201 CHRONICLBSnREINTERPRETING PHILOSOPHYnby Thomas MolnarnTo paraphrase a well-known saying, We are all revisionistsnnow! Yet somehow even our revisionists arentimid—they wait for favorable winds before they “revise”nhistory, economics, philosophy, and science, then writenbooks about “how it really started,” “how it really happened.”nI suspect that revisionism is a branch of popularizednhermeneutics whose self-assigned function is to place undernsuspicion every human enterprise, in the name of othernenterprises that are above suspicion: Darwin’s, Freud’s,nNietzsche’s, Marx’s, Heidegger’s are never suspected themselves.nTheirs are the unquestioned idola fori.nParallel to the fashionable revisionism, as conformist asnother intellectual novelties, there is a quieter variety whichnindeed allows us to take a new look at past, therefore also atnpresent, situations and movements. What I have in mind isnThomas Molnar is visiting professor of religious studies atnYale University and the author of The Pagan Temptationn(Eerdmans).nnnthe painstaking restudy of the philosophical enterprisenwhose unity of inspiration we take so easily for granted,nfrom Thales to Sartre. No detergent or toothpaste is sonroutinely praised as our “Western philosophical heritage,”nas if the unity of our heritage were a verifiable and justifiablenconclusion. If pressured, we acknowledge that Plato andnAristotle are vastly different in presupposition, method, andnworld view, and also that Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans,nCynics, Neo-Platonists further enlivened the scene. Wenmight also concede that philosophy after Augustine andnBoethius became “theology’s handmaiden” and that Descartes,net al. launched new postulates; yet we stubbornlyninsist that Western philosophy has been one long speculativentwine never pulled any way but forward.nThere is, however, new thinking on the matter, which —nunspectacular and superficial as the various deconstructionismsn— has not received a great deal of attentionnfrom the academic dandies. This genuine revisionism—ngenuine because it is documented inquiry,nnot merely sudden inspiration and semantic interpretation—nis based on the exhaustive rereading of the Ancients’nworks. What was found in them is a spirituality thatnhas been occulted by at least three centuries of excessivenintellectualism. In my own rereading, I was both right andnwrong with my book God and the Knowledge of Reality,npublished 15 years ago. The argument there correctlyndistinguished two lines of Western philosophical speculations,nthe discursive and the absolute knowledge, the firstnrepresented by Aristotle, Thomas, Leibnitz, et al., and thensecond by Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, perhaps Nicholas ofnCusa, Giordano Bruno, and others. Unconsciously I wasninclined toward Bergson’s dichotomy between those whonintuit reality and those who measure it; but while Bergsonngave his preference to the intuitive type of knowledge, Inargued, in order to “save reason” and the reasoning way tonGod, in favor of the primacy of the second kind.nIn the light of recent revisionism I was not blatantlynwrong, but was content with an incomplete grasp of things.nNo wonder; we have been accustomed to philosophicalnsystems announcing their color through a kind of philosopher’sncalling card, with epistemology, logic, metaphysics,nethics, and politics written on it, one following from whatnpreceded. Any thinker not able to display the five “philosophicalndisciplines” under one canopy was a dilettante likenPascal or Nietzsche, the guiltier since in their times philosophynwas no longer a servant of theology but a master of thenuniversity. By the 18th century, the philosopher had to be anHerr Doktor Professor, or he was undeserving of the name.nNeedless to say, philosophy is today shattered by overintellectualization,nand some of the disjecta membra arencalled phenomenology, linguistic analysis, existentialism,nstructuralism. It is not necessary to put things back togethernto justify a new perspective.nThe new perspective may be summed up by mentioningnthe title of Pierre Hadot’s new book, Spiritual Exercises andnAncient Philosophy. Hadot is teaching at the College denFrance, founded in the 16th century as a focus of highn