11 - Philosophy as an Inventive Convergence of Methods

Summary

It is easy to think that the loss of religious belief was primarily a matter of intellectual attrition, dialectical engagement with arguments, scrutiny of the grounds of belief, and so on; the hoary monsters of Hume and Kant, of evolutionary theory and biblical criticism. But what poets like Hughes have emphasized here is the role of recalcitrant experience as a far more potent and destructive force than argument, and the role of a shattered imagination. It is the disorientation of the released prisoner who has to make sense of his new surroundings and to reappraise everything he had taken for granted, including the conditions of his former settled certitude. There are other aspects to philosophy than the dialectic, as I have sought to emphasize.