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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Words and Ideas

Words and Ideas

To understand a philosophical argument one must make an intellectual effort; but men are not commonly convinced that an argument is true by intellectual means alone. One has to understand further why a given philosopher has explored a given problem, what tools his age gave him to use, and above all, what kind of universe he inhabited – for a Hindu mystic, a scholastic philosopher, and Norman Mailer, inhabit universes so different that exchange might appear impossible between them. There is no such thing as thought without somebody thinking it. Josef Pieper presents us with the somebodies – Boetius, Dionysius the Areopagite, Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas – as intelligible persons, and then shows us how they thought about God and the Creation. In this context Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, to take one example, looks much more convincing. A great deal of Josef Pieper’s book is difficult reading, but no paragraph of it is dust-laden.

The same cannot be said of Jean-Paul Sartre. A less imaginative essay cannot ever have been written about imagination – Coleridge must surely have spun like a turbine in his grave when it was published. Sartre is more scholastic than the scholastics, for he applies their intricate methods to the impoverished universe admitted by existential logic. Much of his argument seems to be a knocking down of straw men. He does prove, however, that images of things do not exist in the same way that things exist. One had perhaps taken this for granted.

1963 (297)