By Quentin Lauer
It really is an fact that the credentials of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) have been in no way these of a pro thinker. He had no measure within the topic and he by no means attended a college. Nor was once he generally or deeply learn within the culture of Western philosophy. He was once, still, a really philosophical philosopher: convincing, persuasive, provocative, arguable. regardless of all this, nobody has, as much as the current, dedicated a complete ebook to the exam and research of his adequately philosophical considering and writing.This booklet makes an attempt to diversity in all places within the writings of Chesterton, even perhaps to betray him a little via attempting to systematize his concept. it really is, in spite of the fact that, no longer betraying Chesterton to say that there's one principal subject matter round which all his pondering and writing should be ordered: the topic of the grandeur of the truth of human, created within the photograph of God and taking part within the fantastic thing about divine creativity. His philsophy, if we wish to signify it in anyone manner, is a philosophy of lifestyles, of human residing, with all that suggests of rationality and freedom, of fact and paradox, of faith and morality, or religion and desire and love-in brief, of all that makes human dwelling spectaculary helpful.
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Example text
N. Whitehead! That, however, is not exactly to the point. The real question is whether there is anything about the thought of Chesterton which should recommend it precisely to philosophers. Many of my friends concur in telling me that this is a giant step down from Hegel! There are few who would deny, even today, that Chesterton was a brilliant essayist who confronted with consummate skill the issuesparticularly the moral issuesof his day. This very fact, however, we will be told, stamps a date on his essays, making it a waste of time to read them today, as though one could stamp a date on moral issuesor on Page 6 moral reasoningwhich, by the way, Chesterton considered the very heart of philosophical thinking.
To write or speak about anyone's thought is to run the risk of systematizing it, and, in the case of Chesterton, this would be to falsify it; and this is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to write about Chesterton's thought, which resists systema- Page 7 tization. There is, however, a sense in which Chesterton's thinking is systematic; not in the sense that one can logically derive all his ideas by systematically working out the principles from which he beginshe is no Aristotle or Aquinas or Spinoza or Hegelbut in the sense that his view of reality is consistently holistic, literally seeing the interrelatedness of all reality in such a way as to see the unreality of the partial if it ceases to be organically connected to the whole.
This seems to be the place, by the way, to lay to rest the suspicion entertained by not a few that Chesterton was simply impractical, concerning himself far more with ideas than with action. If by this is meant that Chesterton Page 15 could scarcely tie his own tie or remember where he was supposed to be at a given time, there may be a trivial sense in which the statement is true. If, on the other hand, it means that he devoted too much of his time to thinking and not enough of it to doing, it is exasperatingly nonsensical.