August 21, 2024

I hope you do not mind an aporetic reflection from your president. I have long been intrigued by a paradox at the heart of our work as scholars and educators: we can only really grasp truths universally, but the things we hope to understand are each individuals. Universals do not exist as standalone beings, only individuals actually exist. To discover, to know, to grasp an individual requires transforming it through the attention given to it—in our case through long study, experimentation, and dialectical inquiry—into a mode made fit for our minds: we universalize individuals in order to apprehend them. But the individual beings, the things we seek to know, really only exist as individuals. Can we really know individuals? If only individuals exist, can we really know any thing? 

Should you be alarmed that I am soon to conclude that knowing is impossible and therefore we ought to embrace one of the many versions of relativism, let me assure you that is not where I am leading you. Rather, I think there is genuine wisdom in recognizing some of the limitations, born from the very nature of our minds encountering things in the world, of what we mean when we do in fact know some things. One fruit of this wisdom is the recognition of more to learn about the things we do know, another is an appreciation of the things themselves in their unknowable glory. 

In one of his many, brief, and profound books,¹ Josef Pieper makes much of something Aquinas observes in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aquinas remarks: “The reason, however, why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvelous.”² In the manner meant by Aquinas and Pieper, everyone in this room could be a poet, or a philosopher, or both. These names are not used to refer to academic disciplines, but rather the fundamental attitude of those dedicated to wrestling with things themselves theoretically and creatively in a manner that transcends everyday experience. What motivates us is the wonder of what we study and create. We marvel at this world, or some features of it, and then we each cultivate a disciplinary approach to satisfying our hunger to know and to participate in the marvels that surround us. 

So too our students are propelled by their regard for the marvelous. In their earliest years with us, we lead them through the collective wisdom of our tradition, the tried and true modes of knowing that comprise the liberal arts core we provide them. Then, when older, we lead them to adopt a particular way of regarding the whole of reality, to seek wisdom as economists, or historians, or mathematicians. The disciplines are necessarily partial in what they encompass, but also necessary for making progress. The good thing about the commonality of our cores on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, is that all our students are well apprised of the fact that there are multiple disciplined vantage points from which to view the whole. The mathematician knows enough history to know that the historian has both advantages and disadvantages with respect to the mathematician’s disciplined approach to acquiring knowledge, and vice versa. 

So, we are poets or philosophers insofar as we are attuned to the marvelous. What makes things marvelous? In general, I would say it is both what they are and what they point to. Things really are marvelous. Things, like veiny leaves in spring and wiggling worms in the wet soil, and also things like a corporation that harnesses creativity to produce a new product line. Things are marvelous, even if they go unnoticed. It is not true that marveling is in the eye of the beholder, unless one means by that phrase merely that the marveling act requires a marveler. The reason each of us has his or her own particular objects about which we especially marvel is not because we are responsible for inserting the marvelous into the world, as though we chose what to think about and then decided that just those things would attract our attention. Rather, our inner receptivity to what awaits discovery varies and the circumstances of our lives vary, and so some things arrest our attention and other things arrest our colleague’s attention. We miss much of what is marvelous. But we should count ourselves fortunate for having learned to marvel well at whatever marvelous things have in fact introduced themselves to us. 

Things are marvelous in what they are. Their particular shape and order, their actions, their complexity, their color. In short, things are marvelous in their very being; which is to say, in their distinct individuality. But they are also marvelous in what they point to. They point to what they are like, and what they are unlike. They also point to what is absent, like the causal flow of events that led to their individual existence, leading all the way back to God as first cause. But God is also pointed to in a more immediate fashion—that is to say, a fashion in which the individual being itself provides us a human’s-eye glimpse of God, and not just one step in a chain of causal regression that leads back to the first cause—with respect to the existence of things themselves. For, simply be-ing, that is existing as the individual being a thing is, is to be be participating in the deep being, the act of existence subsisting itself, as Aquinas calls God in On Being and Essence. It is God’s act of existence that grounds the existence of each individual being, not in the way one action produces another, but actively and continuously. Beings are by way of participating in God’s being; and, not vice versa. Marvelous individual beings are signs, then, of deeper things; the deepest thing, in fact. Seeing beings in their ontologically thick vertically connected dimension requires something like an existential imagination, a mode of seeing that is receptive to the existential depths of each being.³ 

Perhaps I have moved from one form of obscurity to another in laying this all out, having moved from an epistemological paradox to existential Thomism; I certainly hope not. The world abounds in marvelous individual beings, and we have the extraordinary privilege of being able to commit the bulk of our time and attention to understanding them. What a gift this is, both for us, and for the students whose desire to know we are charged with directing. 

But, of course, dangers abound in our research and in our teaching. Not dangers intrinsic to the pursuit of knowledge of the wondrous things we study from within our particular disciplines, but dangers arising from how we might measure achievement in our pursuit of knowledge. The French phenomenologist Michel Henry has much to teach us about those. Henry contends in his bracing work, Barbarism, that we intellectuals have come to treasure the theoretical over the actual, that we have tended more and more to prize empirically measurable results as though they are exhaustive accounts of things themselves. This has led us to assert, for instance, that the leaves of Southern Oaks are not green since colors themselves are not real properties, or that dogs are not more than their collection of subatomic particles. We assert such claims, though we can hardly act in the world as though we really believe them. We thus become disconnected from, as he calls it, the life of things, and indeed from our own lives. Though this might appear to be a problem arising from an overemphasis on a scientific disciplinary perspective, Henry is careful to explain that that would be a mistake. The sciences qua sciences are not in the least way the problem here, but rather an unscientific, an unphilosophic, and an unpoetical obeisance to a technological and scientistic ideology. Sculptors and theologians are as much to blame as scientists. The problem for us who have dedicated ourselves poetically and philosophically to a life in pursuit of wisdom is the tendency we can have to mistake our work for one of intellectual conquest. Even the best of us can feel the tug toward a sort of acquisitiveness, amassing our hard-won intellectual achievements and falling into the Cartesian trap of thinking ourselves the masters and possessors of what we study. 

Henry goes a step further to argue that this ideological fantasy to regard the theoretical, the transferrable, the digitizable, as the real has undermined culture. The result is a rampant barbarism, and thus the title of his book. For those interested in Henry’s analysis, you may find his concluding chapter on the destruction of the university particularly pertinent to our times and concerns. 

C.S. Lewis in his Abolition of Man, the book selected for our faculty discussion this year, anticipates this same problem. Lewis’s point of departure is different than Henry’s, for Lewis is particularly concerned with the manner in which we have engaged in a now century-long effort to push a fallacious fact/value distinction to the point of eviscerating the human heart. We have been endeavoring in the name of academic achievement to step out of what he calls the Tao, “Stepping outside of the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”⁴ But, like Henry, Lewis is careful not to see in the efforts to abolish man a problem with the sciences or scientists, but rather with a narrow minded view of the supposed march of human progress: “To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to ‘bodysnatchers’ is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.”⁵ 

This quotation from Lewis brings us back to where I began: the way we know things relies upon universals, from which we build concepts of the things we study. Those concepts can be compared to other concepts, they are often measurable, and readily transportable through digital media such as emails, peer-reviewed articles, and podcasts. But, our ideas of things are not the things themselves. It is knowing the things themselves that we long for, but we can all fall into the temptation of thinking we have them in all their marvelous glory when we can conceptualize them. But, as soon as we conceptualize them, they no longer remain what they in fact are. Abstracted universals, though derivable from the individual things, are not the individual things; much less so are the concepts we derive from abstracted individuals. 

Aquinas, for all his admiration of the human power to know, is exquisitely attentive to this chasm between our knowledge of things and the things themselves. He argues in the Summa theologiae, I. 86,1, that we cannot know individual beings, at least insofar as they are individuals, and at least not directly. We can have an indirect knowledge of individuals, since our senses perceive them, and our imaginations image them, but what we harvest from them are universals, and it is only universals that we know directly. But, universals do not exist as standalone beings, they are rather actualized potencies of a thing’s graspable meaning. The world is a world of gloriously existing individuals, marvelous beings whose glory we can glimpse but whose actuality we cannot intellectually fully measure. We can indeed know things through the universals we abstract from them, and we can refine the conceptions we build from those universals, but neither those conceptions nor the universals underlying them are the actual individual things themselves. 

This seems to me hardly an occasion for intellectual despair. News flash: we are not God. Our mode of knowing by abstracting universals from the objects of our sense experience is made fit for our human estate. But, I think we are in fact better researchers, better artists, and better educators when we mind the gap between our ideas of things and those things themselves. It is those things themselves that make this an enchanted world, one that provokes our wonder in response to their marvelous way of being. 

So, let’s allow ourselves to be surprised this year by those things we spend the most time with—our research projects, our creative works of artistry, and our students. I think we make a mistake when we attempt to recover the sense of wonder we once had about what we encountered in the discipline we each respectively made our own; that is, I am not encouraging an exercise in nostalgia. Rather, we should allow ourselves to be attentive to the marvelous in the things to which we have already dedicated so much study and creative energy. This might require reminding ourselves of the gap between our knowledge of those things and the things themselves; there is so much more to those things than what we know of them. Our students, too, may need similar reminders as they begin to taste the power of the knowledge they do acquire. And, above all, let’s allow ourselves to be awestruck by our students, those marvelous budding philosophers and poets signifying in a most poignant way the God in which their being participates.

Sincerely,

Jonathan J. Sanford, Ph.D.
President
Professor of Philosophy

[1] Josef Pieper. The Philosophical Act, translated by Alexander Dru (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2009).
[2] Aquinas. Commentary on the Metaphysics, I, 3.
[3] I mean “existential imagination” in a sense similar to what David Brown calls a “sacramental imagination.” See David Brown. God and Enchantment of Place, (Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Brown’s “A Sacramental World: Why it Matters,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, edited by Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford University Press, 2015): 603-615.
[4] C.S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man, (New York, NY: HarporCollins Publishers, 2001): 64.
[5] Ibid., 70-71.