Facs
Transcript
philosophical truth and the truth of faith. Further, the term seems to indicate that there is one philosophical faith – as one has often called it, the philosophie perennis, the “perennial philosophy.” Now this is a very questionable term, and I would join all the historians who would tell us how much non – perennial things always happen in the history of philosophy! And I would say, instead of that: only one thing is perennial, namely the Question, the Question about the structure of being, about ultimate reality, which is the philosophical question, but the answers are not eternal, not even the mystical answers, which usually are taken to be the patterns of an eternal philosophy. In this moment I would defend nominalism – which means quite a lot, if I do so! [smiling]. There is a continuous process of interpenetration of philosophical elements and elements of faith. But there is no philosophical faith, and there is no one philosophical faith. Therefore I prefer to drop this term, which makes the mistake of connecting philosophy and religion in a way which makes the difference impossible.
Now we had said (and this is the result of these considerations so far) that there is ultimate concern – and that means faith, or religion – in every creative philosophy, in every philosopher who is passionately concerned about being itself and not only a special section of being. But the opposite is also true: there is philosophical truth in the truth of faith, although they are never identical. We have seen that the truth of faith is expressed in symbols, while the truth of philosophy is expressed in concepts, and the whole problem now comes down to the problem of the relationship of concepts and symbols.