The Case For Opacity
C.S. Lewis and the Limits of Reason
Yesterday, I wrote about Maimonides’s claim that the philosophical project is, or can be, a spiritual one. Yet Maimonides was not only a philosopher; he was also someone who, according to Leo Strauss, believed in the central importance of the Law. Philosophy without law can discover truth, but it may be ethereal, anti-social, unmoored, if it tries to build everything from the ground up. The Law, for Maimonides, says Strauss, grounds society in values that, while unphilosophical or pre-philosophical, are the basis for our ability to get along. Philosophy is the second story on a non-philosophical foundation.
In Heideggerian terms, the Law is a stand-in for our “thrownness”; in Strauss it is a stand in for Revelation.
C.S. Lewis argues how both transparency and opacity make vision possible:
You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.
—C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
What Lewis calls opaque, we might call that which we must use philosophy to see (the world). But if we are seeing it, we are not therefore using it as a means of seeing.
Philosophy is the window; but the world at which we look, and in which we live, is the garden. The Law, Thrownness, Revelation, Tradition, Community—these are terms for that make even first principles thinking seem secondary. Historically speaking, first principles are not first. The first thinkers did not base themselves in first principles. Nor will the last ones.
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