Why Has It Become Unintelligible to Ask the Question as to Why the Vocation of Intelligibility has Itself Become Unintelligible?

This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores the conditions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical foundations of Christian belief. It proceeds from the conviction that theology exists because these questions exist and that theology's first responsibility is to render Christian doctrine intelligible without diminishing, translating away, or replacing the reality to which it refers.

In the previous reflection I suggested that Christian theology's contemporary difficulties may not be primarily theological. They may instead reflect something far more comprehensive: a culture in which the very vocation of seeking to understand reality has itself become difficult to recognize as a genuinely human calling. If that suggestion is even approximately correct, however, another question immediately presents itself. How has it become possible for this loss to occur almost unnoticed? Or, stated more precisely, why has it become unintelligible even to ask why the vocation of intelligibility has itself become unintelligible?

The question is easily misunderstood. I am not asking why fewer students major in philosophy, why theology occupies a smaller place within the modern university, or why technology has displaced contemplation as a dominant cultural value. These are important historical developments, and they deserve careful explanation. Yet every historical explanation already presupposes something that I increasingly find remarkable.

Whenever we explain an historical development, we assume that history itself is intelligible. Whenever we offer a genealogy of an idea or an institution, we assume that the genealogy genuinely illuminates what occurred. Whenever we distinguish a better explanation from a worse one, we assume that reality is sufficiently ordered that our explanations can become more or less adequate to it.

The point is not subtle, but it is surprisingly easy to overlook.

Every attempt to explain the eclipse of intelligibility already exercises the very vocation whose eclipse it seeks to explain.

That observation has gradually convinced me that the deepest question before us cannot simply be historical. A genealogy of the disappearance of intelligibility, however illuminating, cannot finally explain the conditions that make genealogy itself possible. Every historical account already presupposes that the past may be truthfully understood. Every explanation already assumes that inquiry itself is capable of yielding genuine understanding. History therefore cannot finally explain the possibility of historical explanation. It can only exercise it.

This has led me to suspect that the phenomenon requiring philosophical attention is not first secularization, modernity, technology, or even theology. It is inquiry itself.

Human beings are remarkable creatures. We do not simply react to our environments. We seek to understand them. We construct interpretations. We formulate hypotheses. We revise judgments that prove inadequate. We compare explanations. We abandon some models while refining others. The scientist does this. The historian does this. The physician, the mechanic, the judge, and the child gradually learning how the world works all participate in the same remarkably familiar activity.

The familiarity of inquiry may explain why we so seldom pause to ask what kind of phenomenon it actually is.

The point is not that inquiry succeeds perfectly. Quite the contrary. We discover its character precisely because our interpretations continually encounter resistance. Reality refuses to accommodate every construction equally well. Some explanations illuminate what confronts us; others gradually reveal their inadequacy. We discover, often reluctantly, that not every way of thinking about the world proves equally capable of making sense of what the world presents to us.

For many years I have found myself returning to Alfred North Whitehead's observation that philosophy, no less than science, advances through the construction of models whose adequacy is continually tested by experience. We imagine possibilities, but reality does not leave every possibility standing. Something constrains our constructions. Some models continue to illuminate the phenomena before us, while others eventually collapse beneath the weight of what they cannot explain. The important point, at least for the present reflection, is not what that constraining "something" ultimately is. The philosophical question comes earlier.

What kind of activity is it that continually seeks more adequate understanding?

This question has become increasingly important to me because I suspect that much contemporary philosophy begins too late. We debate realism and anti-realism, naturalism and theism, idealism and materialism, long before we have adequately reflected upon the phenomenon all of these positions seek to explain. We argue over competing ontologies before asking what sort of activity inquiry itself must be if any ontology is ever to become rationally preferable to another.

Perhaps this is one reason the larger question has become so difficult even to formulate. We have become extraordinarily accomplished at conducting inquiries while rarely inquiring into inquiry itself. We have become skilled at offering explanations while seldom asking what kind of world makes explanation possible. We have become adept at constructing theories while largely neglecting the more fundamental question of what it means for one theory genuinely to illuminate reality more adequately than another.

I increasingly suspect that this neglect is not accidental. It may instead reveal something distinctive about the intellectual horizon within which we now live. We continue to exercise the vocation of intelligibility every day, yet we seldom pause to wonder what kind of phenomenon that vocation actually is. Like breathing, inquiry has become so familiar that it has largely disappeared from view.

Whether this observation proves philosophically fruitful remains to be seen. At present it functions less as a conclusion than as an invitation. Before asking whether reality is ultimately material or spiritual, finite or infinite, personal or impersonal, perhaps we should first ask a simpler question. What are we doing when we genuinely seek to understand anything at all?

The more I reflect upon that question, the more I suspect that it may be one of the most neglected philosophical questions of our time.