Living the Truth

By Josef Pieper

Living the Truth includes two other Pieper books: Truth of All Things and Reality and the Good.

This volume presents illuminating treatises of Josef Pieper on Thomistic anthropology and on the principles of right human behavior based on anthropology.

With his customary lucidity, Pieper shows how all reality is positioned between the mind of God and the mind of man and is the basis for both man's unquenchable yearning and the measure of all man's knowledge. He then develops the Thomistic position that reality is also the basis for the good and therefore the norm of conscience and ethical action. As Pieper himself expresses in part of the thesis of the second treatise, "An insight into the nature of the good as rooted in objective being, of itself compels us to carry it out in a definite human attitude, and it makes certain attitudes impossible."

Josef Pieper was schooled in the Greek classics and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He also studied philosophy, law and sociology, and has been a professor at the University of Munster, Germany. His books have been widely praised by both the secular and religious press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681493077

Josef Pieper

Josef Pieper, perhaps the most popular Thomist philosopher of the twentieth century, was schooled in the Greek classics and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He also studied philosophy, law, and sociology, and he was a professor at the University of Munster, West Germany. His numerous books have been widely praised by both the secular and religious press.

Book preview

The Truth of All Things

An Inquiry into the Anthropology

of the High Middle Ages

Translated

by

Lothar Krauth

INTRODUCTION

With the expression, All that exists is true, Western philosophy for almost two millenia intended to make a statement not only about reality as such but no less about the nature of man. The great teachers of the High Middle Ages had uncritically absorbed the quintessence of Western traditional thought since earliest Greek times and thus represented it undistorted. These teachers above all took the seemingly unrealistic principle of the truth of all reality in fact as an anthropological statement that explained something about human nature. To show this is the first purpose of our study.

We do not set out, therefore, to defend the statement about the truth of all things with objective arguments, much less to prove it (a quite impossible task, after all). No, the intention is entirely to concentrate on interpretation alone. We wish to show the meaning of this statement within the ontology of the High Middle Ages. Consequently, we shall have to deal primarily with Thomas Aquinas, the outstanding representative of classical medieval metaphysics. It seems that in his thought there converged, for a brief historical moment, those lines that previously had searched, separately, for a focal point, and that soon afterward again diverged in different directions.

And yet, the ultimate purpose of our study does not concern history. Rather, through an exposition as meticulous and comprehensive as possible, we aim to draw out the far-reaching ontological dynamics inherent in this principle of the truth of all things.

Yet the truth that dwells in the core of all things none but the few do contemplate.

Anselm of Canterbury (De veritate, chap. 9)

Chapter One

1

Omne ens est verum,¹ all that is real, is true. Confronted with the concise sweep of this statement, we of these latter days are prone to feel intuitively an admiration for such grand simplicity, yet coupled with confusion, even with utter puzzlement as to the exact and specific meaning of those few words.

The other statement, omne ens est bonum, all that is, is good, equally a principle of classical Western metaphysics,² does not appear, if only on the surface, to be so totally inaccessible to our understanding. We of the post-Kantian era may at least think we understand it somehow, perhaps by identifying it with a certain thesis of liberalism (the mother of the notion that man is essentially good). But, of course, such an interpretation misses entirely the precise and original meaning of that principle. And the deceptive certainty of such an erroneous approach may well be more detrimental than the utter perplexity caused by the statement, all that is real, is true.

Such, then, is indeed the situation: drawing only on prevailing and common thinking, the attempt to unlock the meaning of this statement will not succeed, not even in opening up a dead end.

Post-Kantian philosophy, here understood in a nonchronological sense, is of no help in this matter. All the textbooks, even those that lately claim again the occasional title of ontology, omit any reference to the principle of the truth of all things.

2

In one of the Platonic Dialogues we find the statement, "what is most noble (ariston) in all existing things, is truth."³ Yet Plato himself should not be seen as having originated the principle of the truth of all things. Not only Parmenides seems to have known it, but Pythagoras as well;⁴ and Pythagoras in turn drew on a much more ancient tradition. Plato, however, has given this concept its definitive expression for many centuries to come. He recognized and confirmed it as belonging to the inalienable cultural patrimony of mankind. This is all the more remarkable in view of what happened in the first major break in the Western philosophical tradition: Renaissance humanism on the one hand despised and eliminated the principle of ontological truth, together with metaphysical ontology as such—while on the other hand drawing its own tenets, especially its antitraditional stance, from the very same Platonic (or Neoplatonic) heritage. The same has to be said of the reemerging Aristotelianism of that era. This new Aristotelianism had sprung mainly from Averroism and thus from Neoplatonism;⁵ it, too, attacked the Aristotelianism of the traditional Scholastics. Quite heterogeneous positions united in the battle cry of that period: No to Scholastic Aristotelianism! Dialectical Disputations against the Aristotelians: this title of a philosophical treatise by Lorenzo Valla stands for an entire literary genus of that period. These Disputations, in a manner more passionate and rhetorical than profound, dismiss also the traditional teaching on transcendentals,⁶ the doctrine of those notions that transcend and encompass the different types and categories of all existing beings: the concepts of unity, truth and goodness.

The Renaissance humanists, then, are among the first to reject the principle of the truth of all things; they even deny that it expresses anything meaningful at all.

The stagnating and sterile conceptual framework of late Scholasticism no doubt needed to be shaken up drastically. But for almost a century the protest against every traditional notion knew no bounds; in Goethe’s words, not least and especially in all branches of science. So much so that Francis Bacon finally had the audacity to wipe out everything written so far on the slate of humanity. Goethe notes "insensitivity of Bacon toward the values of antiquity and calls it very unpleasant. For who can listen impassively when Bacon compares the works of Aristotle and Plato to lightweight planks that are easily washed up oh our shores by the streams of time, precisely because they lack robust and meaningful substance."⁷ It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Bacon erases the concept of transcendentals not only from science but from metaphysics as well. Incidentally, he dismisses them in such a haughty and summary way that he even fails to mention at all the concept of transcendental truth, that is to say, the concept of the truth of all things.⁸

3

We shall briefly consult some other thinkers who, like Bacon, should be counted among the ancestors and founding fathers of modern philosophy and science.

Bacon’s compatriot Hobbes is quite familiar with the principle of ontological truth. But for him this concept of the metaphysicians is inane and childish.⁹ Veritas enint in dicto, non in re consistit: there is no truth in things.¹⁰

Descartes explicitly decides to get away from all philosophical tradition, and this should not be overlooked¹¹ in spite of ample evidence that he, too, is influenced by it. True, he still writes Meditationes de prima philosophia, that is, meditations on metaphysics; and the fourth of these meditations is entitled On Truth and Falsehood. Yet not a word is found in it about the truth of all things. For Descartes, there is no truth in things.¹²

Spinoza, in his Cogitata metaphysica, mentions the concept of the truth of all things only to dismiss it as nonsense. Altogether in the wrong are those who consider truth to be a property of being.¹³ It appears that Spinoza was unfamiliar with the great thinkers of the Middle Ages;¹⁴ not only that, he also may not have understood the essential quest and ultimate concern of an entire metaphysical tradition that enjoyed a revived interest in the Baroque era, Spinoza’s own time.¹⁵ Truth, he says, could only reside in a statement. Things, in contrast, he calls mute—a devastating notion that bespeaks abysmal consequences! The short chapter in the Cogitata metaphysica concludes thus: Nothing more remains to be said. Even our preceding comments would not have been worthwhile except in view of those authors who at all cost had to search for the nodes on the rushes and wound up so entangled in such inanities that they could no longer find their way out,

We now look to Leibniz who, open-minded and knowledgeable, would not easily despise or dismiss traditional teachings. In his works we do find the general idea which is also expressed in the principle, all that exists, is true. Yet here, elements of this idea are widely scattered, as it were, and hidden in various contexts. His doctrine of a primordial, predetermined universal harmony, the consentement préétabli, shows a certain affinity to the notion in question. Still, if we look for the formulation itself of the truth of all things, which, of course, is no mere verbal construction but rather an expression whose very complexity of meaning indicates the universal reach of the cognitive connections involved, this formulation itself seems to be absent in Leibniz’s vast and intricate opus.

We should not fail to mention here the opinion of some scholars who hold that Leibniz, contrary to his own words,¹⁶ had only superficial knowledge of thinkers like Albertus, Thomas, Bonaventure, or Scotus.¹⁷ Noteworthy, too, is the way Leibniz’s teacher, Jakob Thomasius, opens the chapter on Truth in his Latin catechism of Metaphysical Questions: Is truth, strictly speaking, a property of reality? No, Why not? Because truth does not reside in reality but in the mind that perceives reality. Can truth, therefore, in no wise be called a property of reality? Truth can be called an extrinsic, or an extrinsically defining, property of reality.¹⁸

Kant, finally, long before the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, labeled the principle of the truth of all things sterile and tautological.¹⁹ The 1781 first edition of the Critique is silent on this matter. The second edition, however, six years later, contains a newly inserted paragraph on the traditional doctrine of transcendentals, specifically on what the Scholastics called the principle of the unity, truth, and goodness of all existing things.²⁰ There, we do indeed read:

Now, although the application of this principle has proved very meager in consequences, and has indeed yielded only propositions that are tautological, and therefore in recent times has retained its place in metaphysics almost by courtesy only, yet, on the other hand, it represents a view which, however empty it may seem to be, has maintained itself over this very long period. It therefore deserves to be investigated in respect of its origin. . . .

Yet what results can we expect from such an investigation into the origins of a traditional ontological principle, after the entire thrust of philosophy had been reversed in Kant’s Copernican revolution? He concludes that the principle of the truth (and unity and goodness) of all reality does definitely not indicate a "property of things; its specific and valid meaning concerns, rather, certain logical requirements and conditions inherent in any perception of things". The particular reasoning behind this interpretation is of no consequence for our topic here. For it becomes sufficiently clear already that Kant explicitly denies truth to be a property of reality as such; It is, therefore, entirely correct when certain approving commentators see this paragraph of the Critique as intending to discredit once and for all the basic concepts of traditional ontology.²¹

4

We should now try to find out in what form the basic concepts of traditional ontology had come to those philosophical innovators.

This much seems already certain: the above-mentioned philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, excepting Leibniz perhaps, did not know firsthand the great teachers of the High Middle Ages—Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus—certainly not through those teachers’ own texts and their own language. It is therefore quite possible that those latter-day philosophers took up arms against teachings that wrongly passed as tradition while not deserving that name. They might have fought a tradition whose ontological concepts, once keys to unlock reality, now had lost—if not their original meaning—at least their vigor, their freshness, their energy. We should not overlook the fact, however, that the authentic tradition’flourished, undiminished and with renewed vitality, throughout the same time, the seventeenth century, and beyond. It flourished in the Scholasticism of the Baroque era, thanks in part to a small number of superior thinkers, but especially because of many outstanding and respected academic teachers, as Max Wundt has shown in an admirably precise and comprehensive study covering Protestant Germany.²²

In which form, then, has someone like Immanuel Kant come to know the doctrine of the truth of all things? This question finds a rather precise answer. We know Kant’s philosophy teachers, Franz Albert Schulz and Martin Knutzen, who were disciples and followers of Christian Wolff, a philosopher of the German Enlightenment. Moreover, while teaching at the university, Kant selected as textbook for his obligatory lectures on metaphysics, even during the time the Critiques were published, the manual by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, also a Wolff disciple. Wolff’s Philosophia prima sive Ontologia and Baumgarten’s Metaphysial (of exactly one thousand paragraphs) each contain a chapter dealing explicitly with the principle of the truth of all things.

We should mention right here that Wolff explains in a separate thesis his own notion of the universal truth of reality, as not standing against the teachings of the Scholastics, who, however, he says, had employed confusing terms, while his own formulations would define the concept with utmost precision. He evidently seeks legitimacy from the philosophical tradition, having asserted that he was more indebted to the works of Thomas Aquinas than to Leibniz’s philosophy.²³ Strangely enough, people have believed him. The pertinent literature has consistently presented Wolff’s philosophy as an authentic heir to the Scholasticism of the High Middle Ages.²⁴ The concept of transcendentals in particular, it is said, had not changed at all.²⁵

In truth, however, there exists hardly any affinity, much less a deeper agreement, between Wolff-Baumgarten and Albertus-Thomas-Scotus in their respective teachings on the truth of all things, despite terminological similarities. Actually, only someone lacking all sensitivity regarding levels of mental excellence can fail to recognize the abyss separating the intellectual giants of the High Middle Ages from the pedantic philosophical systematists of the Enlightenment.

5

First, then, we examine Metaphysica of Baumgarten for its stand on the doctrine of the truth of all things. The relevant statements are found in a chapter with five short Latin paragraphs²⁶ (the entire Metaphysica really is rather a handy handbook and not at all voluminous, despite its one thousand paragraphs).

The exposition begins by defining transcendental truth—an explanatory footnote in German calls this the necessary metaphysical truth—as the ordered structure governing the essential constituents and intrinsic attributes of all that exists, all being. The second paragraph states: true is a predicate of all that exists because the identifying dimensions of every being are, in fact, interconnected according to universal ordering principles. What could these ordering principles be? They are the following universal principles (principia catholica): the principle of contradiction (principium contradictionis): the principle of underlying reason (principium rationis);²⁷ distinct from the latter, the principle of sufficient reason (principium rationis sufficients); finally, the principium rationati, difficult to translate, and meaning that no thing at all is ever totally superfluous and useless.²⁸ The third