IN THE COURSE OF THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS, I have not hesitated to take a definite position on or advance a definite view concerning the ideas under consideration.
The great ideas being the main subjects of controversy in the tradition of Western thought, readers must realize that the account given of the six ideas treated in this book represents a point of view about them—well considered, representing many years of reflection, yet nevertheless one point of view about matters concerning which others disagree with the opinions expressed.
In some instances, I have called the reader’s attention to views that I think are untenable, and I have tried to persuade the reader to accept my judgment.
In some instances, I have presented conflicting views. There I have tried to show how the conflict can be resolved, especially when the opposite sides on a particular issue represent half-truths that can be reconciled.
In still other instances, I have indicated questions that remain to be answered without doing more than intimating what the range of answers might be.
I have not gone far enough in the direction of exposing all the fundamental issues, all the disputed questions, and some of the unanswered ones, which constitute the controversies that have centered around each of these six ideas in the course of twenty-five centuries of Western thought. Nor can I undertake to overcome that failure. That undertaking would call for an effort too comprehensive to be accomplished in a small book.
The Institute for Philosophical Research has made that comprehensive effort only once—in dealing with the idea of freedom. The two volumes published on that subject in 1958 and 1961 were the product of more than six years of reading and discussion, engaging the minds of more than twenty-five people working cooperatively. The two volumes, comprising about fifteen hundred pages, were heavily burdened with footnotes. They were laced with quotations from the authors whose opinions were reviewed and compared. They carried bibliographies citing works studied and works examined running in number well over five hundred. They examined a half dozen major controversies, each involving numerous issues. The exploration of the controversy about the freedom of the will and free choice, broken down into four main issues, occupied more than three hundred pages.
I mention all this to explain why the brief enumeration I am going to make, in the next two chapters, of important issues and questions concerning truth, goodness, and beauty, and of liberty, equality, and justice, must necessarily be inadequate. Nevertheless, it may serve to give readers some slight realization of what remains to be done by anyone who wishes to push his own thinking further on any of these subjects.
To achieve a decent brevity, for which I am sure readers will be grateful, I shall have to be highly selective. My criterion of selection will be to choose issues and questions that have a direct and significant bearing on matters treated in the preceding chapters of this book. In a few instances, I may attempt to indicate how a basic conflict among competing theories can be resolved, or how an important question might be answered.
Readers who have already begun to challenge or query the views I have expressed in the preceding chapters, as well as readers who may be stimulated to do so by what is set forth in the two remaining chapters, can go much further. The exploration of the intellectual intricacies of any great idea is an almost endless process. It is also a most rewarding adventure, the most pleasurable and profitable use of one’s mind by anyone who enjoys thinking, which is the reason Plato called philosophizing “that dear delight.”