Dallas Willard was one of the most intriguing Christian philosophers of the last several decades. He was a first-rate philosopher who did his initial academic work on the thought of Edmund Husserl, and his first major academic work was Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge: A Study in Husserl’s Philosophy (1984). He would go on to translate a number of Husserl’s works, and also to write a number of books on the Christian spiritual disciplines, and Christian spirituality more generally. Particularly influential have been his The Divine Conspiracy (1998) and The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988).
When I was working on my Ph.D. at Baylor University, I had the opportunity to spend an evening with Dallas, who was coming to Baylor to speak several times on campus. I was working with college students at my church, and contacted Dallas to ask if he would speak to the college group. He gladly accepted, and we spent a wonderful evening discussing a range of topics with the students. At one point in the evening I asked Dallas what he would recommend reading if one was trying to think through issues of epistemology and the question of the objectivity of knowledge. Dallas replied, “Well, if you are serious, I would suggest going back and reading Edmund Husserl. He is difficult, but it is worth the effort.” Some 18 years later, on a sabbatical in Cambridge, I read slowly Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences. But that is another story.
I hopefully will write what will be a series of blog posts here at “Thinking Through the Bible,” reviewing this work by Willard. I have been waiting for his book, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge (Routledge, 2018), for a long time. A number of years ago I learned that some of Dallas Willard’s students were attempting to bring his final (unfinished) work to completion. Professor Willard had spoken often about knowledge, including moral knowledge, in a number of his writings. The book we now have was, and is, his magnum opus. We are in debt to Steven L. Porter, Aaron Preston, ad Gregg A. Ten Elshof, for the work they have done in completing this volume.
In a Foreword by former colleague (at University of Southern California) and a twenty-one page introduction by the editors, we learn something of the history of how this uncompleted work (at the time of Willard’s death in 2013), eventually was published. The editors helpfully summarize something of Willard’s own education and philosophical pilgrimage. Logical positivism seemed to be on the wane, while the naturalism of Quine was on the rise (xii).
The editors share that in the last stages of Dallas’ life, they offered to complete Willard’s work. Dallas accepted. About five of seven chapters were finished by Dallas before his death. The first five chapters appear in the book essentially as Willard wrote them. For the remainder of the book (original three chapters, but divided into four because the length of the chapter [ultimately chapter 6] on Rawls, and the chapter [ultimately chapter 7] on MacIntyre). The editors worked from a prospectus Willard had written, as well as various notes and other writings of Willard, to complete the volume. The editors place in bold-faced what is most clearly from their own hands.
The editors (here quoting Willard) state the book’s thesis: “the disappearance of moral knowledge . . . is not an expression of truth rationally secured, but is the outcome of an historical drift, with no rational justification at all or only the thinnest show of one” (p. xix). The authors also suggest a second thesis, in their own words: “systematic problems in ethical theory contributed to the disappearance of moral knowledge, if only by failing to provide an adequate bulwark against it [i.e., against the disappearance of moral knowledge]” (p. xix). The lengthy Introduction is a fairly detailed chapter-by-chapter summary, and is worth the reader’s time.
In his own Preface, Willard appears to summarize a, or the, key thesis of the book:
What characterizes life in so-called Western societies today, however, is the absence, or presumed absence, of knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice: knowledge that might serve as a rational basis for moral decisions, for policy enactments, and for rational critique of established patterns of response to moral issues. This is what I term, in this book, ‘The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge.’ (p. xxx).
Willard Continues:
That “disappearance” is not necessarily a matter of moral knowledge being impossible. Nor does it mean that no one actually has moral knowledge–though some have claimed that to be so. It is simply that knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, does not, for whatever reason, present itself as a publicly accessible resource for living an delving together. Such knowledge is–again–for whatever reason–not made available as a body of knowledge by those institutions of Western societies which are regarded as responsible for the development and communication of knowledge crucial for human life and well-being. This is an observable fact, but, strangely, one not widely understood and taken into account by the very people who have broad responsibilities in human affairs–educational and otherwise. (p. xxx).
Willard asks a question which is driving his volume: “Can a decent human existence, individual or corporate, be supported otherwise than upon a body of moral knowledge, understood as such and made widely available through standard instruments and institutions of education?” (p. xxxi).
In our next installment we will turn to Chapter One, “Moral Knowledge Disappears,” where Willard traces something of the way in which moral knowledge has disappeared in Western culture.
