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VII. Is Progress in Philosophy Indefinite, or Is There a Philosophia Perennis?
"Considering the historic succession of systems and the evolution of doctrines from the remotest ages of India down to our own times, and standing face to face with the progress achieved by contemporary scientific philosophy, must we not infer the indefinite progress of philosophic thought? Many have allowed themselves to be led away by this ideal dream. Historic Idealism (Karl Marx) regards philosophy as a product fatally engendered by pre-existing causes in our physical and social environment. Auguste Comte’s “law of the three states”, Herbert Spencer’s evolutionism Hegel’s “indefinite becoming of the soul”, sweep philosophy along in an ascending current toward an ideal perfection, the realization of which no one can foresee. For all these thinkers, philosophy is variable and relative: therein lies their serious error. Indefinite progress, condemned by history in many fields, is untenable in the history of philosophy. Such a notion is evidently refuted by the appearance of thinkers like Aristotle and Plato three centuries before Christ, for these men, who for ages have dominated, and still dominate, human thought, would be anachronisms, since they would be inferior to the thinkers of our own time. And no one would venture to assert this. History shows, indeed, that there are adaptations of a synthesis to its environment, and that every age has its own aspirations and its special way of looking at problems and their solutions; but it also presents unmistakable evidence of incessant new beginnings, of rhythmic oscillations from one pole of thought to the other. If Kant found an original formula of Subjectivism and the reine Innerlichkeit, it would be a mistake to think that Kant had no intellectual ancestors: he had them in the earliest historic ages of philosophy: M. Deussen has found in the Vedic hymn of the Upanishads the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, and writes, on the theory of Mâyâ, “Kants Grunddogma, so alt wie die Philosophie” (“Die Philos. des Upanishad’s”, Leipzig, 1899, p. 204).
“It is false to say that all truth is relative to a given time and latitude, and that philosophy is the product of economic conditions in a ceaseless course of evolution, as historical Materialism holds. Side by side with these things, which are subject to change and belong to one particular condition of the life of mankind, there is a soul of truth circulating in every system, a mere fragment of that complete and unchangeable truth which haunts the human mind in its most disinterested investigations. Amid the oscillations of historic systems there is room for a philosophia perennis – as it were a purest atmosphere of truth, enveloping the ages, its clearness somehow felt in spite of cloud and mist. “The truth Pythagoras sought after, and Plato, and Aristotle, is the same that Augustine and Aquinas pursued. So far as it is developed in history, truth is the daughter of time; so far as it bears within itself a content independent of time, and therefore of history, it is the daughter of eternity” [Willmann, “Gesch. d Idealismus”, II (Brunswick, 1896), 55O; cf. Commer “Die immerwahrende Philosophie” (Vienna, 1899)]. This does not mean that essential and permanent verities do not adapt themselves to the intellectual life of each epoch. Absolute immobility in philosophy, no less than absolute relativity, is contrary to nature and to history. It leads to decadence and death. It is in this sense that we must interpret the adage: Vita in motu.”
From Philosophy at the Jacques Maritain Center
