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Home , Historicism

and the Modern World by Donald Phillip Verene (review)

Jeffrey Dirk Wilson

The Review of Metaphysics, Volume 72, Number 1 (Issue No. 285), September 2018, pp. 157-158 (Review)

Published by The Education , Inc.

For additional about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/736132

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 157

involvement in the lives of citizens, oblivious to the greater control ceded to the government by such proposals. Exit Left provides an approach to enhancing personal liberty that is more nuanced than many liberal and libertarian theories. The political and financial practicalities of the theory, as well as a more general discussion of the social costs entailed, probably deserve more discussion than what Taylor provides in this concise and very readable book.—John Safranek, Omaha

VERENE, Donald Phillip. Metaphysics and the Modern World. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2016. xx + 146. Paper, $21.00—Verene begins by reminding his reader that Aristotle held mythology and philosophy to be enterprises that both aimed to discover the about the first principles and causes of the world. His first fifty pages constitute an argument for that view, examining thirty-five centuries of Western culture as a whole. The remaining chapters are devoted to the ways four modern philosophers have worked out relationships between myth and philosophy: Vico, Hegel, Cassirer, and Whitehead. Throughout, Verene makes the case for against Cartesian soliloquy that characterizes too much and for a restoration of that special soul-seeing that took from the Greek mystery , theorein, long since rendered as contemplation. The reader Verene’s excellence as a teacher. His accounts of Vico, Hegel, Cassirer, and Whitehead, whether read as a primer or refresher, are clear, succinct, and insightful. I never thought I could understand what Whitehead was about until Verene explained him to me in this book. Verene makes the case for metaphysics in the modern world, both for the continued legitimacy of Plato and Aristotle as living philosophers, but also for those who engage metaphysics in modern terms. This account is part of a larger theme that runs throughout Verene’s works, namely, arguing for of philosophy as philosophical method. Verene is a leading exponent of this approach, and the present work has a subtle but definite polemical edge in arguing for the legitimacy of history of philosophy. Verene often uses the word “speculation” as an alternative term for “contemplation,” in the sense of Thomistic speculative that have truth as their end in contrast to practical and productive sciences, which have as their ends, respectively, actions and products. In modern philosophy, he says, “[c]riticism replaces speculation.” He quotes Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason: “To criticism everything must submit.” Verene replies to Kant, “Under such conditions speculation becomes not only unfashionable but impossible.” In a broad stroke against most forms of modern philosophy, Verene pronounces, “These [thinkers] mistake 158 ELIZABETH C. SHAW AND STAFF

critical thinking for philosophy.” What they take for criticism in Plato’s Socrates is in fact irony, which Verene defines as offering “self-determined distance from the matter at hand,” which is often evidenced in Socrates’ (irritating) habit of asking the obvious. “The Socratic question,” he opines, “frees us from taking ourselves too seriously.” In earlier work, Verene has only addressed the human element of philosophy as dealing with things “human and divine.” Here, by contrast, he develops a philosophy of God and allows for the legitimacy of as a correspondent to philosophy in the work of theorein. St. Anselm’s ontological argument constitutes the perfection of what Verene calls “complete speech,” “the speech that puts the whole into words.” Philosophers qua philosophers first make distinctions and then “resort to arguments along the path of their great narrative, but these [arguments] are only to demonstrate the partial that lie within it. . . . Complete speeches are likely stories intended to take over the reader and lead the reader to the point at which the author is thinking.” That God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is a likely story. The iteration of the various arguments that follow this insight are meant to guide the reader in exercises of contemplation until the reader sees—and this is the seeing of theorein—what the author saw, namely, the likelihood of the story. Ratio lies at the heart of every true narratio. The ontological argument becomes a touchstone for the rest of the book, and one may add, as it has for philosophers over the past 900 years. Though metaphysics “must fall prey” to , because the “divine . . . is a science of the divine and not the divine itself,” historicism does not govern “the production of metaphysics.” Whitehead provides a point of departure for Verene to draw his conclusion about things human and divine: “Without metaphysical insight into the divine, human are left in history without any objective ground for freedom developed from self-determination. Metaphysics as well as religion are the means to confront time.” Thus, a historicist and relativist view of life implies the highest degree of and the least degree of freedom. It is the Absolute that makes human freedom possible and, in a certain sense, indeed necessary. Metaphysics and the Modern World is compelling and beautiful. The introduction and chapters 1 through 3 read like a manifesto for the way metaphysics, which is to say “philosophy” rightly understood, should be undertaken. Chapters 4 through 7 discuss how four modern philosophers exemplify that . Verene’s work informs, challenges, and even inspires its readers.—Jeffrey Dirk Wilson, The Catholic University of America