Edward Feser's Blog, page 11

What counts as magisterial teaching?

Popes speakinfallibly when they either proclaim some doctrine ex cathedra, or reiterate some doctrine that has already beentaught infallibly by virtue of being a consistent teaching of the ordinarymagisterium of the Church for millennia. Even when papal teaching is not infallible, it is normally owed“religious assent.”  However, the Churchrecognizes exceptions.  The instruction DonumVeritatis , issued during the pontificate of St. John Paul II,acknowledges that “it could happen that some Magisterial documents might not befree from all deficiencies” so that “a theologian may, according to the case,raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents ofmagisterial interventions.”  Donum Veritatis explicitly distinguishessuch respectful criticism from “dissent” from perennial Church teaching.

The clearestsort of case where such criticism would be justifiable would be if a popehimself says something that appears to conflict with the Church’s traditionalteaching.  This has happened a handful oftimes in Church history, the clearest examples involving PopeHonorius I and Pope John XXII.  TheChurch has always acknowledged that in these rare cases, it can be justifiablefor the faithful respectfully to reprove a pope.  I have written on this matter elsewhere (hereand here)and direct the interested reader to those articles.

Severaldocuments issued during the pontificate of Pope Francis have, according to hiscritics, exhibited “deficiencies” of precisely the sort Donum Veritatis says can be criticized in this way.  There is, for instance, Amoris Laetitia, which appears to allow, in some cases, absolutionand Holy Communion for those in invalid marriages who are sexually active andlack firm purpose of amendment.  There isthe 2018 revision to the Catechism, which gives the impression that the deathpenalty is intrinsically wrong when it characterizes it as “an attack on theinviolability and dignity of the person.” Most recently, there is FiduciaSupplicans, which allows for blessings for same-sex and adulterouscouples.  In these particular respects,these documents appear to conflict with the traditional teaching of the Church.

I havewritten on these controversial documents elsewhere, and what I want to addresshere is a different issue.  Suppose oneor more of these magisterial statements is indeed problematic in just the waysthe critics allege.  It seems that whatwe would have in that case is magisterial teaching that is, to borrow thelanguage of Donum Veritatis,“deficient.”  But in arecent article at The Catholic Thing,Fr. Thomas Weinandy has proposed what appears to be an alternativeinterpretation.  Commenting on Fiducia Supplicans, he suggests thatsuch deficient teaching is not truly magisterial after all, and for that reasonnot binding on the faithful.  Here is therelevant passage:

St. John Henry Newman providescriteria for judging what is true and what is erroneous doctrinal development(a “corruption”)… Newman presumed that all pontifical teaching or teaching frombishops concerning doctrine and morals is magisterial.  I propose that any pontifical teaching orteaching from bishops that overtly and deliberately contradicts the perennialteaching of previous councils and pontiffs is not magisterial teaching,precisely because it does not accord with past magisterial doctrinal teaching.

The pope or a bishop may be, byvirtue of his office, a member of the magisterium, but his teaching, if itcontradicts the received previous magisterial teaching, is notmagisterial.  Such false teaching simplyfails to meet the necessary criteria.  Itpossesses no ecclesial authoritative credentials.  Rather, it is simply an ambiguous or flawedstatement that attempts or pretends to be magisterial, when it’s not.

Endquote.  This might at first glance seemodd.  If teaching on faith or morals ispresented by the magisterium of the Church, isn’t it, by that very fact, magisterial in nature?  But it seems to me that what Fr. Weinandy isgetting at can be illuminated by way of an analogy with what St. Thomas Aquinassays about the nature of law.  Aquinasfamously distinguishes several kinds of law, the two most relevant for presentpurposes being natural law and human law.  The natural law, of course, has to do with morallybinding precepts grounded in human nature and discoverable by unaided reason.  Human law, by contrast, is man-made ratherthan discovered or grounded in nature. 

But humanlaw is necessary in order to give precision to the application of naturallaw.  For example, we can know by naturallaw that it is wrong to steal or damage someone else’s property.  But how exactly to determine what counts as another person’s property canin some cases be difficult.  For example,if someone homesteads some piece of land, how deep under the ground do hisproperty rights extend?  How much of theairspace above the land does he have a right to control?  Does he have the right to drain stormwateronto adjacent land, or to prevent it from draining onto his own?  And so on. Human law is needed in order to resolve such questions so that propertyowners can know what they can reasonably expect of one another and how toresolve disputes between them.  To theextent that human law applies and extends the natural law in such a way, it isbinding on us, just as natural law is.

However,such law is binding on us only tothat extent.  Indeed, for Aquinas,strictly speaking, it doesn’t even countas law if it is not consistent with natural law.  He writes: “Every humanly made law has thecharacter of law to the extent that it stems from the law of nature.  On the other hand, if a humanly made lawconflicts with the natural law, then it is no longer a law, but a corruption oflaw” (Summa Theologiae I-II.95.2, Freddosotranslation).  And since it is not law,it lacks the binding force of law. Suppose, for example, that some purported law was passed by Congress thatpermitted people to steal the property of those of some particular race orethnicity, or abolished private property altogether.  Because such a measure would positivelycontradict the natural law, it would on Aquinas’s analysis not count as agenuine law at all, and for that reason no one would be bound to obey it.

Law, on thisunderstanding, cannot properly be understood except teleologically, by reference to the end or purpose it serves. Human law, to be true law, must facilitate the application of the naturallaw.  Hence, when it deviates from thisend, it fails to be true law.  It is insuch a case mere pseudo-law, or atbest a failed attempt at law.  Attempting to make such laws is likeattempting to make tea but forgetting to put the teabag into the hot water, orby running the water through coffee grounds. Even if the person making it intendedit to be tea or even thinks of itas tea, the result will not in fact be tea.

Thisanalysis, as I say, gives us an analogy by which we can understand Fr.Weinandy’s thesis.  Like human law,magisterial acts have a teleology, anend or purpose for which they exist and apart from which they cannot properlybe understood.  That purpose is to conveythe deposit of faith, draw out its implications, and apply them to concretecircumstances.  When they facilitate thatpurpose, we have genuine magisterial teaching. But should some act, even an act by a pope, be contrary to that end,then the result cannot be a genuine magisterial act, any more than a human lawthat contradicts the natural law can be a true law, or any more than hot waterrun through coffee grounds can be true tea.

Suppose, forexample, that a pope were to teach that Christ had only one will, as PopeHonorius appeared to do in the letter that led to his condemnation for aidingand abetting the Monothelite heresy.  OnFr. Weinandy’s interpretation, the correct thing to say is not that this was agenuinely magisterial act, albeit one that was in error.  The correct thing to say is that this was not a genuinely magisterial act, butrather at best a failed attempt atcarrying out a magisterial act.  It was akind of misfire, because a truly magisterial act always facilitates conveying thedeposit of faith, and Honorius’s act did the contrary of that.  In Fr. Weinandy’s view, the novel teaching inFiducia Supplicans is anothermisfire, an attempt at a magisterialact that fails insofar as it is contrary to the deposit of faith.

I wouldsuggest that yet another way to understand Fr. Weinandy’s position is that heis, in effect, interpreting the word “magisterial” as what philosopher GilbertRyle called a “success word.”  A successword is a word that describes an act or state that must be successful if it isto be carried out or exist at all.  Forexample, if you can be said genuinely to have proved something or to knowit, then it must in fact be true.  Youcan’t really have known something that turns out to be false, but at most onlyhave thought that you knew it.  Nor can you prove something that is false,but at most only try to proveit.  By contrast, “believe” is not asuccess word, because you can believe something even if it is in fact false.

“Magisterial,”on this interpretation, is also a success word. If some thesis is in fact contrary to the deposit of faith, then itcannot be genuinely magisterial, any more than a false statement can be knownor proved.  At most it can wrongly be thought to be or intended as magisterial, just as you can think you know or intendto prove something that is in fact false.

If it seemsbold to say that the Church can in some cases attempt a magisterial act and yetfail, it is worth pointing out that there is a sense in which Fr. Weinandy’sthesis is actually less bold thanwhat Donum Veritatis itselfsays.  For again, Donum Veritatis says that it is possible for “magisterial documents”and “magisterial interventions” to be “deficient” even with respect to their “contents,”and not just their form or timeliness, and for that reason open to legitimate criticismby theologians.  This seems to imply thata thesis can be genuinely magisterialand yet nevertheless mistaken and open to correction by the faithful.  Fr. Weinandy’s positon, by contrast, impliesthat a genuinely magisterial act cannot be mistaken or open to suchcorrection.  Whatever one thinks of hisposition, it is hard to see how it is in any way less respectful of magisterialauthority than Donum Veritatis is.

A comment on comments

Dear reader,if it seems your comment has not been approved, sometimes it actually has been approved even if you don’t see it.  The reason is that once a combox reaches 200comments, the Blogger software will not show any new comments made after thatunless you click “Load more…” at the bottom of the comments page.  The trouble is that this is in small printand easily overlooked.  In the screen capabove, I’ve circled in red what you should look for.

Occasionally,your comment does not appear because it has notbeen approved.  Sometimes this is becausethe comment is too off-topic.  Most of thetime, it is because the comment is nothing more than a drive-by insult or thelike, or is blasphemous or obscene. Those are never let through if I notice them.  Sometimes obnoxious comments are let throughif they are not too egregious and there is also a more substantive point madein the comment.  But I ask readers kindlyto refrain from sophomoric squabbles and the like.

Finally, sometimesyour comment has not appeared simply because it takes me a while to get toapproving comments.  I’m trying to bemore speedy on that, sorry.

Avicenna, Aquinas, and Leibniz on the argument from contingency

Avicenna,Aquinas, and Leibniz all present versions of what would today be called the argument from contingency for theexistence of a divine necessary being. Their versions are interestingly different, despite Aquinas’s havingbeen deeply influenced by Avicenna and Leibniz’s having been familiar with Aquinas.  I think all three of them are good arguments,though I won’t defend them here.  Idiscussed Avicenna’s argument in anearlier post.  I defendAquinas’s in my book Aquinas ,at pp. 90-99.  I defend Leibniz’s inchapter 5 of my book FiveProofs of the Existence of God . Here I merely want to compare and contrast the arguments.

Because Iwant to focus on what I take to be the main thrust of each of the argumentsrather get bogged down in exegetical details, I will offer my own paraphrasesof the arguments rather than quote directly from any of these thinkers’ texts.

Here are thethree arguments.  Avicenna’s is from the Najāt, and can be paraphrased asfollows:

At least one thing exists.  It has to be either necessary orcontingent.  If it’s necessary, thenthere’s a necessary being, and our conclusion is established.  But suppose it is contingent.  Then it requires a cause.  Suppose that cause is a further contingentthing, and that that further contingent thing has yet another contingent thingas its own cause, and so on to infinity. Then we have a collection of contingent things.  That collection will itself be eithernecessary or contingent.  But it can’t benecessary, since its existence is contingent on the existence of itsmembers.  So, the collection must becontingent, and in that case it too must have a cause.  That cause is either itself a part of thecollection, or it is outside it.  But itcan’t be part of the collection, because if it were, then as cause of the wholecollection, it would be the cause of itself.  And nothing can cause itself.  So, the cause of the collection of contingentthings must be outside the collection. But if it is outside that collection, it must be necessary.  So, there is a necessary being.

Aquinas’sversion is the third of his famous Five Ways in the Summa Theologiae.  It can beparaphrased as follows:

Some things are contingent in nature,as is evident from the fact that they come into existence and go out ofexistence.  Such things can’t existforever, since whatever is contingent, and thus is capable of failing to exist,will in fact at some point fail to exist. So, if everything was contingent, then at some point nothing would haveexisted.  But if there was ever a timewhen nothing existed, then nothing would exist now, since there would in thatcase be nothing around to cause new things to come into existence.  But things do exist now.  So, not everything can be contingent, and theremust be a necessary being.  Now, such athing might derive its necessity from another thing, or it might have itsnecessity of its own nature.  But therecouldn’t be a regress of things deriving their necessity from something elseunless it terminates in something having its necessity of its own nature.  So, there must be something which has itsnecessity of its own nature.

Leibniz’sversion is in the Monadology.  It might be paraphrased as follows:

For anything that exists, there mustbe a sufficient reason for its existence. In the case of the contingent things that make up the universe, thiscannot be found by appealing merely to other contingent things, even if theseries of contingent things being caused by other contingent things extendedbackward into the past without beginning. For in that case, we would still need a sufficient reason why the seriesas a whole exists.  But the series as awhole is no less contingent than the things that make it up.  So, the explanation cannot lie in the seriesitself.  A complete explanation orsufficient reason can be found only if there is a necessary being that is thesource of the world of contingent things. So, there must be such a necessary being.

Each of thesethinkers goes on to argue that, on analysis, it can be shown that the necessarybeing must have the key divine attributes, and therefore is God.  But I want to focus here just on thereasoning each argument gives for the existence of a necessary being.  And again, I won’t be defending the argumentshere, but just comparing them.  So Iwon’t say anything about how the arguments might be fleshed out or thereasoning made tighter, how various objections would be answered, and so on.

What do thearguments have in common?  First, they allrest, of course, on the distinction between contingent beings and necessarybeings, and argue that it cannot be that everything falls into the formerclass.  Second, they all reason causally to the necessary being as thesource of everything other than itself. Third, for that reason, they all have at least a minimal empirical component insofar as theyappeal to the contingent things we know through experience and argue from theirexistence to that of a necessary being.

A fourthsimilarity is that all three thinkers cash out the nature of the necessarybeing’s necessity in terms of the distinction between essence and existence.  Though, as my paraphrases indicate, this is adistinct step that does not and need not be stated in the argumentsthemselves.  Furthermore, our threephilosophers do not do this in quite the same way.  Avicenna, and Aquinas following him, holdthat the cause of things in which essence and existence are distinct must be anecessary being in which they are notdistinct.  Leibniz, however, does not saythat God’s essence is his existence,but that his essence includesexistence.  (This way of putting thingshas influenced much contemporary discussion – and not for the better, because itobscures the implications for divine simplicity that Avicenna's and Aquinas’s wayof speaking makes clear.)

A fifthsimilarity is that none of the three arguments either presupposes or assertsthat the universe had a beginning.  Allof them hold that the existence of a necessary being can be established even ifwe were to suppose that the world of contingent things has always been here.

A sixthsimilarity is that each of the arguments moves from a claim about contingentthings considered individually to a claim about contingent things consideredcollectively, albeit in different ways. For Avicenna, just as an individual contingent thing requires a cause,so too does the totality of contingent things require a cause.  For Aquinas, just as individual contingentthings must fail to exist at some point, so too must the collection ofcontingent things fail to exist at some point, at least if there were nonecessary being.  For Leibniz, just asindividual contingent things require an explanation outside them, so too doesthe collection of contingent things require an explanation outside it.

How do thearguments differ?  First some background.  Scholastic philosophers often distinguish physical from metaphysical arguments for God’s existence.  Physical arguments are those that proceedfrom facts about the concrete physical world as interpreted in light of thephilosophy of nature.  For example, Aquinas’sFirst Way is commonly interpreted as a physical argument because it begins withthe reality of motion, understood along Aristotelian lines.  Metaphysical arguments are those that proceedfrom more abstract considerations that are not tied to the physical world perse.  For example, Aquinas’s proof for God’sexistence in De Ente et Essentiabegins with the fact that there are things whose essence and existence aredistinct and argues that such things require a cause whose essence just issubsistent existence itself.  Since thereis an essence/existence distinction in angels no less than in material things,the argument does not depend on facts about the physical per se. 

Of the threearguments we’re considering here, Aquinas’s has a more physical cast than thoseof Avicenna and Leibniz.  For theobservation that material things come into being and pass away, and the claimthat material things individually and collectively would go out of existence givenenough time, play a big role in the argument, and these are points about thephysical qua physical. 

By contrast,Avicenna’s and Leibniz’s arguments have a more metaphysical cast.  Even if we take them at least to refer tophysical things, what they focus on is the contingencyof these things rather than anything specifically physical.  And angels, which are immaterial, are in asense contingent too, insofar as there is in them an essence/existence distinctionand thus the need for a cause which imparts existence to them.  (To be sure, there is for Aquinas also a sense in which angels are necessarybeings, since once they exist, there is nothing in the created order that candestroy them.  Still, they have to becreated by God, who could also annihilate them if he wills to.  Hence angels have only a derivative necessity rather than a strict necessity.  For that reason, they also have a kind ofcontingency.)

Hence, itseems that one could remove any reference to the physical as such from Avicenna’sand Leibniz’s arguments without altering their basic thrust.  Indeed, one could even remove any referenceto any actual specific contingent things and argue simply that if there are contingent things (whetheror not there really are any), they couldn’t be the only things that exist, for the reasons Avicenna and Leibnizgive.  Aquinas’s Third Way, by contrast,would be a very different sort of argument if the physical claims it makes wereremoved from it.

A seconddifference is that the notion of explanation,and with it the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), play an explicit role inLeibniz’s argument but not in Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s.  That is not to deny that Avicenna and Aquinasare at least implicitly committed to PSR, and that it lurks in the backgroundof their arguments, which are of course offering explanations.  But this is not thematized in theirarguments, the way it is in Leibniz. This reflects Leibniz’s distinctively rationalist approach to metaphysics.

Here’s oneway to understand the difference.  TheScholastics distinguish several “transcendentals,” attributes that apply to allthings of whatever category – being, truth, goodness, andso on.  These are taken to be “convertible,”the same thing looked at from different points of view.  For example, truth is being considered asintelligible, and goodness is being considered as desirable.  (I say a lot more about the transcendentalsin this article.) 

Avicenna’sand Aquinas’s arguments essentially consider reality under the guise of the transcendentalattribute of being.  The being of contingent things, they argue,must derive causally from the being of something that exists in an absolutely necessaryway.  Leibniz’s argument, by contrast,essentially considers reality under the transcendental attribute of truth. The intelligibility of contingentthings, he argues, presupposes a necessary being which is intelligible in itself rather than by reference to something else.

A thirddifference is that the impossibility of an infinite regress of a certain kindplays a role in Aquinas’s Third Way that finds no parallel in Avicenna’s andLeibniz’s arguments.  To be sure, and asI have said, none of the three arguments rules out the possibility of aninfinite temporal regress – a regressof what Aquinas would call “accidentally ordered” causes extending backwardinto the past.  None of them supposes ortries to establish that the world had a beginning.  But Aquinas’s argument does include thepremise that a series of beings that derive their necessity from something elsewould have to terminate in something that has its necessity of its own natureor built into it.  And here he isappealing to the impossibly of an infinite series of causes of what he calls an“essentially ordered” kind, also known as a hierarchicalcausal series.  (I discuss thedifference between these two kinds of causal series in many places, including Aquinas and Five Proofs.)

Any furtherdifferences between the three arguments seem to me to reflect these threefundamental differences.  And thedifferences are important, both because they capture different aspects ofreality, and because they entail that some objections that might seem to haveforce against one version of the argument from contingency will not necessarilyapply to other versions.  (Though, as Ihave indicated, I think each version can successfully be defended againstobjections.)

The heresy with a thousand faces

In anew article at Postliberal Order,I discuss the disturbing parallels between the woke phenomenon and the medievalCatharist or Albigensian heresy, a movement so fanatical and virulent that thepreaching of the Dominicans could not entirely eliminate it and Church andstate judged military action to be necessary.

Immortal souls at West Point

Had a greattime visiting the United States Military Academy at West Point this week for aThomistic Institute talk on the theme “Do You Have an Immortal Soul?” Thank youTI and cadets!

Voluntarism in The Vanishing

Thereputation of 1993’s The Vanishing has suffered because critics judge it inferior to the 1988 Dutch movie of whichit was a remake.  But considered on itsown terms, it is a solid enough little thriller.  Jeff Bridges is effectively creepy as theoddball family-man-cum-kidnapper Barney Cousins.  I had reason to re-watch the flick the otherday, and was struck by what I take to be an underlying theme of the contrastbetween voluntarist and intellectualist conceptions of humanaction.

Tooversimplify, intellectualism in the sense in question is the view that theintellect is prior to the will, whereas voluntarism holds that he will is priorto the intellect.  That is to say, forthe intellectualist, the will only ever wills what the intellect first judgesto be in some way good; whereas for the voluntarist, the will wills what it doesindependently of the intellect, and the intellect follows along for the ride.  The dispute is thus over whether it is ultimatelythe intellect or the will that is “in the driver’s seat” of human action.  Naturally, things are more complicated thanthat, but this characterization will do for present purposes.

Applied tothe issues of free will and moral responsibility, the dispute betweenvoluntarism and intellectualism cashes out in the difference between what theologianServais Pinckaers calls the “freedom of indifference” and “freedom forexcellence.”  On the former conception offree will, associated with Ockham, the will is of its nature indifferent towardthe various ends it might pursue, and thus is freer to the extent that it is atany moment equally capable of choosing anything.  The implication is that a will that isstrongly inclined to choose what is good rather than what is evil is less freethan a will that is not inclined in either direction.  By contrast, on the conception of free willas “freedom for excellence,” which is associated with Aquinas, the will isinherently directed toward the good in the sense that pursuit of the good isits final cause.  The implication is thatthe will is more free to the extent that it finds it easy to choose what isgood and less free to the extent that it does not.

How is thisrelevant to The Vanishing?  Let’s start with a brief summary of theplot.  (I’ll leave out the most crucialspoilers, for any readers who haven’t seen it.) The movie begins with Barney elaborately planning a kidnapping, forreasons that are only revealed later and made especially hard to fathom giventhat he otherwise seems like an ordinary, middle class loving father andhusband.  Meanwhile, we’re introduced to writerJeff Harriman and his girlfriend Diane (played by Kiefer Sutherland and SandraBullock, respectively) who are on vacation and stop at a large and busy gasstation, where Diane goes into the snack shop to pick up supplies.  After waiting in the car for an unusuallylong time, Jeff goes to look for Diane but can find her nowhere.  The employees, customers, and police all proveto be of no help in finding her, and she has vanished without a trace.

The moviethen flashes forward three years, and we find that Jeff has during that wholetime been looking for Diane without success. He has posted fliers with Diane’s picture all over the vicinity of thegas station, appeared on television to discuss the case, followed any lead hecan find, and repeatedly badgered the police, all to no avail.  The search has become an obsession, and hasexhausted him.  When he starts a newrelationship with a waitress named Rita (played by Nancy Travis) it seems hemay finally abandon the search.  But thenBarney, who has been following the case during this time, decides to contactJeff and reveal that he is the one who abducted Diane.  He promises Jeff that he can at long lastfind out exactly what happened to her, but only if he agrees to experience whatshe did – beginning with allowing Barney to drug Jeff with chloroform to knockhim out, just as he had drugged Diane. 

I’ll leaveit to the interested reader to watch the movie and find out what happens.  The relevance to voluntarism is this.  When explaining to Jeff why he did what hedid, Barney begins by describing actions he had performed through the course ofhis life despite their being dangerous. One of them involved saving a drowning girl, which had made Barney ahero in the eyes of his daughter.  Butrather than gratifying Barney, his daughter’s admiration troubled him.  He worried that he could not be worthy ofbeing thought by her to be a good man unless he was just as capable of doinggreat evil as he was of doing good.  And so he decided that he would prove tohimself that he was capable of such evil by doing the worst thing he couldthink of to another person – which turned out to be Diane (and where we findout exactly what he did to her by the end of the movie).

Barney’stale reveals, first, a fixation on the power of the will.  He recounts jumping off a roof as a boy eventhough he knew it was dangerous, and indeed resulted in him breaking his arm.  Throughout the movie he is almost alwaysunflappable even in moments of distress, as when he suffers a serious beatingwith equanimity.  But the truly voluntaristelement is his apparent belief that a praiseworthy action could only flow from somethinglike what Pinckaers calls the “freedom of indifference” – that is to say, from awill that was not in any way aimed at the good more than at anything else, butopted for it anyway.  This, it seems tome, is the best way to make sense of Barney’s claim that he could only beworthy of praise for his good action of saving the girl if he was no lesscapable of an evil action like what he does to Diane.  The kidnapping was, in effect, his way ofproving to himself that he did indeed possess the “freedom of indifference.”

Had he not been able to bring himself to dosuch an evil thing, and had he saved the little girl because of an inclination towardbenevolence, this would have been perfectly consistent with what Pinckaerscalls the “freedom for excellence,” and would have been morally praiseworthy onthat conception of freedom.  Barney’sdissatisfaction with himself evinces an implicit rejection of this conception andof its implications concerning what makes a person praiseworthy.  But neither do his actions flow from any positiveinclination towards sadism, nor from a rejection of moral norms.  He is portrayed as, in general, a pleasantenough person.  And he acknowledges thatit is just for Jeff to want Barney harmed for what he has done.  He never evinces the slightest enjoyment ofcausing others pain.  All his actions areperformed in the bloodless manner of a scientific experiment (and indeed, it isrevealed that Barney is a chemistry professor). He simply wants to make of his will something capable of anything. 

Only a goodaction that flows from this kind ofwill is, he thinks, praiseworthy, and the reason seems to be that he thinksonly this kind of action would flow from the sheer arbitrary freedom of the will alone rather than from anynatural sentiment of benevolence or from a respect for rational criteria.  This is, to be sure, a curious conception offreedom and moral praiseworthiness, and quite perverse (indeed, depraved) fromthe point of view of an intellectualist like Aquinas.  But reading Barney as implicitly committed toa conception of freedom as the “freedom of indifference” makes intelligiblewhat might otherwise seem a simply bizarre and incoherent character motivation.

If Barneytakes the voluntarist emphasis on the will to an extreme, there is also a sensein which the other main character, Jeff, can be said to take theintellectualist emphasis on the intellect to an extreme.  His new girlfriend Rita grows increasinglyfrustrated with his inability to overcome his obsession with findingDiane.  She is, more than anything,jealous of this lost former girlfriend she has to compete with.  Jeff explains that Rita is the one he loves,and that romantic longing no longer has anything to do with his obsession withfinding Diane.  It is not knowing that bothers him.  He admits that if he had a choice between twoscenarios, one in which Diane is alive somewhere and happy but he never findsout what happened, and one in which he does find out but she is dead, he wouldprefer the latter.  Whereas Barney hasmade himself into a blind will divorced from intellect and its standards oftruth and goodness, Jeff has made himself into an intellect obsessed withattaining a certain piece of knowledge to the exclusion of willing what is infact good. 

Related posts:

Popculture roundup [where you’ll find other pretentious philosophical analysesof movies, music, comics, and the like]

Voluntarismand PSR

Thevoluntarist personality

Avicenna’s flying man

PeterAdamson’s new book IbnSīnā (Avicenna): A Very Short Introduction is an excellentprimer on the great medieval Islamic philosopher.  After a biographical chapter, it treatsAvicenna’s views on logic and epistemology, philosophical anthropology,science, and natural theology, and closes with a discussion of his influence onlater philosophy and theology.  Among thethings readers will find useful is the book’s discussion of Avicenna’s famous“flying man” argument.  Let’s take alook.

The flyingman thought experiment is one of the means (not the only one) by which Avicennaaims to establish the incorporeality of the human soul.  He presents it at the end of the firstchapter of his treatment of the topic of the soul in his work The Cure.  One place you can find the relevant passageis Jon McGinnis and David C. Reisman’s anthology ClassicalArabic Philosophy, which translates it as follows:

For the purposes of establishing theexistence of the soul… [I]t has to be imagined as though one of us were createdwhole in an instant but his sight is veiled from directly observing the thingsof the external world.  He is created asthough floating in air or in a void but without the air supporting him in sucha way that he would have to feel it, and the limbs of his body are stretchedout and away from one another, so they do not come into contact or touch.  Then he considers whether he can assert theexistence of his self.  He has no doubtsabout asserting his self as something that exists without also [having to]assert the existence of any of his exterior or interior parts, his heart, hisbrain, or anything external.  He will, infact, be asserting the existence of his self without asserting that it haslength, breadth, or depth, and, if it were even possible for him in such a stateto imagine a hand or some other extremity, he would not imagine it as a part ofhis self or as a necessary condition of his self...  Thus, the self whose existence he asserted ishis unique characteristic...  Thus, what[the reader] has been alerted to is a way to be made alert to the existence ofthe soul as something that is not the body – nor in fact any body. (pp. 178-79)

The basicidea of the thought experiment is as follows. A man who comes into existence in the bizarre circumstances Avicennadescribes would have no sensory experiences. For one thing, he has from the start somehow been suspended in midair, ina manner that does not involve even the air pushing against him – perhaps bymiraculous divine action.  Hence he hasnever experienced external physical objects exerting any pressure on hisskin.  Because his arms, legs, fingers,etc. are all spread out away from one another, he also has not felt even hisown body parts pressing against him. Because he is veiled (presumably in a manner that does not involve aveil making contact with his body) he has never seen anything.  Presumably his ears, nose, and tongue aresimilarly prevented from being affected by any stimuli.  Hence he has no awareness of any physicalobject, not even his own body.  AsAdamson notes, while some might object that such a man would still have proprioceptiveexperiences of his limbs, it is not difficult to extend the thought experimentin a way that would prevent that.  Wecould imagine, for example, that the miraculous suspension of the normal operationof the relevant nerves is a further part of the situation. 

Now, the manwould, Avicenna claims, nevertheless have awareness of himself.  He would know that he exists, even though he would not know that his body exists, and indeed would not know that any physical world atall exists.  In that case, though, hemust be distinct from his body andfrom anything corporeal.  For if he werecorporeal, how could he know he exists without knowing that anything corporealexists?

Parallels to Avicenna?

I’ll comeback to some of the remarks Adamson makes about the argument, but first let memake some observations of my own.  Avicenna’sargument might seem similar to arguments later developed in the Cartesiandualist tradition.  For example, in hisSixth Meditation, Descartesargues that he could in principle exist without his body existing, if Godwilled to create him that way.  And in hisbook Engines of the Soul, W.D. Hart argues that it is possible in principle for a person to have visualexperiences while lacking a body, in which case it is possible for a person toexist without a body.

However,Avicenna’s argument is importantly different, in several respects.  First, Avicenna emphasizes that the man inhis thought experiment has had no sensoryexperiences at all.  By contrast,Hart’s argument involves a disembodied person who does have such experiences. And at least earlier in the Meditations,in Meditation One, Descartes suggests that it is possible for someone to havesensory experiences even in the absence of the existence of his body or of anymaterial world at all, if a Cartesian demon caused a disembodied mind to hallucinate. 

Second, the keypremise of Avicenna’s argument is epistemic,whereas the key premises of the Cartesian arguments mentioned are ontological.  Descartes and Hart start with the idea thatit is possible for the self to existwithout the body, and conclude from that that the self is distinct from thebody.  Avicenna starts with the idea thatone can know the self without knowing the body, and concludes fromthat that the self is distinct from the body.

Third, andrelatedly, the thought experiments Descartes and Hart appeal to presuppose thatthe self could in fact exist apart from the body, whereas Avicenna’s thoughtexperiment does not.  That is not to saythat Avicenna doesn’t think the self could survive without the body, but onlythat that would be a further conclusionof the argument rather than a presuppositionof the argument. 

The reasonthese differences are important is that they make Avicenna’s argument immune tocertain objections that might be raised against Descartes and Hart.  First, one might question the assumption thatsensory experience really is possible without a body.  If that assumption is wrong, then Hart’sargument will fail (though whether Descartes’s argument would fail will dependon how seriously Descartes wants us to take the Cartesian demon scenario).  But Avicenna’s argument makes no suchassumption. 

Second, becausethey presuppose that it is possible for the self to exist apart from the body,Descartes and Hart might be accused of begging the question.  They are trying to get from the possibility of the self existing apartfrom the body to the real distinctionbetween self and body.  But a critic canobject that the claim that it is possible for the self to exist apart from thebody presupposes that there is adistinction between self and body, and thus can hardly cogently be appealed toin order to establish such adistinction.  Avicenna is not open tosuch an objection.

If we arelooking for arguments from the tradition that are similar to Avicenna’s, itseems to me that a more plausible parallel is to be found in some arguments earlier than his, which were developedby St. Augustine in On the Trinity.  Augustineheld that the mind can know its own essence with certainty, but does notknow with certainty that corporeality is part of its essence.  Hence, he concludes, corporeality is not partof the mind’s essence.  He also held thatthe mind can know itself without the mediation of any imagery, but cannot knowmaterial things that way, and concluded that the mind must not be material.

Augustine’sand Avicenna’s arguments are similar, then, in starting with what the mind knows or doesn’t know about itself andabout material things, and from this epistemic premise drawing a conclusionabout the distinction between the mind and anything material.  The key difference is that Avicenna appealsto a novel thought experiment in order to make his point about what the mindknows.

Some objections

As Adamsonnotes, one objection that can be raised against Avicenna’s argument would be todeny that the flying man really would or could know of his own existence.  One could hold that it is only after the mind has had some perceptualexperiences that it comes to know itself, by way of reflecting on thoseexperiences.  Note that one can hold thison the basis of the moderate empiricism of Aristotle and Aquinas, withoutcommitting oneself to the more extreme modern empiricism of Locke and hissuccessors.  And as that indicates, onecould hold this without rejecting Avicenna’s conclusion that the mind isincorporeal, but only the flying man argument’s particular way of arriving atthat conclusion.

Adamson alsonotes that Avicenna’s argument has to be understood in light of his broaderepistemological commitments, which include the thesis that the self is alwaysat least tacitly aware of itself.  I findthese broader commitments dubious, but for present purposes will simply notethat the need to defend them in order to get the flying man argument off theground at the very least makes it a considerably less punchy argument than itmight appear to be at first glance.

Anotherobjection noted by Adamson is that to know one’s self without knowing one’sbody does not by itself entail thatthe self is different from the body, any more than the fact that Lois Laneknows that Clark Kent is at the DailyPlanet without knowing that Superman is there entails that Clark Kent isdifferent from Superman.  Adamsonsuggests that one way Avicenna could reply to this would be to argue that toknow a thing’s essence, specifically,requires knowing its essential constituents. If we say that the flying man knows his essence while not knowinganything about his body, then the body cannot be among the self’s essentialconstituents.

Thisinterpretation of the argument underlines its parallels with Augustine’sarguments.  I refer the reader to mydiscussion of those arguments, which is not unsympathetic even though theyare not my own preferred way of establishing the mind’s immateriality. 

Related reading:

Avicenna’sargument from contingency, Part I

Avicenna’sargument from contingency, Part II

Avicennaon non-contradiction

Progress report

My friends, it exists. More news later.

Jesuit Britain?

My review ofthe anthology Projectionsof Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons in Politics,Law, and Rights , edited by Leopoldo Prieto López and José Luis CendejasBueno, appears in the Winter2023 issue of Religion and Liberty.

New Year’s open thread

Let’s openthe New Year with an open thread.  Now’sthe time at last to bring up that otherwise off-topic comment that keepsgetting deleted, or anything else you like. From Art Nouveau to Art Blakey, from presidents to presentism, fromsci-fi to Wi-Fi to hi-fis, everything is on topic.  Just keep it civil and classy.  Previous open threads collected here.