Boring, Muddledheaded, And Banal

by on July 25, 2026 | Comment

Philosopher James K. A. Smith suffered through a period of profound depression. He found solace and insight in the writings of some of the great Christian mystics. And what he learned, he tells us, is that there is a wisdom and peace that transcends what can be provided by philosophical analysis, arguments, and systems.

That premise has the makings of an interesting book. Unfortunately, Smith did not write one. I am sorry to be hard on someone who does seem to have gone through a period of real emotional distress. The trouble is that what he presents as a remedy is worse than unhelpful. Shockingly, given Smith’s prominence as a Christian thinker, the book’s philosophical content is muddleheaded where it isn’t simply banal. And the appeal to the mystics ends up being something of a bait and switch. Smith’s main interests turn out to be contemporary art, movies, novels, and music—which he strains, unsuccessfully, to connect to the mystical tradition. The result is a self-indulgent mess that offers the reader no helpful entry into mysticism but only a vague, anticlimactic sentimentality. I wish I could say something nicer.

In his younger days, Smith tells us, his work in philosophy was characterized by “intellectual swagger” and “pugilistic polemics” aimed at “winning” and finding “security.” The point of constructing an airtight argument was to dominate others; the quest for knowledge was about building an intellectual fortress within which he might feel safe. This spirit, he claims, reflected that of the Western philosophical tradition, which has from the beginning tended toward “conquest,” “control,” and “­exclusion.” In his own experience, he says, it yielded only “a sterile, lonely cell” that “locked other people out.” The sequel was a spiritual crisis. He came to realize that deep down he was still just “a little boy” looking for affirmation. His solution was to advocate a different approach to philosophy, his aim being not to “defend The Truth” but to “figure out how to love.” Whereas he once aspired to be “the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine,” now he “dream[s] of being Mr. Rogers.” His new dream requires abandoning “discursivity,” leaving behind the “antiseptic precision of binary logic,” and reconceiving philosophy as open-ended contemplation, more about “the process, not the conclusion.”

There are several serious problems with this new understanding, not the least of which is that it reduces philosophy to banal pop psychology clichés. (Find your inner child, for whom life is a journey rather than a destination!) Smith’s portrayal of the Western philosophical tradition is a caricature, and even he seems to acknowledge in one or two places that his criticisms apply more to modern philosophy than to earlier eras. For example, he notes that modern thought has had a tendency to make intellectual life dryly academic, and to focus on aspects of reality that can be exploited technologically or commodified. The ancients, by contrast, emphasized that philosophy is a way of life with a contemplative dimension. Read more»

Edward Feser | First Things | July 13, 2026

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