Edward Feser’s recent commentary on Étienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience is a fascinating read—but not necessarily for the reasons Feser himself might intend. He offers a summary of Gilson’s historical argument, tracing how metaphysical errors—often caused by attempts to reduce metaphysics to some narrower discipline—have led to intellectual dead-ends. Yet, despite the elegance of the historical overview, it is not at all clear how Edward is approaching these matters critically. In fact, one gets the impression that he is too entangled in the same tradition he seeks to clarify.
You might suppose from the title of Etienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience that it is a book about philosophy in general. And ultimately it is. But its bulk is devoted to detailed accounts of the ideas of thinkers Gilson regards as having gotten things badly wrong, such as Abelard, Ockham, Descartes, Malebranche, Kant, and Comte. There is relatively little about thinkers Gilson regards as having gotten things largely right, such as Aristotle and Aquinas. This might seem odd. For the sympathetic reader might suppose that the experience of philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas should surely count as least as much as (indeed, more than) that of more wayward thinkers, when elucidating the nature of philosophy.
But such a reaction would reflect a misunderstanding of the book’s title. “Philosophical experience,” as Gilson uses the phrase, has nothing to do with some way of life or psychological profile that philosophers share in common. He’s not concerned with “what it’s like to be a philosopher,” as Thomas Nagel might say. A clue to what he does mean is provided by the titles he gives the book’s first three parts, viz. “The Medieval Experiment,” “The Cartesian Experiment,” and “The Modern Experiment.” The “experience” referred to in Gilson’s title is analogous to the experience on which empirical science rests. It has to do with a kind of experimentation to which certain philosophical ideas have, in a way, been put.
What way is that? Gilson holds that “the history of philosophy is to the philosopher what his laboratory is to the scientist” (p. 95). The theories of empirical science entail predictions which can be tested by observation. By contrast, metaphysical theories, which concern matters that transcend what can be observed, cannot be tested that way. All the same, such theories also have their entailments, and if a metaphysical theory leads to conclusions that are incoherent or otherwise known to be false, then we have grounds for rejecting it. Now, given the limitations of the individual human intellect, not all the implications of a metaphysical theory are ever worked out or understood by the individual thinker who came up with it. We need to look to what his successors had to say in developing further the thinker’s premises, taking them in new directions, criticizing them, and so on. Hence it is to the history of philosophy, rather than to the laboratory, that we must look in order to test metaphysical theories. The “experiments” to which such a theory is put are, essentially, embodied in the historical record of what happened as the theory was developed and criticized in this way.
Take, for instance, the treatment of Peter Abelard. Gilson criticizes Abelard for reducing metaphysical questions to issues of logic. But this seems like a shallow way to frame the issue. What neither of them appears to fully acknowledge is the sheer intellectual acrobatics someone like Abelard had to perform just to rationalize Christian dogma. Abelard’s work is not simply “logicism” gone awry—it is the product of a historical struggle to harmonize reason with faith. Rather than pick apart Abelard’s philosophy as a free-floating error, we should first recognize that he belongs to a larger intellectual tradition: Scholasticism. And that approach itself is deeply problematic, precisely because it begins with premises that are not up for examination—namely, theological ones.
But here is the real irony: Edward Feser is no neutral observer. He believes in the soul. He advances a largely Catholic metaphysical framework. And this puts him in the very position that distorts his reading of the philosophers he critiques. He cannot simply say that Scholasticism was a dead-end or that reducing metaphysics to logic was, in Abelard’s case, a desperate attempt to square belief with reason. He’s too committed to preserving the same structure Abelard was struggling within. As a result, he ties himself up in the same knots and is unable to untangle himself.
This makes it remarkably easy for someone like me—who is not bound by such dogmatic commitments—to critique Feser’s position. It’s not that everything he says is wrong. In fact, it’s sometimes illuminating. But the lens through which he views the history of philosophy is so skewed by his theological commitments that it warps his conclusions. And so it is up to the reader to figure out which part he gets right and which part he gets wrong. So, that makes his work less than satisfactory. The very idea that modern philosophy is a “synthesis of all metaphysical errors” is, frankly, the kind of sweeping dismissal one can only make if one is nostalgic for a lost metaphysical order—usually a medieval one—rather than genuinely curious about what modern thinkers were trying to accomplish.
In short: Gilson’s book may be worth reading for its historical insights, but Feser’s reading of it—like much of neo-Scholasticism—tells us more about the anxieties of Catholic metaphysicians than it does about the true dynamics of philosophical progress. And that, in itself, is a kind of “philosophical experience” worth thinking about.