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A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge
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Wiatn hei wn trobdtyuh aceut tihoonr
TransacPtuibolni shers
NewB runswi(cUk. Sa.nAdL. o)n do(nU .K.)
New material this edition copyright © 1994 by Transaction Publishers, New
Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. Originally published in 1965 by The Macmillan
Company, New York. "Appendix: God in the Colleges .. originally appeared in
Harper's Magazine, 1961.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven
tions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transn1itted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing
from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers,
Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 94-2300
ISB1N-5:6000 -741-9
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Novak, Michael.
Belief and unbelief : a philosophy of self-knowledge / Michael Novak.
- 3rd. ed., expanded with a new introd. by the author.
p. cn1.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56000-741-9
1. Belief and doubt. 2. Self-knowledge, Theory of. 3. God.
BD215.N6 1994
121'.6-dc20 94-2300
CIP
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Transaction Edition lX
Prefa ce to the 1986 Edition 3
Preface 9
INTRODUCATD IIOANL:E CTIINCQAULI RY
1. Toward Civil Conversation 15
2. Tke Attraction of Atheism 18
3. Tke Task of Our Inquiry 24
4. A Dialectical, Not Formal, Mode 29
35
1:T HEC ULTURCAOLN TEXT
1. Tke "Post-Religious" Age 35
44
2. Clarifications: Belief and Fa itk
55
2:P HILOSOAPSSH EYL F-KNOWLEDGE
1. In tke Beginning Comes Decision 55
2. Types of Self-Knowledge 62
3: 75
DECIDWIHNOGI A M
1. Subject World and Object World 75
2. Wkat Is a Man? 81
3. The Drive to Understand 101
4: 7
WHATD OI M EANB Y" GO"?D 10
1. In Prayer 107
2. Rules for a Language about God 114·
3. Tke Hidden God 123
Contents
5: 34
DECIDING \VHETHER TO BELIEVE 1
1. What Is Real? 134
2. Into the Presence of God 149
6: 59
GOD OR EVIL 1
1. The Irrational 159
2. The Good God 165
3. The Two Mysteries 171
75
7:
AN EFFECTIVE HUMANISM 1
175
1. God Against Man
2. Corruption and Community 182
Epilogue 189
Appendix: God in the Colleges 193
Notes 210
A Selected Bibliography 227
Index
235
INTRODUCTION TO THE
TRANSACTION EDITION
As in the second edition of this book, published by Uni
1985,
versity Press of America in I have decided to leave the
main body of the text intact. That original inquiry presents
enduring argu1nents e1nbedded in a vivid, concrete context,
and not much is to be gained, and much lost, by recasting
them.
Most of the original manuscript had been written before
the murder of my brother Richard in Bangladesh (as it now
16, 1964.
is) on January Dick's death added to the passion
informing the argument, which had been taking shape
through lectures that I was then giving at the Catholic Cen
ter at Harvard.
As I noted in the preface to the UPA edition, my brother
was a missionary priest of the Holy Cross Fathers, and was
then studying Arabic for a future career, he hoped, as a
scholar of Islam; he was also teaching at Notre Dame College
in Dacca. During the Muslim-Hindu riots of that time he went
to the assistance of an elderly priest living alone in an area
outside Dacca where the danger was most intense, but at a
time when fears had somewhat receded. With his usual cool
ness (my private nickname for him was "the Lionhearted")
he set out by bicycle for the twelve-mile trip, was waylaid by
young river pirates on the ferry across the swollen and al
ready corpse-strewn river, and ( as testimony at the trial of
.
1X
x Introduction to the Transaction Edition
the culprits later came out, supported by the slashed condi
tion of the cassock he had been wearing) died by a knife
wound to the chest. He was twenty-seven, wi , thin. Just yes
ry
terday, I mailed the broken glasses he had been wearing, long
ago sent to the family, to the archives of his alma mater
Stonehill College, in North Easton, Massachusetts.
Some early readers thought that my brother's senseless
death had precipitated in me a crisis of faith, to which this
book was an answer. That is not really true. I had been ,vork
ing in the darkness that is quite normal to genuine belief in
God (as also to unbelievers) for quite some time. In a sense,
I preferred the darkness; it is a surer place. What I can't deny
is that my brother's death added to the intensity of my ,vords
and to the desire to make eve sentence as true and clear as
ry
I could make it. It seemed that I owed him that much. He
and I had from time to time discussed such matters, recotn
mended books to each other, even shared some poetry. He
understood the darkness.
So the reader will understand, perhaps, ,vhy I resist the
thought of altering the words I wrote at that time, poor as
they may be. They stand as pay1nent on my debt to 1ny
younger brother.
As noted, � was at Harvard ,vhen these pages were ,vritten,
a Harvard whose philosophy department ,vas dominated by
Willard V.0. Quine, whichjohn Ra,vls had just joined. It was
a Harvard as yet unshaken by the events that ,vere soon to
shatt�r the calm of Harvard Yard, the protests of radical stu
dents followed by a succession of other protests. The peace
of the Enlightentnent still reigned. (In a piece for Harper's
Magazine, "God in the Colleges," I tried to capture the intel
lectual co1nplacence of the tnoment. See Appendix.) Confi
dence in reason ,vas at an apogee, even if it ,vas often a
kind of 1nathen1atical, scientific, logical reason, mixed ,vith
an underlying 1nanagerial pragmatism. I didn't find intellec-
.
Introduction to the Transaction Edition
Xl
tual kinship there, although I did find much decency and
courtesy. My own sources were ancient and medieval, and
my own intellectual passions ran more in the direction of
various European writers such as the existentialists and
phenomenologists. In addition, I was deeply interested in
problems of literature and fiction, !iaving just published a
first novel, The Tiber was Silver based upon my experiences
in Rome, where I had studied for two years. I am afraid
that, though I learned much and was never sorry to have
chosen Harvard, Harvard philosophy at the time did not much
impress me. It seemed to me too thin and airless, much
like the logic-chopping medieval Scholasticism that I was most
in flight from. Rawls arrived too late to nourish my long
standing interest in approaching philosophy through ethics.
In a sense, then, this book represented my alternative to
Harvard philosophy. Its subtitle, "A Philosophy of Intelligent
Subjectivity," was also intended to mark out a life's work for
me. I suspected at the time that my way toward that goal
would be circuitous, like the ascent up a mountain, for I
thought, on the one hand, that metaphysics is best approached
through ethics, and ethics through politics; and, on the other
hand, that to write well on politics, ethics, and finally the
deeper and larger things, a student ought first to seek out
experiences in those areas that bring knowledge, so to speak,
through the tips of the fingers. The French philosopher
Jacques Maritain (a hero of mine then and now) once quoted
Aristotle as saying that no one could write well about ethics
or metaphysics until he was at least fifty years old; too many
matters of experience are at stake. This is not literally true,
of course; Thomas Aquinas died, like Boethius, at forty-nine;
and no one has ever been able to show me a more brilliant
discussion of ethics than Aquinas' Commentary on Aristotle's
Ethics, which line-by-line sets forth two of the most powerful
and practical ethical discussions in history, that of the pre-
xii Introduction to the Transaction Edition
Christian Greeks and that of a brilliant Christian drawing
upon some 120ye0ar s of further Christian experience and
reflection. (Aquinas knew well the Muslim and Jewish writ
ers of the time and drew on their works, too. He was also
one of the first men in the West to have under his eyes the
newly discovered text of the Nicomachean Ethics, lost for more
than a thousand years but freshly translated into Latin for
him by his friend William Moerbeke.)
To make a long story short, after leaving Harvard for 1ny
first teaching position, at Stanford, I began a long journey
through various explorations of politics, ethnicity, culture,
and sports, including a necessary detour through certain con
troversial investigations into a taboo subject, the moral stand
ing of capitalistn.
I am ready now to take up again where this book left off,
in an attempt to give a philosophical account of the f ounda
tions of the free society; these lie in the accord behveen "the
truth of things" and human consciousness, habits, and insti
tutions. To accomplish this is to give a full account of "or
dered liberty," and thus of "intelligent subjectivity." Thus,
Belief and Unbelief is the point at which I began the long jour
ney of my mature ,work, and I need soon to close the circle.
Since that time ahnost thirty years ago ,vhen this book ,vas
being written, of course, the word "foundations" has beco1ne
a much contested word, particularly through the '\\rork of
Richard Rorty. Rorty holds that the ancient-to-1nodern Euro
pean quest for "foundations" is mistaken, and that the A1neri
can quest, initiated particularly by John De,vey, for an
"anti-foundational" approach (via solidarity, pragmatism, and
open-1ninded inquiry) represents a 1nore ethical, 1nore hu-
1nane, and politically tnore successful intellectual approach.
To this end, Rorty again and again attacks the ideal of "ob
jectivity," and tries to replace it ,vith the ideal of "solidarity."
Two texts 1nay stand as shorthand for his position:
Introduction to the Transaction Edition
x111
The desire for "objectivity" boils down to a desire to ac
quire beliefs which will eventually receive unforced agree
ment in the course of a free and open encounter with people
holding other beliefs.
Pragmatists would like to replace the desire for objectiv
ity-the desire to be in touch with a reality which is more
than some communit with which we.identify ourselves-with
y
the desire for solidarity with that comn1unity.
For Rorty, in the one case, the yearning for objectivity is to
be boiled down; in the other, it is to be replaced. In both
cases, Rorty is at war with objectivity but not with rationality
and reasoned discourse. In both cases, too, Rorty is not pro
posing a vision of the isolated individual-self-enclosed, and
walled-off from others-but, quite clearly, a vision of humans
in-community. (One might even call Rorty's vision, in a bow
to its more or less hidden roots in the work of his grandfa
ther, Walter Rauschenbusch, a secular version of the Protes
tant "social gospel.")
The attentive reader will already have noted that my own
conception of "intelligent subjectivity" must have some rela
tionship to Rorty's effort to move beyond the tradition of
objectivity. But what relation? This is not the place to offer a
full-dress contrast between Rorty's view and my own, or even
to mark out all the places where I am not persuaded to fol
low him, and to point out all the turns I think he should have
taken, but missed. Nonetheless, in introducing a work which
departed from the well-trod (but deceptive) path of "objec
tivity"-and which deliberately invoked both "intelligence" and
"subjectivity" in its subtitle-I owe the reader at least a sketch
of some similarities and differences.
First of all, both Rorty and I have been influenced (t o dif
ferent degrees and in different traditions) by Christian phi
losophy. Rorty, for example, has noted that philosophers
today may owe considerably more to the teachings of Jesus
