The philosopher’s quest for knowledge never ceases, according to James V. Schall, S.J.
“Philosophy leaves us in a state of expectancy,” Shall said, speaking Monday night to approximately 50 people at the Delta Phi Epsilon Professional Foreign Service Fraternity.
According to Schall, basic philosophical concepts aren’t simply found in Aristotle’s ancient texts but in the daily Washington Post sports page.
“Sports are the harbinger of current philosophy,” Schall said.
To demonstrate this point, Schall pointed to two different sports articles found on the same page that he said illustrate contradictory philosophical principles. The first, in which the Washington Mystics basketball team spokesperson said that a player’s posing for Playboy wasn’t an issue, seems to imply that private matters should not be public concern. According to the second article, former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis attacked heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman for calling him gay on national television. This story seems to show, he argued, that private matters are worth fighting over in the public sphere.
“There is raw material all around you around you that has contradictory material that cannot all be true,” Schall said.
What philosophers need to do, according to Schall, is to think, make decisions and, above all, restore order.
Using the same Socratic methods and interrogating style that has made his classes famous, Schall said that all humans by their very capacity to think are philosophers.
“All men are given the same capacity to know,” Schall said.
According to Schall, philosophes are not “useful” people in the sense that their knowledge is used to change reality.
“We do not make reality,” Schall said. “It is given to us.”
The main purpose of philosophy, he suggested, is to understand oneself. And the only way to understand oneself is to be “knowing something which is not ourselves.”
According to Schall, people might despair because they feel they do not know every answer and therefore will not to be able to find the truth. But this misses the point of philosophy, he claimed. Philosophers should always be searching for the truth, but not finding the truth does not imply the journey was worthwhile.
Schall pointed to one of his favorite quotations, from Pope John Paul II, who said: “Human knowledge is a journey which allows no rest.”
Schall said that process of thinking and the journey to find reason is what the mind does.
Reality is presented to us in an unedited form for us to wonder about, Schall said, as in the case of the Washington Mystics and Rahman-Lewis story in the Washington sports page.
The truth, Schall said, is left for us to ponder.
