Nicholas Wolterstorff, recently retired as Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale, is arguably contemporary Christianity’s most versatile philosopher. He has been noticed for metaphysics (On Universals [Chicago, 1970]); recognized for his work in aesthetics (e.g., Works and Worlds of Art [Oxford] and Art in Action [Eerdmans, both 1980]); noted (and notorious) for his defense of the marginalized, and especially Palestinians (Until Justice and Peace Embrace [Eerdmans, 1983]; respected for contributions to philosophical theology (Divine Discourse [Cambridge, 1995]); and praised for his championing of Christian education (Educating for Responsible Action [Eerdmans 1980] and Educating for Life: Reflections on Christian Teaching and Learning [Baker, 2002]). He is perhaps best known, however, for his work alongside William Alston and his old college buddy Alvin Plantinga in developing one of the most important theories of knowledge of our day, the so-called Reformed epistemology (Reason within the Bounds of Religion [Eerdmans, 1976] and several co-edited books).
Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Modern European Philosophy)
Cambridge University Press
280 pages
$37.41
In the service of the latter agenda, Wolterstorff has also demonstrated an extraordinary ability at the history of philosophy. What he has uncovered in what he calls “the archaeology of cultural memory” is both startlingly revisionist of what we all thought we knew about modernity and bracingly relevant to our own immediate concerns. In particular, Wolterstorff’s findings dispute commonly held stereotypes of what “modern thinking” is, and they point toward instructive and exciting alternatives to arrogant forms of both modern and postmodern thought.
Wolterstorff has produced two volumes in the last several years, each of which deals with a major figure in modern philosophy: John Locke and the Ethics of Belief and Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. These full-length monographs are, in an important sense, preliminary chapters in Wolterstorff’s magnum opus of epistemology—the completion of which is eagerly awaited by his many philosophical fans. In the meantime, we have plenty of recovered treasure to enjoy in these two historical books.
In John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, Wolterstorff presents a public intellectual deeply afraid of the social chaos around him in late-17th-century Europe. Religious extremism has riven his country and those across the Channel. Locke therefore offers his Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a tract for the times, not as an arcane disquisition for his fellow academicians. And since his times are not entirely unlike our own, we do well to consider what he offers. Indeed, Wolterstorff sees Locke responding to a question strikingly apropos to our day: “How should we form our beliefs on fundamental matters of religion and morality so as to live together in social harmony, when we can no longer appeal to a shared and unified tradition?”
Locke indeed breaks with tradition and instead enlists Reason as our primary agent of thinking—that’s what makes him modern. More particularly, the medieval mind’s regard for tradition, its assumption that rationality itself consists essentially in the study and appropriation of tradition, has brought misery to Europe. Wolterstorff offers a lapidary account of this outlook:
The conviction remained that if one assigned the proper priorities among the texts (with the Bible being preeminent), selected the right senses, used the appropriate strategies of interpretation, and made the right distinctions, a richly articulated body of truth would come to light. St. Paul and Virgil, Aristotle and Augustine, would all be seen to fit together. Where once the texts had appeared contradictory, now they would be seen as getting at different facets of the complex truth.
Locke thinks that most people in the past, who thus formulated the tradition we inherit, did not govern their beliefs properly. They foolishly took onboard all sorts of dubious and even pernicious ideas without submitting them to the scrutiny of critical reason. Worse, they then elevated various versions of this mish-mash to the level of dogma, and proceeded to fight religious wars over them.
Locke wants everyone to calm down and take themselves a little more humbly—indeed, a lot more humbly. Locke’s view of epistemic (and therefore political) humility shows up in several key respects:
(1) We should, he advises, dispense with tradition and instead we should employ Reason to analyze what our senses tell us. Then we should strictly apportion our assent to whatever we conclude out of such reflections according to the grounds we have for believing them. Rather than a yes/no, all-or-nothing mentality, we should establish a sort of gradient of belief. Thus we recognize that most of what we believe is not certain, but more-or-less probably, and we hold our beliefs therefore with the appropriate firmness and humility.
Wolterstorff asserts that here is the core of Locke’s philosophy and of his status in the history of philosophy: “Locke was the first to develop with profundity and defend the thesis that we are all responsible for our believings, and that to do one’s duty with respect to one’s believings one must, at appropriate junctures and in appropriate ways, listen to the voice of Reason. …Locke, on this issue, is the father of modernity.”
(2) We should recognize, however, that Reason can provide us with certainty only on very restricted matters—really, just on the state of our own minds. I think I’m sitting in a chair; I think I’m typing on a keyboard or reading a magazine: We can know that, at least, for certain. But that’s pretty much all Reason can approve as certain. Granted, we also have occasional glimpses of the true order of things—what Locke calls “insights.”But beyond this very small yield of the rationally or intuitively certain, we have only belief, opinion, judgment, and the like.
Thus, contrary to the stereotype of the Enlightenment thinker subjecting every perception and conception to the gimlet eye of Reason, Locke says that one is obligated to undertake such rigorous inquiry only into issues of maximal “concernment” to one. These, after all, are the issues that drive people to extremes of belief and action, even to civil war. Locke otherwise does not offer such regulations for thought on anything else: “Locke,” Wolterstorff contends, “has no general theory of belief-entitlement.”
(3) Before God, however, we can humbly do our duty, for God has graciously provided sufficient indications of his will, of the nature of the world and of our selves, of his salvation, and so on that we can indeed live as Christians and please him thus. We do not have certainty about all these things—thus we ought not to act as if we do (in, say, religious wars). What we have instead is sufficient for us to humbly believe and obey.
The correct response, therefore, to a properly deep and wide skepticism about our possibility of getting to “the things themselves” is, Locke says, grateful contentment, and thus Wolterstorff quotes Locke in what could be a rebuke to the postmodern skeptics of our own time:
We shall not have much reason to complain of the narrowness of our minds, if we will but employ them about what may be of use to us; for of that they are very capable: And it will be unpardonable, as well as childish peevishness, if we undervalue the advantages of our knowledge, and neglect to improve it to the ends for which it was given us, because there are some things that are set out of the reach of it. …If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things; we shall do much-what as wisely as he, who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.
So much, then, for the stereotype of Locke as the Great Modern Knower whose reason magisterially sweeps over the empirical landscape and comes to universal, certain conclusions about it all. Instead, we find a Locke who is fearful precisely of those who are willing to do battle as fanatical believers in this or that—shall we say it?—metanarrative. Locke seeks to chasten us all with his restricted view of what we can properly claim to know. Locke stands between the premodern and the postmodern in his distrust of “community lore”—whether the appeal to a universal tradition or to the traditions of this or that party—as he seeks to live his life, as he hopes others will, according to our best perception of the true nature of things.
If John Locke turns out to be surprisingly sympathetic to some of the doubts of our own (and every) time, then surely Thomas Reid, the great Scottish philosopher of “Common Sense,” will give comfort to those of us who long for certainty in today’s epistemological whirlwind, will he not?
Well, Wolterstorff replies, yes and no. Reid, Wolterstorff contends, is more epistemologically critical than he is constructive. “Oh, no! Another postmodernist!” some might cry. Again, Wolterstorff might say, yes and no.
Reid devotes a great deal of energy to demolishing what he sees to be a misguided approach to knowledge, which he terms the “Way of Ideas.” Unfortunately for standard-brand modern philosophy, the Way of Ideas is not merely a branch but the main trunk of epistemology from Descartes (and Locke) forward to Kant.
Wolterstorff is skillful in attending to the details of Reid’s thought, but the main thrust is also quite clear. The Way of Ideas—roughly, the basic scheme of perception by which the things “out there” somehow cause us to have ideas of them in our minds, and thus we form appropriate beliefs about them—doesn’t actually illuminate what is happening. Reid powerfully demolishes this scheme—so basic that most of us take it for granted, even if we couldn’t actually explain it if asked. The “problem of the external world” remains intractable: We just don’t know how we reliably get “in here” (in our minds) what’s “out there” (in the world).
Having set aside the Way of Ideas to his own satisfaction (and, largely, to Wolterstorff’s as well), Reid then says, “I do not attempt to substitute any other theory in [its] place.” Reid asserts instead that it is a “mystery” how we form beliefs about the world that actually do seem to correspond to the world as it is. (Our beliefs do seem to have the virtue of helping us negotiate that world pretty well.)
The epistemologist who has followed Reid to this point might well be aghast. “What?” she might say. “You have destroyed the main scheme of modern Western epistemology only to say that you don’t have anything better to offer in its place? What kind of philosopher are you?”
“A Christian one,” Reid (and Wolterstorff) might reply. For Reid takes great comfort (as, we should note, did Locke) in trusting God for the creation of the world such that human beings are well equipped to apprehend and live in it. He encourages readers therefore to thank God for this provision, this “bounty of heaven,” and to obey God in confidence that God continues to provide the means (including the epistemic means) to do so. Furthermore, he affirms, any other position than grateful acceptance of the fact that we believe the way we do just because that is the way we are, is not just intellectually untenable, but (almost biblically) foolish.
Thus Reid dispenses with modern hubris on the one side and postmodern despair on the other. In the latter case, Wolterstorff puts a remark of Wittgenstein’s into Reid’s mouth as they both, so to speak, confront the philosopher who, just like a clever adolescent, professes to doubt what everyone else knows is true. (This is the sort of person who says, “You just think you’re sitting in a chair now, but in fact you could be anyone, anywhere, just imagining you are you sitting in a chair.”) To such foolish skeptics, who are patently ungrateful for the knowledge they have gained so effortlessly by the grace of God, Wittgenstein/Reid affirms that we should respond not with disputation, but with contempt: “Ach! Unsinn!” we should say. “Oh, what rubbish!”
The burden of proof, then, is put where it belongs: on the skeptic who has to show why we should doubt what is otherwise so immediately evident, rather than on the believer who has to show why one ought to believe what seems effortless to believe. (This crucial shifting of the burden of proof, we might note, has been a very successful maneuver in much of Reformed epistemology itself as these contemporaries of ours have challenged the presumptive dominance of naturalism in our day. “Why should the Christian have to justify her beliefs on someone else’s—that is, on naturalistic—terms?” they ask.)
Indeed, the burden of proof is also upon Locke to demonstrate why he is so confident of Reason’s ability to illuminate even the restricted territory he assigns it. Reid is dubious about all claims to such knowledge, even those as circumspect as Locke’s. “Darkness,” Reid writes, is heavy upon all such investigations. We know through our own action that we are efficient causes of things; we know God is, too. More than this, however, we cannot say, since we cannot peer into the essences of things. Reid commends to us all sorts of inquiries, including scientific ones, but we will always be stymied at some level by the four-year-old’s incessant question: “But why?” Such explanations always come back to questions of efficient causation, and human reason simply cannot lay bare the way things are in themselves so as to see how things do cause each other to be this or that way.
Hume therefore was right on this score, Reid allows. But unlike Hume—very much unlike Hume—Reid is cheerful about us carrying on anyway with the practically reliable beliefs we generally do form, as God wants us to do. Far from being paralyzed by epistemological doubt, therefore, and far also from being inflamed by any epistemological chauvinism (as in “We men/women/whites/blacks/heterosexuals/homosexuals see things better than you do”), Reid offers all of us a thankful epistemology of trust and obedience.
Wolterstorff thus offers us stimulating, even surprising, portraits of these two giants of modern philosophy. We all thought we knew that John Locke was confident that Reason could unlock the secrets of the universe. Didn’t all “moderns” think so, and now aren’t we past all that in the postmodern era? Hmm. Maybe the disjunction between “modern” and “postmodern” isn’t as simple as it appears in many popular portrayals.
We all thought we knew that Thomas Reid taught “Common Sense” as a kind of willful ignoring of the “real issues” thrown up by Hume and Kant. Thus we felt no qualms about neglecting the work of a man who was perhaps the most popular philosopher in Britain and North America for almost two centuries—one who, in Wolterstorff’s view, deserves to be recognized as the peer of Immanuel Kant.
It turns out, at least in Wolterstorff’s portrayals, that these philosophers were more circumspect, more relevant, more interesting, and even more Christian than we knew. It turns out that we have a lot to learn from them as, indeed, we do from Wolterstorff himself. While we await Wolterstorff’s own new proposals, therefore, we profitably can join him in musing upon the heritage we have received afresh from his “digs” into our philosophical past.
John Stackhouse is the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College, Vancouver, and author of three new books: Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford Univ. Press); Evangelical Landscapes: Facing Critical Issues of the Day (Baker); and Church: An Insider’s Look at How We Do It. (Baker).
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