“I appeal also to philosophers, and to all teachers of philosophy, asking them to have the courage to recover, in the flow of an enduringly valid philosophical tradition, the range of authentic wisdom and truth — metaphysical truth included — which is proper to philosophical inquiry — John Paul II, Fides et Ratio # 106 (151)

“Fides et Ratio is to my mind Pope John Paul II’s most radical encyclical to date (1998), surpassing in its own way even the astonishingly countercultural Evangelium Vitae. This has not been generally recognized, mainly because the encyclical’s subject matter is not easily accessible to those who lack extensive philosophical training, and also because the document contains none of the proscriptions concerning sexual morality with which the Holy Father’s critics in the media and in theology departments are obsessed. Nonetheless, the adoption of the encyclical’s vision of intellectual inquiry would strike at the core of many of the epistemological assumptions endemic to the modern academy.— Alfred J. Freddoso, University of Notre Dame

“Pope John Paul II [in Fides et Ratio] suggests that postmodernism [the philosophical precursor and undergirder of Woke philosophy] appears on the horizon at this point in history (2000) as a form of nihilism, resulting from the crisis of rationalism for which Catholic theology provides the precisely correct philosophical antidote: self-certainty and absolute values based upon faith in the truth of personal existence sought in relation to God. He writes:

“As a result of the crisis of rationalism, what has appeared finally is nihilism. As a philosophy of nothingness, it has a certain attraction for people of our time. Its adherents claim that the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth. In the nihilistic interpretation, life is no more than an occasion for sensations and experiences in which the ephemeral has pride of place. Nihilism is at the root of the widespread mentality which claims that a definite commitment should no longer be made, because everything is fleeting and provisional (71).

This Modern philosophy, he says, has abandoned the investigation of being to concentrate on knowing. This move accentuates the limited capacity to know rather than the use of knowledge to reach the truth, leading to forms of agnosticism, relativism and pluralism.

The Pope argues, “A legitimate pluralism of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are  equally valid, which is one of the most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in the truth” (10).

Against the ‘postmodern’ nihilistic view, Pope John Paul II pits a set of absolute values based upon the radical question of truth about personal existence, about being, and about God. He reaffirms the truth of faith and the faith in truth as a foundation for personal and communal life, suggesting that a core of philosophical insight in the history of thought has revealed certain principles as a “spiritual heritage of humanity” an implicit philosophy which all schools should use as a reference-point.

He includes the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality, certain fundamental moral norms (unspecified) “which are shared by all,” as well as the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth, and goodness. This is what he calls “right implicit reason”.

“Once reason successfully intuits and formulates the first universal principles of being and correctly draws from them conclusions which are coherent both logically and ethically, then it may be called right reason or, as the ancients called it, orthos logos, recta ratio (8).

Excerpts from Michael Peters,  Orthos Logos, Recta Ratio: Pope John Paul II, Nihilism and Postmodern Philosophy“.

— Rocco Buttiglione: John Paul II, Poland and the Hegelian Menace

— Despair in the land as U.S. suicides hit all time high (thank macabre wall-to-wall media in part)

— Updated