Chesterton and Philosophy:
I see there's sort of a debate about the quality of Chesterton's philosophy. Mr. Austin Bramwell writes the case against:
In Orthodoxy, Chesterton’s chief tactical point was that the main Christian dogmas were more liberal in their implications than the self-consciously liberal dogmas by which they were assualted. . . . This was not put very well. But it was connected with a harder idea — that of Christianity as the “slash of the sword” which would destroy natural religion, the Arnoldian compromise, and the Inner Light, and establish that the world was a good deal less “regular” than it looked. It was to a world where “life” was “unreasonable” and superstition abounding, and where “earthquakes of emotion” could be unloosed about a word that Christian vigilance was presented as the response.
In other words, Chesterton is an irrationalist. His seeks to paralyze the intellect in order to make room for awe. Admittedly, there can be no religion without awe (at least I think that’s right). Still, if Cowling is right, Chesterton opposes the traditions of natural theology and faith seeking understanding. His Christianity tries to keep reason permanently cabined.
Mr. Ross Douthout replies
in favor that Chesterton was more of a newspaperman than a philosopher.
Part of what makes Chesterton appealing to so many readers is also what makes him frustrating if you approach his writing looking for straightforward, syllogistic argument — namely, that his appeals on behalf of Christianity (or any other cause) tend to rove from history to philosophy to intuition to revelation to politics to aesthetics and then back to history again, with all different sorts of arguments crowding in together, and no necessary A=B=C thread to follow all the way through. He is not an “irrationalist,” as Bramwell suggests, but he isn’t Plato either. But then again neither are most people: They justify what they believe, whether it’s about God or political order or love or any other aspect of human affairs, based on a mishmash of different facts, ideas, experiences, premises, impulses, and so forth. And Chesterton succeeds as a polemicist, if not as a philosopher....
That's giving away too much to Mr. Bramwell's position. Chesterton is a better philosopher than either credit.
First, let's start with the suggestion that Chesterton "isn't Plato" because of his mode of argument, which mixes mythology and intuition, politics and aesthetics. So does Plato! In the
Republic, he starts off the clash with a man who comes barreling in 'like a
wild beast,' and raises a philosophical challenge using language appropriate for a duel. Plato's
Socrates undertakes an argument that begins with a symbolic story about a
magic ring that gives a wicked man the power to seem good, and a good man who is fated to be both imprisoned and scorned. How can we say that the virtuous man is really the happy one?
To answer this challenge, he then departs into an analogy -- the description of the ideal state. It's a double analogy, though, because the state is like a person and a person is like a state: they are divided into reason, spiritedness, and the more base drives. In the state, those most suited to reason should rule the spirited (who perform as the physical defenders of the state and its laws) and those less able to control base drives (who do labor). In the person, the reason is meant to rule over the spirit, which gives you strength to flourish; and over the base drives, which must be satisfied in a way that accords with reason.
(A point occasionally missed is that this analogy is to be operating at both levels, all the time. Thus, when Plato writes that soldiers should only be called courageous for obeying the orders of the rulers, it isn't the case that soldiers should have no initiative but should blindly obey orders. It is the case that, when they do act with initiative, they should be obeying the 'ruling' part of their soul, reason, which should guide their spirited actions. This is the difference between courage and rashness.)
Does this analogy actually solve the puzzle of the magic ring? Not that I can tell; but it certainly does give rise to a great deal of thought and exploration of ideas. There is no A=B=C at work, though. Plato's assertion of the primacy of reason doesn't mean either that he sets aside the aesthetic or the political, nor even that his ruling reason requires him to answer the questions he raises, or make sure his analogies are sufficient for a solution.
Likewise, in the
Timeaus, Plato departs into a mythological analogy (or possibly into actual mythology) when trying to explain the nature and origin of time. He explains about a minor godlike figure crafting chaos in the image of eternity. Later Neoplatonists refining this image make a fairly baroque concoction:
Plotinus, for example, wants us to hold in mind both a One, which exists wholly without dimensions, and Eternity, which does likewise, and where Intellect lives; and a World Soul, which invents the world and time; and of which our souls are part. So, the unextended things end up being present in all extended things, but somehow without losing their unextended nature: or else all extended things are present inside the unextended things, making them an illusion. It is sometimes suggested that the extended things emanate from the unextended ones, but that is not the answer, because he also says that the World Soul (which is unextended) is in every part of the world just as a man's soul is in every part of his body; or possibly the body is inside the soul, as he suggests elsewhere.
Chesterton, who is writing about ineffable things as well, does a better job of keeping them imaginable. Plotinus is asking us to believe that the true nature of the universe is something like a round square. Working through even how to construct his model is a mind expanding exercise partially because he is asking you to think what is rationally impossible (an unextended thing that is in every part of an extended thing without becoming multiple).
The point is that our reasoning and intuitions about the world are insufficient to the truth as he sees it: but insofar as this qualifies as grand philosophy, as it surely must, the proper complaint against Chesterton would be that his ineffability is
too easy to imagine. It is that it is too reasonable, not that it is irrational.
Now, post-Enlightenment, we're supposed to believe that reason is indeed capable of being -- as Mr. Bramwell puts it -- being 'uncabined.' Yet Kant, that prince of Rationality, did not think so; he wrote the
Critique of Pure Reason to lay out what some of the limits of human reason were. He ran into other, practical limits elsewhere: after his
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which asserted that rational nature would reliably produce morality, in the actual
Metaphysics of Morals he ends up asserting that
a number of emotions -- including what Mr. Bramwell is describing as awe, which is also variously translated as "reverence" or "respect" -- are necessary to human morality. Even if reason can tell us what the right thing to do is, we have to have a reason to
ask what the right thing to do is. Rational nature alone does not provide it: for example, if you can imagine a tiger who was rational, his reason might well not suggest the Golden Rule or a Categorical Imperative.
Kant's second Critique ends on a similar note, which finds what he had doubted could be found in earlier writings: a reliable road to God. This he does not find in reason alone, though, but in reason as applied to the awe he feels at 'the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.'
Ultimately, very few philosophers in history have achieved the A=B=C precision of modern analytic philosophy. More importantly, none of the great ones have achieved it, and many appear not to have striven for it.
Kierkegaard did not want it; St. Thomas Aquinas, for all of his love of reason, was
willing to stand on ineffability when it came to the Trinity.
A second basic point: Chesterton was writing at the end of the Romantic period. As we were
discussing a few days ago, the Romantic period responded to the Enlightenment by suggesting that there had been too much focus on rationality. Human nature is such that romance is necessary as well. Chesterton's two-phase approach -- liberality, but also the 'slash of the sword' -- is an attempt at dialectic synthesis, which is a highly philosophical thing to attempt.
It's also not clear to me that the Romantic thinkers were wrong. The Romantic period ended in World War I's killing fields: but not because it was disproven. In a sense, it was proven. People walked away from the Romantic period because it seemed to have given rise to fearful things: which is to say that they followed their hearts. Many of them followed their hearts right into Red Communism and the emotional intensity of fascism. When we see Wagner seized upon by the Nazis, we see the truth of Romanticism's critique of the Enlightenment -- but also Plato's remarks that the spirited nature should be guided by reason. The two must talk.
A philosophy that does not engage aesthetics, politics, and mythology is therefore incomplete in an especially dangerous way. Philosophy must engage these questions above all, insofar as it is philosophy in the service of humanity. Chesterton's ready ability to weave a binding strand between image and argument, aesthetic and ethic, is a strength. It doesn't abandon or 'cabin' reason. Rather, it is the kind of reason that knows how to approach the Beautiful as well as the True.
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