INTRODUCTION

According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 'the Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics in our time' (GL5, 656).

Obviously, this tocsin represents a distinctive, even idiosyncratic, conception of metaphysics, one thoroughly incompatible with any of the standard conceptions of metaphysics in Anglo-American philosophy. For Balthasar, metaphysics and Christian theology are distinct activities, each with its own sources and rules; but neither, he believes, can be properly conducted in ignorance of the other. Christian theologians cannot develop an account of biblical revelation which would pretend to be completely unconnected with pre-Christian and non-Christian traditions of metaphysical thinking. On the other hand, the experience of wonder which is central, in his view, in all philosophical traditions, is now almost completely invisible to philosophers who are not themselves practising Christians. In virtue of the biblically grounded awe at the divine glory which is made available to Christians, liturgically and in ascetical practice, it becomes possible to retrieve the 'experience of being' which, historically, philosophers from the beginning have sought to articulate, and with which any serious philosopher today should wish to engage.

In short, the true guardians of the experience of being are those philosophers who have the faith to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Since the early work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch in Oxford in the 1950s, moral philosophers in the analytic tradition have discussed the viability of reconstructing something like ancient Greek ethics (Plato for Murdoch, Aristotle for the other two) in order to avoid versions of Kantian deontology or of utilitarianism, which then seemed the only choice on the agenda. Now that the latter predominates, the challenge, as Charles Taylor puts it, is to get beyond treating “all goods which are not anchored in human powers or fulfilments as illusions from a bygone age.” That is to say, he wants to open up a nonanthropocentric perspective on the good, to allow us to see the “sovereignty of good” over the moral agent. Sources of the Self, Taylor's major contribution to moral philosophy, is explicitly a “retrieval” of this nonanthropocentric perspective which, as he believes, philosophy since the Enlightenment has been motivated to occlude.

From the beginning of his philosophical career, Taylor has sought to relieve us of philosophical theorising that seems misguided or blinkered. He detected behaviourism at work in influential psychological theories (section 1). He sees modern moral philosophy concerned only with doing right at the expense of considering what the good for human beings actually is (sections 2 and 3). He contends that the ancient belief in the objectivity of the good is still at work in everyday moral behaviour, however confusing and undermining modern philosophical theories are of this idea (sections 4 and 5).

The philosophy of religion, as commonly understood by Christians in both the Catholic and Reformed traditions, whether they think it a worthwhile enterprise or not, begins with arguments for the existence of a deity, proceeds to show that this deity is necessarily unique, eternal, and suchlike, and leaves it to reflection on divine revelation to consider whether this deity might be properly designated as ‘three persons in one nature’. Much later, after discussing the metaphysical implications of the incarnation of the second person of the triune godhead, one would arrive at theories about the death of Jesus Christ as putatively redemptive, and describable as sacrificial, atoning and the like.

Some good work has been done recently on how, when and why this paradigm established itself in Christianity. Plainly, its origins lie in Greek philosophy, as L. P. Gerson (1990) has recently demonstrated with great thoroughness. Subsequently, at the Enlightenment, philosophers started to look for natural explanations for the existence of religion. The supernatural claims of Christianity rapidly became a matter of secondary interest as all the intellectual energy went into discussing the rational foundations of theistic belief, as Buckley (1987), Preus (1987) and Byrne (1989), among others, have recently shown.

Suppose, however, that, instead of beginning from what is logically antecedent and perhaps even extraneous to the Christian religion, one were to focus straightaway on what might seem to an outsider the most arcane and esoteric, if not even the most implausible and unpalatable, of all Christian doctrines—that the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth is to be regarded as a ‘sacrifice’ which ‘reveals’ our ‘sin’ and offers ‘redemption’: what sense might we derive from such a proposal?

In a footnote to the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787) Kant remarked that ‘it still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence [Dasein] of things outside us … must be accepted on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof' (B XL). In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger remarks, somewhat less famously, that the scandal of philosophy, far from being the continuing absence of philosophically satisfactory proof of the existence of the world outside human subjectivity, is rather the very idea that such proof need be sought at all: ‘If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it’ (BT, 205).

In other words, the familiar problems of scepticism about the existence of the external world collapse as soon as the place of human beings in the world is properly identified—an attractive thesis, if Heidegger can substantiate it. We need seek no ‘proofs’; we need only remind ourselves of the facts. We are, from the outset, beings-in-the-world. There is no problem about the relation between subjectivity and the objective world. How we are is revelatory of the world. Heidegger's choice of the ordinary word ‘Dasein’, meaning ‘existence’ as in the Kant quotation, to designate the manner of being enjoyed by creatures like ourselves, is of course arbitrary and idiosyncratic, but his purpose is to exploit the word's etymological structure.

This essay is concerned with the dispute between realists and idealists, particularly in the form given to it in the immensely influential work of Michael Dummett, because Donald MacKinnon has insisted on its importance for theologians. That they should pay much more attention to their philosophical presuppositions is something that he has urged, not without some success, over many years. The reopening of the controversy may, however, prompt an attempt, not to resolve it so much as to make it superfluous. It will be suggested, at any rate, that the work of Charles Taylor, although at present much less influential, offers a perspective which it would be more fruitful for theologians to explore.

That Donald MacKinnon has conducted an anti-idealist campaign throughout his career need not be documented at great length. As an undergraduate at Oxford in 1934 he found himself being liberated from the theologically seductive doctrines of the British idealists by having to study the writings of the Cambridge realists, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. In 1935, as another autobiographical note discloses, he was taken by Isaiah Berlin to hear John Wisdom deliver a paper on Moore and Wittgenstein. If he appreciated how Wisdom had made his own Wittgenstein's ‘emancipating insight’ that we are philosophically misled by the habit of supposing the meaning of a word to be an object, he also responded positively to Wisdom's communication of ‘the ruthlessly honest meticulous realism of Moore’.