451 - Prospect For Metaphysics: Essays In Metaphysical Exploration

Prospect For Metaphysics:
Essays In Metaphysical Exploration
Edited by Ian Ramsey
240 pp. New York, Philosophical Library, 1961. $6.00.

Almost all of these essays are individually well worth reviewing; but all that the reviewer can hope to do is to list them and then discuss briefly two which happen especially to interest himself.

There is an excellent critique of A. C. Maclntyre's "Logical Status of Religious Belief" by Howard Root and a most valuable discussion of the place of reason in religion by Ninian Smart. There is an interestingly re-thought Augustinian treatment of the problem of evil by Mark Pontifex, and a most thoughtful and thought-provoking essay on "Metaphysics and the Limits of Language" by C. B. Daly. There are more and less illuminating essays on ethics by A. C. Ewing and D. A. Rees respectively, and likewise on Greek philosophy by Hilary Armstrong and

J.S. Dickie. A slight restorative is applied to traditional metaphysics By D. J. B. Hawkins, and Illtyd Trethowan offers a useful analysis of A. J. Ayer's account of knowledge. These, together with the two further essays discussed below, comprise the volume. It is noteworthy that the book represents a Catholic-Protestant collaboration in the interests of philosophical research.

Ian Ramsey's essay is entitled "On the Possibility and Purpose of a Metaphysical Theology." By the metaphysical he means the empirically unobservable. For example, the word "I" may evoke in oneself an awareness of a metaphysical reality, a self-consciousness which eludes external observation and description. Further, this metaphysical word "I" acts as the integrator of a number of diverse areas of language for example, psychology ("I'm angry"), medicine ("I'm a malaria case"), economics ("I'm a wage earner"), etc. (But does not the more empirical "he" perform the same integrative function?) Another metaphysical word, "duty," expresses a reality which discloses itself to us in situations of moral challenge. On such occasions "the penny drops" or "the light dawns" and we find that we have a use for a metaphysical category. Ramsey treats the term "God" in a similar way. The situations which

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lead us to talk about God are ones in which we are thereby enabled to integrate the most diverse possible elements of language and experience. "God" can link together the stars and atoms as well as "I": "just as 'I' acts . . . as an integrator word for all kinds of scientific and other descriptive assertions about myself, 'I exist' being a sort of contextual presupposition for them all, so also may 'God' be regarded as a contextual presupposition for the Universe" (p. 174).

This essay (taken together with Ramsey's Religious Language and Freedom and Immortality) constitutes one of the most interesting and original of contemporary attempts to justify metaphysical, including theological, language. The main critical question that I want to raise concerns the transition from the first metaphysical category, "I", to the last one, "God." Many would grant that "I" cannot be analyzed without remainder into publically observable states and that it is in this sense metaphysical. But is talk about God as easily justified? Can it properly be claimed that "God is guaranteed to us very much as we are to ourselves" (p. 176). Surely we should have to be God himself in order for his reality to be guaranteed to us in this way. I am aware of myself from the inside and have thus the most absolute possible guarantee that I exist. But I am not aware of God from the standpoint of the divine self-consciousness; and therefore it seems that there must be a large and important difference between the grounds of our assurance of the existence of God and of ourselves. Many philosophers I think may justifiably complain that having established the reality of something metaphysical, namely the "I," Ramsey passes without sufficient further argument to the conclusion that theological language also corresponds to unseen realities which fulfill our theological definitions.

H.D. Lewis ("God and Mystery") finds new relevance and value in an old way of meeting some of the problems of religious belief. He points out that an irreducible element of mystery pervades and limits our awareness of other human beings. Each remains in the inner recesses of his being a mystery to all but himself. There is no direct acquaintance with another's mind; and this is even more true with regard to the mind of God. God is known to us only as the mystery which is "the other and positive side of the impossibility of ultimate fortuitousness" (p. 225). To be religious "is to apprehend a 'beyond' which thought cannot reach but which thought itself requires as its completion" (p. 226).

Lewis holds that we do not infer this Something which saves us from ultimate fortuitousness, but that on the contrary "the initial awareness we have of God is direct or immediate" (p. 231). He has difficulty however in establishing that what he has described is a direct awareness of God rather than of a general and religiously thin idea of God. For

453 - Prospect For Metaphysics: Essays In Metaphysical Exploration

example, he says that our knowledge of God is "a little like knowing that some entity must have another side although we have not the faintest notion what this is like" (p. 233). It will seem to many that Lewis has stressed the mysterious element in the idea of God so heavily that what emerges from his discussion is all mystery and no God. He seems to be pointing to an unspecifiable negation of ultimate meaninglessness, but hardly to a compelling object of human worship. Is there room here for any positive conception of God which would permit a claim concerning divine revelation?

The editor and authors deserve our warmest gratitude but the Philosophical Library's pricing of 240 pages at $6.00 is a greedy disservice to writers readers, and the cause of learning.

John H. Hick
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey