So this was my culminating assignment for my school's philosophy class. I'm sharing it here because it summarizes a lot of my views on the history of philosophy. It is somewhat rough, and I hope in the future to do a series clarifying this piece a little.
In his book, The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes in the form of a story his idea of eternal return, the idea in biblical terms that there is nothing new under the sun that all things in this universe will be repeated endlessly. He does not advocate for this idea as literal truth, but instead proposes it as a thought experiment. If this waking life is all that there is and what is, gets repeated infinitely; how would that influence our decisions on a daily level? I propose that Nietchze is both right in this idea and at the same time wrong. Patterns do repeat in history, but the universe is not recycling the exact same events over and over again. The primary pattern is a struggle between beginning with the idea of ultimate meaning (universal) and the idea of beginning with particulars, and then trying to find ultimate meaning from there. In this lecture, I will endeavor to explain a Christian philosophical interpretation of history. I will start this lecture by explaining the whole universal/particular pattern in history. Next, I will explain how to apply these ideas to actual history. Finally, I will explain the importance of these ideas.
The primary idea of the struggle between a transcendent universal, and individual particulars, was articulated most clearly in Francis Schaeffer's book, How Should We Then Live. He says that if one begins with man and the things of this world; the problem lies in how to create an ultimate meaning for each individual thing. Without this ultimate meaning, which Schaeffer refers to as a universal, and beginning only from individual acts: “what is the use of living and what will be the basis for morals, values, and law” (Schaeffer 55). So in this framework we have two distinct ideas, which I will call the thesis and the antithesis for the sake of convenience. The thesis is the universal, that God is and he created. The antithesis is the particular, that Man is, he is alone and the center of the universe. The entire history of philosophy is a struggle, a dialectic to use Hegel’s term, between the contradictory tension inherent in these two ideas.
Now that we have explained the two conflicting interpretations of the world that have been argued back and forth in every age of history, let's start applying these ideas to actual history. God is, and he created, that is the thesis we established in the last paragraph. Now, when mankind was seduced by the serpent, the serpent himself provided our antithesis. “Ye shall be as gods'' (Genesis 3:4) This one statement sums up the antithesis and forms the entire basis of humanism. Basically, man is a god and there is no need for a creator. Fast-forward to the Greek empire, which was where philosophy became a distinct discipline. According to Sproul the first philosophers like Thales of Miletus were concerned with finding the Arche, or ruling substance, the thing that spun this wide world into being. They wrestled through numerous potential arche or universals, discarding all of them. Finally, it was Aristotle who hit on the idea of an unmoved mover, a “God” of sorts which set the universe in motion. Now after Aristotle’s organization of logic, and Socrates’s struggle with the Sophist’s, the biggest event in world history was the life of Christ and the rise of the church sometime in the waning days of the Roman Empire. Christianity was a much-needed shot in the arm for philosophy and the arts. For the first half of the Christian era til about the 1380s, the church was the primary center of learning. In the late thirteen hundreds, though, men of learning began to discover the ideas of the ancient Greeks. This rebirth brought back philosophies from the Greek time; like humanism and Materialism and Skepticism. The history of the world, from the Renaissance to the enlightenment era, is marked by this struggle between the church and the humanists. Again we see the struggle between the thesis of God as the universal essence, and the antithesis man as the universal essence. This is when by and large philosophy began to fall away from Christianity. Philosophers like Descartes and Locke would give lip service to the idea of God, but soon the idea of God was either considered empirically necessary but unprovable, or completely unnecessary according to later humanists. The two philosophers who best present the dilemma of the post renaissance era are Immanuel Kant and Soren Kieergard. Kant’s entire philosophy is trying and failing to reconcile the particulars of the material world with the concepts of value and transcendent meaning. This is because, like Socrates saw back in the ancient days; there must be a universal thing that transcends all other particulars so that there can be value and meaning. Kierkegaard on the other hand embraced the dichotomy Kant struggled with putting all universal meaning into a separate realm that could only be accessed through a “leap of faith” After Kant and Kierkegaard, modern philosophy gets even more antithetical to the point where it becomes the thesis, that all of modern civilization is based on. To the modern world, God is dead, there is no truth, and all morality is subjective.
So now that the struggle has resulted in a godless world where philosophy has become relative and meaningless, where do we go from here? Well according to Hegel the natural progression from the struggle between a thesis and an antithesis is that eventually there will be a synthesis, a merging of the two ideas, rescuing what is true in both. In this the truth from the Greek ideal is that there needs to be a ruling essence, a universal to give meaning to the particular things in this universe. In essence, Christianity offers the answer to the question that has been recurring since the time of the Greeks. Who or what transcends and rules this universe? It is important that Christians break the down spiraling trend in philosophy. That is the reason why it is so important to study philosophy holistically in order to see the general trends that have led the modern world into the sorry state it's in. Because if we as Christians know the trends in philosophy, we can break them. The modern world will eventually grow weary of its meaningless worldview and come seeking life. “ But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in.” (Orwell) That is where Christians ought to come in. The ideology of the world can be broken and the proper order of things can be restored if Christians are courageous in their resistance, unbending in their philosophical stance, and willing to share their views and provide the alternative that this world is so desperately in need of. The modern world is looking for an answer. The question is do we have one?
So that's one of my period pieces for you from before I started this journey. Part of my mission with using words and thoughts to bring about the Kingdom of God is to provide in my own small way the alternative junior me says Christians need to provide.
In closing: "The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world. Take care and do not forget, ideas are also weapons." ~ Subcomandante Marcos
Have a nice weekend, all.
Works Cited
Schaffer, Francis. How Should We Then Live? Crossway, 2005. Print.
Orwell, George. Inside the Whale and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with Secker & Warburg, 1984. Print.
Sproul, R. C. The Consequences Of Ideas. Illinois: Crossway, 2000. Print
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. The Gay Science; with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York :Vintage Books, 1974.