigorous rational demonstration of truth — nevertheless has a higher pedagogical value as a guiding principle for philosophy.”³
The distinctiveness of modern philosophy
Modern philosophical inquiry is of a different kind.⁴ Descartes’ paradigmatic attempt can serve as an example.
Its initial impulse is methodological doubt. This radical doubt is intended to create a tabula rasa, a clean slate from which the construction of a philosophical system can begin.
If doubt is understood merely as a healthy scepticism towards established patterns of thought and claims to truth, towards the prejudices of the intellectual climate of the age and of one’s own thinking, then it is entirely compatible with the representatives of the philosophia perennis.
In Cartesian doubt, however, the relationship with objective reality and tradition is disrupted, indeed interrupted and severed:
“Descartes began with methodological doubt, but did not stop there: for his grounds for doubt extended to all truths, even immediate truths and the very nature of the human faculties of the soul. In this way he opened the door wide to universal doubt, and thus methodological doubt became actual doubt: in this philosophy we can see nothing other than a form of scepticism.”⁵
The thinker left to himself — autonomous in this sense — attempts to develop his own philosophy out of nothing, or, more precisely, a philosophical system that claims to reconstruct reality as a closed and comprehensive whole, proceeding from a single principle.
As Balduin Schwarz observes, Descartes began from a legitimate concern and a real problem of his time, namely, the experience:
“That an immeasurable amount of material could justify itself only through its long tradition, that much else stood alongside it without any connection, and that entire fields of the mind seemed to resemble an undifferentiated heap of precious and rotten goods …. Methodological doubt created distance from all this: nothing was to enjoy precedence over anything else; everything had to undergo the same scrutiny. And now Descartes began, as it were, to read through the heap, separating, rejecting, and accepting.”⁶
The fundamental principle here was not a silent openness to everything encountered, but rather the idea of clear and distinct knowledge, approaching mathematical exactness.
According to Commer, modern philosophy since Bacon and Descartes has been characterized by subjectivism, because these philosophers “established the subjective criterion of knowledge and rejected the tradition of the objective criterion.”⁷
In contrast to the philosophia perennis, modern philosophy lacks “a firm objective foundation in things,” and the “purely subjective standpoint is the fundamental error of modern philosophy.”⁸
This leads to a constant succession of systems and viewpoints, thereby tempting us into the error of a principled relativism. Subjectivism intensifies to the point of Fichte’s subjective idealism.⁹
In the succession of its systems, modern philosophy lacks continuous progress of the kind in which inherited knowledge is taken up and developed further, acquired insights are refined and expanded. Yet this is precisely the experience from which Kant himself started.
Wonder rather than final certainty
Descartes’ attempt became the paradigm of modern system-building, to which, for example, Edmund Husserl still referred in his Cartesian Meditations (1929).
The completed system promises an exhaustive knowledge of the world. With its help, the world would not only be known in its entirety but also understood and penetrated with absolute certainty.
The representatives of the philosophia perennis, on the other hand, are convinced that the philosopher will always remain someone searching for ultimate certainty and complete knowledge.¹⁰ Only God is capable of knowing with absolute certainty. Philosophia, however, is love of wisdom: a loving search for the truth possessed by God.
This conception can already be found in Pythagoras.
However much truth the philosopher may acquire, and however much he may validly come to know, there always remains something of mystery and unexplored depth.
The claim of the modern system-builder is therefore rejected from the outset.
The philosophia perennis has nothing to do with superficial claims to know everything or with shallow dogmatism. Rather, it remains open to mystery and wonder.
Wonder is, and always remains, the experience that permeates philosophy through and through.
References
- Ernst Commer, Die immerwährende Philosophie. Platon, Aristoteles, Augustinus, Thomas von Aquin. Heusenstamm: editiones scholasticae, 2013 (reprint of the first edition, 1899), p. 41.
- Cf. Josef Pieper, Über die platonischen Mythen. Munich: Kösel, 1965.
- Commer, op. cit., p. 51.
- The contrast between the philosophia perennis and the modern age’s “autonomous philosophy of systems” is the central theme of Balduin Schwarz’s book: Ewige Philosophie. Gesetz und Freiheit in der Geistesgeschichte. Leipzig: Jakob Hegner, 1937.
- Commer, op. cit., p. 107.
- Schwarz, op. cit., p. 148.
- Commer, op. cit., p. 116.
- Ibid., p. 104.
- Cf. ibid., pp. 117–118.
- Cf. Josef Pieper, “Das Geheimnis und die Philosophie,” in Weistum, Dichtung, Sakrament. Aufsätze und Notizen. Munich: Kösel, 1954, pp. 60–69.
A terminological note: I have translated Hören auf die Wirklichkeit as “Listening to Reality,” rather than “Listening to Actuality.” The German Wirklichkeit here has a distinctly ontological meaning: reality as it exists independently of our thinking and conceptual constructions.
The expression Angleichung unseres Denkens an das, was ist is particularly important for a Thomistic reading. It evokes the classical definition of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei — the conformity or adequation of the intellect to reality.
This makes the article especially relevant to the distinction between the autonomy of the knowing subject and the receptive character of intellectual knowledge in Aquinas.
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