The wise reason

“The crisis of modernity is not synonymous with the decline of philosophy. Philosophy, indeed, must commit itself to a new course of research, to understand the real nature of this crisis and to identify new prospects towards which to direct itself”. For modernity, if “rightly understood”, reveals an “anthropological question”, which is the central theme of our time, and requires “a new programme, a more exact understanding of the nature of man”, remarked Benedict XVI in the audience he granted to the university teachers who had gathered for the 6th Symposium organized by the Office of University Pastoral Care of the Vicariate of Rome, in collaboration with the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe (CCEE) and the Pontifical Lateran University. Held in Rome from 5 to 8 June, the symposium was devoted to the theme: “Widening the horizons of rationality. Prospects for philosophy”. “The increased credence that some authors give to religions, and to Christianity in particular, is a clear sign of the sincere desire to wrest philosophical reflection from self-sufficiency”, said the Pope, who spoke of a “revival of philosophy and of its irreplaceable role”. There were over 400 participants at the meeting, 65 speakers, from 26 countries. On the final day the symposium was addressed by Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council of Culture. Knowledge – he said – is not “possession of truth”, but an “exploration” in the “infinite space of truth”. It is, therefore, a “religious act”.The tetrahedron of rationality. “For many scientists, transcendence is difficult to accept”, because “it is seen as an unjustified departure” from the “solidity” of science, declared the Italian physicist Ugo Amaldi. Scientific knowledge is based on the “here and now”, on the “rational application of procedures” that operate “a selection”, excluding “mistaken or incoherent observations and criteria” to “describe, predict and act”. But “scientific problems are only a tiny fraction of the general questions posed by man”. To find satisfactory answers to “existential questions”, we need a “wise knowledge, often a religion”. Reason, therefore, is like a “tetrahedron”: all its faces concur to respond to the “fundamental questions: what is true? What is good?” According to the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, philosophy has “the characteristic of not having fixed limits, in contrast to other sciences”, and therefore “it is able to decide what it can know or, more precisely, what it can have the ambition to think of”. “If philosophic reason is reduced to objectivity, to the empiricism of the exact sciences”, it then “renounces its own dominion of research and loses hermeneutic authority”. The exact sciences reason “according to laws and measurements”, but they leave open the question of “what resists the laws of objectivity”. The idea of God cannot be reduced to “the religious phenomenon”. “The horizons of reason transcend the phenomenal world: they expand into the area of “indefinite, in other words, positively infinite” knowledge. Reason comes into play. In the view of the German theologian Bernhard Casper, we need to “ask ourselves whether there are no unobserved” and “decisive” presuppositions in the modern understanding of rationality. Some philosophers, such as Levinas, emphasize the importance of “man’s encounter with the other person”, “not only as part of a world in which he lives and reacts according to biological, psychological and sociological laws, but as someone who takes a position as a person in his own self in relation to every type of scientific legality”. Reason comes “into play” by “involving man in his totality in such a request for unconditional meaning”. In this way “faith becomes fides quaerens intellectum“. It stimulates “a human rationality that takes seriously its own temporality and the original act of self-giving to the other person that is implicit in all knowledge”. Synthesis of knowledge. “Science – it was underlined on the final day of the symposium – cannot be considered as a unified and coherent universe”. “Questions are posed that science alone cannot answer”. That’s why we need a “synthesis of knowledge in a perspective of wisdom”. Religion has “an intrinsic reasonableness”. “Its specificity is the opening to the Other, ever new, who must be encountered in all his manifestations”. The “central question” of contemporary culture, however, is: “who is man?”. “We need to start out anew from this question to rethink the nature of reason, since it poses questions to which scientific, calculating rationality is unable to provide answers”. “Man is able to attain a unified vision of knowledge”, because “however innumerable are the forms of knowledge, there is only one subject” who “knows, prays, loves, creates art, forms a family, works…”. And “Christianity has much to offer” for a “synthesis of faith and reason”: “the Logos that became flesh helps us to understand reason both in its historical and its ontological dimension”.