This
post is actually not about Wittgenstein, but I’m using that to illustrate a
point. Wittgenstein was a famous philosophy prof. at Cambridge. Years ago,
commentators on Wittgenstein used to discuss him as if he was a British
philosopher, like J. L. Austin. But, of course, he wasn’t. That treatment changed when this book
was published:
Allan
Janik & Stephen Toulmin: Wittgenstein’s Vienna
For
more, see:
The point
the authors were making is that you couldn’t really interpret Wittgenstein in a
cultural vacuum. To understand him, you had to understand his formative
influences.
The book
also benefited from the fact that Toulmin was one of Wittgenstein’s star students.
So he had firsthand knowledge of Wittgenstein.
If you
want to understand Wittgenstein, it’s not enough to read Wittgenstein. You also
need to study the life and times of Wittgenstein. It also helps to read
expositions of his philosophy by distinguished students of his, who had the
opportunity to question him, viz. Elizabeth Anscombe, Norman Malcolm, Stephen
Toulmin.
Now, I
say all that to say this. I’m struck by how often evangelical converts to Rome
imagine that they can jump feet first into the church fathers without any basic
background information. They imagine that if they just read the church fathers
in some English translation, they understand what they are reading. Yet that’s
terribly naïve.
Wittgenstein
is far closer to our own time and civilization than the church fathers. Yet you
can’t expect to understand his philosophy by simply reading his works.
To
understand the church fathers, you have to do some serious reading in the
secondary literature. You have to know things about their parents, education,
social class. About the political and socioeconomic circumstances that
conditioned their outlook. About their philosophical mentors and foils.
Some
Clarkian Scripturalits like Drake Shelton also suffer from Catholic convert
syndrome when it comes to the church fathers.
"Who, then, can be saved?"
ReplyDeleteThe Bible was written to be generally understandable to posterity. The same cannot be said for church fathers, who lack the benefit of inspire foresight.
DeleteHey Steve, Drake Shelton doesn't not represent Clarkians in general, nor Clark's view of the Trinity in particular. According to Shelton, Clark "labored under the Western view" (meaning, he wants to like Clark, but hates the fact that he disagreed with him on the Trinity) and if he cared to read Clark's work on the Trinity, he would be dissatisfied with most of it's premises and certainly the conclusion.
ReplyDeleteShelton like's to reduce the discussion to analogical knowledge vs. univocal knowledge as if the acceptance of the latter view necessarily makes you a Nicene subordinationist and the acceptance of the former necessarily makes you an irrational Western-Trinitarian.