Content area
Full text
RECONSIDERATION
I
We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason. There are some who offend against these three rules, either by affirming everything as demonstrative, from want of knowing what demonstration is; or by doubting everything, from want of knowing where to submit; or by submitting in everything, from want of knowing where they must judge.-Blaise Pascal1
PASCAL'S SUBTLE LIMNING OF BELIEF and doubt and the need to be firm in both would have appealed to Josef Pieper. Pieper approved of Pascal's contributions to the seventeenth-century debate over the validity of tradition because it allowed for a clear distinction between the factbased truth-claims of empirical science and the tradition-based truth-claims of theology.' If one understood the nature of these different truth-claims one would indeed know "where to doubt [and] where to feel certain." The doctrine of falsifiability is integral to the self-understanding of the natural sciences to this day. Tradition, on the other hand, which for Pieper ultimately derives from revelation, proclaims certainties. Pieper's long essay on tradition in the pages of Modern Age (Spring 1994) specifically endorses tradition as "a dynamic matter," though, inviting reason to cooperate with faith in one's willing acceptance of that which is handed down, the traditum. As American society at large uncritically applauds scientific progress for its own sake while endangering the skepticism which responsible science maintains at its core, Pieper's decidedly untimely meditations on being-in-theworld, his habit of pronouncing the world good ("gutheissen") and of affirming the value of the individual deserve reconsideration.
American readers encountering the life and work of Josef Pieper are required to perform the labor of cultural translation. As a German, a Catholic philosopher, a conservative sociologist, a writer of crisp and deliberate prose, a man whose lifetime measured the entire breadth of the twentieth century (19041997), Pieper may be no less remote from our world than Ralph Waldo Emerson with whom he shares the gift of clear and distinct expression though none of his other attributes. If all of Pieper's attributes are potential obstacles to our appreciation of his work, they can at the same time become pathways for us to travel towards him. The...