.

Anyone who scoffs at philosophy and thinks that it's a waste of time ought to read this excellent article.  Anyone who does read it and still thinks it's a waste of time is not intellectually honest, or, alternatively, is one who has fallen headlong into the unknowing pit of intellectual insanity which is well-described in the last third of this fine paper.

This below is a copy of the PDF file that you can download for free at THIS website.  The free file has nice photos of many of the men to whom it refers, mostly in the second half.  






1
Philosophy and its Effect on Society
By Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D.


Plato and Aristotle
In life, everything is interconn
ected in some fashion. Sometimes the
interconnections are obvious; sometimes they are obscure. Philosophy
suffers the burden of being one of the more esoteric of human disciplines,
at least as far as the typical man in the street is concerned,
and thus its
connections to everything else in the world are often more obscure. But
the connections between philosophy and everyday life are very d
irect.
Although philosophical ideas are the first in line of men’s ide
as, they
usually find their way into everyday life by being processed and displayed
in more ostensible forms, such as art, music, architecture, cinema,
literature, clichés or dialogues in bar rooms.
But as in every other discipline, there are only two kinds, Christian and
non-Christian. This lecture is going to show us the beliefs and
proposition
of non-Christian philosophy and its effect on everyday life. We
will show
the problems and futility of non-Christian philosophy and why Christian
philosophy is not only a better answer, it is the only answer for modern
man.
According to most modern philosophers, Plato is the beginning of all
philosophy. Among other things,
Platonism contains the philosophical
concept that the material world we experience on earth has, in
the
spiritual realm, an ideal image or abstraction of itself.
Picture yourself being bit by a mosquito. There is one thing important to
know about this mosquito, however. It is the last mosquito alive on planet

2
earth. Nevertheless, because of the pain, you decide to smack the
mosquito with your hand. Having been flattened like a pancake,
the
mosquito is virtually unrecognizable. But you need not lose hope that you
have eliminated the mosquito entirely from existence, because according
to Plato, in the spiritual realm there is an ideal image of a mosquito
preserved for eternity, and thus the universe shall never lose
the perfect
picture and essence of a mosquito.
Hence, in Platonic philosophy, it was the “ideal image” in the
spiritual
realm that gave everything of the material world its real meaning and
purpose. This ideal image would not be any one kind of mosquito, but a
kind of abstract composite of all mosquitoes. In modern language, the
millions of particular mosquitoes
would have their one universal
integration point in the ideal mosquito. According to Plato, we
know of
this ideal mosquito because we once existed there, but now we find
ourselves on planet Earth with thousands of different kinds of
material
mosquitoes.

This is where the philosophical phrase “a priori” originates, for we, says
Plato, had a “prior” life in another world. From the knowledge
we gained
in this “prior life,” we possess
universal eternal truths which
we obtained
from the ideal images – truths that will never change, whether
the are
stated here, on Mars, Alpha Centauri, or wherever; or whether t
hey are
stated in the past, in the present, or in the future. How does
a seven year
old know that 2 +2 not only equals four, but will always equal
four?
Because these are “a priori” eternal truths that can never change. The
search for the origin and nature of eternal truths is behind every
philosophy known to man. This has always been the most significant
philosophical question: “what do we know; and how do we know it
?”
Whereas Plato answered the question of the origin of eternal truths by
saying they came from “a priori” knowledge, Aristotle answered
the

12
The Christian answer is, yes, we can have a “final experience,”
but it is
with a personal God who communicates verifiable truth to us as
personal
beings, truth that can be discussed and debated, and held accountable
against all other systems of thought and practice.
Jean Paul Sartre
tried to answer Kierkegaard’s dilemma by calling the
area below the Line of No Return “absurd,” thereby compelling us to find
meaning in life by escaping through a mere act of the will, an
act that
would authenticate and give purpose to one’s existence. But since this act
was not tied to reason, rationality or morals, then in Sartre’s
philosophy,
if you are driving down the road and see an old lady in the pouring rain,
you can stop to pick her up or you can run her over. There is no difference
between the two, because it is only the act of the will that matters for
one’s self-authentication.

13
Martin Heidegger
tried to answer the dilemma not by an act of the will
but by creating a realization of Angst, a feeling of dread of the unknown.
This feeling of dread would give one significance to his existence. As one
commentator put it: “Angst is one of the primary instruments through
which the ontic character and context of everyday existence is
made
inescapably aware of, is rendered naked to, the pressures of the
ontological. And further, Angst is a mark of authenticity, of the
repudiation of the ‘theyness’.” 1
Each of these men (Jaspers, Sartre, Heidigger) take a leap into
the
irrational, hoping that they will find something meaningful above the Line
of No Return, but they have no basis from their own system to
substantiate the leap. Sartre, for example, had always chided his
colleague, Albert Camus, for not
being consistent to existential principles.
But one day, Sartre signed the Algerian Manifesto, declaring it
a “dirty
war.” Once he did this, his followers became quite disillusioned, not
because the Algerian war was a good war, but because Sartre made a
moral decision within his philosophical system that was amoral.
The reality is, of course, that man is made in the image of God, and
morality is built into his psyche. There is no way to escape it. He can try to
suppress it (as Romans 1:18 says), but it will always seep to the surface

1 Steiner, 1978.

14
because it cannot be extinguished. Man cannot escape the way his mind
works. The only way he can affirm something as true is on the basis of
knowing its opposite. If he says
he loves his wife, he doesn’t
do so without
knowing what it means to not love her. If he says a tree is beautiful, he
doesn’t do so without knowing what ugly is.
Bernard Berenson
(d. 1959) professor at Harvard, was the world’s
greatest expert on Renaissance art in his day. He was sought out for his
ability to date and price any Renaissance piece of art. He love
d the beauty
of Renaissance art, so much so that when he compared it to the
ugliness
of modern art, in his own words, modern art was “bestial.” Berenson was
also a Roman Catholic, at least by name. In one of his own ugly
moments,
he took a married woman, Mary Costelloe, away from her husband,
living
with her for years and then marrying her when her husband died
(since
as a Catholic, Mary could not divorce her husband). But when Berenson
married her, they forged an agreement that each would be allowed to
have extra-marital affairs, and they lived this way for 45 years. When
Berenson was admonished for this, he would simply say: “You are
forgetting the animal basis of our nature,” the same thing he said about
modern art. Obviously, Berenson could not live within his own system of
philosophy.

37
our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures.”7
But
immediately after Vatican II, the Barthian Catholic liberals ma
de it appear
that the phrase “for the sake of our salvation” meant that Scri
pture was
only error-free when it spoke about salvation, not history. Eve
n today, 40
years later, we see this unfortunate interpretation permeate th
e
intellectual climate. The working docuмent publicly approved by
the
Vatican Synod’s Secreteriat and
published as a supplement in
L'Osservatore Romano
, “Instrumentum Laboris,” contains a heresy in
section 15(c), where it proclaims that Scripture contains error
s on
matters that are not written "for the sake of our salvation." T
his
proposition, of course, is erroneous. Vatican II’s
Dei Verbum 11
had stated
quite clearly, as did the rest of Catholic tradition before it,
that “the books
of Scripture” were “without error,” for in being without error
they are
able to teach us all of God’s tru
ths “for the sake of our salva
tion.”
Be that as it may, if one says that the history is in error, ye
t the salvation
message is true, the theory immediately breaks down when histor
ical
facts are used in Scripture to substantiate the salvation messa
ge (
e.g
., the
Incarnation, Resurrection). In other words, one cannot deny the
history
and keep the salvation. He must accept both, or there will be n
o salvation.
Hence, most Protestant liberals concluded there was no real red
emption
offered in Scripture. They propo
sed that the apostles and other
s following
Jesus just made it appear as if Jesus came to save the world, a
nd
Christianity was thus born and grew on nothing more than a myth
.
Conversely, the Catholic liberals, tied to the dogma of the Cat
holic Church
and fearing excommunication for t
oo radical a view, weren’t so
free to
make such earth-shattering conclusions. So instead of outrightl
y rejecting
the history as the liberal Protestants did, the Catholic libera
ls would
merely raise doubt about the history in the form of interrogati
ves, a
methodology that was frequently used by one of the leading Cath
olic
7
Flannery edition.
38
liberals, Raymond Brown. For example, Brown says in his book
The Birth
of the Messiah
that after Vatican II, “A faithful Catholic would have to ask:
‘Should one rank the biological manner of Jesus conception as a
truth God
wanted put into the Sacred Writings for the sake of our salvati
on?’”
Brown, a Catholic priest, taught
at one of the most liberal Pro
testant
seminaries in the United States, Union Theological Seminary in
New York.
Union Theological led American schools in teaching the liberali
sm and
Neo-Orthodoxy originating from E
urope. In the end, of course, o
nce you
are selective about what is inerrant in Scripture, it becomes a
n arbitrary
system dependent on the whim of
the reader, and it falls by its
own
weight.
As for the Barthians, and those
Catholics who thought they coul
d live in a
dichotomy between Catholic dogma and the New Theology, once you
make the decision that Scripture contains historical mistakes,
then
everything is up for grabs. Suddenly, because the first eleven
chapters of
Genesis are understood as more myth and outmoded cultural expre
ssions
of the day than historical fact, this left room for people such
as Bultmann,
Barth, Kung, Rahner and de Chardin to reject or modify the stor
y of Adam
and Eve. But if you reject Adam and Eve, you reject Original si
n. If you
reject Original sin, you must claim that man is as he always wa
s. This is a
Hindu concept. So it is no surprise to see some Catholic theolo
gians forge
a synthesis between Hinduism and
Catholicism, such as Raymond
Panikkar, Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.C. and Anthony de Mello, S.J.
Prior to
this titanic shift, a traditional Roman Catholic, using the pre
-Hegelian
Thesis-Antithesis apologetic, would totally reject Hinduism, an
d hold that
its adherents were eternally damned unless they became saved. B
ut now
we have the Hegelian synthesis, a philosophy that has slowly bu
t surely
seeped down into the very heart of modern man’s psyche, to the
very
doorstep of his theological beliefs and affirmations. So you se
e how just
39
one philosophical concept can ha
ve such a penetrating effect on
the
masses.
As I noted previously, Aquinas, because of his belief in a supe
rnatural God
expressed in the Trinity, was able to keep a balance between un
iversals
and particulars, or between Grace and Nature. The Trinity gives
us the
balance between the two positions, for we have the One God but
we also
have the Three Persons. Problems crept in, however, when during
the
Renaissance, Catholic humanism (
e.g., Erasmus), the Reformation
, and the
Enlightenment, we see that Natur
e began to emasculate Grace.
By the time of
Rousseau
(d. 1778) the category of Grace had been totally
destroyed. It was replaced by Freedom, which then led to the Fr
ench
Revolution in 1789. The ideal was to be free of religious const
raints,
which usually happens when men forget they have a sin-tainted n
ature,
which in this case was replaced by Rousseau’s
tabula rasa
or blank slate.
40
The same thing happened in the 1960s counter-culture revolution
,
whether it was in religion or secular society. Liberal theology
had
weakened the concept of Original sin; psychology and psychoanal
ysis had
replaced religion as the state-o
f-the-art therapeutic device fo
r modern
man. This shift was based on the
idea that a sin-tainted nature
was not
the cause of man’s personal problems, rather it was Freud’s und
eveloped
superego that needed to learn to control the basal id, or throu
gh
B. F.
Skinner’s
behavioral psychology that modi
fied man’s behavior as if he
were a dog being trained. Skinner put his own two-year old daug
hter in
one of his “Skinner boxes,” forc
ing her to do certain behaviors
by a
reward and punishment system of candy and electrical shocks,
respectively.
But what happens in these skewed paradigms is that Nature, beca
use it
no longer has Grace to control it, becomes autonomous, and with
autonomy comes determinism, and with determinism man becomes a
machine, without any meaning or significance, something his ima
ge-of-
God psyche will not let him accept. In order to escape the inev
itable
insignificance of an autonomous Nature, Rousseau took a leap in
to
Freedom as the ideal, thus fomenting revolution because society
had
restrained man’s freedom. Rousseau could not live under the Lin
e of No
Return, for it made him into a robot. He sought an escape in re
volution,
hoping that it would somehow relieve the tension and the futili
ty. But
41
alas, like everyone else who tried to make the leap into the ir
rational,
there was nothing really there, and Rousseau would die in despa
ir.
Conclusion
:
There are only a few possible answers to the philosophical prob
lems we
have outlined. Man must answer three basic philosophical questi
ons if he
is to find any meaning to life.
First
, he must answer the origin of his personality, for no one has
shown
how personality can come from the impersonal.
Second
, man must answer the contrast between his nobility and his
cruelty. Man is noble because he does great things, but he is a
lso cruel
because he destroys both other men and the things he creates. W
hat is it
that that determines whether he helps the old lady across the s
treet or
runs her down with his car?
Third
, man must answer is his epistemology, how he knows what he
knows.
Concerning these three basic ques
tions, there are two classes o
f answers.
The
first class
is that there is no answer, an answer which many modern
people take, from the bumper sticker that says “Life is a bitch
, and then
you die” or “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins,” to Sartre’
s
“everything is absurd,” to John Cage’s
musique concrète
, to Aldous
Huxley’s leap into the irrational comfort of mind-altering drug
s. We, as
Catholics who are commanded to evangelize the world, must point
out to
these modern people that they simply cannot live in their syste
m, just as
John Cage found out that he could not eat mushrooms randomly, e
lse he
would die of poison. The fact is, the universe shouts with orde
r and
complexity. It works like a well-oiled clock. It is not a mass
of confusion.
42
Hence, man must conform to the universe. He must use logic and
order.
They are not absurd.
The
second class
of answers, of course, is that there is a genuine answer
that is logical, rational, complete and can be communicated. Of
this
second class, there are three possibilities.
The
first answer
is that everything came from nothing. This, of course, is
only a theoretical answer, because we know that something canno
t come
from nothing. Yet often when a s
cientist or secular philosopher
uses this
argument, he will try to make nothing into a little something s
o he can at
least start from somewhere. Various words are chosen to arrive
at this
position as, for example, when Stephen Hawking, the world famou
s
physicist, refers to the universe as beginning from “an infinit
esimal point
so small that we cannot conceive of it” or he may refer to it w
ith the more
convenient scientific term, “the singularity.” We cannot let th
em get away
with this, because it is a lie. If they are going to argue that
the universe
came from nothing, then it must be an absolute nothing. No sing
ularities,
no infinitesimal matter, n
o energy, no nothing.
The
second answer
is to maintain that all we see now in the universe
had an impersonal beginning, such as raw energy or mass. As we
already
saw, however, if you start with the impersonal, you end up with
the
impersonal, unless you can show h
ow the personal can come from
the
impersonal, which no one has ever done. Modern science’s answer
to
personality is merely to say that it is a product of the impers
onal
(neurons) plus complexity (billions of neurons), resulting in a
what
appears like personality.
Further, an impersonal beginning can never produce genuine mora
ls.
Morals become the product of mere metaphysics, or even worse, a
product of statistics (as in Alfred Kinsey’s
sɛҳuąƖ Behavior of the Human
43
Male
), or the majority vote (as in various forms of democracy, or e
ven in
Plato’s
Republic
wherein the concept of the
po
v
liV
[the city] is replaced by
the Philosopher Kings). Modern man’s religions are also inadequ
ate for
this task, because each of them begins with an impersonal deity
or deities
that do not love or communicate, but just exist. In pantheism,
for
example, morals do not exist, for everything in pantheism is eq
ual. There
is no diversity, no particulars to match the unity, the univers
als. The final
Karma of Hinduism is to accept your impersonality and reject yo
ur
individuality so that you can become absorbed into the One impe
rsonal.
But if we begin from the persona
l (as Christianity does), then
morals do
not depend on mere metaphysics but on pure love.
The
third answer
is to begin with the personal. Please note, there are no
other answers than these three. As someone once said, when you
get
down to the basic questions, the
re are few people left in the r
oom. We can
use this to our advantage in evangelizing modern man, for we ca
n safely
show him that Christianity is not merely the best answer, it is
the only
answer. God and man are separated by infinity, but they are jo
ined by
personality. Man and animal are joined by being finite, but the
y are
separated by personality. So man must bridge the chasm between
God
and himself through personality, or by relating to God on a per
sonal level.
As Christianity teaches, for example, if we have offended a per
sonal God,
we seek his personal forgiveness, we draw on his personal quali
ty of
mercy and compassion.
Likewise, in being of
fended, yet also bei
ng infinite
in majesty and power, God requires, in the personal realm, an
appeasement of his person in order to preserve his honor. Thus
the
Second Person of the Trinity, by his own personality, voluntari
ly gave
himself to be the propitiation to appease the First Person. It
is all based
on personhood and what is required to preserve personhood. This
is why
we also call God “Father,” and not
“The Other,” or merely “the
Infinite,” for
“Father” is a personal term.
44
And in that answer we have not only the personal and infinite G
od, we
have the Three Persons who each have their own Personality, wit
hin that
infinite God. There was a very good reason that our Church Fath
ers
referred to the Trinity as Persons, as opposed to Modes (as in
Modalism
or Sabellianism), because each one in the Trinity is personal.
The Persons
of the Trinity loved and communicated with each other before cr
eation,
and when the Trinity created man the Persons instilled in man t
he same
personal traits so that man could love God and love his fellow
man. And
because God is personal and the members of the Godhead loved ea
ch
other, God did not need to create man in order to love. Rather,
God
created man because of love, to foster love, to reflect the God
head’s love.
The finite and the infinite coul
d be joined together by love, w
hich would
hold them together for the rest of eternity. This contrasts to
Hinduism.
Although there are five faces in the Hindu presentation of God,
they are
not persons, they are impersonal entities. One of the entities
is feminine,
Kali, but she is a destroyer, often pictured with fangs and sku
lls hanging
around her neck. This is because there is no difference between
cruelty
and non-cruelty in Hinduism. Perhaps the feminine representatio
n in Kali
is a picture of Eve, which is not uncommon in pagan religions.
So we see how in all these instances philosophy has an overwhel
ming
effect on how modern man thinks
and lives his daily life. There
is only one
answer for modern man. It is Christianity. Go out to the highwa
ys and
byways and tell them the Good News!

Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D.

My thanks to Christian philosopher, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, for
much of the
information contained herein, and with whom I personally communicated
on these topics before his death in 1984.


.

This is an interesting post. It is too bad that there have not been more responses to it.

Yes it is the particular incarnation of thought which underlies all that is said and done, for good, or for ill.  

Quote from: J.Paul

Yes it is the particular incarnation of thought which underlies all that is said and done, for good, or for ill.  

It's curious you would refer to thought as something that can be incarnated.  

There's no doubt that thought can be conceived, but is that what you mean by "particular incarnation?"

.

Does it not enter into man and ultimately find its expression and actualization through him? By particular I refer to an individual strain of conception, which when developed become a coherent philosophy, which then underpins certain modes of action.

.

The PDF is viewable directly using your browser at this website page:

http://galileowaswrong.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Philosophy-and-its-Effect-on-Society.pdf


.