Resenha de dois livros recentes do Haldane, um conhecido filósofo católico tomista analítico, da University of St Andrews, a mais antiga universidade da Escócia, fundada em 1413. Digo conhecido, naturalmente, no mundo de língua inglesa, porque não parece ser o caso, no país com a maior população católica do mundo.
Seeking Meaning and Making Sense by John Haldane, Imprint Academic £8.95
The Church and the World: Essays Catholic and Contemporary by John Haldane, Gracewing £9.99
There was a time, John Haldane reminds us, when philosophers cared about what went on outside the academy. They reflected on "human manners, opinions and practices", and if their musings could be transmitted to the general, educated public then so much the better. For most of the 20th century this honourable tradition showed many signs of vanishing without a trace. Academic philosophy became increasingly (and not always helpfully) specialised, extraordinarily technical - indecipherable to the uninitiated - and even moral philosophers began to ignore actual moral problems in order to crease their foreheads analysing the language in which ethics might be discussed. At such a time - "the bad days", as Haldane puts it - the immediacy, accessibility and humour of, say, a Platonic dialogue seemed a long way away. There was space to wonder whether the engagement and passion of so many 18th-century and 19th-century thinkers had simply been a dream.
Thankfully, things are looking up. The public intellectual and the philosopher-journalist, although they might appal their snootier academic colleagues, are very much back in vogue - and John Haldane, as hard-working as any of them, is in the vanguard.
These two volumes consist of pieces - many of them tweaked and extended - taken from a wide range of journals and newspapers over the past decade. It seems unlikely that any reader will agree with everything that Haldane has to say - this one certainly did not - but even when he takes up what seems to be an unnecessarily combative and uncompromising stance (on abortion and stem-cell research, for instance), he still argues with extraordinary clarity. This can only help to move crucial debates forward. There is very little dead wood here, little padding or digression; just points made and illustrated with economy and precision.
In Seeking Meaning and Making Sense Haldane is essentially sounding a counterblast to the massed ranks of nihilists and postmodernists who have poured scorn on the very notion of seeking out life's meaning - they dismiss such an endeavour, in Haldane's phrase, as rather like "hunting for unicorns".
If there are no shared values, if any talk of "human nature" is bunkum, if we really are just bundles of atoms rattling around in a value-neutral material universe, then can it really make any sense to talk about living a good life, or doing the right thing, or ascribing value to this or that action, attribute or artefact?
The most obvious riposte is that this is precisely how most of us conduct our lives: we do seek meaning, we do make value judgments, we do seek out "unifying and ennobling visions". The nihilist would reply that just because we do something doesn't make such action sensible: perhaps we are simply deluding ourselves just like all our gullible forbears. It is, however, a lot easier to call yourself a nihilist than to live like one. Who among us doesn't, either as a daily profession or, just occasionally, in the dark watches of the night, try and descry some meaning? And if such behaviour serves some purpose - if it offers consolation, provokes debate, make us look at things afresh - then, ultimately, that is all the utility it requires. The bulk of Haldane's book is dedicated to showing how an ability to "deliberate and act in accord with reasons - to find meaning" is "part of the human form of life", and one that, despite much talk of the death of metaphysics, remains in rude health. He ranges widely, discussing, among much else, the intellectual traditions of Scotland, the moral content of New Labour's agenda, and the controversial issues raised by genetic research.
The movie Toy Story provokes a humorous and insightful analysis of the power of simple moral tales; in another essay a suitable amount of opprobrium is poured on the novelist Dan Brown and, elsewhere, the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe and the painter Felix Kelly are praised to the skies. So far as a satisfying reading experience is concerned, compendiums such as this have their inherent flaws and, despite Haldane's efforts to impose structure and continuity, this is a book better dipped into than read cover to cover.
There are many riches contained within its pages, however and, even when his philosophical fuse is evidently becoming very short indeed, Haldane sustains a suitably urbane and respectful tone.
Haldane obviously enjoys trying to demolish the ideas of Daniel Dennett, for instance, but he at least does Dennett the courtesy of taking those ideas seriously. This is important because, as Haldane explains elsewhere, debates about the nature of God and religion (think Dawkins and Hitchens, but also some of their opponents) have begun to suffer from far too much rancour and, on occasion, vulgarisation.
Finally, albeit briefly, we turn to Haldane's The Church and the World. Again, the breadth of Haldane's concerns is extremely impressive. Alongside discussions of the legacy of John Paul II and the challenges facing the Church (issues of governance, formation of the priesthood, and debates about sexuality chief among them), Haldane touches on everything from sectarianism in Scotland, to debates about evolution, to the scandals that have rocked American Catholicism.
Again, however, Haldane has several basic messages to hammer home. He has little time for a woolly Catholicism in which "the religious and moral requirements of the Church are increasingly disregarded - if they are even known about", and in which the Church is "something inessential, more to be sampled on special occasions than to be embraced as the very stuff of life itself". Haldane believes that our culture is "visibly adrift on the seas of relativism" and, from his perspective, a little more rigour and steadfastness would be a boon. Again, there is room to dissent from much of what Haldane has to say, but it is impossible to argue against his insistence that serious philosophising ought to play a crucial role in the Christian life and that - as one of his chapter heads puts it - the Church cannot do without its intellectuals.
Jonathan Wright
Fonte: The Catholic Herald
