Philosophy
as a deep kind of thinking, as specialised logical analysis, as an exercise in
wonder, as critical, as a search for wisdom and as rational: what should we
make of all these ideas? A good place to
start is the idea of being critical.
Since we will not be able to agree with all the above ideas and the ways
in which they have been thought through, we will need to be critical
ourselves. Being critical has often been
equated with incessant questioning, with a sceptical attitude that refuses to
be duped. This gives us the image of
philosophy as a kind of thinking that reflects more deeply than usual by
uncovering assumptions and presuppositions that we often take for granted, and
have perhaps never given much attention to.
Or perhaps being critical involves questioning convictions that are held
on to with great passion and are rarely subjected to rational scrutiny. While these certainly have a place, at its
root ‘to be critical’ means to hold something up for judgement according to
some criteria. It is not a mark of being
critical just to question everything.
Instead, we need a firm hold of the basis or principle on which we build
our judgement. This “firm hold” is nothing
other than an element of faith that is inseparable from our thinking; we must
trust and be committed to the criteria we use to make our judgements. So we can see that simply playing off
philosophy as “critical” against religion as “dogmatic,” with the accompanying
claim that philosophy is based on “reason” whereas religion is based on “faith”
is actually a lazy way of understanding things that needs to be critically
questioned!
As
we saw earlier, we learn from God’s word that we are creatures made in the
“image of God”, that we find our home in God’s good creation and that we are
given the task to rule over, to care for, to cultivate and develop creation
(See §2-5). Our definition of philosophy
must therefore reflect this. So as a
first approximation we will take philosophy to be one way in which we can
bear God’s image in caring for and developing creation. Since this is a definition that can serve for
all human activities it may seem of little consequence. However, it will help
us sift through the ideas we enumerated earlier and give us criteria to make
(admittedly fallible) judgements about their worth. In particular we will stress that philosophy
is a human activity that fits into created reality and cannot be understood
apart from the reality in which it is embedded.
As Dooyeweerd notes in the above quote, reality is a coherence of many
interrelated meanings (see also §7) and philosophy is itself part of this
coherence and not something above it. As
a human activity it has no special relationship to God, no privileged role in
guiding life or setting out what is ultimately true. When people divorce themselves from their
true identity as image bearers of God and fail to recognise that meaning and
purpose come from God, the source of true wisdom (Proverbs 1:7, Colossians
2:2-3), that all creation belongs to God and is made by, through and for him
(Romans 11:33-36), then philosophy can become a vehicle of false religious hope
and faith. On these grounds we are
forced to question one of the most important and long-standing convictions to
be found in the history of philosophy.
Again and again we will confront the high esteem given to Reason by many
philosophers: that Reason is the highest
and best in us, that Reason is the key to reality, that Reason is that which is
unchanging and unconditionally reliable, that it is what is most godlike in us,
that it is independent of particular cultures and faith commitments. This veneration of Reason is central to much
western philosophy, which has taken itself to be the exercise of Reason par
excellence. To ask critically whether
assigning such a status to Reason properly helps us understand what is going on
in philosophical thought is not an easy task and we shall have to keep returning
to it.
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