Grace and Philosophy by Brown Hunter;

Author:Brown, Hunter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2019-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

4

Modern Philosophy

The reports by philosophers illustrated in the first chapter of this book describe three observable, spontaneous behaviours by reason in response to the fact of existence. The first is awareness of a philosophically unspecified characteristic of that fact which elicits astonishment. The second is a judgment that metaphorical language about miracle and gift best describes that characteristic. I have used the term “gratuity” to represent these uses of language which convey an apparent absence of causal antecedents sufficient to determine or explain fully the object of experience. The third behaviour is a tenacious propensity to seek deeper understanding of the phenomenon even after causal inquiry has proven insufficient to the task.

My focus upon such reports rather than the metaphysics of gratuity does not bode well for a philosophical project. The reports are vague in a way which modern philosophy avoids. They are first-person accounts of private experiences which, as such, do not lend themselves to the third-person analyses of public phenomena preferred by philosophy. Their recourse to metaphor falls outside normal language use in the discipline. They involve subjective and religious elements which conflict with the near-universal commitment by philosophers to detachment from such influences. They exhibit a fog of incomprehension about exactly what metaphysical phenomenon has evoked the powerful responses they record and how they are able to distinguish that phenomenon from causal ignorance. They do not explain how the phenomenon of gratuity usually encountered in personal contexts would also be encountered in the existence of a largely impersonal universe. Considering these liabilities, most philosophers would likely say that such reports belong, at best, to the domain of poetry but certainly not philosophy. The ease with which such a distinction between poetry and philosophy can be made at the expense implicitly of the latter is indebted to unique ways in which modern philosophy understands what constitutes the natural functioning of reason and its relationship with the world. Such an understanding involves deficiencies which I will illustrate and then critique in this chapter.

What constitutes reason’s natural functioning is nowadays generally understood to include activities free from religious, subjective, and other influences which are considered potentially subversive of truth-seeking. Such a view is a child of early modernity and is deeply influenced by the rise of the modern sciences. There is much support for it even among philosophers engaging matters of religion, as can be seen in a recent study of the discipline.1 As a participant in the academy, the study observes, philosophy is required to take upon itself a commitment to an independence and autonomy of reason which will replicate the impartiality of the sciences. It is incumbent upon a scholar to set aside all personal and religious propensities and undertake work built upon considerations completely apart from such influences.

Analytic philosophy of religion is viewed more or less approvingly, on account of the apparent precision and rigour of its analyses and argumentation. Philosophers of religion housed in religious studies departments, however, are under greater pressure to replicate the detachment

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