The Principles That Shape Our Philosophy (Whether We Admit It or Not)

You can learn a lot about someone from their controlling principles.

You can learn a lot about someone from their controlling principles—that is, what motivates them, philosophically speaking. Sometimes people are explicit about their controlling principles; other times—often, in fact—they’re not. You have to sort of root around for them, and sometimes you find them, sometimes you don’t.

What might a person’s controlling principles be? In some cases, they’re religious or political—a prior commitment to a certain ideology or agenda, for example—and much of what they do in philosophy is really just a search for ways to support or defend those perspectives; to make them seem publicly reputable or even just reasonable in their own mind. (Related to a common theme of this blog: Obviously, some people defend God philosophically because they want God to exist; equally obviously, some people defend atheism philosophically because they want God not to exist—both of these are real). Essentially, they’re engaged in philosophical apologetics. I’m not saying this is inherently negative; to some extent, we all engage in apologetic efforts.

Can this be an impediment to truth? Sure. But it doesn’t always have to be—many people, after all, wind up changing their views, even after originally setting out to defend them, simply by encountering difficulties or alternative perspectives along the way. In such cases, their controlling principle actually leads them to abandon it, and, whether they realize it or not, they typically adopt a new one.

In other cases, someone might hold to a controlling principle of “finding truth.” That sounds noble, but it’s usually a bit more complicated than that; it’s often more like, “Finding truth, just as long as it doesn’t conflict with THIS MORE CHERISHED COMMITMENT OF MINE.” If we’re being honest, I think we can say this is probably true of all of us. I mean, it’s almost certainly true of me.

I can genuinely say that I really want to know the truth about things—really! But at the same time, there are certain commitments I hold that I frankly couldn’t imagine abandoning. In fact, I’d go as far as to say these prior commitments are necessary conditions for getting at the truth of things—certainly the ultimate truth of things.

In a way, it’s as if my ultimate commitment is to the idea that there is an ultimate truth of things—one that can, in principle (even if not always in practice), be known. And I’m saying I just don’t see how I could ever accept something that would cause me to abandon that commitment. So, in a sense, this commitment compels me to seek truth, insofar as there is some ultimate truth to be found. But it also prevents me from entertaining a certain “possibility”—one that, I suppose, some people might (absurdly, in my view) think is true: that there is no ultimate truth to be found, that reality is, at bottom, absurd. They might even take this as evidence that I’m not truly truth-oriented, that I’m somehow prejudiced. So be it, I guess!

Perhaps it would help if I explain what I mean just a little more.

My ultimate controlling principle is the avoidance of skepticism—that is, affirming the radical intelligibility of reality. Related to this is not just my acceptance of the PSR (Principle of Sufficient Reason— i.e., the idea that everything can be explained or made sense of) and my desire to find a worldview that eliminates brute facts (which I think classical theism does), but also my commitment to a general metaphysical program that best aligns with—or, rather, secures—my strongest intuitions.

And what all that means, in practice, is this: Other things being equal, I think it’s better (according to my controlling principle) if a worldview doesn’t force you to abandon or seriously revise your strongest common-sense beliefs.¹ For me, that means avoiding the various nihilisms—moral nihilism and mereological nihilism in particular—which I think Aristotelianism handles quite well (and which, in turn, leads naturally to my commitment to classical theism). It also means seeking a worldview that can make sense of authentic human agency or genuine free choice, since that is, for me, a very strong intuition indeed!

Of course, some of these commitments are more expendable than others. I could, I suppose, see myself becoming a sort of theological determinist if I thought the weight of evidence and arguments pointed in that direction. I don’t think that would undermine my overall controlling principle. But again, my intuition of my own agency is just very strong, so I’m naturally inclined toward trying to make sense of how such a feature of the world is possible—particularly in light of God’s universal causality (another of my commitments).

Why are these controlling principles actually controlling for me? That’s an important question—and, honestly, I don’t have any immediately great answer to it, except to say that I want to secure the things that seem, and have always seemed, most true to me as given through basic experience.

It has always seemed undeniably true to me that certain things are objectively wrong and ought not to be done, regardless of my—or anyone else’s—preferences. It has always seemed undeniably true that I have genuine agency, at least in most ordinary circumstances: that I can affect history, that I am not merely the effect of history. It has always seemed undeniably true that I am an enduring subject who undergoes change—that while I differ in many ways from my two-year-old self, I am still substantially the same entity, the same person. And it has always seemed undeniably true that things can be made sense of, that they have causes or explanations, and that nothing is simply, inexplicably brute.

I’ve said many times before that the biggest move away from naturalism for me wasn’t any direct argument for theism (those came later)—it was, rather, the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness in trying to secure so many of these basic beliefs. I constantly felt the pressure from a consistent (minimalist) naturalism to radically revise or abandon these beliefs: the pressure toward anti-realism (nihilism), determinism, reductionism, and, ultimately, skepticism.

Perhaps those descriptions actually map reality, and I’ve simply failed to fully sign onto the program because of my controlling principles. Perhaps. But I really don’t think so.

1. Since I think breaking these commonsense beliefs often invites a wider skepticism.