Edward Feser's Blog, page 22
July 3, 2022
Problems for Goff’s panpsychism
Panpsychism is the view that conscious awareness pervades the physical world, down to the level of basic particles. In recent years, philosopher Philip Goff has become an influential proponent of the view, defending it in his books Consciousness and Fundamental Reality and Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness . He builds on ideas developed by contemporary philosophers like David Chalmers and Galen Strawson, who in turn were influenced by early twentieth-century thinkers like Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington (though Russell, it should be noted, was not himself a panpsychist).
Goff’s views are bound to be of special interest to many of the regular readers of this blog, given that a critique of the conception of matter associated with Galileo and other early modern proponents of the mechanical world picture is central to his position. The problematic nature of this conception of matter has, of course, been a longstanding theme of my own work. Naturally, then, I think that Goff’s publicizing of what he calls “Galileo’s error” is an important contribution. But unfortunately, what Goff wants to put in place of that error is, in my view, not much of an improvement. Certainly his argument for panpsychism from the rejection of Galileo’s mistake is a gigantic non sequitur.
The limits of physics
Let’s begin with what Goff gets right. Common sense takes ordinary physical objects to have both (a) size, shape, motion, etc. and (b) color, sound, heat, cold, etc. Early modern philosophers and scientists characterized features of type (a) as “primary qualities” and features of type (b) as “secondary qualities,” and argued that the latter are not genuine features of matter as it is in itself, but reflect only the way conscious awareness presents matter to us. What exists in mind-independent reality is nothing more than colorless, soundless, tasteless, odorless, etc. particles in motion. Color, sound, taste, odor, etc. exist only in the mind’s experiences of that reality.
That’s the short version of the story, anyway. There are various complications. For example, on Locke’s version of the distinction, it is not quite right to say that secondary qualities don’t exist in mind-independent reality. In fact, both primary and secondary qualities are really there in physical objects. The difference is that the experiences that primary qualities generate in us really “resemble” the qualities themselves, whereas the experiences that secondary qualities generate in us do notresemble the qualities themselves. On Locke’s view, there really is something in an apple that resembles the shape you see in it, but there is nothing really there in the apple that resembles the color you see in it.
Influenced by this Lockean way of making the distinction, later philosophers would say that whether colors, sounds, heat, cold, and the like really exist in mind-independent reality depends on what we mean by those terms. If by “color” you mean a surface’s tendency to absorb light of some wavelengths while reflecting others, then you can say that color really exists in physical objects. But if by “color” you mean what common sense means by it – the perceived look of red, or blue, or whatever – then the claim is that there is nothing like that in physical objects themselves, but only in our experiences of them. Color, sound, heat, cold, etc. as common sense understands them are claimed to exist only as the “qualia” of conscious awareness, to use what has become the standard jargon.
The basic idea is clear enough however these details are worked out. Now, the reasonGalileo and the other proponents of the mechanical world picture took this view, as Goff emphasizes, is that they wanted to develop an entirely mathematized conception of nature, and while primary qualities were thought to fit comfortably into this picture, secondary qualities do not. They are irreducibly qualitative rather than quantitative, so that attempts to analyze them in purely quantitative terms always inevitably leave something out. The solution was to hold that they just aren’t really part of the natural world in the first place, but (again) only part of the mind’s perception of that world. Problem solved!
Well, not really. In fact, this move is itself problematic in several respects. One of them is that drawing a sharp distinction between primary and secondary qualities turns out to be much more difficult than it at first appears, as Berkeley famously showed. The Aristotelian philosopher, who defends common sense, would say that this is a good reason to think that secondary qualities are, after all, as objective as primary qualities. Berkeley, of course, drew the opposite conclusion that none of these qualities are really objectively out there. And he made of this claim, in turn, the basis of an argument for idealism or the denial of matter’s very existence.
The more common approach, however, was to try to make some version of the primary/secondary quality distinction work, and this went hand in hand with a Cartesian sort of dualism rather than idealism. As early modern thinkers like Cudworth and Malebranche pointed out, dualism was in fact an inevitable consequence of the primary/secondary quality distinction. For if color, sound, heat, cold, etc. as common sense understands them don’t exist in matter, then they don’t exist in the brain or the rest of the body (since those are material). And if they do nevertheless exist in the mind, then we have the dualist conclusion that the mind is not identical with the brain or with any other material thing.
The very conception of matter that modern materialism has committed itself to is therefore radically incompatible with materialism. And that is why materialists have had such a difficult time answering objections like Chalmers’ “zombie argument,” Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” and Nagel’s “bat argument,” and solving the “hard problem of consciousness” that such arguments pose for them. Attempting to develop a materialist account of consciousness while at the same time presupposing the conception of matter inherited from Galileo and Co. is like trying to square the circle. It is a fool’s errand, born of conceptual confusion and neglect of intellectual history.
Now, another lesson, and one especially emphasized by Russell and Eddington, is that the methodology that modern physics has inherited from Galileo and Co. guarantees that physics tells us far less about the material world than meets the eye. In particular, what physics reveals is only the abstract mathematical structure of physical reality, but not the intrinsic nature of the entities that flesh out that abstract structure.
Since these are all themes I have been going on about myself for many years, I am, with this much, highly sympathetic. A defense of the structural realist interpretation of modern physics and critique of the mechanical world picture are major themes of my most recent book Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science. These are important parts of the broader case I make there for a neo-Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Goff does not take them in that direction, but he does a real service by making better known the nature and implications of the conceptual revolution the mechanical philosophy set in motion.
Goff’s errors
After this point, however, Goff’s argument starts to fly off the rails. His next move is to borrow a further idea from Eddington and Russell, who held that introspection of one’s own conscious experiences does reveal the intrinsic nature of at least one physical object, namely the brain. That is to say, when you look within and encounter qualia – the way red looks, the way heat feels, the way a musical note sounds, and so on – what you are directly aware of are the entities that “flesh out” the abstract causal structure of the brain revealed by science.
Now, if qualia are the intrinsic properties of at least this one physical object, and we know nothing from physics about the intrinsic properties of any other part of physical reality, then, Goff proposes, we can speculate that qualia are also the intrinsic properties of all other physical reality. Physics, he says, leaves a “huge hole” in our picture of nature that we can “plug” with qualia (Goff, Galileo’s Error, p. 132). But since qualia are the defining features of conscious experience, it follows that conscious experience exists throughout the material world.
To be sure, Goff is keen to emphasize that the conscious awareness associated with, say, an electron is bound to be radically unlike, and more primitive than, ours. He also notes that a panpsychist need not attribute conscious awareness to all everyday physical objects (such as a pair of socks) but only to the more elementary bits of matter of which they are composed. Still, he is attributing something like sentience to physical reality well beyond the animal realm, indeed well beyond the realm of living things.
But this line of argument is fallacious, and the bizarre solution panpsychism proposes to the problem of how to fit consciousness into the natural world is completely unnecessary. For one thing, it is hard to imagine a more stark example of the fallacy of hasty generalization than Goff’s inference from what (he claims) brainsare like to a conclusion about what matter in general is like. Suppose we allow for the sake of argument that introspection of qualia involves direct awareness of the intrinsic properties of the matter that makes up brains. Brains are an extremely small part of the matter that makes up even just the Earth, let alone the rest of the universe (from which, as far as we know, they are entirely absent). They are also the most complex things in the universe. Why suppose that all matter, and especially the most elementary matter, is plausibly modeled on them? Surely the prima facie far more plausible bet would be that most matter is radically unlikebrains.
A second problem is that Goff’s argument takes for granted that what contemporary philosophers call “qualia” really are features of conscious experience rather than of the external objects that conscious experience is experience of. And that assumption is open to challenge. After all, common sense would take it to be obvious that when we learn what an apple tastes like or looks like, what we are learning is something about the apple itself, not about our experienceof the apple. And the Aristotelian conception of nature that the mechanical world picture displaced would have agreed.
The point is not that what seems obvious to common sense mustbe correct, but rather that it shouldn’t simply be taken for granted that contemporary philosophers’ habit of talking about the way an apple tastes, the way red looks, the way heat feels, etc. as if these were features of the mind (and thus as if they were “qualia”) – as opposed to features of mind-independent reality – reflects an accurate carving up of the conceptual territory. Goff himself emphasizes that Galileo’s treatment of these qualities as mind-dependent was motivated by his project of developing a purely mathematical conception of nature; that this was a philosophical thesis rather than one that has been established by science; and that it created the very problem of consciousness that Goff thinks panpsychism solves. Why not solve it instead by simply not following Galileo in making the conceptual move that created the problem? Goff says that “Galileo took the sensory qualities out of the physical world” and that panpsychism is “a way of putting them back” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, p. 138). Why not instead merely refrain from taking them out in the first place?
Or, if we’re going to speak of putting them back after Galileo took them out, why not put them back in the specific places he took them from? Why instead put them into every other bit of matter, including unobservable particles, when that is not where they came from? For example, Galileo (and the mechanical philosophy more generally) hold that the redness you see when you look at an apple is not in the apple itself, but only in your mind. Goff tells us that, in order to solve the problems this sort of view raises, we should say that the redness you see is in your brain, and that something analogous to it is in electrons and other particles. Why not just say instead that it really is in the apple after all, and leave it at that? Goff’s “solution” is analogous to trying to rectify the injustice caused by a theft by giving the stolen money back to everyone except the person it was taken from!
It might be replied that to reject Galileo’s move in this way would conflict with the findings of modern physics. But again, as Goff himself emphasizes, the move is at bottom philosophical rather than scientific in nature. To be sure, scientific considerations (about the physics of light, the neuroscience of vision, etc.) are relevant. But they do not by themselves establish the correctness of the mechanical philosophy’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, because the scientific evidence is susceptible of different philosophical interpretations. Nor could Goff object that reversion to something like the conception of color, sound, etc. that prevailed before the rise of the mechanical philosophy would be too radical a departure from philosophical orthodoxy. For he acknowledges that panpsychism represents a radical departure from it, and argues that such a departure is necessary in order to solve the problem posed by Galileo’s conceptual revolution.
Moreover, some mainstream contemporary philosophers would, for reasons independent of debates about either panpsychism or Aristotelianism, defend the “naïve realist” view about qualities that was overthrown by Galileo and the mechanical philosophy. I have defended it as well. (See pp. 340-51 of Aristotle’s Revenge, which includes a discussion of the relevant contemporary literature.) Goff not only reasons fallaciously to the conclusion that conscious experience pervades inorganic reality, but reasons from assumptions about the nature of color, sound, heat, cold, etc. that his own critique of the mechanical philosophy should have led him to question.
A further problem is that the suggestion that there is something analogous to consciousness in fundamental physical particles and other inorganic entities is simply prima facie implausible, and not just because it sounds bizarre. As Aristotelians argue (see Aristotle’s Revenge, pp. 393-95), sensation is closely tied to appetite and locomotion, so that the absence of the latter from plants tells strongly in favor of the absence of sensation from them as well. What is true of plants is a fortiori true of electrons and other particles too, to which it is even more implausible to attribute appetite or locomotion. There are simply no good empirical grounds for attributing anything like sentience to the inorganic realm, any more that there are for attributing it to plants.
The attribution also turns out to be completely pointless, given other things Goff says. Consider that the panpsychist’s attribution to basic physical particles of something analogous to consciousness is alleged to make it more intelligible how the brain could be conscious. For if matter is already conscious “all the way down,” as it were, then there should be no surprise that the complex organ that is the brain is conscious too. We need simply to work out how the more elementary forms of consciousness that exist at lower levels of physical reality add up to the more sophisticated form with which we are familiar from our own everyday experience. This is known as the “combination problem,” and while Goff thinks there are promising approaches to solving it, he acknowledges that panpsychists have not yet done so.
You might suppose, then, that Goff is committed to a kind of reductionism according to which higher-level features of the natural world are intelligible only if reducible to lower-level features, where Goff differs from materialist reductionists only in positing the existence of consciousness at lower levels as well as at higher levels. But in fact, Goff explicitly rejects this reductionist assumption, citing in support the work of contemporary critics of reductionism like Nancy Cartwright. Goff allows that physical objects can have properties that are irreducible to the sum of the properties of their parts. But then, what is the point of positing consciousness at the level of basic particles as part of an explanation of how animals and human beings are conscious? Why not instead merely take the consciousness that exists at the level of an organism as a whole to be one of those properties irreducible to the sum of the organism’s parts? That is exactly what the traditional Aristotelian position does.
Goff says that there must be something that fleshes out the abstract structure described by physics, and alleges that “there doesn’t seem to be a candidate for being the intrinsic nature of matter other than consciousness” (Galileo’s Error, p. 133). But in fact there is no great mystery here in need of some exotic solution. We need only to see what is in front of our nose, which, as Orwell famously said, requires a constant struggle. The concrete reality that fleshes out the abstract structure described by physics is nothing other than the world of ordinary objects revealed to us in everyday experience. Physics is an abstraction from that, just as the representation of a person’s face in a pen and ink sketch is an abstraction from all the rich concrete detail to be found in the actual, flesh-and-blood face. No one thinks that the existence of pen and ink drawings raises some deep metaphysical puzzle about what fleshes out the two-dimensional black-and-white representation, and neither is there any deep metaphysical mystery about what fleshes out the abstract structure described by physics. The bizarre panpsychist solution is no more called for in the latter case than in the former.
Does that mean there is nothing more to be said about the intrinsic nature of matter beyond what common sense would say about it? Not at all, and Aristotelianism provides a detailed account what more there is to be said about it. It is to be found in the hylemorphist analysis of material substances as compounds of substantial form and prime matter, possessing causal powers and teleology, and so on. Again, for the details see Aristotle’s Revenge (as well as its predecessor Scholastic Metaphysics, and the work of other contemporary Aristotelians like David Oderberg). Goff is right that a radical solution is needed to the problems opened up by Galileo’s error. But it is to be found, not in panpsychism (which ultimately amounts to yet a further riff on Galileo’s error), but in a return to the classical philosophical wisdom that the early moderns abandoned.
Related posts:
The hollow universe of modern physics
June 27, 2022
Aristotle on the middle class
On CNN the other day, liberal commentator Van Jones complained that the Democrats are “becoming a party of the very high and the very low” ends of the economic spectrum, and do not appeal to those in the vast middle, including the working class. He notes that the “very well-educated and very well-off” segment of the party talks in a way that sounds “bizarre” to ordinary people, citing as examples the use of terms like “Latinx” and “BIPOC.” He could easily have added others, such as “cisgender,” “whiteness,” “intersectionality,” “heteronormativity,” “the carceral state,” and on and on. To the average person, the commentators and activists who use such jargon – insistently, humorlessly, and as if everyone does or ought to agree – sound like cult members in need of deprogramming, and certainly of electoral defeat. (I would also note that having a college degree and being facile with trendy political theory does not suffice to make one “very well-educated,” but let that pass.) Beyond a reference to reparations, Jones is vague about exactly what it is about current left-wing policy that might appeal to the poor. Is it higher gasoline and food prices? Being the ones who had to go out and do the manual labor while the laptop class stayed cozily locked down working from home and watching Netflix? Skyrocketing crime in poor neighborhoods because of the demonization and defunding of police? Or is it free needles, the license to shoplift and to defecate in the streets, and other hallmarks of the George Gascón and Chesa Boudin style of law (non-)enforcement? But it would be an insult to poor people to think this anarchy aids or appeals to them. Here too, it is actually the poor who suffer most from left-wing excess, while the rich congratulate themselves for their (twisted understanding of) virtue.
In any event, Aristotle would agree with Jones about the general principle that a wise statesman should appeal to the middle class. Aristotle says that even a legislator who is personally more favorable to the very rich or the very poor “at all times… ought to endeavour to include the middle people” and make the laws “attractive to those in the middle” (Politics, Book IV, Part XII, Sinclair translation).
The reason is not the cynical one that this is a good way to secure power. The reason is one of basic principle concerning what is best for society as a whole. In Book IV, Part XI Aristotle observes that all states are made up of “the very well-off, the very badly off, and thirdly those in between,” and argues that those in the middle are best suited to governing:
This condition is most easily obedient to reason, and following reason is just what is difficult both for the exceedingly rich, handsome, strong and well-born, and for their opposites, the extremely poor, the weak, and those grossly deprived of honour. The former incline more to arrogance and crime on a large scale, the latter are more than averagely prone to wicked ways and petty crime. The unjust deeds of the one class are due to an arrogant spirit, the unjust deeds of the other to wickedness…
There are other drawbacks about the two extremes. Those who have a superabundance of good fortune, strength, riches, friends, and so forth, neither wish to submit to rule nor understand how to do so; and this is engrained in them from childhood at home: even at school they are so full of la dolce vita that they have never grown used to being ruled.
End quote. What is of most interest in these comments is Aristotle’s insight that the extremely wealthy, no less than the extremely poor, are temperamentally unfit to wield power. (This is not only an Aristotelian insight, but a Platonic one – recall from the Republic that the guardian class are not permitted even to handle money, let alone amass personal fortunes.) What makes them unfit is their tendency toward arrogance, softness, and consequent difficulty following reason or submitting themselves to rules.
A more perfect description of our decadent liberal elites cannot be imagined. It is not poor or working people, but rather the affluent and “educated,” who live in a fantasy world in which there are innumerable “genders,” the bogeyman of “white supremacy” lurks behind every bush, inflation has no connection to the federal government’s having shoveled out gargantuan piles of free money, and the rules (about wearing masks and staying locked down, for example) apply only to the ruled and not the rulers. You need facility in abstract theory to get yourself to believe such lunacy, and you need the insulation from reality that wealth provides to avoid suffering the costs of it, at least in the short term.
Aristotle notes that a true polity requires some measure of “friendship” or “partnership” between the different groups that make it up. This is not possible when the very poor or the very rich dominate, because “the former [are] full of envy, the latter of contempt.” Now, malignant ideologies like Critical Race Theory are syntheses of envy and contempt, which make true friendship or partnership between citizens impossible. But here too it is not the poor but rather the affluent, the educated, and the powerful – “woke capitalism,” the universities, HR bureaucracies and the like – who are injecting this poison into the body politic. And it is these elites, rather than the poor, who have been the source of the diabolically cruel regime of general lawlessness that has been trying to impose itself upon the West in the last few years.
Aristotle notes that given the defects described above, tyranny is much more likely to arise out of the rule of the very rich or the very poor than out of the middle classes. A more effective tyranny still is that in which the very rich stir up the poor against the middle classes. As Plato noted, oligarchy tends to degenerate into, and in the short term profit from, radically egalitarian democracy, with tyranny as the sequel.
Conservatives have in recent years increasingly come to realize that the super-rich are not their friends. As usual, what we moderns have to relearn, Aristotle already knew 2300 years ago.
Related reading:
Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx
Liberty, equality, fraternity?
Continetti on post-liberal conservatism
Woke ideology is a psychological disorder [on Plato’s analysis of democracy]
June 19, 2022
What is conscience and when should we follow it?
I plan to post some unpublished material that’s been accumulating over the years, over at my main website. First up is a lecture on the theme “What is Conscience and When Should We Follow It?” which I’ve given a couple of times but has never seen print. Is conscience a kind of emotion? A kind of perceptual faculty or “moral sense”? An operation of the intellect? Or some sui generis faculty? When are we obligated to follow conscience? What is a lax conscience? A scrupulous conscience? A doubtful conscience? What does the Catholic Church teach about these matters? These issues and related ones are addressed in the talk.
June 12, 2022
Economic and linguistic inflation
F. A. Hayek’s classic paper “The Use of Knowledge in Society” famously argued that prices generated in a market economy function to transmit information that economic actors could not otherwise gather or make efficient use of. For example, the price of an orange will reflect a wide variety of factors – an increase in demand for orange juice in one part of the country, a smaller orange crop than usual in another part, changes in transportation costs, and so on – that no one person has knowledge of. Individual economic actors need only adjust their behavior in light of price changes (economizing, investing in an orange juice company, or whatever their particular circumstances make rational) in order to ensure that resources are used efficiently, without any central planner having to direct them. Inflation disrupts this system. As Milton and Rose Friedman summarize the problem in chapter 1of their book Free to Choose:
One of the major adverse effects of erratic inflation is the introduction of static, as it were, into the transmission of information through prices. If the price of wood goes up, for example, producers of wood cannot know whether that is because inflation is raising all prices or because wood is now in greater demand or lower supply relative to other products than it was before the price hike. The information that is important for the organization of production is primarily about relative prices – the price of one item compared with the price of another. High inflation, and particularly highly variable inflation, drowns that information in meaningless static. (pp. 17-18)
I would suggest that a similar problem is posed by what is called linguistic or semanticinflation. This occurs when the use of a word that once had a fairly narrow and precise meaning comes to be stretched well beyond that original application. The result is that the word conveys less information than it once did. One way this occurs is via the overuse of hyperbole. The author of the article just linked to gives as examples words like “awesome” and “incredible.” At one time, if an author used these terms to describe something, you could be confident that it was indeed highly unusual and impressive – a rare and extremely difficult achievement, a major catastrophe, or what have you. Now, of course, these terms have become utterly trivialized, applied to everything from some fast food someone enjoyed to a tweet one liked. At one time, calling something “awesome” or “incredible” conveyed significant information because these terms would be applied only to a small number of things or events. Today it conveys very little information because the words are applied so indiscriminately.
Now, the same thing is true of words like “racism” and “bigotry.” At one time, to call someone a “racist” implied that he was patently hostile to people of a certain race, and to call someone a “bigot” implied that he was closed-minded about certain groups of people or ideas. Accordingly, these terms conveyed significant information. If someone really was a racist, this would manifest itself in behaviors like badmouthing and avoiding people of races he disliked, favoring policies that discriminated against them, and so on. If someone really was a bigot, this would manifest itself in behaviors like being intolerant of those he disagreed with, refusing calmly to discuss or debate their ideas, and so on.
Today the use of these terms has been stretched far beyond these original applications. In part this is a result of hyperbole born of political partisanship. Labelling political opponents “racists” and “bigots” is a useful way to smear them and to stifle debate, just as hyping something as “awesome” or “incredible” is (or once was, anyway) a useful way to draw attention to it. But the stretching of these terms has also resulted from the influence of ideologies (such as Critical Race Theory) that claim to reveal novel forms of racism and bigotry of which earlier generations were unaware – forms that float entirely free of the intentions or overt behavior of individuals. The result is that even people who exhibit no behavior of the kind once thought paradigmatically racist and who harbor no negative attitudes about people of other races can still be labeled “racist” if, for example, they dissent from CRT or other woke analyses and policy recommendations.
In fact, the words have drifted so far from their original meanings that today it is precisely those who are most prone to fling around words like “racist” and “bigot” who are themselves most obviously guilty of racism and bigotry in the original, narrower and more informative senses of the terms. They will, for example, shrilly and bitterly denounce “whiteness, “white consciousness,” and the like as inherently malign, even as they claim to eschew negative characterizations of any racial group. They will refuse to engage the arguments of their opponents and try instead to shout them down and hound them out of the public square, even as they accuse those opponents of bigotry.
Partisan hyperbole and wokeness have thus introduced so much “static” (to borrow Friedman’s term) into linguistic usage that the terms no longer convey much information. They now usually tell us little more than that the speaker doesn’t like the people or ideas at which he is flinging these epithets. It is no surprise, then, that use of these terms is increasingly generating more eyeball-rolling and yawns than outrage or defensiveness. As with “awesome,” “incredible,” and the like, overuse inevitably decreases effectiveness. The indiscriminate use of “racism” and “bigotry” is like printing too much money – in the short term it produces a euphoric jolt, but in the long-term it is self-defeating.
Related posts:
June 10, 2022
The New Apologetics
I contributed an essay on “New Challenges to Natural Theology” to Matthew Nelson’s new Word on Fire anthology The New Apologetics. It’s got a large and excellent lineup of philosophers, theologians, and others. You can find the table of contents and other information about the book here.
June 7, 2022
COMING SOON: All One in Christ
My new book
All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory
will be out this August from Ignatius Press. Some information about the book, including advance reviews, can be found at the Amazon link. Here’s the table of contents: 1. Church Teaching against Racism
2. Late Scholastics and Early Modern Popes against Slavery
3. The Rights and Duties of Nations and Immigrants
4. What is Critical Race Theory?
5. Philosophical Problems with Critical Race Theory
6. Social Scientific Objections to Critical Race Theory
7. Catholicism versus Critical Race Theory
June 6, 2022
Anti-reductionism in Nyāya-Vaiśesika atomism
Atomism takes all material objects to be composed of basic particles that are not themselves breakable into further components. In Western philosophy, the idea goes back to the Pre-Socratics Leucippus and Democritus, and was revived in the early modern period by thinkers like Pierre Gassendi. The general spirit of atomism survived in schools of thought that abandoned the idea that there is a level of strictly unbreakable particles, such as Boyle and Locke’s corpuscularianism. Its present-day successor is physicalism, but here too there have been further modifications to the basic ancient idea. For example, non-reductive brands of physicalism allow that there are facts about at least some everyday objects that cannot be captured in a description of micro-level particles. Atomism has a long and interesting history in Indian philosophy as well, and an anti-reductionist version was developed within the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika tradition (named for two systems which arose independently but later blended together). Some key arguments were worked out in response to rival, reductionist brands of atomism defended within certain schools of Buddhism. They can be found in the Nyāya-sūtra and the commentarial tradition based on it, relevant texts from which can be found in the very useful recent collection The Nyāya-sūtra: Selections with Early Commentaries, edited by Matthew Dasti and Stephen Phillips.
An important larger theme in the Nyāya-sūtra(which covers a wide variety of metaphysical topics) is the self-defeating character of skepticism. The commentators deploy this idea against Buddhist reductionist atomism as well. (Cf. pp. 100-3 of Dasti and Phillips.) Both sides make reference to ordinary objects, such as a clay pot. Both sides agree that the pot is ultimately made up of unobservable atoms. But the Buddhist reductionist says that those atoms are really allthat exist, that there is no such thing as a composite whole over and above them.
The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika commentators argue that the position that results from this is incoherent. The Buddhist position presupposes that we can know that there are atoms, but claims that the composites we take to be made up of atoms are unreal. If they are unreal, then of course we cannot be said to know of them through perception. But the atoms are not perceptible either. So how could the Buddhist know of them any more than he knows the purportedly unreal composites? In fact it is only through the composites that we can know the atoms that make them up. Hence the composites must be real.
This argument focuses on our knowledge of objects, but a second, related point made by the commentators focuses on our active engagement with them. Composite objects can be grasped and pulled, and sometimes pulled merely by virtue of getting hold of a part of them. This could not be done if there were no composite over and above the whole. Consider how, if you spill a pile of sugar on the counter, you can’t remove it merely by grasping one side of the pile and thereby pulling the whole pile. The argument is that if the atoms were all that really existed and the composite whole did not, then you couldn’t pull on a pot (say) any more than you could pull on a pile of sugar.
The commentators consider possible objections the reductionist might raise. (Cf. pp. 103-6 of Dasti and Phillips.) Consider an object made of bits of straw, rocks, and wood glued together. You could pull on it just by virtue of pulling some part of it, but the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika anti-reductionist would not want to consider this random object a true composite the way a pot is. The commentator Uddyotakara responds by biting the bullet and allowing that this odd object should be counted as a composite. (Here we see how Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika anti-reductionism, though something with which an Aristotelian hylemorphist is bound to sympathize, is not quite the same position. For the Aristotelian, we need to draw some important distinctions here. The random object in question would have a merely accidental form rather than a substantial form, and thus not count as a true substance, even if it is a composite of some kind.)
Another possible objection to the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika position that the commentators consider goes like this. If you look at a forest from far enough away, it can appear to be a single, unified whole. But this is a misperception, and in fact there is nothing more there than the trees that make up the forest. Similarly, where we take there to be an everyday composite like the pot of our earlier example, there is really only the atoms that make it up.
The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika response to this objection is that the analogy is a false one, because atoms, unlike the trees that make up a forest, are not observable. In the case of the forest, it makes sense to say that we are really perceiving trees, and simply mistaking them for some larger whole. We do, after all, really see the trees. But in the case of an object like a pot, it does not make sense to say that we are really perceiving atoms, and simply mistake them for a pot. For again, as both the Buddhist reductionist and the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika anti-reductionist agree, we can’t perceiveatoms at all, even in a distorted way.
The commentators also consider the suggestion that the features of a composite can be accounted for entirely by way of factors like the proximity and contact between atoms, and that the “conjunction” of atoms that yields a purported composite is nothing more than that. (Cf. pp. 106-7.) The commentator Vātsyāyana responds that there has to be more to it than this insofar as “new entities” with distinctive properties can arise out of the conjunction of atoms. He seems to be presenting a variation on the theme familiar from contemporary anti-reductionist views (including contemporary hylemorphism) that wholes have causal powers and properties that are irreducible to the sum of the powers and properties of the parts. Indeed, Uddyotakara illustrates this idea by noting that “yarn is different from the cloth made from it, since the two have different causal capacities” (p. 107).
He also argues that yarn must be different from the cloth made from it insofar as the former is a cause of the latter (Ibid.). And he distinguishes this cause from the cloth’s “other causes,” such as “the weaver’s loom.” Here we might seem to have an implicit distinction between what Aristotelians call materialcause (the yarn) and efficient cause (the weaver’s loom). But Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika speaks of a thing’s “inherence cause” rather than material cause, i.e. that in which the qualities of the composite inhere. And the notion of an inherence cause is broader than that of material cause, since it can include things other than matter (e.g. a location).
Important differences aside, the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika position, like other anti-reductionist positions in the history of philosophy, converges in key ways with Aristotelian hylemorphism. At the very least, it seems clearly to amount to a kind of non-reductive physicalism, and perhaps even approximates what is today sometimes called “structural hylemorphism” (which differs from traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic hylemorphism by taking parts to exist actually rather than virtually in wholes – thereby, from the A-T perspective, abandoning the unicity of substantial form).
As I argue in chapter 3 of Scholastic Metaphysics, these varieties of anti-reductionism are ultimately unstable attempts at a middle position between reductionism on the one hand and A-T hylemorphism on the other. Maintaining a coherent anti-reductionism requires going the whole Aristotelian hog.
Related posts:
May 31, 2022
Indeterminacy and Borges’ infinite library
Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” (from his collection Labyrinths) famously describes an infinite library, comprising books which together represent every possible combination of characters in the alphabet in which they are written. Most of the books are gibberish, just as, if you emptied a bag of Scrabble letters onto the floor and looked at the patterns that resulted, almost none of what you’d see would count as a genuine word or sentence. But because every possible combination is there, many intelligible books are there too. In fact, every possible such book is there, so that the library contains all knowledge, every truth there is about everything. For any of these truths, though, the trick is to find it somewhere in this infinite, bewildering Babel. That’s the idea, anyway, and Borges’ narrator’s description of the library, its history, and its denizens is arresting. But would such a library really contain all knowledge? Yes and no. Unusual as the library is, it is nevertheless made up of books, more or less as we know them – that is to say, physical objects with marks whose semantic meaning is a matter of linguistic convention. And as I have discussed many times over the years in various books, articles, and here at the blog, systems of material representations (words, pictures, or what have you) are, considered just by themselves, inherently indeterminate, inexact, or ambiguous in their content. Given their physical properties alone, there is no fact of the matter about exactly what meaning they convey.
The indeterminacy of the physical
This is a truth acknowledged by philosophers of widely divergent commitments, from W. V. Quine to James F. Ross, and the conclusions they draw from it are no less divergent. I follow Ross in holding that, since we have thoughts which dohave determinate, exact, or unambiguous content, the lesson we should draw is that thought cannot be identified with any system of material representations. For example, it cannot be identified with representations encoded in brain activity, in the electrical circuitry of a computer, or the like. (I develop this line of argument in detail in my ACPQ article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” and have defended it against various objections here at the blog, for example in this post.)
Quine’s famous example involves a linguist trying to interpret a native speaker’s utterance of “Gavagai” in the presence of a rabbit, where the utterance is in some heretofore unknown language. The linguist could translate it as “Lo, a rabbit!”, but might also produce translations that, instead of making reference to a rabbit, referred instead to either a temporal stage of a rabbit or an undetached rabbit part. Which translation is to be preferred would depend on what beliefs the linguist thought he should attribute to the native speaker. Does the speaker and the community he comes from fundamentally conceive of the world in terms of persisting substances? In that case, the first translation would be preferable. Or do they conceive of it instead in terms of ephemeral events? In that case, the translation that made reference to a “temporal stage of a rabbit,” however odd to our ears, would be the one to go with. And so on.
Deciding between the options would require appeal to other utterances of the speaker, along with the speaker’s behavior in general and the physical surroundings in which the conversation takes place. But these other utterances, and the behavior as well, are also all susceptible of various alternative interpretations. Suppose that the linguist is able to put together three different manuals of translation of the native speaker’s language, all of which are equally useful in allowing him to communicate with the speaker, but none of which is consistent with the others (since, for example, they translate “gavagai” in the three different ways described). Then, Quine says, if behavior, facts about physical surroundings, and the like are all we have to go on, then there just is no fact of the matterabout what the speaker really means. The choice of which translation manual to use is a pragmatic matter.
Since Quine thinks that is all we have to go on, he draws the radical conclusion that there is indeed no fact of the matter about what the speaker means. And since the scenario he describes differs only in degree from the situation we’re all in with respect to each other, he concludes that there is no fact of the matter about what any of us means either. Other philosophers, judging (quite rightly in my view) that this position is incoherent, conclude instead that behavior, physical surroundings, and the like are not all that we have to go on.
Now, it turns out that if the rest of what we have to go on is just more in the way of physical facts, then that will not suffice to change the outcome of Quine’s argument in the least. For example, as Saul Kripke showed, appealing to computer programs purportedly being implemented in the brain makes no difference at all, because exactly which program any machine (or the brain) is running is itself indeterminate from the physical facts alone. Thus does Ross conclude that the semantic content of our utterances, and the conceptual content of our thoughts (which is the source of the content of our utterances) is not to be identified with any physical or material properties at all. (Again, see the articles linked to above for detailed exposition of the argument, responses to various objections, and so on.)
Infinite, schminfinite
Note that adding material representations (words, computer code, whatever) to a system of representations ad infinitum doesn’t change things in the least. Even an actually infinite series of material representations will, considered just by itself, be as indeterminate or ambiguous in its semantic content as a finite series. To see this, consider the following series:
…-4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 …
Suppose that in some infinite corridor of Borges’ library, you can find this series written on a wall, extending forever in both directions. Wouldn’t that unambiguously represent the series of integers? Given our conventions, sure it would. But given onlythe physical properties of the representations, it would not. For the physical properties do not themselves have any inherent connection to the numbers represented. There is, for example, no inherent connection between “4” and the number 4, any more than there is an inherent connection between “IV” and the number 4 or between “IIII” and the number 4. That they are related is merely a matter of our conventions. Suppose that “4” instead stood for cheeseburger, that “7” stood for carburetor, that “18” stood for collapse of the wave function, that “47” stood for Stan Lee’s sunglasses, and so on. Then the infinite series written on the corridor walls would not represent the integers, but rather some bizarre sequence of disconnected concepts.
This is in fact why most of the books in Borges’ library would be gibberish. Linguistic representation involves layers of conventions. For example, there is in English the convention by which “a,” “b,” “c,” etc. count as letters. But there is the further convention by which the sequences of letters “dog” and “cat” count as words. There is, by contrast, no convention by which “rbxzt” or “ZZggTT” counts as a word. So, putting limits on what counts as a letter only goes so far in excluding meaningless marks. In English, the conventions will allow in “a,” “b,” “c,” etc. but not, say, “ȸ” or “Ж.” But “a,” “b,” “c,” etc. will still yield meaningless combinations of marks. Languages are in this way inefficient, allowing for the possibility of enormous amounts of nonsense unless some special conventions exclude it, but where (given the indeterminacy of the physical) there is no way to exclude all of it.
Could there be a system of representations that contains no gibberish? And, for that matter, no indeterminacy of meaning? Yes, but it would have to comprise what the Scholastic philosopher John Poinsot (also known as John of St. Thomas) called “formal signs,” which are signs that are nothing but signs. To explain the idea by way of contrast, consider again the written word “dog.” This is a sign that is more than a sign. It is, in particular, a sequence of physical shapes and on top of that it is a representation of dogs. A formal sign that represented dogs would be one that has no such double nature. It would be a representation of dogs and nothing more than that – it would not, for example, also be a sequence of shapes, or of noises, or the like. Concepts, according to Scholastics like Poinsot, are formal signs in this sense. (For a bit more on this notion, see pp. 27-28 of “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” linked to above.)
But a system of signs that are nothing but signs would not be a system of material representations. For to be a material representation just is to have some additional nature over and above being a representation (for example, the nature of having such-and-such a shape, such-and-such a chemical composition, or what have you). So, if there could be a system of representations that contained no gibberish, and also no indeterminacy or ambiguity of content, then that too would not be a system of material representations. It is because material representations have this dual nature – of being representations and also, on top of that, material things of a certain kind – that material properties and meaning can “come apart” from one another in a way that entails either gibberish or ambiguity.
Hence, a system of representations containing no gibberish or indeterminacy of meaning would not be Borges’ library which, qua library, comprises material representations (books, written words, etc.). Borges’ library could contain all possible knowledge only if there is something distinct from the library, by reference to which (some of) the linguistic marks contained in the books by convention count as representations of all possible knowledge. Borges’ narrator recognizes that the library by itself does not suffice to determine exactly what any book within it represents, saying:
An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language? (p. 85 of the Penguin books edition)
Beyond the library
Of course, the denizens of Borges’ library, who read and interpret the books, are distinct from the library itself, and they assign meanings to the linguistic representations contained therein. But they are not the ultimate source of the information said to be contained in the library, and could not be, since in none of their minds (considered either individually or collectively) is all of that information to be found. That’s precisely why Borges describes some of them as searching the library for books that would contain certain secrets they would like to know. In some way, then, there must be something distinct not only from the library, but also from the minds of its inhabitants, that determines the meaning of the (subset of) representations contained in the books that count as all possible knowledge. What would this be?
One possible answer is implied by mathematician and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker’s notion of the “Mindscape,” which I discussed in a post some years back. The Mindscape is essentially the collection of all the possible concepts, propositions, and inferences that a mind might entertain, considered as something analogous to Plato’s realm of the Forms. But as the Neo-Platonic/Augustinian tradition argued – and as I argue too, in chapter 3 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God – ultimately we can make sense of the Platonic realm only if we understand it as comprising ideas in the divine intellect. (Though as I explain in the post just linked to, Rucker’s Mindscape is not itself to be identified with the divine intellect, but rather as something that ultimately presupposes the divine intellect.)
Though Borges’ infinite library does not exist, something analogous to it – in particular, analogous to it in its being a repository of all knowledge – could exist, and indeed does exist, viz. the divine intellect. But there is in it neither gibberish nor indeterminacy.
Related reading:
Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought
Revisiting Ross on the immateriality of thought
Kripke contra computationalism
May 23, 2022
The hollow universe of modern physics
To say that the material world alone exists is not terribly informative unless we have some account of what matter is. Those who are most tempted to materialism are also inclined to answer that matter is whatever physics says it is. The trouble with that is that physics tells us less than meets the eye about the nature of matter. As Poincaré, Duhem, Russell, Eddington, and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers and scientists were keen to emphasize, what physics gives us is the abstract mathematical structure of the material world, but not the entire nature of the concrete entities that have that structure. It no more captures all of physical reality than a blueprint captures everything there is to a house. This is, of course, a drum I’ve long banged on (for example, in
Aristotle’s Revenge
). The methods of physics as they’ve been understood since the time of Galileo make this limitation inevitable. As philosopher of physics Roberto Torretti writes:
While Aristotelian science favored loving attention to detail, through which alone one could succeed in conceiving the real in its full concreteness, Galileo and his followers conducted their research with scissors and blinkers… The natural processes and states of affairs under study were represented by simplified models, manageable instances of definite mathematical structures. The inevitable discrepancies between the predicted behavior of such models and the observed behavior of the objects they stood for were ascribed to “perturbations” and observation errors. (The Philosophy of Physics, pp. 431-32)
The “scissors and blinkers” have to do with the way that Galileo and his successors ignored or cut away from their representation of the physical world anything that cannot be captured mathematically – secondary qualities (colors, sounds, etc.), teleology or final causes, moral and aesthetic value, and so on. Thus, as Torretti writes, “modern mathematical physics began in open defiance of common sense” (p. 398). Galileo expressed admiration for those who, applying this method in astronomy, had “through sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to the contrary” (quoted at p. 398).
The point isn’t that this is necessarily bad. On the contrary, it made it possible for physics to become an exact science. But physics did so precisely by deliberately confining its attention to those aspects of nature susceptible of an exact mathematical treatment. This is like a student who ensures that he’ll get A’s in all his classes simply by avoiding any class he knows he’s not likely to get an A in. There may be perfectly good reasons for doing this. But it would be fallacious for such a student to conclude from his GPA that the classes he took taught him everything there is to know about the world, or everything worth knowing, so that the classes he avoided were without value. And it is no less fallacious to infer from the success of physics that there is nothing more to material reality, or at least nothing more worth knowing, than what physics has to say about it (even if a lot of people who like to think of themselves as pretty smart are guilty of this fallacy).
Moreover, to take modern physics’ mathematical description of matter to be an exhaustive description would, as it happens, more plausibly underminematerialism altogether rather than give content to it. In particular, it arguably leads to idealism. I briefly noted in Aristotle’s Revenge (at pp. 176-77) how twentieth-century physicists Eddington and James Jeans drew this conclusion. Torretti (at pp. 98-104) notes that Leibniz and Berkeley did the same.
Here’s one way to understand Leibniz’s argument (which Torretti finds in some of Leibniz’s letters). Every geometry student knows that perfect lines, perfect circles, and the like cannot be found in the world of everyday experience. Concrete empirical geometrical properties are at best mere approximations to the idealizations that exist only in thought. But the mathematical description of the material world afforded by physics is also an abstract idealization. As such, it too can exist only in thought, and not in mind-independent reality. Of course, Leibniz’s theory of monads already purports to establish that there is no mind-independent reality, so that perception no more gives us access to such a reality than physics does. The point of the argument of the letters (as I am interpreting it) is to note that the abstractions of physics cannot be said to give us a betterfoundation for conceiving of the physical world as mind-independent. On the contrary, qua abstractions they are even less promising candidates for mind-independence than the ordinary perceptual world is.
Berkeley adds the consideration that systems of signs, such as the mathematics in which modern physical theory is expressed, can be useful in calculations even though some of the signs do not correspond to anything. As it happens, I discussed this theme from Berkeley in an earlier post. The utility of a system of signs in part derives from the conventions and rules of the system, rather than from any correspondence to the reality represented by the system. This conventional element in physics’ mathematical representation of the material world reinforces, for Berkeley, that representation’s mind-dependence.
To try to give content to materialism by identifying matterwith whatever physics says about matterwould, if this is right, essentially be to transform materialism into idealism – that is to say, to give up materialism for its ancient rival. To avoid this, the materialist could, of course, appeal to some philosophical theory about the nature of matter that recognized that physics tells us only part of the story. But this would be to acknowledge that materialism is, after all, itself really just one philosophical theory among others, no better supported by science than its rivals are. It would be to see through the illusion that metaphysical conclusions can be read off from the findings of modern science.
The picture of nature provided by modern physics is in fact highly indeterminate between different possible metaphysical interpretations – materialist, idealist, dualist, panpsychist, or (the correct interpretation, in my view) Aristotelian. It is (to borrow from Charles De Koninck) a hollow vessel into which metaphysical water, wine, or for that matter gasoline might be poured. But it doesn’t by itself tell us which of these to pour.
Again, see Aristotle’s Revenge for more, or, for instant gratification, the posts linked to below.
Related posts:
Meta-abstraction in the physical and social sciences
The particle collection that fancied itself a physicist
May 14, 2022
Nietzsche and Christ on suffering
Over and over we are taught in scripture and tradition that suffering is the lot not only of mankind in general, but of the Christian in particular. Christ, the “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), is our model. When he warned that he must suffer and die, “Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you,’” which prompted Christ’s own famous rebuke in response: But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 16:22-25)
St. Paul tells us that he repeatedly begged God to relieve him of some persistent source of torment:
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”… For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12: 9-10)
The lives not only of the martyrs, but of the saints more generally from the time of the early Church to the present, witness to suffering’s being the norm in the Christian life. Pope St. John Paul II even spoke of a “Gospel of suffering” (a phrase also used by Kierkegaard), the message of which is that suffering redeems us and makes possible a particularly intimate union with Christ.
Take up your cross
In the Christian understanding, then, suffering is, to borrow the software programmer’s phrase, a feature, not a bug. It is not an inexplicable fact about the human condition, nor an embarrassment to Christian theology that the tradition would prefer to distract us from. On the contrary, the tradition puts the reality of suffering front and center, and insists that it is an inevitable consequence of original and actual sin. In an earlier post, I developed this theme, and argued that modern bafflement at the suffering that exists in the world is more a consequence of apostasy from Christianity than a cause of it. It is largely an artifact of the softness and decadence of modern Western affluence.
That contemporary Christians have themselves been corrupted by this softness and decadence is evident from the way they deal with resistance to the Church’s hard teachings, especially on matters of sex. They are keen to reassure our sex-obsessed society that sexual sins are not the worst sins. This is like reassuring Bernie Madoff that fraud is not the worst of sins, or Watergate conspirators that perjury is not the worst of sins – it is true, but not exactly where the emphasis needs to be. Sexual sins, while not the most serious, are still serious, for they are uniquely destructive of rationalityand social order. They are also very easy to fall into and can be very difficult to get out of, and as a result are extremely common (much more so than fraud and perjury, for example). Their prevalence and intractability, and the widespread irrationality and social disorder that are their sequel, are on vivid display all around us. Yet even most conservative churchmen and theologians would prefer to talk about almost anything else. Why?
Naturally, cowardice is a factor. But it is not just a matter of failing to do one’s duty on this or that particular uncomfortable occasion. It is, I would argue, a more general unwillingness to face up to the unavoidability of suffering, or to require others to face up to it. The litany of complaints about Christian sexual morality is familiar: But I’m in an unhappy marriage. But I’m in love with someone else. But it’s a habit I can’t break. But I can’t help feeling this attraction. But I was born this way. But I’m frustrated and can’t find anyone to marry. But I feel like I’m in the wrong body. But I can’t handle a baby right now. But, but, but. You mean I cannot fulfill my desires? You mean I have to suffer with these feelings, possibly for the rest of my life?
The traditional Christian answer would be: “Yes, that’s exactly right. Take up your cross.” But the modern Christian gets weak in the knees, changes the subject, and perhaps even feels guilty for having raised it in the first place.
Note that I am not saying that “Take up your cross” is all that need be said. By no means should that be the last word. But it must be the first word. Modern Christians suppose otherwise because they confuse mercy with feeling sorry for someone. These are not the same thing. More precisely, though mercy typically does involve feeling sorry for someone, not everything that is done out of feeling sorry for someone amounts to mercy.
The quality of mercy
Mercy, as Aquinas teaches in Summa Theologiae II-II.30.3, is a virtue. Now, a virtue is a mean between extremes, falling between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. The vice of deficiency in this case would, of course, be mercilessness. What would be the vice of excess where mercy is concerned?
Aquinas notes that “mercy signifies grief for another's distress. Now, this grief may denote, in one way, a movement of the sensitive appetite, in which case mercy is not a virtue but a passion.” What he means is that sometimes what we have in mind when we speak of “mercy” is a kind of passion or feeling, namely a feeling of grief over the distress another person is experiencing. This feeling is not itself the virtue of mercy. Rather, it is typically associated with the virtue. (Many feelings are like this. For example, love is typically associated with feelings, but it is not itself a feeling. Rather, it is the willing of what is good for someone. That can exist even when the feelings are absent, and the feelings can exist when genuine love is absent. There is a rough-and-ready correlation between a given virtue and certain feelings, but they must not be confused.)
When the feelings in question are governed by reason, then we have genuine mercy. But Aquinas distinguishes genuine mercy from “the mercy which is a passion unregulated by reason: for thus it impedes the counselling of reason, by making it wander from justice” (emphasis added). An example would be feeling so sorry for Bernie Madoff that one advocates letting him off scot-free, even if he is unrepentant.
This would be what we might call a vice of sentimentality, which involves putting feelings in the driver’s seat where reason should be. To be sure, because we are rational animals rather than angelic intellects, we needfeelings to give us rough-and-ready everyday guidance. When all goes well, they prompt us to do the right thing when reason is weak, or when there is no time to think through a problem. Still, they are only ever a highly fallible assistant to reason, and, like all things human, can become distorted. This is what happens when the feelings associated with mercy for a sinner become so strong that they lead us to ignore the fact that he is a sinner. To be sure, genuine mercy does more than merely call for repentance and penance. But it does not do less than that. And it helps the sinner (as gently as possible) to accept the inevitability of the suffering that results, rather than pretending that it is avoidable, or simply changing the subject.
From Christ to antichrist and back again
That the acceptance of suffering is necessary to perfecting us is basic Christian moral wisdom, but at least to some extent it is even part of the natural law. That is clear from the example of someone who in other respects couldn’t be further from the Christian view of things, namely Friedrich Nietzsche.
Like Aquinas, Nietzsche distinguishes between two kinds of pity, and favors one while rejecting the other. There is, Nietzsche says, a kind of pity which sees man in his lowly condition and seeks to ennoble him. But there is another kind of pity which makes man smaller, and is born of sympathy with “those addicted to vice” and with the “grumbling” and “rebellious” elements of society more generally (Beyond Good and Evil 225, Kaufmann translation). Under the influence of this false pity, Nietzsche says:
Everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and… the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, the opportunity and necessity for educating one’s feelings to severity and hardness is lacking more and more; and every severity, even in justice, begins to disturb the conscience. (201)
The inevitable result, Nietzsche argues, is collapse into a general licentiousness:
There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence. (201)
The hard truth, Nietzsche teaches, is that to achieve what is truly good for individuals and society requires the discipline of suffering, and that those who blind themselves to this are not the friends of mankind, but its enemies:
You want, if possible – and there is no more insane “if possible” – to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible – that makes his destruction desirable.
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? (225)
Similarly, in The Will to Power, he writes:
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not – that one endures. (910, Kaufmann and Hollingdale translation)
It is ironic that a man who characterized himself as an “antichrist” should ape Christ’s call to take up the cross. But it is not entirely surprising, for the enemies of the Faith typically mimic it in some respects, even as they reject it. And Nietzsche’s embrace of suffering is certainly not identical with that of the Christian. Nietzsche is an elitist who neither calls all men to excellence nor thinks all capable of it; Christ teaches that all are made in God’s image, calls all to repentance and holiness, and sacrifices his life for all (even if not all will accept this sacrifice). For the strength needed to bear up under suffering, Nietzsche would look within; the Christian knows that it is possible only through grace. The Nietzschean superman glorifies himself; the Christian glorifies God.
But if Christians can love their enemies, they can learn from them too. It is a sign of the diabolical disorder of our times that they need from one of their greatest enemies a reminder of the difference between true and false mercy, and of the suffering entailed by the former.
Related posts:
The “first world problem” of evil
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