should not be, the heavens are silent. Yet, the story of the Passion, in laying bare human
affliction, is suffused with compassion in the recognition of what is happening. Do we
not need to acknowledge that the divine simply suffers? The compassion that suffuses the
story of the Passion shows what can happen to innocence and love, and that “showing”
intercedes for us simply in revealing what it does. But once we say that this was done in
order that we are shown these things, a horrible mockery is made of human affliction. As
against a consequentialist eschaton, when Christ is exalted, raised on high, it is not with
healed wounds.^15
end p.464
Religion and Philosophical Investigation
At the close of my introductory remarks to this chapter, I asked what the difference is
between acknowledging a divine reality and the philosophical investigation of reality. As
we have seen, religious belief is a confession, the expression of a conviction. The
philosophical investigation, on the other hand, is the struggle to do conceptual justice to
the world in all its variety. It is born of wonder at the world and a readiness to combat our
confusions concerning it. This is philosophy's contemplative task in the academy.
There are philosophical objections to this conception of philosophy. Some have thought
that it leads to an evasion of questions of truth (Wainwright 1995). Others have said that
one's philosophy is always determined by one's personal perspectives and commitments,
and that philosophers seek in vain for a perch above the fray (Wolterstorff 2000, 155).
Still others have thought, absurdly, that a contemplative conception of philosophy
expresses the following desire: “Attachment to ideals is fine for common men; as
philosophers, however, we should set aside all ends and aims. We should strive to be past
caring” (Denham 2000).
A contemplative conception of philosophy has none of these consequences. The perch
above the fray is not, as some have thought, one from which the philosopher arbitrates
between our beliefs in the name of rationality. Neither is it a view from nowhere. It is a
contemplation of the world from the vantage point of disinterested inquiry. Nor does it
mean that the person engaged in such inquiry does not have, or ceases to have, personal
values and perspectives. On the contrary, as Winch says, doing conceptual justice to the
world “is a task of enormous difficulty, both at the technical level and also because of the
moral demands it makes on the writer, who will of course him or herself have strong
moral or religious commitments and will also be hostile to certain other possibilities”
(1996, 173).
Philosophers who resist a contemplative conception of philosophy will have to meet its
challenge in any discussion of the place of philosophy in the academy. No talk of
different, basic presuppositions will be able to evade it. If it is claimed that the way we
see things is determined by our perspectives, not personally, but in philosophy, one will
have to refute in detail the countless examples of Wittgenstein's descriptive conceptual
success in showing us different perspectives; the way he teaches us to give attention to
perspectives and voices that are not our own, and to do conceptual justice to them in their
own terms. It would have to be shown that Wittgenstein does not teach us differences,