How do Thomists do Philosophy?
It’s probably easiest to begin answering the title question by briefly charting the chronology of any given thinker’s engagement with Thomism. The opening question should then be re-stated in the simpler form: How does one become a Thomist? Though this might not seem like an obvious place to start, my reason for answering the question in this way should make sense by the end. And I will begin by doing so initially from the perspective of my own encounter with and subsequent engagement of Thomism.
When I first encountered the thought of Aquinas, I entered into engagement with his writings with interest, openness, and enthusiasm. He was put before me by my teachers as a trusted figure of the Western philosophical (and theological) tradition, as someone from whom I would gain much if I attend to his writings with some degree of focus. When I then immersed myself in his thought-world, I found a figure in possession of penetrating and acute insight, one who displayed an uncommon clarity of expression together with ability to organize his thought into a coherent whole, and, most importantly, one whose arguments and their conclusions sounded with the ring of truth.
Having experienced Aquinas’ genius in this first-personal way, I then set myself the task of coming to a basic comprehension of the Thomistic system. This, I believe, is the first task of a Thomist: to comprehend the conceptual worldview of Aquinas—in each of its most important parts, and in their intelligible interconnection as a unified whole. This initially involves coming to an appreciation of the meaning of the principles upon which Aquinas’ system is founded, the concepts out of which his schema is constituted, the propositions formed of these concepts together with their conceptual interconnections, and the arguments by which the whole structure is knit together as a logically articulated whole. In the end this involves nothing else that ‘following’ the intelligibility of Aquinas system from foundation to gable, outlining for oneself the discrete structure of each of the components, while learning to trace the logic uniting these parts with one another, before finally stepping back and ‘seeing’ the coherence of the whole.
Yet, after having achieved this kind of understanding (at least to a basic degree), the work of the Thomist is only just beginning. The budding Thomist must then proceed with the further task of bringing Aquinas’ system back to the world, so that the whole schematic (in all its parts and as an interconnected whole) can be ‘tested’ against the realities purported to be illuminated. And this is to say that the thinker must think through Aquinas’ system in the presence of the realities identified and explicated, in order to see for him or herself that these realities are illuminated and clarified, rather than veiled and obscured. This is to see the world through the lens of Aquinas’ schema; it is to bring things into due resolution by focusing on these same things with the aid of his concepts.
Just so, the conceptual schema of Aquinas must be ‘proven’ by each thinker... but proven not simply as validated, but rather as validated for the thinker him or herself, live and first-personally. This is an absolutely necessary moment of understanding, for we simply cannot adhere to any system of thought, including the Thomistic worldview, with genuine intellectual assent if we do not see the matter for ourselves, with clarity of sight, with evidence. Before proving a system in this way, one has only accomplished a task proper to the history of philosophy, where some theory is brought into relief and understood in itself. But if one is to accomplish the proper task of a philosopher as such, then the thought has to be made one’s own by the kind of understanding that sees it is so. Therefore, it is only in this way, by seeing reality actually illuminate by the Thomistic system, that one becomes a Thomist.
And yet again, having achieved this deeper kind of understanding, the work of the Thomist is still only in its first beginnings, for all genuine Thomists have the further twofold task of teaching the thought of Aquinas, in addition to doing research in a Thomistic vein, while applying Aquinas’ thought to philosophical problems both old and new. At times, this latter venture will involve refining and extending Aquinas’ system, by first making explicit what is already implicit, and by then drawing further conclusions from his principles and arguments. This effort brings further degrees of completion to Aquinas’ system, slowly and gradually through time and history, with each new generation taking up the baton and passing it on to the next.
Across all these domains, then, we see that the genuine Thomist looks toward reality in order to attain a clear and insightful understand of its structure and meaning from a definitively Thomistic perspective. Inasmuch as time-tested system of Aquinas has borne abundant fruit at the hands of countless thinkers over the course of these eight centuries since his life, while solving innumerable problems ranging from the simple yet profound to the complex and involved, I would argue that Thomism has proven itself to be a system of thought worthy of close attention and study, understanding and application. It is, therefore, worthwhile to do philosophy in the way Thomists do philosophy.
