Paul Tillich died in 1965 in the era of the rise of space science and with a world full of regional wars and conflicts. For non-commerical or vocational Christians it was failure easy to overlook his work. Tillich was very well known along with Karl Barth to most Protestant Christians, yet I wonder how well read he was to philosophers.
Reading Tillich's essays published in 1926 (and thtis version in 1965) brings an awareness of his role in bridging the gaps amidst many philosophical systems that grew in that time. One may find an empirical and epistemological vein following science and an avenue of the development of the philosophy of logic and language regarding the empirical. Tillich developed a way of regarding a scientific worldview and of culture concurrently existing with alternative and even trancending ontology. That is the unconditional.
Before the rise of science when the world was not well understood from a mechanical point of view it was simpler for the religious inclined to have a naive view of the world-experience as a manifestation of the unconditional. The maya or illusory nature of temporal things was self-evident and stimulated even the Athenian philosophers such as Aristotle to find underlying principles of material changes and to develop structures in logic and language to represent those relationships. That inquiry was parelled in plain materrial scientific research.
Religion can be a cultural affair as well as an encounter with the unconditional. Modern afficiandos of science have often attacked the cultural aspects of religion, yet the scientific worldview fails in its essential voacation to grasp the worlod-experience of things-in-themselves-the unconditional. Paul TIllich's early work in his career helps to illuminate the tripartite classification of human epistemology regarding ontology.
I enjoyed finding Tillich's excellent comments on Kant and Hegel and of the formulation of meaning-reality paradigmata within a subjective database for regarding reality. Sure science provides excellent data-yet it isn't exclusive and exhaustive informing a human being about the meaning or being of reality for-itself.
Tillich provides a way of regarding metaphysics as a religious intuition rather than of a greater physics such as I have prevalently considered it to be in recent times. For example one has a variety of cosmological theories and might extrapolate what is 'beyond' the known. Tillich's parameter for metaphysics is not like that.
Having read Schopenhuaer, Kant and Hegel it is helpful to to find Tillich to be a philosopher of religion able to place traditional classical westernn metaphysics within a context that isn't antipathetic to Plotinus' Enneads and view of the One.
The wikipedia page below on TIllich refers to Origin as having a view of the 'unoriginate' that is probably something like Plotinus's idea about 'The One'. In the book I am reading I think the translator uses the term 'the unconditional' to mean 'the unoriginate'.
That idea of God as not requiring anything to prove he exists, or scientific classification that would reduce Him to some sort of creature is as valid now as then. The immanence of a transcendent point of view of reality is always a good thing to have about in the busy world of secularism and science today.
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