A secular view of metaphor and analogy may have us believe all too easily that metaphorical language is not as “important” or “true” as literal language.[2] And, as some have pointed out, sometimes the Bible suggests the contrary: that metaphors and analogies are potent and have been woven into the fabric of reality for divine purposes.[3] But the problem, at second glance, is more complicated than distinguishing between “metaphorical” and “literal” language. These categories themselves assume that there is a clear line between “literal” and “metaphorical” language, which is oftentimes not the case. Yet, what is even more important is that the literal/metaphorical distinction many times betrays an unbiblical affirmation, namely, that literal language can be understood exhaustively (univocally) and thus has no element of mystery or depth.[4] Metaphorical language, on the other hand, is more overtly “loose” and mysterious, and thus is potentially less helpful and more difficult to comprehend (equivocally). This view of literal and metaphorical language, however, is deeply flawed and theologically problematic.

As a test case, let us look at the Bible’s description of God as our Father. Trying to make this a literal statement or a metaphorical one is not so helpful. If, on the one hand, we say that it is metaphorical, what do we mean? Do we mean that God is not really our Father, or perhaps that God is our Father, but only in a secondary sense; in the primary sense, our earthly father is our true father? This brings up many problems, as I have recently realized. After reading the following words of Herman Bavinck, and considering a passage such as Galatians 4, I wonder whether this “metaphorical” approach is really the way in which we should approach such language, especially if “metaphorical” is understood in the sense described above.[5] Bavinck writes,

The scriptural name “Father” is a much better description [than “unbegotten”] of the personal property of the first person. Implied in the word “fatherhood” is a positive relation to the second person. The name “Father” is even more appropriate than the word “God,” for the latter is a general name signifying transcendent dignity, but the name “Father,” like that of yhwh in the Old Testament, is a proper name, an attribute describing a personal property of God. Those who deny to God the name “Father” dishonor him even more than those who deny his creation. This name of “Father,” accordingly, is not a metaphor derived from the earth and attributed to God. Exactly the opposite is true: fatherhood on earth is but a distant and vague reflection of the fatherhood of God (Eph 3:14–15). God is Father in the true and complete sense of the term.[6]

We can easily breeze over such a statement. “Yes, yes, God is the true Father of all. Now what else?” What else?! Bavinck is turning our earthly experience on its head. We tend to think that our earthly experience with fatherhood is the basis on which we understand Paul’s claim that God is our Father. But the reverse is the case, according to Bavinck. God’s intrinsic Fatherhood is the grounds for any earthly manifestation of fatherhood. So, if we read a passage such as Gal 4:4–7, we should understand God to be our Father literally, right? Not quite.

That approach has its problems as well. The word “literally” could be misunderstood to mean that we are sons in the same way that Christ is the Son. But that would not be theologically accurate either. The divine Son is eternally generated by the Father, and the Spirit proceeds both from him and the Father. Eternal generation and Spirit-procession are not qualities that we have as creatures. This does not mean that we are not sons of God, however. Directly after v. 4, when Paul makes the statement that the Son of God was born of a woman, he tells us we have been adopted as sons and are now sons (v. 5, 6). And, what’s more, we receive the Spirit of God’s eternal Son and cry out to God as Father (v. 6). So which is it? Are we literal sons or metaphorical sons?

Maybe the literal/metaphorical distinction is not so helpful here. In fact, it can even be harmful. Think about how this distinction is often used. If we can delineate which statements in Scripture are “literal” and which are “metaphorical,” that could be fodder for univocal thought, suggesting that some statements in Scripture can be understood as “brute” facts, known by God in the same way that they are known by us. In saying that God is literally our Father, we can be tempted to think that there is little mystery in such language. But we easily find mystery if we press the semantics a bit. If God is our Father, what does that mean? He is not our Father by blood, of course, since that is an earthly trait (this would be a “literal” view). But he is ultimately responsible for our coming into existence, and the moving of blood through our veins, which keeps us in this earthly existence, would not have come about apart from his speech and breath (Gen 2:7; Job 33:4). In that sense, he is our Father by blood, since our earthly father merely fell in line with God’s structuring of the human race (this could be a “metaphorical” view). So even the phrase “Father by blood” is deep and mysterious and eschews the literal/metaphorical distinction. We can understand it to a degree, but our finitude keeps us from understanding it exhaustively or from categorizing it with divine surety.

The same could be said for other fatherly behaviors attributed to God: offering guidance (Ps 23:2; 139:10), showing love (1 John 3:1), teaching us from his wisdom (Ps 51:6), chastising us for wrongdoing (Heb 12:6), etc. It does not seem to be helpful to apply the literal/metaphorical distinction in such cases, for embedded in this distinction is often (though not always) an intention to understand language exhaustively, to demarcate with precision the beginning and end of so-called “literal” and “metaphorical” expressions.

Instead, we might simply say that these fatherly behaviors are things that God truly does, but we can (and should) understand them analogically, with a profound sense of awe and an appreciation that this triune God is in a loving, guiding relationship with us. He knows what that means far more than we do, but he has not hidden that meaning from us. He has revealed it to us, but revealed to us as creatures.[7]

We can still express truth in language analogically. God really is our Father in Christ by the power of the Spirit. We know this because he has told this to us in passages such as Gal 4:4–7. But we know this only as creatures. We are free to follow Bavinck and affirm that we have been adopted by the ultimate Father, who acts in ways incomparably higher than, but not irrelevant to, our earthly father. We must embrace both the divine and earthly contexts of human language, just as we embrace the divine and human natures of the person of Christ.[8]

And such an analogical approach also gives us more freedom to make linguistic connections and applications today. Consider the divine “adoption” discussed in Gal 4. We can connect this to human adoption analogically, with many benefits.

Thinking from an earthly perspective, we tend to view adoption as the forging of a foreign relationship, the taking on of one person by another family. But the truth is that sin has orphaned all of us. We were all in desperate need of adoption. And God waited until the proper time to adopt us—waiting far longer than the painful interlude many couples struggle with today in trying to adopt children from another country. And it was costly—oh, was it costly. It cost the blood of his own Son, the highest price to be paid.

It is the Trinity—Father, Son, and Spirit—who stands behind the redemptive possibility of adoption.[9] In God’s eternal counsel, a pact was made (the pactum salutis) to adopt not just one child, or a few, but every tribe and tongue and nation. We are—all those in Christ—sons and daughters in a divinely proper sense, a sense which goes beyond any notion of literal or metaphorical language. Thus, “adoption” can be stretched to encompass both earthly and heavenly senses in a way that illuminates both for us as creatures. We can be adopted on earth, but our greatest adoption is by our heavenly Father.

If all of this is true—if we should choose to invoke neither the literal nor the metaphorical category with ultimate control and precision—then we need to begin practicing how to use language analogically, and that may require significantly modifying or, in some cases, even abandoning prior terminology. If we go on using categories like these thoughtlessly, we risk leaving behind the riches of redemption and relegating the truth of the gospel to a seat at the univocal table, where we continue to imagine that we can fathom all that God has done for us in calling us back to him as our Father.

Notes

[1] Poythress suggests, helpfully, I believe, that metaphors serve as perspectives on the world. See Vern S. Poythress, Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1987), 15–18. Some of these metaphors I have taken from him.

[2] “There is no reason to have any general theological preference for literal language over figurative or to assume that every metaphor must be literally explain in precise academic terms. Scripture does not do that. Often, in fact, figurative language says more, and says it more clearly, than corresponding literal language would do.” John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1987), 227–28. “Language in its literal and metaphorical capabilities derives from God, who is the infinite source of both the literal and the metaphorical and their relation to one another. In mysterious ways the relation is grounded in the very being of God, in the relation of the Father to the Sonthrough the Spirit. We cannot neatly and perfectly separate out the literal and the metaphorical within language, any more than human thinking can perfectly comprehend the relation of the Son to the Father. The presence of the Word before the Father is not only the source of human metaphorical language; it is the source of the world. God created the world through his Word. We therefore expect that the world itself is shot through with metaphor.” Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 284. See also Vern S. Poythress, “Rethinking Accommodation in Revelation,” Westminster Theological Journal 76 (2014): 150–51.

[3] I discuss one option for a biblical approach to metaphor in “In the Beginning Was the Word: John 1:1–5 and a Revelational Theory of Metaphor,” Westminster Theological Journal (forthcoming).

[4] This does not have to be the case. I have no problem with people using the descriptor literal when trying to express that a piece of language is not emphasizing a relationship between two concepts. “Jesus is the savior of the world” is more literal than, say, “Jesus is our rock.” In the latter expression, we have to relate the concept of Jesus to the concept of a rock, mapping the qualities of one onto the other so as to arrive at a deeper understanding of the “target” (Jesus). See George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 63–65. The danger is when we think that the statement “Jesus is the savior of the world” is void of mystery and can be exhaustively understood by us. This violates the Creator-creature distinction and assumes we have God-like mastery over language, when, in fact, “mystery is not something that comes at the end of our study, as if we can master some things but have to default to mystery in the end. Mystery, as Bavinck says, is the lifeblood of all theology. We begin with it, we study and think and learn in its context, and we conclude with the joyous affirmation of its exhaustive presence in all that we know.” K. Scott Oliphint, “Simplicity, Triunity, and the Incomprehensibility of God,” in One God in Three Persons: Unity of Essence, Distinction of Persons, Implications for Life, ed. Bruce A. Ware and John Starke (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 229n23.

[5] All credit where credit is due: I was finally convinced of what I outline in this article after hearing a sermon on Galatians 4 by David Cummings at Calvary Chapel in Quakertown, PA, on September 6, 2015.

[6] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 307.

[7] Note here Oliphint’s words on the “creaturely” nature of all that we do: “Because God has spoken, we can know who he is, something of what he does, even why he does what he does; and we can know that who he is, what he does, and why he does what he does is revealed to us to know as creatures, not as creators. In other words, it is not the case that since we have the truth of Scripture, what we know is identical with what he knows. . . . All that we are, think, do, and become is derivative, coming from or out of something else; we depend on, as well as mirror, the real, the Original, the Eimi. In classical terminology, we are ‘ectypal.’ The kind or type of people we are, knowledge we have, thoughts we think, things we do, is always and everywhere a copy, pattern, impression, image, taking its metaphysical and epistemological cue from the only One who truly is, that is, from God himself.” K. Scott Oliphint, Reasons for Faith: Philosophy in the Service of Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2006), 176, 178–79.

[8] Edward Morgan helpfully explains how Augustine understands language as “incarnational.” Human speech is analogous to the incarnation—God’s internal Word manifested in the flesh and applied in the love of the Spirit—and thus “the incarnation in fact reads as a commencement of an explicitly Trinitarian conversation between God and humanity, whereby through the incarnation humanity recognizes as Trinity the God who addresses it. Reflection on this conversation leads the human person closer to God, who is truth. Finally, the Spirit inspires this conversation.” Edward Morgan, “The Concept of Person in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” in Augustine and Other Latin Writers: Papers Presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held at Oxford, ed. F. Young, M. Edwards, and P. Parvis, Studia Patristica 43 (Paris: Peeters, 2006), 206.

[9] “Paul’s specification of the Spirit’s identity—his delineating who this Spirit is whom the Galatians have received—involves his referring the Galatians back to God and Jesus. However, he does not picture God and Jesus as enjoying a priority to which the Spirit is then added as a supplementary afterthought. If that were the case, then we would not be able to speak of mutuality in the constitution of the identities of God, Jesus, and the Spirit. Rather, Paul has in mind a fully reciprocal relationship whereby the Spirit’s identity is intertwined with God’s and Jesus’ identities from the outset. Both in eternal priority and in the temporal outworking or “sending” from that eternal priority, the Spirit is identified here along with God and his Son in a web of inter-determinative relations. This matrix or web that exists between God, the Son, and the Spirit preexists their effecting of the Galatians’ adoption described in 4:5.” Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 142.

In our previous post, part 1, we introduced our thesis and opened with the beginning of Barth’s life. We pick up here with his years from the beginning of his academic career to his death.

C. Professor Barth

In 1922 he was appointed professor of Reformed Theology in Göttingen. The position was newly minted and was to accommodate Reformed students in an predominately Lutheran school. One of his first lectures was on the Heidelberg Catechism. This was his initiation into Reformed academic study. He worked, it is reported, day and night to prepare his lectures. Some of his earliest lectures were at 7 AM, having only finished his lecture notes between 3-5 AM! He was quite critical of the Catechism, saying that historically it marked the transition between the Reformation’s zeal to the church’s complacency (Busch, 128). The first question and answer, he said, is “definitely not good” beginning as it does with “your comfort.” Apparently, it was too pietistic and subjective!

It was during these years at Göttingen that he began to prepare his lectures on Dogmatics.¹ Here he took up Heppe’s Dogmatics and began to understand and appreciate more and more the old Reformed theologians, especially Calvin. It is not that he agreed with them. But working from them, and learning lessons from them, he refined his own dogmatics in its own characteristic way. He could not go back to his Professors’ immanence theology, but neither could he go all the way with the Reformed. Rather, he re-appropriated the Reformed insights and gave them his own distinctive spin, within a basic modern framework. We’ll discussion his theology some more later on.

It was while in Göttingen in 1924 that Barth met Charlotte von Kirschbaum. She was a helper to Barth in his research, indexing and cataloging many quotes from the reading he was doing. Charlotte, or Lollo (sometime “my dear Lollo”) as he called her, was 13 years younger than Barth (born June 25, 1899). In the summer of 1925 we know she assisted Barth in his research on Augustine and Luther as they went off together to “the Bergli,” a summer cottage owned by their mutual friends. She was 26 at the time, and Barth had just turned 40. It is reported that there was a deep mutual trust and understanding between them (Busch, 185). In fact, so deep was their relationship that she moved into the home with him and his family (in 1929), much to Barth’s wife’s (Nelly) chagrin. This relationship caused a great strain in Barth’s other relationships, including with his mother and close friends. Busch notes that “the intimacy of her relationship with him made particularly heavy demands on the patience of his wife Nelly.” (ibid). Nelly increasingly faded into the background, even though she never left him. It is said that this arrangement, even and especially when Barth and Lollo went off to the Bergli for study, caused a great strain, burden, and suffering for his wife and children. Lollo was herself an accomplished theologian in her own right. She wrote on and lectured on the Protestant doctrine of woman. Her insights even made their way into CD III.2 (Busch, 363). When she finally died, several years after Barth (d. 1975), she was buried with him and his wife (d. 1976) in the same plot.

In 1925 he made another move, this time to Münster. There he prepared seminars on the history of Protestant theology from the time of Schleiermacher and also on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? This seminar (and the book that came from it), it is argued by some, was the impetus for a significant shift and change in his thinking. It is particularly the thesis of von Balthasar that his Anselm book marks a turn in Barth’s theology toward an analogia entis, or an analogy of being, in a more classically scholastic direction. More on this later.

In 1930 he made his last move in Germany, this time to the University of Bonn. It was here that Barth would come up against Hitler and the 3^rd Reich. Eberhard Busch notes that

Politics suddenly became interesting for Barth in 1933, after Adolf Hitler established the Third Reich. Barth spoke out in anger against Naziism when it attempted to create new “German Christian” churches in which National Socialist political theories were given the same sanctity as theological dogma….[according to Barth] This was a nationalist heresy….[which produced] confusion between God and the spirit of the German nation.

In response to the Nazis, Barth launched a new magazine to attack this “heresy.” Furthermore, in 1934 he wrote the Barmen Declaration—an anti-Nazi protest that claimed the autonomy of the church from all temporal power. The declaration was signed by 200 leaders of Germany’s Lutheran, Reformed and Evangelical Unionist churches.

It did not take long, however, for the Nazi’s to persecute non-conformists. The opposing party to the Nazi’s, the Democratic Socialists Party, was threatened by the Nazi’s. The leadership of the DSP advised those in the party who held academic posts to withdraw their formal membership so as not to sacrifice their academic careers. But Barth would not resign his membership. He said, in short, if they want him to teach, they have to take him as he is, party membership and all. Soon thereafter, the Nazi’s disbanded completely the Democratic Socialist Party.

And Barth’s days in Germany were now numbered.

So, the German Christian Movement began to grow, and they encouraged all others in the church to join with the Nationalist government. In the midst of this there was a push to make changes in the church’s book of order (Bausch, 226). The changes would be quite “patriotic,” speaking of “our beloved German Fatherland” and provide for a centralized “Reich Bishop.”

In response to these proposed changes, a group called the “Pastor’s Emergency League” was formed. Out of this group the “Confessing Church” was founded. The was a coalition that opposed the change in the church order. Barth wrote in this context calling the position of the German Christians “heresy” and summoning the church to do theology, and only theology. The church is to be concerned to preach the Gospel only, and is not to see church membership tied to race or blood.

The document in which he wrote this was entitled “Theological Existence Today” and was sent to Hitler on July 1, 1933. 37,000 copies were printed before it was banned the following year. The effect of this pamphlet is said to have been “tremendous” (Busch, 227). The new church order, however, was put into place, including the notorious “Aryan paragraph,” which stated that only Aryans, or those married to such, would qualify for employment in the church.

Accordingly, the persecution would only increase. As a professor at the University of Bonn, Barth was technically a civil servant. But he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Führer or open his classes with the Nazi salute. It would be bad taste, he told them, “to begin a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount with ‘Heil Hitler.’” Soon after, Barth was brought before a Nazi court and found guilty of “seducing the minds” of German students, was suspended and eventually fined 20% of his annual salary.² This spelled the end of his time in Bonn. Providentially, however, it was the occasion for his return home to Basle, where a special chair of theology was offered to him by the University. It is here in Basel that he would live, write, and teach for the rest of his life.

In 1962 Barth paid a long overdue visit to the U.S. Here he lectured many times, including at the University of Chicago and Princeton. While in America he met the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as Billy Graham (whom he met earlier back in Europe). It was while he was at Princeton that he had his one and only run-in with the Westminster apologetics professor, Cornelius Van Til (more on this below). And finally in 1968, after suffering a series of health set-backs (including at least one stroke), he died peacefully at in his bed where he was being taken care of by his faithful wife, Nelly. She found him dead on the morning of December 10 in their Basel home.

D. Literary Corpus

Barth’s literary output is by any standard amazing. He wrote a lot along the way including a large library of sermons, letters, and other unpublished manuscripts. This is not even including his course lectures (much of which made it into his published volumes) and other special lectures he gave.

But the back bone to his literary work, after the two versions of his Romans commentary, is the Göttingen Dogmatics and his Church Dogmatics. While he was teaching in Göttingen, he gave two rounds of lectures on Dogmatics between 1924-25. These lectures were published in three volumes. It was anticipated that the Göttingen Dogmatics would be translated into English and made available in two volumes, but only one volume has ever been published.

After this, while he was in Münster, he published his Christian Dogmatics in Outline, which he later labeled “a false start.” But these four volumes all formed the ground work for his later real start, which became known as the Church Dogmatics.

He began the CD in Bonn and then continued it in Basel. The first part of volume I was released in 1932 and the final part of volume IV was released in 1967, the year before he died. He had anticipated writing a fifth volume on the doctrine of redemption, which would have included his thoughts on eschatology. However, by the time he finished volume IV, he was literally too tired to do it. He expressed his “lack of energy and mental drive” to make it happen. But the finished project was 13 tomes, excluding the index, spreading out over nearly 10,000 pages.

I have included a link to a timeline of Barth’s literary output and his career here. This timeline was put together by Darren Sumner and posted at the Out of Bounds blog. This provides a very helpful, at-a-glance, resource for gaining appreciation and understanding of his literary productivity.

E. Meeting with Van Til

There are many versions of the story of Van Til and Barth meeting. Truth is, Van Til made at least one attempt to meet Barth while he was in Basel, even phoning Barth’s house. Unfortunately, Barth was out of town and unable to meet.³ When Barth came to the States, he gave a lecture at the chapel on the campus of Princeton University. Van Til and Art Kuschke traveled up to Princeton to hear the lecture. Afterwards they hurried outside to meet Barth. Van Til introduced himself, they shook hands, and Barth said something to effect “you say bad things about me, but I forgive you.” According to Kuscke’s account, Van Til did not reply to Barth before he was whisked off in a car and taken away. Van Til did follow-up soon thereafter with a letter seeking to set the record straight that he never called Barth the worse heretic in church history, and never questioned his personal faith. Van Til also asked Barth’s forgiveness if he had misrepresented anything he wrote (Muether, 191). Barth never replied.

To the best of my knowledge, Barth never makes any explicit reference to Van Til in any of his published writings. He does seem to allude to him in a letter on June 1, 1961 to G.W. Bromiley at Fuller Seminary in which he refers to some of his “fundamentalist” critics as those who believe him to be the worse heretic of all time (Busch, 380; Karl Barth Letters: 1961-68, 8). He also refers to Van Til in a letter to Edward Geehan (editor of the festschrift for Van Til, Jerusalem and Athens) saying that Van Til has not understood a word he has written. Barth, however, quickly acknowledges that he himself had not understood Van Til’s critique! (Muether, 191). He further refers to Van Til, in a veiled manner, in his 1955 preface to CD IV.2, xii. In there he refers to certain “fundamentalists” who are beyond the pale of dialogue because they are “cannibals.” It is interesting to note that Van Til signed his last letter to Barth as “C. Van Til, Ein Menschenfresser” (Muether, 191).

F. Relationship with Bultmann and Brunner

Many have lumped together the three great “B’s” of dialectical theology – Barth, Bultmann, and Brunner – as if they were of a cloth. But, actually, it did not take long for Barth to part company with these two. In the mid-30’s Brunner issued a call for dialectical theology to give some room to Natural Theology in its thinking. To this call Barth issued his very passionate “Nein!” where he argued that to give any quarter to Natural Theology is to go back to the analogia entis and neo-Protestantism. Bultmann with his denial of the historicity of the miracles of Jesus, the supernatural acts of God, and his demythologizing hermeneutic moved the basis of theology away from Christ and back to man. From Barth’s perspective, scientific history is a human construct and formed Bultmann’s starting part in theology. For Barth, this was to ground theology in something other than God’s revelation, which is Jesus Christ himself. Because of this, Barth leveled several lengthy critiques of Bultmann throughout his CD.

Again, so much more can – and should – be said about this man’s amazing (and often time disturbing!) life. But for now we move beyond his biography and reflect some on his thought. We will take up his theology in the next part of this series – part 3.

In this post, I plan to give a brief historical sketch of the movement from nineteenth century absolute idealism to twentieth century analytic philosophy. In a follow-up post, I will survey the response Cornelius Van Til gave to absolute idealism, and then examine the analytic tradition in light of Van Til’s Reformed insights.

Absolute idealism held a tempestuous sway over philosophy in Britain, America, and the European continent during the nineteenth century. This philosophical system was initiated by the prominent German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), and then further developed by philosophers like F. H. Bradley (1846–1881), J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925), and Josiah Royce (1855–1916). Absolute idealism’s central tenet was that all of reality is a single mental subject. The absolute idealists’ metaphysic—their theory about the nature of ultimate reality—was tied to a distinctive epistemology or theory of knowledge. They believed that reason was the proper source of knowledge, not empirical observation. Whenever we sensibly experience an object as having spatiotemporal location or some other physical property “we are perceiving it more or less as it really is not.” Rationally consider any particular thing, the absolute idealists taught, and you will rather find that that thing is necessarily involved in a higher, all-inclusive, organic thought-complex.

Just as soon as absolute idealism reached its highest point of influence, two of its most promising young practitioners, G. E. Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), proposed a decisive revolt. This revolt at the start of the twentieth century constituted the beginnings of what is known today as the analytic school of philosophy.

Analytic philosophy’s defining characteristic was its rigorous commonsense philosophical method. Analytic philosophers usually dealt with individual problems, and attempted to solve those problems by appealing to logic, intuition, and experience. For example, G. E. Moore in his essay, “Proof of an External World,” famously argued that he had two hands by gesturing with them while saying, “Here is one hand and here is another.”

Analytic philosophers also put a premium on linguistic clarity, primarily because of the ambiguity that they thought riddled the writings of absolute idealists. Analytic philosopher John Searle points out that as a result “for most of the twentieth century the philosophy of language was ‘first philosophy.’ Other branches of philosophy were seen as derived from the philosophy of language and dependent on the results in the philosophy of language for their solutions.”

Near the end of the twentieth century, another philosophical shift occurred, this time from within analytic philosophy itself. The philosophical method of analytic philosophy remained, but, to use once more the words of John Searle, “the center of attention has now moved from language to mind.” One of the many reasons Searle gives for this recent development is that numerous philosophers “working in the philosophy of language see many of the questions of language as special cases of questions about the mind.” Searle also mentions another likely culprit for the recent reorientation of the philosophical disciplines:

For many of us, myself included, the central question in philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how to give an account of ourselves as apparently conscious, mindful, free, rational, speaking, social, and political agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, physical particles. (p. 7)

Although it should be debated whether empirical science truly supports the weighty doctrine of materialism, many analytic philosophers follow Searle in thinking that it does. So, in Searle’s circles, he has sufficient justification for writing his book, Mind, wherein he attempts to give a materialistic explanation of the mental. Searle’s whole project is to account for how we can have meaningful mental capabilities as purely material agents, and this requires for Searle to account for human freedom. But Searle cannot account for human freedom, he says so himself: “We really do not know how free will exists in the brain, if it exists at all. We do not know why or how evolution has given us the unshakable conviction of free will. We do not, in short, know how it could possibly work. But we also know that the conviction of our own freedom is inescapable. We cannot act except under the presupposition of freedom” (p. 164).

As has been the case throughout the history of philosophy, we have come full-circle. At the beginning of the twentieth century, analytic philosophers revolted against absolute idealism, along with its insistence upon the mental nature of ultimate reality, in order to follow the dictates of commonsense and to account for material reality. At the end of the twentieth century, analytic philosophers like Searle have followed their intuitions and gained their material world at the seeming expense of meaningful human mental activity.

Sources — The quote in the first paragraph is from J. M. E. McTaggart, “Time,” in Metaphysics: The Big Questions (eds. Peter van Inwagen and Dean W. Zimmerman; 2^nd ed.; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 123. McTaggart used this phrase in reference to our experience of things as in time, but the phrase also captures the way many absolute idealists addressed our experience of things as having any distinctively physical property. All quotes from Searle appear in his Mind: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Other sources I consulted were E. D. Klemke, ed., Contemporary Analytic and Linguistic Philosophies (2^nd ed.; Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000) and Frederick Copleston, Modern Philosophy: Empiricism, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Britain and America (vol. 8 of A History of Philosophy; New York: Image Books, 1994),