PHILOSOPHY, SYSTEM, WONDER:
A RESPONSE TO RENÉ ARCILLA

Alven M. Neiman
University of Notre Dame

The reason, however, why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvelous.

Thomas Aquinas

It is difficult to tell a shortsighted man how to get somewhere. Because you cannot say to him: “Look at that church tower ten miles away and go in that direction.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The questions that Professor Arcilla raises in his paper are crucial ones for all human beings, not merely for philosophers. In his remarks René not only recommends but also exemplifies an ancient and venerable tradition of philosophizing. Like him, I have the highest regard for this tradition; like him, I feel that nothing is more necessary in these sad times than a recovery of this philosophy in both our private and public lives. This agreement vastly outweighs any differences we might have concerning its nature and application. In the context of our current need, these disagreements are as trivial as perhaps any disagreement can possibly be.

What is René’s paper about? What tradition of philosophy does he recommend to us? Why does he recommend it? What is this talk of a biology teacher about? Because much of what is said in René’s paper is conveyed through indirect means, I think it is best for me, as a respondent, to return to his earlier work in order to supplement his remarks for today. We can first of all, then, look to such work for a clearer, more direct defense of a philosophy, espoused by René, that goes beyond systems or tools to inform our lives with meaning. Once I’ve paraphrased that earlier account, and commented upon it, I believe we will be in a better position to understand and evaluate the remarks that René has today put before us.

So, once again, what is this tradition of philosophy about? From here on I will refer to it as PW or philosophy as wonder. In a paper entitled “Metaphysics in Education after Hutchins and Dewey” René recommends PW as a middle ground between Robert Hutchins’s support of, and John Dewey’s rejection of, a substantive metaphysics in education.¹ In that paper, René argues that they can be reconciled if we distinguish between two types of metaphysical philosophy. The first, espoused by Hutchins and rejected by Dewey, I will call PS, or philosophy as system. In PS, metaphysics becomes a fixed dogmatic system of beliefs, a catechism aimed to explain, and quiet all large-scale debate about the hidden nature, the ultimate explanation, of things. René’s examples of PS include “Christianity’s Realm of God’s Will,” “The Romantic Realm of Nature,” and Nietzsche’s “Realm of the Will to Power.”² With Dewey, René argues that any such system, including Hutchins’s Aristotelian one, taken as separate from, more basic than, any regulation by experience is undemocratic. Any attempt to utilize PS within education must therefore be rejected because it would foster the social and cultural divisions Dewey finds in the classical culture of Plato’s day, as well as in the Middle Ages.

It is at this point, however, that René parts company from Dewey. In defense of Hutchins, he argues that there is, besides PS, another metaphysical philosophy available, our PW, that is, in fact, necessary for any truly liberal education. Too often PS is thought to exhaust metaphysics; in this context education often is reduced to mere training. What, according to René, is this PW and what does it add to educational thought and practice? Why is it so important?

As I understand it, PW is not so much a set of answers as a manner of questioning; it is a sensibility fostered by writers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Thomist Joseph Pieper. (A similar sensibility is found in great poets such as Rilke, Eliot and Wordsworth.) For such people a rejection of PS must not be taken as a rejection of the natural human disposition to wonder: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “What is the meaning of it all?” and so on. PW does not aim to definitively answer these questions, for such an attempt, an attempt at a contemporary “physics of the abstract,” will simply shut our eyes to “the miracle and mystery of existence.”³ Rather, PW encourages us “to dwell in and on these fundamental questions,” to see all our sciences, systems, discursive truths as a limited, partial whole.⁴ With Wittgenstein we might then come to see this something as more important than any other sight, as worthy of devout silence rather than reductive systemization.

Before returning to René’s biology teacher, I want to say a bit more about PW and its contemporary practitioners. In recent “wonderers,” the espousal of PW often comes attached to a substantive critique of culture. In such critiques, our present age is seen as one in which the ability to wonder has been severely limited. Science and technology are often seen as primary causes of this loss. As Pieper puts it, the daimonic philosophy of total work has triumphed over the world of the Gods.⁵ Scientific explanation and inquiry is taken as a replacement for real understanding. So now it is all too often believed that our wonder at “the starry heavens above” ought to be satisfied by an astronomy text. Our “understanding” grows as our world grows more and more mundane.⁶

I read René’s earlier paper, as well as his current one, as part of his ongoing attempt to find a place for PW within democratic, American education. Admirably enough, René wants to rid us of the evil of metaphysics without losing its good. He wants to convince us that even though pragmatism is incompatible with PS, it can thrive in conjunction with PW. I applaud René’s ongoing attempt to forge a pragmatic educational theory that treats our metaphysical urge not as a superstitious habit, but as a sensibility that must, if we wish to live truly human lives, be fostered and disciplined.⁷

In the paper before us, René’s specific aim seems to be a limited one. Rather than talk of PW in relationship to human existence per se, René focuses here on the life and work of one mundane soul, a biology teacher, call him Mr. B. In this paper René wonders whether Mr. B might have any need for PW. His thesis is that PW can be of use to Mr. B as he struggles to deal with his hypothetical misanthrope, Alceste. Does René make his case? Could he convince Mr. B? More importantly, why is he so interested in Mr. B?

René’s use of Cavell in this context is fascinating. On the Cavellian account the problem of the misanthrope is essential to adolescence, part and parcel of the difficulty any bright and sensitive youth might have in deciding between the hypocritical world of the adult, and the fraudulence of withdrawal back into childhood. The world of the adult is, for Cavell, (as well as for Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Pieper) hypocritical, in part, because it so often requires of us what Sartre called “bad faith.” It makes use of elements of PS to keep us comfortably enmeshed within the world of work, free of the tremendous yet fearful realities of Wittgenstein’s realm of the mystical. Yet any intelligent young misanthrope will see that complete withdrawal from this world is of no use; in fact, it is impossible. We are (to paraphrase Aristotle) human beings, not beasts or men. Complete purity is an impossibility.

Is Cavell’s description in tune with our own experiences of the misanthrope? I am willing to admit that the account seems, at least, to have a universal application. After all, we were all adolescents once and all of our children will some day be adolescents. Yet, I can imagine forms of life in which PW is more at home in the adult world of work than it is in ours. The greater the difficulties of our adolescent misanthrope become, the greater the condemnation of our culture ought to be. Might it not be the case that the misanthrope only becomes as violent and self-destructive as ours has in a sick world, a world in which the domain of total work disguises and distorts our need to wonder? In a world like ours, a world of total work, perhaps the only possible health for our misanthrope is pain and sickness.

Will René’s PW help Alceste? If Mr. B engages Alceste by way of PW, will Alceste return to learning? If so, how can we teachers of future Mr. Bs convince them of the positive value of PW? Is it proper, or even possible, to present PW to our Mr. Bs, or to anyone, as a means to an end, a philosophy useful for the working world of teaching? If, as I believe, PW is possible only by the grace of God and operable only as an end and not a means, how can it be “used” in the way René thinks it might? Another question, perhaps a provocative one: how can philosophers, how can we, help our future Mr. Bs when our own domain as “professionals” has itself succumbed to the imperative of total work? How in the brave new world of the contemporary corporate university, dedicated to the production of knowledge and serviceable students, can our own teaching avoid its self destruction?

Earlier, I insinuated that René’s paper communicates its most important message by way of indirection. On the direct level, it asks whether Mr. B can be convinced of the value of philosophy for his educational practice. But the real question, a question that I believe René is here most concerned with, is aimed at us. Can we, as professional philosophers, recover and reattach ourselves to PW? Can we recover the sensibility of impractical wonder in a university environment almost entirely swallowed up by daimon work? Is pragmatism compatible with this wondering mode? Or is it simply another form of reductive scientism?

These questions are crucial ones. René is to be applauded for suggesting them to us. But we can only deal realistically with them once we admit the limitation of his PW/PS dichotomy. PW, taken as a mode of inquiry, as a metaphysical exercise, requires that some parameters be set out first and taken for granted. It is wrong, then, to see PW as a way of keeping us completely free of the taint of metaphysical system. We must, if we are to wonder, make some choices, some leaps of faith. Since we cannot avoid such leaps, we need to pay special attention to our blind spots in leaping.

Our rejection of Sellars’ myth of the given seems, in today’s professional climate, to go only so far. We are prone to look at myths like those found in Scripture as crude nonsense, yet we tend to treat equally crude Nietzschean myths of power and oppression as gospel truth. Depending on its setting, PW’s wonder can be read, and exercised, in more than one way. Philosophy as practiced by Socrates, by Plato and Aristotle, by Aquinas, is most certainly a religious sentiment. Moreover, if Pieper is right, it requires embodiment in a cult, an institutionalized celebration. In this tradition, to wonder is most basically to wonder at what is taken as created. It is to treat creation as a gift.⁸ Outside of this context, philosophical wonder all too easily turns into the dread of a Sartre, the madness of a Nietzsche, the grotesque political vision of a Heidegger. It may be twisted, as it has been by many post-Cartesian philosophers, into a hideous system of reductive doubt that leads to the worship of work.

Is Pieper’s wonder, a wonder at creation taken precisely as a gift, even possible for 20th century intellectuals like us? Can it find a place within the minds of those who, like René, are attracted to pragmatism, democracy, modernity suitably modified? In a fallen world like ours, can the idea of a creator again be taken seriously? In days as strange as ours, who knows what might happen if we take a deep breath, open our eyes, and really look?

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1. René Arcilla, “Metaphysics in Education after Hutchins and Dewey, ”Teachers College Record 93, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 281-89.

2. Arcilla, “Metaphysics in Education after Hutchins and Dewey,” 281.

3. The reference to “physics of the abstract” is taken from Wittgenstein’s categorization of C.D. Broad’s metaphysics of mind and function, of course, as repudiation. I fear I have, however, lost the reference. For Arcilla’s reference to “the miracle and mystery of existence” I refer to an earlier draft of the paper I mentioned in footnote 1, read in a symposium at our 1990 meeting of The Philosophy of Education Society, entitled “The Metaphysical Foundations of Desire.”

4. Arcilla uses the dwelling metaphor in “Metaphysics,” 288.

5. This account of Pieper’s work is taken from his classic Leisure, the Basis of Culture, translated by Alexander Dru (New York: Mentor Books, 1963). My first prefatory remark is taken from Pieper’s text, 89.

6. This sort of remark about science and wonder makes up an important series of remarks of Wittgenstein published posthumously on Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). My second prefatory note is taken from this text, 3e.

7. The idea of metaphysics as spiritual discipline or exercise is crucial to the work of my teacher David B. Burrell. See, for example, his Exercises in Religious Understanding (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975). For similar remarks (by a philosopher who I believe has influenced René) see Pierre Hadot’s Plotinus on the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

8. For Pieper’s discussion of the close ties between what I referred to as PW and religious cult or celebration, see Leisure, the Basis of Culture, 112-126.