Charles De Koninck, Jacob Klein, and

Socratic Logocentrism
JUNE 9, 2014 / EDMUND WALDSTEIN, O.CIST. / EDIT
The bi-lingual Quebecois journal Laval thologique et philosophique, has
recently uploaded its archives to the web. This was the organ of Laval School
Thomism, and the early issues contain lots of fascinating material by Charles De
Koninck, the schools most distinguished thinker, as well as pieces by his students
and colleagues. Laval School Thomists have a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward
writing and publishing. In the spirit of Socratess critique of writing in
the Phaedrus,1 they are wary of the ways in which writing can aggravate the tendency
of words to lose their connection to things. De Koninck argues that philosophy is
rooted in the common conceptions which human reason forms prior to any
deliberate and constructive endeavor to learn. These common conceptions are the
most certain knowledge, but they are vague, indistinct, confused. As Aristotle puts
it at the beginning of the Physics, What are first obvious and certain to us are rather
confused, and from these, the elements and principles become known later by
dividing them. The role of philosophy, then, is to make clear what is already
contained in common conceptions. De Koninck was a great enemy of philosophic
systems in which concepts are rendered intelligible by their function in the system,
rather than by their rootedness in pre-scientific logos. Among his disciples one gets
a sense that the problem with writing is that it lends itself to the development of a
technical vocabulary from which such systems are formed. De
Koninck was especially opposed to any system which would use not words, which
by their nature intend the world, but symbols, which replace what they represent. He
pointed out the absurdities that followed from conceiving of thought as a method of
manipulating symbols according to rules of replacing logic in the ancient sense
with philosophical calculus, or characteristic, or symbolic mathematical logic; all of
which are not so much logic as grammatology.
In this De Koninck agrees with a philosopher of a quite different tradition: Jacob
Klein. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, Klein did not follow his teachers. He
understood philosophy in a way very similar to De Koninck. He looked to the Greeks
whose account of philosophy he summarizes as follows:
The literal and correct Latin translation of logos is ratio, which implies that speaking
about something is understanding it, although the understanding may not be perfectly
clear. The task of philosophy, according to the Greeks, is to make the speaking which
is common to everyone perfectly clear. (Modern Rationalism, p. 58)
This implies that there is no strict separation between mind and world: mind is very
emphatically the receiving of the world and nothing but that. (Ibid. p.58) The means
of this reception is logos, speaking; to speak something is to understand it. This
understanding is very certain, but at the same time it is vague and confused, and it is
the task of philosophy/science to make distinct and clear what is always already
contained in the logos: In Greek science, concepts are formed in continual
dependence on natural, prescientific experience, from which the scientific concept
is abstracted. (Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, p.
120) The nature of this abstraction is of course conceived of quite differently by
different thinkersfor Platonists what is really going on is a kind of reminder of
the eternal forms, whereas for Aristotle forms present in concrete things are literally
abstracted and received into the mind. But the important point is that for all of
them scientific concepts are something received from reality. For all Greek
thinkers abstraction is something very different from what it comes to mean in
modern thought.
Kleins book on the origin of algebra is about the great change in conceptualization
that was achieved by Descartess transformation of mathematics from a
contemplative looking at form, to a method for manipulating symbols. Cartesian
symbols are something unknown in Greek mathematicsthey do not intend any
concrete object, but are indeterminate quantities that are treated as determinate
objects. Klein expresses this by saying that they are second intentions treated as first
intentions, but Sean Collins has argued that they can better be understood as the kind
of intentionality that the mind has when it is not apprehending the order of being, nor
of its own act, nor of the moral acts of the will, but rather the order that it makes in
artifacts, external things of which it is the cause. Symbolic representation
signifies that which has existence through the very act of symbolizing. (John
Brungardt has a helpful discussion of Collins, Klein, and De Koninck here).
The reason why Descartes introduced this new conceptualization was that the order
which man produces in external things was his main interest:

For [new conceptions in physics] opened my eyes to the possibility of gaining

knowledge which would be very useful in life, and of discovering a practical
philosophy which might replace the speculative philosophy taught in the schools.
Through this philosophy we could know the power and action of fire, water, air, the
stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we
know the various crafts of our artisans; and we could use this knowledge as the
artisans use theirs for all the purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make
ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature. (Discourse on the Method, Part
6)
As Klein writes, modern science is not so much the understanding of nature as the
art of mastering nature. (Modern Rationalism, p. 60) It does this by applying
symbolic mathematics to the world through measurement.

And Descartes and his followers thought that this was the only true science,
the mathesis universalis. Hence in modernity all of thought is conceived of as
symbolic calculus. Thus the problem of intentionality becomes acute: how does one
know that the symbolic system corresponds to any objective reality? The symbols
always supplant the reality of which they are supposed to be signs. This is problem
is a key to understanding much of recent philosophyboth in the analytic tradition,
played out most powerfully in Wittgensteins Tractatus; and in continental
philosophy, brought to its limits by Jacques Derrida. Derridas Of Grammatology is
perhaps the most profound working through of the implications of the abandonment
of logo-centric for gramma-centric thought.
But Derrida underestimated the extent of to which Descartess innovation was really
innovative; Derrida reads it as merely a step towards revealing what was always
really going on in Western thought. Derrida does indeed see a shift in Descartes,
caused by the rise of the new science, but only the shift in the location of the
presenceit is no longer found in the world or the divine, but in the self (from which
the presence of the world is then deduced). But Derrida thinks that the new science
merely aggravated something that was always present in mathematics:

Within cultures practicing so-called phonetic writing, mathematics is not just an

enclave. [] This enclave is also the place where the practice of scientific language
challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing
and all its implicit metaphysics (metaphysics itself ). (Of Grammatology, p. 10)
As Joshua Kates put it, in an unusually illuminating book on Derrida,
That science, or theorein, becomes the kind of merely symbolic and instrumental
inquiry that Klein takes to be characteristic of modernity, a development that both he
and Husserl believe is corrigible, for Derrida is a possibility inherent in all scientific
knowledge and theoretical truth from the first. (p. 142)
Klein would actually not disagree that all science is threatened by the possibility of
a separation from its roots in pre-scientific logosin fact, he claimed that late
scholastic science was so separatedbut his claim was that Cartesian symbolism
made this separation more thorough and complete than it had ever been before.
Derrida, however, argues that already Platos privileging of speech over writing is
based on an illusionthe illusion of logos, of real presence in the word. Derridas
claim is that all of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger is determined by
a logocentrism that is based on illusion and is therefore tyrannical. But now this
illusion has exhausted itself; it is time to give up on logos and embrace the shifting
play of grammata. That is a slight exaggeration; Derrida, unlike his less cautious
followers, is clear that is is never entirely possible to escape the metaphysics of
presence.2
But Klein does not take the Derridean route. Klein thinks that the modern
development is corrigible. He wants to restore a truly Socratic logocentrism. And
thus there is an ambivalence toward writing in his work as well. As Eva Brann notes
in the preface to a book on Klein and Husserl, Klein came to see the practice of the
Socratic method in the great books discussions that he helped to form at St. Johns
College (he began teaching there soon after the beginning of the new program) as
his primary form of philosophical practice. Nevertheless, he did continue to write a
little occasional essays and commentaries on Plato. He took Plato himself as a model
of a kind of writing that honors, rather than threatens, logos. If one reads Kleins
writings, and those of his students in the St. Johns Review, one finds a very Platonic
stylea playful style that uses questioning and aporia and irony to de-sedimentize
the clichs of our language. It is thus that the written word repays its eternal debt to
the spoken word. (The Problem and the Art of Writing)
The Laval School Thomists also wrote a bit (as the archives of Laval thologique et
philosophique show), but their philosphical model is rather Aristotle than Plato. They
adopt Aristotles marvelous discipline of thought, his patient attention to common
conceptions, and his painstaking, almost pedantic, unfolding of what is implicit in
them. De Koninck himself is not the best example of this, since he had an impulsive
temperament, and a taste for polemic. A better example is his student Duane
Berquist.
As it happens, my own alma mater, Thomas Aquinas College in California, has been
heavily influenced by both De Koninck and Klein. It was founded by a group of
philosophers who had studied under De Koninck at Laval, but had then gone on to
teach the Integral Program at St. Marys College in Moraga, CA, which was
explicitly based on the curriculum of St. Johns. TAC took from St. Johns the
method of Socratic discussion, and much of the curriculumincluding a mathematics
program heavily influenced by Klein. (Eva Brann of St. Johns callsTAC our
Western look-alike). And from the Laval School TAC took a devotion to St.
Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, and their method. One dont think, however, that one
can say we TAC alumni have developed a writing style that synthesizes Laval and
St. Johns. If one reads the articles in The Aquinas Review (only partly online), one
finds that most are written in the style of Laval, and a few in the style of St. Johns.
I wonder if a synthesis would be possible.
Notes:

1. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name
was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the
inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and
astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of
letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country
of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes
call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him
came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians
might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and
Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and
censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long
time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the
various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the
Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the
 memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the
parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or
inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you
who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have
been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this
discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners souls, because
they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written
characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have
discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your
disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers
of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be
omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company,
having the show of wisdom without the reality. (Phaedrus 274c-275b)
2. Of course, it is not a question of rejecting these notions; they are
necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them.
[] Perhaps [the age of the sign] will never end. Its historical closure is,
however, outlined. [] Within the closure, by an oblique and always
perilous movement, constantly risking falling back within what is being
deconstructed, it is necessary to surround the critical concepts with a careful
and thorough discourseto mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits
of their effectiveness and to designate rigorously their intimate relationship
to the machine whose deconstruction they permit; and, in the same process,
designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the
closure can be glimpsed. (Of Grammatology, pp. 13-14)