This excerpt is from volume one of Peter Redpath’s recently published autobiography, Meditations on My Life as a Brooklyn Existentialist, Philosophical Paladin, and Samurai Thomist (En Route Books & Media, 2024). Please pick up a copy and support Professor Redpath’s important work.
Unlike I suspect most contemporary, professional philosophers and scientists, I did not come to my understanding of the psychological habits of philosophy and science in academia. A proper understanding of these psychological dispositions has been largely absent from there for centuries.
I came to it first on the streets of my Dyker Heights, Bay Ridge neighborhood. Over many following years, I added to this through different forms of practical and productive life and work experience in many different locations.
My friend and former colleague from St. Francis College on Montague Street in Brooklyn, Nino Langiulli (r.i.p) used to refer to himself philosophically as a “Brooklyn Existentialist.” Decades ago, he penned a wonderful book he had entitled, Brooklyn Existentialism: Voices from the Stoop Explaining How Philosophical Realism Can Bring About the Restoration of Intelligence, Character, and Taste (Fidelity Press, 2008). I think that label fits my psychological disposition equally well.
In that book, Nino attempted to do pretty much the same thing many colleagues of ours and I have been trying to do for decades. He attempted to restore common sense in the form of moral, intellectual, practical, and productive prudence to the contemporary world.
The single best introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the nature of philosophy and science coming from his writings (not from a secondary source) is his discussion of the nature of prudence as he presents this in questions 47 through 56 of the second part of the second part of his magisterial Summa theologiae (2a2ae, qq. 47–56).
Therein, he states that all forms of prudence—observational as well as operational—are generated in the human soul through a psychologically innate (not acquired) habit (habitus, in Latin) to which in Latin he refers as solertia.
He adds that, to some extent, this quality is generated in all somewhat psychologically healthy human beings by possessing from birth some conflated disposition toward being ‘shrewd’ (solers) and ‘quickwitted’ (citus).
He asserts, further, that possessing these psychological dispositions causes a person—even an infant—to possess the quality of synesis: a psychological disposition that is the contrary opposite of a person in the state of asynesis. According to Aquinas, such a person is ‘asinine’—lacks common sense (Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 51, a. 3).
As St. Thomas sees it, practical and productive (concretely operational) prudence—and, subsequent to them, abstractly observational prudence—first develop within an individual and individual culture when, to some extent within that culture, the knowing activity of ‘conscience’ connects human activity to the natural law principle and prescription of ‘Do good and avoid evil!’ (referred to in Latin as the natural law principle of synderesis).
According to Thomas, conscience is simply the moral virtue of prudence—to whatever extent it has developed as a natural and acquired habitus (possession, having) existing within an individual or culture—to impel us human beings to do real good and avoid real evil.
In a way, conscience does this chiefly by psychologically sitting as a ‘moral memory’ in the form of a combined judge, jury, witness, prosecution, and dispenser of rewards and punishments essentially related to: (1) the excellence and beauty or ugliness and deformity of the soul of a human being and (2) some moral choice a person has made, is making, or might be considering to make.
For St. Thomas, prudence is the form of all virtue—moral, practical, productive, and intellectual. ‘Strictly speaking,’ he maintains that, without it, no human being, culture, or civilization can be habitually virtuous, talented, artistic, scientific, wise, or sane. Wherever and whenever it exists in any individual, culture, or civilization, the psychological habit of prudence is the chief, proximate cause of all philosophy/science.
Hence, ‘strictly speaking’: (1) an imprudently philosophical or scientific person can never be really philosophical or scientific; (2) an imprudently just person can never be really just; and (3) an imprudently courageous person is actually cowardly or rash—is not, and can never be, actually courageous at all.
An imprudent philosopher, or scientist, is asinine—a fool—the contrary opposite of someone wise. For the simple reason that he or she is a fool, is short on common sense, such a person can never habitually or non-habitually wonder about how to escape from ignorance so as to escape from the potential and actual damage ignorance can cause to an individual person being able to live a happy human life. He or she is not in touch with reality enough to do so.
Prudence is simply a species of uncommon common sense in the sense that, in whatever individual and culture it first comes to exist, it does so by prudentially reflecting on the behavior of people with practical and productive understanding (people with ‘know-how’ like farmers, sailors, businessmen, craftsmen) related to what causes different organizational wholes with which they are experientially familiar to behave the way they do.
St. Thomas tells us that, etymologically, the word ‘prudence’ is simply a contraction of the Latin term providentia (‘providence’—being able to ‘see ahead,’ anticipate the implications of our actions). This is something fools can never do.
In addition, in what is often referred to as his famous ‘Treatise on Law’ (Summa theologiae, 1a2ae, qq. 90–97), Thomas maintains that the natural law is simply God’s divine providence (prudence) as this applies to moral choices we human beings make.
By following prudence in our moral choices, we human beings do nothing other than measure our behavior to conform to God’s prudence as contained within natural law as this applies generically, specifically, and individually to us living as rational animals—not as beasts!
When we intentionally behave in conformity with properly understood principles of natural law, we do more than follow brute, animal instinct. Through a healthy conscience, we conform our behavior to the rule of eternal, divine and human law as principles of human action that exist within the providential order: measures of divine prudence given to members of the human species by a providential God!
In its healthy form, conscience connects human beings to natural law, divine prudence, and sense reality. In so doing it: (1) stands as an obstacle to us becoming madmen and (2) essentially enables us to possess beautiful human souls through which we might achieve fully human perfection and live a beautiful human life in all respects in this life and the next.
Ignoring the voice of such a conscience is just plain damn dumb!
