Edward Feser's Blog, page 30

Schmid on existential inertia

At his blog, Joseph Schmid has replied to my recent post about his criticisms of the Aristotelian proof.  The reply is extremely long.  Now, I often write long blog posts myself.  Indeed, my previous post on Schmid was, at over 5,000 words, pretty long.  But by my count (via cutting and pasting into MS Word), Schmid’s reply clocks in at almost 40,000 words – all written up and posted within just two days after my post!  And even the cursory look I gave it shows that it raises a variety of issues that go well beyond anything I talk about in my post.  Into the bargain, it also summarizes and links to myriad otherblog posts, articles, and YouTube videos of Schmid’s which, he indicates, we ought to check out if we want to have a better idea of his views about the matters under discussion! 

Well, no offense to Schmid – who seems like a nice enough guy, and an intelligent one – but I’m afraid I can’t spend the rest of the summer, or even the rest of this week, reading and responding to this mountain of material.  And if I’m going to choose something of his to read, I have to say that a rambling and largely off-topic 40,000-word blog post banged out over two days doesn’t seem the most promising candidate.  So, it seemed to me that a workable compromise would be to press on with what I had thought to do before he posted his reply, which is to read and comment on the other of Schmid’s two published academic articles, “Existential inertia and the Aristotelian proof.”  Since the notion of existential inertia seems to be at the core of our disagreement, and since I take it to be a reasonable assumption that this article contains Schmid’s most rigorous presentation of his views on that topic (and that his latest blog post presupposes the article in any event), I take that to be a reasonable way to conclude our exchange for now.  Fair enough? 

EIT versus EET

Schmid starts out his paper by distinguishing the “Existential Inertia Thesis” (EIT) from what he labels the “Existential Expiration Thesis” (EET).  According to EIT, objects of the kind that make up the world of our experience will persist in existence unless something acts positively to destroy them.  According to the rival EET, such objects will cease to exist unless something positively acts to sustain them in being.  Hence, consider an example like the water in a certain glass at time t.  According to EIT, as long as nothing acts to destroy the water, it will continue to exist at t + 1.  Nothing has to do anything in order to make the water continue to exist.  All that is necessary is that nothing does something to knock it out of existence.  But according to EET, unless something acts to make the water continue to exist, it will not exist at t + 1.  It’s not enough that nothing does anything to destroy it.  The fact that nothing acts positively to sustain it will suffice for its going out of existence.

Arguments for God’s existence like the Aristotelian proof I defend in chapter 1 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God (and which was discussed in my previous post on Schmid) are concerned in part to show that EIT is false and EET is true.  Now, Schmid writes as if the falsity of EIT and truth of EET are presuppositionsof such arguments.  That is not correct.  Rather, a critique of EIT and defense of EET are parts of such arguments, not undefended background assumptionsof such arguments.  For example, in the course of developing the Aristotelian proof, I point out that a substance like the water in question is composite in nature, i.e. it is made up of parts.  There are different ways you could conceive of these parts – for example, in terms of substantial form and prime matter (if you are an Aristotelian hylemorphist), or in terms of essence and existence (if you are a Thomist metaphysician), or in terms of fundamental particles (if you are a metaphysical naturalist).  It doesn’t matter for the specific purposes of the argument.  What matters is only that the parts, considered just qua parts of that kind at t, are only potentially water at t, and that some additional factor is therefore needed in order to explain why this potential is actualized at t.  That they made up water at t – 1 is irrelevant, because what matters is why they continue to make up water at t, and again, nothing about the parts considered by themselves can account for that.  Hence we need to appeal to some additional factor.

You may or may not agree with this argument.  (In my previous post on Schmid, I defend it against an objection he raises against it.)  But it is precisely an argument against EIT and for EET.  For it entails that the water will not continue to exist from t – 1 to t unless something acts to keep it in existence.  Hence Schmid is wrong to say that the Aristotelian proof (of which this argument is a component part) merely assumes EET.  (Moreover, the whole point of my ACPQ article is to show that, properly understood, Aquinas’s Five Ways – the first of which is a version of the Aristotelian proof – are arguments against EIT.  Schmid cites this article in his own paper, which makes it is especially odd for him to write as if my arguments simply assume the falsity of EIT.)

Schmid also claims that the rejection of EIT does not entail accepting EET.  Consider again the example of the water.  If we reject EIT, Schmid thinks, all that follows is that the water will not of necessity continue to exist without a sustaining cause.  But it doesn’t follow that it will of necessity go out of existencewithout one.  It might simply happen to carry on without one.

This too is not correct.  If the water continues to exist from t – 1 to t, then something must account for this fact, and it will have to be something either intrinsic to the water or extrinsic to it.  Now, if EIT is false, then it is not something intrinsic to the water; and if there is no sustaining cause, then it will not be something extrinsic to it either.  But then there will be nothing to account for its continuing to exist from t – 1 to t, in which case it will not continue to exist.  Which is precisely what EET claims.  So, if we reject EIT, then we must indeed affirm EET.

A critic might respond that this presupposes the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).  Well, since I think PSR is true and have defended it at length in several places, I hardly think that is a problem.  But in fact the argument does not presuppose PSR – or to be more precise, it doesn’t presuppose PSR any more than any other explanation does.  Homicide detectives, insurance investigators, and forensic engineers never take seriously the suggestion “Maybe it just happened for no reason!” when considering the phenomena they are trying to understand, and that is so whether or not they are committed to the principle that absolutely everything has an explanation.  Similarly, we needn’t appeal to such a principle in order to judge that the rejection of EIT should lead us to embrace EET.  (Not that we shouldn’t embrace such a principle.  And as everyone knows, few people seriously quibble about PSR until they start to worry that it might force them into accepting theism.)

A third claim Schmid makes about EIT and EET is that neither has a presumption in its favor, so that we ought initially to be agnostic about which is correct.  A priori, they are evenly matched.  This too, I would argue, is mistaken.  To take an example I have often used, suppose you explain, to someone who has never heard of them before (a young child, say), the nature or essence of a lion, of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and of a unicorn.  Then you tell him that, of these three animals, one exists, one used to exist but has gone extinct, and the other never existed and is fictional.  You ask him to tell you, based on his new knowledge of the essences of each, which is which.  Naturally, he couldn’t tell you.  For there is nothing in the essence or nature of these things that could, by itself, tell you whether or not it exists.  Existence is something additional to the essence of a contingent thing.  It doesn’t follow from such a thing’s essence.

This is, of course, an argument Aquinas gives for the Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence (which I develop and defend in chapter 4 of Five Proofs).  The point for the moment is this.  If nothing about the essence or nature of a thing entails that it exists at allin the first place, then it is hard to see how anything about its essence or nature could entail that will persist in existence once it does exist.  In short, the very nature of a contingent thing qua contingent makes it implausible to attribute to it a feature like existential inertia.  In which case, EET is, contra Schmid, a priori more plausible than EIT.

In summary, then, in the first, stage-setting part of his paper, Schmid makes three dubious claims: that the falsity of EIT and truth of EET are simply taken for granted by the Aristotelian proof (not true); that the falsity of EIT does not give us reason to believe EET (not true); and that EIT and EET are equally plausible a priori (not true).  So unpromising a beginning does not portend well for the rest of the paper, and indeed further serious problems with it arise immediately.

The metaphysics of existential inertia

Schmid next considers two possible ways of spelling out EIT.  The first account goes like this: Consider the water in our earlier example.  Its existence at some time t is sufficiently explained by (a) the state and existence of the water at an immediately preceding time t – 1 together with (b) the absence of anything acting to destroy the water.

Now, an objection that might be raised against existential inertia thus understood (and one I have raised in my exchanges with Graham Oppy and in my previous reply to Schmid) is that it is viciously circular.  Existential inertia would be a property or power of the water.  So, the water’s persistence from t – 1 to t would, on this account, depend on this property or power.  But properties and powers depend for their reality on the substances that possess them.  So, we seem to have a situation where the water’s persistence depends on that of a property or power which in turn depends on the persistence of the water.

Schmid considers something like this “circularity” objection (though his exposition of it seems to me to be quite murky, so it is possible that he has something else in mind).  In response to it, he says that if the objection had any force, it would have force against any account of the persistence of the water, including an account that attributes its persistence to God.  For if we suppose that God causes the water to persist from t – 1 to t, then we will be presupposing that it is possible for it to persist from t – 1 to t, and thus won’t be giving a non-circular explanation of how it is possible for it to do so.  And if the theist replies that God gives the water the ability to persist, then this will only push the problem back a stage insofar as it will presuppose that God has the ability to do so.

I find this to be a very odd response, and I confess that I’m not sure I even understand what Schmid is going on about.  The circularity objection has nothing do with presupposing that it is possible for something to persist, or with presupposing that things have abilities, or anything like whatever Schmid is talking about.  Rather, it has to do with the fact that properties and powers are ontologically dependent on substances, so that substances cannot without circularity be said to be ontologically dependent on properties or powers.

Again, perhaps that is not the objection Schmid is talking about.  But if it isn’t, then I’m not sure what he is talking about.  Certainly he doesn’t seem to be talking about (a) an objection that any critic of EIT has actually given, or (b) an objection that is interesting. 

Anyway, Schmid goes on to discuss a further possible objection to this first way of spelling out EIT, one grounded in a presentist theory of time.  The objection would be that what happens at t – 1 cannot explain what happens at the present moment t, because (according to presentism) past moments like t – 1 no longer exist, and what does not exist cannot be the explanation of anything.  Schmid responds to this possible objection by setting out several arguments in defense of the claim that past events can play a role in explaining present ones.

Schmid does not attribute this objection to anyone, and as he rightly notes, presentists in fact do not in general claim in the first place that past events play no role in explaining the present.  So what is the point of devoting several pages to an argument no presentist has given or is likely to give?  I’m not sure, and I don’t myself have anything to add to what Schmid says in response to it.  Certainly the fact that the past is relevant to explaining the present gives (contrary to what Schmid seems to think) no support to EIT.  For what is at issue in the debate over EIT and EET is not whether what happens at t – 1 is part of the explanation of what is true of the water at t, but rather whether it is by itself sufficientto explain what is true of it at t.

(I have to say that I wonder what kind of rhetorical effect this kind of stuff has on Schmid’s readers, some of whom – judging from my combox – seem very impressed by it.  Schmid’s discussion of this first interpretation of EIT occupies almost five pages of analysis, with the standard bells and whistles that we analytic philosophers pick up in grad school and from reading academic journal articles – semi-formal formulations, the entertaining of various hypotheticals, and so on.  Other things Schmid has written, such as the article addressed in my previous post on Schmid, have a similar character.  Untutored readers, especially those whose knowledge of philosophy is largely drawn from blog posts, Reddit discussions, and the like, are bound to think: “Wow, this is so technical and rigorous!”  Yet in fact the analysis is sometimes not terribly clear, and in this case it is devoted to criticizing claims that no critic of EIT has actually made or is likely to make in the first place!  So it seems to me that some of the rigor is specious.)

Schmid considers a second possible account of EIT, according to which existential inertia is simply a basic or primitive feature of reality.  He suggests that one way of reading this claim, in turn, is that it is a necessaryfeature of reality that things have existential inertia. 

But there are two obvious problems with this.  The first is that there is no reason to believe it.  (I’ll come back to that.)  The second is that there is positive reason to disbelieve it.  Again, with lions, Tyrannosauruses, water, etc., there is simply nothing about their natures or essences that entails that they exist at all.  So how could it be just a basic and necessary feature of a world comprised of such things that they persistin existence? 

Schmid also suggests that the thesis that it is a necessary feature of reality that lions, water, etc. have existential inertia is no less plausible a terminus of explanation than the thesis that God, qua pure actuality, exists of necessity.  Both theses, he claims, posit something “primitive,” but EIT is more parsimonious. 

But this is quite absurd.  As I argue in Five Proofs and in my article on existential inertia (both of which Schmid purports to be responding to in the present article), the reasoncontingent things are contingent is that they are composed of parts, and in particular that they have potentialities as well as actualities.  So, when we say that God is absolutely simple rather than composite and that he is pure actuality devoid of potentiality, we have given an explanation of his lacking contingency – that is, of his existing of necessity.  By contrast, Schmid’s proposal is that the world is made up of things that are contingent, composite, and have potentialities as well as actualities – and yet for all that it is still somehow just a necessary fact about the world that these things have existential inertia! 

This is not a case of being presented with a choice between two alternative possible ultimate explanations, the Thomist’s and Schmid’s.  Rather, it is a case of being presented with a choice between an explanation and an unexplained and indeed counterintuitive brute fact. 

Theoretical vices

This naturally brings us to Schmid’s claim that EIT enjoys several “theoretical virtues” (i.e. virtues of a kind that a good theory ought to possess).  He starts his discussion in this section of the paper by suggesting that the reason things exist at all may be that it is metaphysically necessary that something or other exists.  And in the same way, he suggests, the reason things persist in existence may be that it is simply metaphysically necessary that they do so.  EIT thus provides an explanation of a familiar fact of our experience, viz. that things persist.

To see what is wrong with this, consider the following dialogue:

Bob: Why did Ed start to drink that martini?

Fred: Hmm, maybe it was metaphysically necessary that he do so?

Bob: Wow, that’s an interesting explanation!  And why do you think he kept drinking it once he started?

Fred: I’ve got it – maybe that was metaphysically necessary too!

Bob: Brilliant!  You should write a paper.

I take it you agree with me that Fred’s explanation is not in fact that brilliant.  For why on earth would anyone think it even prima facie plausible that it is necessarythat I start to drink a martini?  True, my nightly routine might for a moment make you wonder, but after a moment’s reflection you’d realize that there are many factors that would prevent it from being necessary – I could run out of gin, or the kids could hide the bottles, or I could opt for a Scotch instead, or whatever.  And if it is not prima facie plausibly necessary that I start drinking, it is hardly any more prima facie plausible that I will of necessity keep doing so. 

But the existence and persistence of everyday objects (lions, water, etc.) are in the same boat.  Again, there is nothing in the essence of any of these things that entails that they exist; they are composed of parts, and thus depend for their existence on these parts being combined; they have potentialities which need to be actualized in order for them to exist; and so on.  That is why they are contingent.  So, if there is nothing more to reality than things of that sort, how could it be metaphysically necessary that there be things of that sort?  And if it is not prima facie plausibly metaphysically necessary that things of this sort exist at all, how could it be any more prima facie plausibly metaphysically necessary that they must persist in existence? 

Of course, that doesn’t entail that there is nothing of which it could be said that it is metaphysically necessary that it exists and persists in existence.  Certainly, this could plausibly be said of something that is absolutely simple and devoid of potentiality (precisely since to be something of that sort is to lack the features that make a thing contingent).  But of course, that’s precisely the sort of thing Schmid wants to avoid positing.

So, Schmid’s proposed “explanation” is really no more interesting than Fred’s.  If we ask “Why does God have existential inertia?” the theist can offer a response: “Because he is non-composite and devoid of potentiality, and thus lacks the features that entail contingency or possible non-existence.”  But if we ask “Why do ordinary contingent things like lions, water, etc. have existential inertia?” all Schmid can say in response is: “I don’t know, but maybe it’s just a necessary fact about them that they have it – wouldn’t that give us a cool explanation of why they persist?”  (Talk about your proverbial “dormitive virtue” explanation!)

Now suppose someone said: “Hey, let’s not be tooquick to dismiss Fred’s explanation.  Consider its theoretical virtues, such as parsimony…”  Would you stick around to listen?  Probably not.  There’s no point in considering such theoretical virtues if the “explanation” is already independently known to be a non-starter.  That’s true of Fred’s explanation, and (for all he has shown) it is, for the reasons I’ve given, true of Schmid’s as well. 

There are other problems with Schmid’s discussion in this section of his paper.  For instance, commenting on my example in Five Proofs of the existence of the water in a cup of coffee being explained in terms of the existence of its parts, he notes that it could plausibly be said instead that the parts in fact depend for their existence of the whole.  Indeed, as he notes, that is what I myself have said elsewhere.  He insinuates that there is, accordingly, an incoherence in my position. 

But there is no such incoherence, and Schmid ignores what should be clear from the context of that discussion in Five Proofs, viz. that I am speaking there in a “for the sake of argument” way.  As I said in the book and in my previous post on Schmid, there are several possible ways one could spell out the metaphysics of the water as it exists at a time t: (a) in terms of substantial form and prime matter, after the fashion of Aristotelian hylemorphism, (b) in terms of essence and existence, as a Thomist would, (c) as an aggregate of particles, as a reductive naturalist might, or (d) in yet some other way.  It doesn’t matter for the specific purposes of the argument, and for the sake of ease of exposition and the naturalistic scruples of many readers, I went with (c) even though my own predilection is for (a) and (b).

Schmid’s discussion ignores this, and makes it sound like I am contradicting myself.  Once again, the untutored reader who has read his article (but not Five Proofs) might think he’s raised some devastating criticism, when in fact he has simply failed to read what I wrote carefully. 

Schmid suggests that another virtue of EIT over the thesis that God sustains things in being is that it better accounts for how physical objects maintain their identity over time.  Indeed, he says that “it is unclear that [the latter thesis] can even account for diachronic identity in the first place,” and he goes on to devote two and half pages to developing this theme.

But who on earth ever suggested in the first place that the thesis that God sustains things in being explains the identity of things over time?  Not me, and not anyone else as far as I know.  That’s simply not a question that the thesis is trying to address.  You might as well object “But the thesis that God sustains things in being doesn’t account for Feser’s martini habit!”  Who said it did? 

So, why would Schmid think to raise this issue?  The reason is apparent from this passage:

On Feser’s account, God does not act ona previously existent concrete object to conserve it in existence, preserving its original constituents.  Instead, God wholly reconstitutes concrete objects from utter non-being at each and every moment. 

This makes it sound like my view is that things are annihilated and recreated at every moment.  But I have never said such a thing, and it is not my view.  Conserving things in being is not the same thing as recreating them after they have been annihilated.  Indeed, the whole point is that God keeps them from being annihilated.  And Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysicians don’t explain diachronic identity in terms of divine conservation, but rather in terms of factors intrinsic to substances, such as substantial form and designated matter.  (Cf. my discussion of that issue in Scholastic Metaphysics, Oderberg’s in Real Essentialism, etc.)

Here too Schmid trots out the standard analytic philosopher’s hoo-hah – semi-formal exposition, oddball thought experiments, etc. – developed in the service of a gigantic red herring.  The unwary reader thinks he’s being treated to a really rigorous critique of my arguments, when in fact he’s being led on a wild goose chase.

Note that I am not accusing Schmid of deliberate misrepresentation, and I am not decrying the use of such analytic methods when appropriate (I was, after all, trained as an analytic philosopher myself).  My point is that in several cases they give a false appearance of rigor to Schmid’s criticisms, which I suspect accounts for some readers’ being (judging from by combox) overly impressed by them.

Now, Schmid does consider the possibility that I might reply by saying that the previous state of an object at t – 1 together with divine action is what accounts for its existence and state at t.  But he objects that “it’s unclear that there is any independent motivation for this move apart from a prior acceptance that things require sustaining causes of their existence.”

Well, of course that’s the motivation, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  Again, Schmid’s discussion here falsely supposes that divine conservation is intended to be an explanation of diachronic identity.  And in that light, one might think it a good objection to ask why, if factors intrinsic to a substance explain diachronic identity, we need to bring in divine conservation.

But again, divine conservation is not in the first place being brought in to explain diachronic identity.  That application is a figment of Schmid’s imagination.  There are two issues here: what accounts for a thing’s identityover time, and what accounts for its persistence in being.  Divine conservation is intended to deal with the second issue; again, the first issue is dealt with instead in terms of factors like substantial form, designated matter, etc.  (True, God conserves those in being too, like he does everything else.  But the point is that divine conservation is not brought in to explain diachronic identity per se.)

An argument against EIT

Finally, Schmid addresses an argument against EIT that I gave in the ACPQ article referred to above.  It goes like this:

1. A cause cannot give what it does not have to give.

2. A material substance is a composite of prime matter and substantial form.

3. Something has existential inertia if and only if it has of itself a tendency to persist in existence once it exists.

4. But prime matter by itself and apart from substantial form is pure potency, and thus has of itself no tendency to persist in existence.

5. And substantial form by itself and apart from prime matter is a mere abstraction, and thus of itself also has no tendency to persist in existence.

6. So neither prime matter as the material cause of a material substance, nor substantial form as its formal cause, can impart to the material substance they compose a tendency to persist in existence.

7. But there are no other internal principles from which such a substance might derive such a tendency.

8. So no material substance has a tendency of itself to persist in existence once it exists.

9. So no material substance has existential inertia.

Schmid raises four objections against this argument.  First, he suggests that the defender of EIT could simply reject hylemorphism on the grounds that, if my argument is correct, hylemorphism would conflict with EIT.  Which is true, but not terribly interesting if I have independent arguments for hylemorphism – as, of course, I do.  But it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect Schmid to present a general critique of those arguments in a journal article devoted to another topic, so for present purposes we can put this issue to one side.

Second, Schmid notes that the Principle of Proportionate Causality (of which premise 1 above is one formulation) allows that there are several ways in which what is in an effect may preexist in its cause.  And he suggests that a tendency to persist in existence may preexist in a material thing’s metaphysical constituents in a more subtle way than I consider.  In particular, he suggests that even if neither prime matter nor substantial form by themselves have a tendency to persist in existence, maybe in combination they will produce something that does have such a tendency – just as two colorless chemical constituents might be combined in a way that generates something that is red.

One problem with this is that, just left at that, it doesn’t really amount to much of an objection.  For in the case of the chemical constituents, there are chemical facts we can point to that explain exactly why they will together generate something red.  But Schmid does not tell us exactly what it is about prime matter and substantial form that would (or indeed could), when they are combined, generate a tendency to persist in existence. 

Another problem is that even if substantial form and prime matter would together yield something with existential inertia, that would just leave us with another version of the circularity problem discussed above.  Existential inertia, as a power or property of the whole substance, would depend for its existence at any moment on the parts of the substance (prime matter and substantial form) being combined; and the parts of the substance being combined at any moment would depend on its power or property of existential inertia.  (As I have said before, there really is no way around this sort of problem for anything that is composed of parts.  Only an absolutely simple or non-composite thing can have existential inertia.)

Now, toward the end of his paper, Schmid does say something that might seem to provide a solution to this circularity problem.  He says that it is the parts of a substance at time t – 1 that explain the whole’s existence at t.  But there would be vicious circularity only if it were the parts at time t that were claimed to explain the whole’s existence at t.

But this simply ignores the sub-argument of the Aristotelian proof, referred to above, which claims that even considered at time t, the parts of the water (or of any other physical substance) considered just qua parts of the kind they are(particles, prime matter and substantial form, essence and existence, or whatever) are merely potentially water, so that some additional factor active at t must be brought in to account for why they are actualized as water at t.  What happened at an earlier time t – 1 is not sufficient to account for that.  But if the additional factor is some other part of the water itself, then we will be back with the circularity problem.

Schmid’s third objection to my argument is directed at step 7.  He says that, for all I have shown, existential inertia itself might be a further internal principle of a substance.  Hence, he claims, the premise begs the question.

To see the problem with this objection, consider an EIT-rejecting reductive naturalist who argues as follows:

The physical world consists of nothing more than fermions and bosons and the laws that govern them.  But there is nothing in the nature of fermions and bosons or the laws that govern them that entails that they have existential inertia.  Hence, there is no such feature in the physical world.

Whatever you think of such an argument, would it beg the question?  Not if the speaker has independent grounds for being a reductive naturalist.  Hence, in response to such a reductive naturalist, a defender of EIT would either have to give some argument against reductive naturalism, or show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises.  It would not be enough merely to accuse the speaker of begging the question.  But by the same token, my argument does not beg the question if I have independent grounds for being a hylemorphist, which I do.  Hence, even if Schmid had other good reasons to reject the argument, accusing step 7 of begging the question is not a good one.

Schmid’s fourth objection to my argument claims that if it succeeded, it would take down EET as well as EIT.  For why would a material substance’s substantial form and prime matter give it a tendency to expire any more than they give it a tendency to persist?  But Schmid’s objection misunderstands the position of those who reject EIT and endorse EET.  Their claim is not that material substances have an intrinsic tendency to go out of existence.  It’s rather merely that they lack any intrinsic tendency to continue in existence. 

Schmid considers this response, and says in reply that it presupposes that the falsity of EIT gives us reason to believe EET, which, he claims, it does not.  But I have already explained above why he is wrong about that.  The falsity of EIT does in fact give us reason to endorse EET.  Schmid also suggests that if I agree that things do not have a positive intrinsic tendency to go out of existence, then that would be enough to vindicate EIT.  But that doesn’t follow at all.  Again, the lack of a tendency to persistin existence is by itself sufficient to undermine EIT. 

(Compare: If there is nothing intrinsic to me that allows me to see as far as a mile, then I am simply not going to see as far as a mile, unless some additional factor – such as a telescope – is brought into the picture.  The mere absence of some factor that prevents me from seeing that far – such as a barrier – is not going to suffice for me to see that far.  Similarly, the mere absence of a positively self-destructive tendency is not going to suffice to ensure that I continue in existence.  If there is nothing intrinsic to me that positively ensures that I do continue in existence, then I am simply not going to continue in existence, unless some additional factor – an external sustaining cause – is brought into the picture.)

Well, I’m approaching 6,000 words this time, and I think that’s enough.  I’m afraid I have no time or inclination to read all the other stuff Schmid has written, or to view his YouTube videos, etc.  But since readers have been asking me to comment, I have tried to be fair to him by taking on his arguments in their strongest form, focusing as I have on what he has said in his two academic articles (which are presumably where the arguments have been given their most careful formulation).  Yet as we have now seen in two detailed posts, those arguments are seriously problematic – being sometimes unclear in their formulation, begging the question, and, in some cases, beholden to straw men and red herrings.  But as I have said, Schmid is an intelligent fellow and he certainly tries to engage his opponents’ arguments in a serious and civil way, and for that I thank him.

Schmid on the Aristotelian proof

A fellow named Joseph Schmid has written a number of articles and blog posts critical of various ideas and arguments of mine, such as the Aristotelian proof defended in chapter 1 of my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  Until this week, I hadn’t read any of this material, though for some time now I’ve been getting an increasing number of requests that I comment on it.  Many of these have been anonymous and weirdly insistent or adulatory toward Schmid, which made me suspect sock puppetry rather than genuine widespread interest.  My attention in recent months has, in any event, been focused on the book on the soul that I am working on and which is way behind schedule (as well as on other existing writing commitments, most of which have deadlines).  I also have an article forthcoming in Religious Studiesresponding to Graham Oppy’s objections to the Aristotelian proof, and after working on that I was inclined to give the topic a rest for a while.  Hence my neglect of Schmid.  But the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  So, in hopes of appeasing the Schmid enthusiasts, this week I read his recent article “Stage One of the Aristotelian Proof: A Critical Appraisal.”  Let’s take a look at it.

Schmid develops three main lines of criticism.  The first is directed at my claim that for an ordinary substance to persist in being at any moment requires that something actualize it at that moment.  The second is directed at what I say about essentially ordered causal series.  The third is directed at my claim that the unactualized actualizer or first cause of the existence of things must be purely actual.  I’ll reply to these in turn.  I’m not going to repeat everything I say in Five Proofs or everything that Schmid says in his article.  So, what follows will presuppose that the reader is familiar with that material.

Concurrent actualization

Consider any ordinary substance that is a compound of actuality and potentiality, such as the water in a certain glass.  I claim in Five Proofs that “the existence of [such a substance] at any given moment itself presupposes the concurrent actualization of [its] potential for existence” (p. 35).  I note that there are several ways one could conceive of this actualization.  One could, in Aristotelian hylemorphist fashion, think in terms of prime matter’s potential to be water being actualized by the imposition of the appropriate substantial form.  Or one could, in Thomistic fashion, think in terms of the essence of the water having existence conjoined to it.  Or one could, in reductive naturalist fashion, think in terms of the particles that make up the water being made to constitute water, specifically, rather than some other substance.  For the purposes of this part of the Aristotelian proof, it doesn’t matter which of these models one goes with.

For expository purposes, let’s go with the last model, and think in terms of a collection of particles of type Pwhich, considered just by themselves, could potentially constitute (a) water, or (b) separate quantities of hydrogen and oxygen, or (c) some other substance or aggregate of substances.  (I say “particles of type P” rather than making reference to atoms, quarks, bosons, or whatever, so as avoid getting sidetracked on questions about the particular physical and chemical facts, which are not relevant to the specific issue being addressed here.)

The basic idea is this.  Consider a collection of particles of type P which constitute water at time t.  Though they actually constitute water at t, there is nothing in the particles qua particles of type P that suffices to make them water rather than one of the other alternatives mentioned.  Again, qua particles of type P they have the potential to constitute water, or separate quantities of hydrogen and oxygen, or some other substance or aggregate of substances.  So, there must at t be something distinct from the collection which actualizes its potential to be water, specifically.

In response to this, Schmid writes:

Feser claims that it is the matter’s potential to exist as water that is presently ‘being actualized’. But ‘being actualized’ is arguably a notion of causal actualization.  Instead of claiming the matter’s potential is presently being actualized, then, a neutral description would say that the matter’s potential to exist as water is presently actual.

But not all actualities consist in or involve reductions of potency to act.  There are things that are (i) actual but (ii) whose actuality is not an actualizedone – that is, not one consisting in the (concurrent) reduction of potency to act (by some causal actualizer).  For Feser, one example of this would be God… For those who do not already accept… that substances are concurrently reducing from potency to act in respect of their actual (substantial) existence – one example of an actuality that is an unactualized actuality may very well be the present existence of the water...

Now, notice that once we alter the phrasing to the neutral ‘the matter’s potential to exist as water is presently actual right now,’ we cannot straightforwardly infer the need for a concurrent, sustaining efficient cause of the water’s existence.

End quote.  Now, there are three problems with this.  First, Schmid is wrong to claim that my characterization of the situation is not neutral.  The implication is that no one who did not already agree with my argument would characterize what is going on as the potential of a collection of particles of type P to be water “being actualized” at t – because this would entail that there is a cause of this actualization, which is precisely what is at issue.

But that is not true.  Someone (a Humean, for example) could agree that the potential in question is being actualized at t, and still go on to claim that there is no causeof this actualization – that it just happens without anything making it happen.  To be sure, I don’t for a moment think that this would be a plausible claim (for the reasons I give in the book when criticizing Hume, defending PSR, and so on).  But that is beside the present point, which is that someone who does not already agree with the overall argument could nevertheless concede the claim that Schmid is criticizing.

A second problem is that Schmid’s proposed alternative way of characterizing the situation is incoherent.  For the claim that “the matter’s potential to exist as water is presently actual right now” (emphasis added) suggests that the collection of particles of type P is both potentially water and actually water in the same respect and at the same time.  But it is a well-known Aristotelian-Thomistic thesis – one which is famously given expression in Aquinas’s First Way, and which Schmid does not challenge – that nothing can be both potential and actual in the same respect and at the same time. 

My own characterization of the situation, unlike Schmid’s, does not imply otherwise.  Again, what I say is that at t, the collection of particles of type Pconsidered just in respect of being particles of type P is only potentially water (and potentially other things too).  The collection is actually water only when considered as particles of type P together with the actualization of the potential in question (which, I also claim, requires a cause to make it happen – though, again, that is an additional thesis).  So, while I say that the particles are potential and actual at the same time, I do notsay that they are potential and actual at the same time and in the same respect. 

Again, though, Schmid’s formulation incoherently suggests that they are potential and actual at the same time and in the same respect.  In particular, it suggests either (i) that considered just qua particles of type P, the particles are both potentially water and actually water, or (ii) considered qua particles of type P together with the actualization of the potential in question, the particles are both potentially water and actually water.  But neither of these makes sense.  If, as in (i), we consider the particles just qua particles of type P, then while they are potentially water, they are not actually water.  If instead, as in (ii), we consider the particles qua particles of type P together with the actualization of the potential in question, then they are actually water, but not potentially water.  (By the way, I am well aware that the last couple paragraphs might need to be re-read a couple of times in order to understand them!  Some of Schmid’s paragraphs are like that too.  That’s just in the nature of the subject matter we are debating and the subtle distinctions it involves, sorry.)

To avoid incoherent formulations like (i) and (ii), Schmid needs to put his point some other way.  The natural way to do it is to characterize the situation as one in which the collection considered just qua particles of type P is merely potentiallywater, but where the collection considered qua particles of type P together with the actualization of the relevant potential is actuallywater.  But that way of putting it would really amount to returning to my formulation after all, rather than offering an alternative formulation.

The third problem with Schmid’s criticism is in his glib suggestion that if God can be actual without being actualized, then – for all I have shown – the water too might be actual without being actualized.  For the view of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers (like me) is, of course, not that it is possible in principle for things in general to be actual without being actualized, but rather that it is possible only for something of a very specific type to be actual without being actualized – namely, for something that is purely actual and thus without any potentials standing in need of actualization.  Water is obviously not like that. 

So, whereas Schmid seems to be appealing to some point of common ground between us as the basis for his objection, in reality he is doing no such thing.  His objection presupposes that something other than what is purely actualmight be actual without being actualized – a presupposition no Thomist would accept and for which he has given no justification.  So, the objection simply begs the question.

Schmid makes some further points in response to replies he imagines I might give to his objection.  Since, for the reasons I’ve just given, that objection fails, his further points are moot.  But I’ll briefly say something about some of them anyway.

He imagines, for example, that I might appeal to PSR as grounds for holding that the existence of the water at t requires some cause at t.  But in response he says that what happened prior to t plausibly explains the water’s existence at t.  Now, I am happy to concede that what happened prior to tis part of the explanation of the water’s existence at t.  But what is in question is whether what happened prior to t is by itself sufficient to explain the water’s existence at t.  Schmid says nothing to show that it would be sufficient.  Meanwhile, I argue in Five Proofsthat it is not sufficient, and (as we have just seen above) Schmid’s attempt to undermine that argument fails.

Schmid also appeals in passing to the idea of “existential inertia” as a purported alternative explanation of the existence of the water at t.  But I have criticized atheist appeals to existential inertia at length (e.g. in this article and more briefly in Five Proofs at p. 233) and Schmid says nothing in reply to those criticisms.  (At least, he does not do so in the present article, which is the only one I’ve read.  But he ought to say something about them in the present article, since the article will beg the question otherwise.)

As I pointed out in one of my recent exchanges with Oppy, one problem with the kind of existential inertia scenario he and Schmid favor is that it is viciously circular.  Existential inertia would be an attribute of any substance that has it.  But attributes are ontologically dependent on substances.  So, Schmid’s proposal amounts to saying that the water’s existence at t depends on its attribute of existential inertia, and that its attribute of existential inertia depends on the existence of the water at t – a metaphysical merry-go-round.  (Only in the case of something in which there is no distinction between substance and attributes – that is to say, something strictly simple or non-composite – does this circularity problem not arise.  That is why God alone can have existential inertia.)

Schmid also quotes a passage in Five Proofs where I speak of the existence of the coffee in a certain cup as being “actualized” by the existence of the water that makes it up, where the existence of the water in turn depends on the existence of the particles that make it up, etc.  Here, he suggests, I am dubiously characterizing what are in fact the constituents of a whole as if they were the efficient causes of the whole.

I can see why Schmid would say this, given an uncharitable reading of the passage in question, which perhaps I ought to have phrased more carefully.  But that he should have read it more charitably is, I think, clear from the fact that I there said that the potential existence of the coffee is actualized “in part” by the existence of the water.  Naturally, the constituents of a thing qua constituents are not efficient causes, but material causes.  But what I meant in that passage is that the existence of the coffee is explained by the presence of its constituents together with something that actualizes the potential of those constituents to be coffee, specifically, as opposed to some other kind of thing.

Essentially ordered causal series

A causal series ordered per se or essentially is one in which the members other than the first have their causal power only in a derivative or borrowed way.  A stock example would be a stick that can move a stone only insofar as someone is using the stick as an instrument to move it.  The stick is a secondary cause insofar as it can do its causal work only if there is a primary cause – a cause with built-in or underived causal power – working through it.  The notion of this kind of causal series plays a crucial role in the Aristotelian proof. 

Schmid claims to offer an alternative account of the notion of an essentially ordered causal series which would not have the implications the Aristotelian proof says it has.  He suggests that a necessary condition on essentially ordered series is that there is some natural tendency or causal power toward a certain outcome that the primary cause operating through the secondary causes is counteracting.  He has in mind cases like the one in which, because of the gravitational pull of the earth, a stick would fall to the ground and lie there inertly unless a person comes along to counteract this gravitational influence by picking up the stick and using it as an instrument to move the stone.

But this is simply wrong.  What Schmid is describing is at most a contingent feature of certain specific examples of essentially ordered causal series.  It is not a necessary condition of all essentially ordered series as such.  For Bto be a merely secondary cause of C, all that is required is that B lack any intrinsic power to produce C.  There needn’t be (though of course in some cases there could be) a countervailing factor (whether some tendency within B or some causal power external to B) positively acting to prevent B from producing C.  There need merely be the absence in B of any positive tendency to produce C.  A primary cause A need merely impart to B the needed causal power.  Aneedn’t, either alternatively or in addition, counteract something that prevents B from exercising the needed power. 

Why would Schmid want to suggest otherwise?  (And suggest is all he does.  He does nothing to show that the counteracting of some opposite tendency is a necessary feature of any essentially ordered causal series.  The most he does is to propose that this is a plausible way of interpreting certain specific examples.)

The reason is that Schmid wants to suggest in addition that the existence of something like the water in our earlier example will need a cause standing at the head of an essentially ordered series only if there is some factor positively acting to knock the water out of existence – a factor which the primary cause in an essentially ordered series would have to counteract.  And the presence of such a destructive factor is, Schmid says, something I do not establish – so that (given his analysis of essentially ordered series) my conclusion wouldn’t follow.

Schmid’s own alternative account of what is going on with the water is this: The water which exists at time t – 1 will, in the absence of some factor positively trying to destroy it, simply carry on existing at t.  A primary cause standing at the head of an essentially ordered series would be needed only if there were some destructive factor that needed to be counteracted.  Since there isn’t such a destructive factor, there is no need to appeal to such a series.

The problem with this, though, is that it once again simply assumes Schmid’s “existential inertia” model of the continued existence of the water – something which, again, I have argued against in the book and elsewhere, and which Schmid does nothing to defend in the present article.  In particular, Schmid will have to assume that model in order to make sense of the suggestion that the water will continue to exist at t in the absence of any destructive factor working positively to knock it out of existence.  So, yet again he simply begs the question.

It is important to emphasize that there is indeed a burden on Schmid to defend his existential inertia model, in order for his objections in the current article to have any force.  He seems to think that it is enough for him that I have not proved that there is a destructive factor positively working to knock the water out of existence.  And indeed I have not proved that, but I have not tried to, because it is irrelevant.  What I have done is argue against the existential inertia model, and if my arguments are correct, then the sheer existence of the water at twill need a cause even in the absenceof anything positively working to destroy it. 

Schmid also claims that I have failed to show that, in the case of the sheer existence of a thing at some time t, the essentially ordered causal series that accounts for it is to be understood according to my analysis of essentially ordered series rather than Schmid’s analysis (where, again, the latter involves the claim that such series necessarily involve the counteracting of some tendency opposite to that of the actual outcome).

But in fact my critique of existential inertia does double duty here.  If the water lacks existential inertia, then it simply will not exist even for a moment, including at t, without a sustaining cause at t.  No factor needs positively to act to try to knock it out of existence; the mere lack of existential inertia will suffice for its failing to exist at t if there is nothing causing it to exist then.  So, if something does cause the water to exist at t, then this won’t be a matter of its having to counteract some factor that is trying to knock the water out of existence (along the lines of Schmid’s model of essentially ordered series).  Rather, it will be a matter of the cause actualizing something (the water) that simply would not otherwise exist at t whether or not there is a factor that needs to be counteracted.  In other words, this will be a scenario that fits my model of essentially ordered series, not Schmid’s.

Now, suppose the water does have a sustaining cause C, and that this cause too lacks existential inertia.  Then Cis ontologically in the same situation as the water.  It toowill simply not exist at t – and thus will not be able to cause the water to exist at t – unless it too has a sustaining cause of its own.  And once again, there need be no destructive factor that this further sustaining cause is counteracting (as in Schmid’s model).  Now suppose that what causes C to exist at t is B, and that B too lacks existential inertia.  Then the same problem will arise yet again.  And once again we will have a case where (contrary to Schmid’s model of essentially ordered series) the need for a sustaining cause has nothing to do with there being some countervailing force that the sustaining cause is counteracting.

Indeed, in the case of the sustaining causes of things which lack existential inertia, we have perhaps the clearest possible example of an essentially ordered series fitting my description of how such series operate rather than Schmid’s description.  Hence to rebut his existential inertia model suffices to rebut what he says about essentially ordered causal series.

(By the way, Schmid’s objections so far seem to me similar to the ones Oppy raised in his own critique of the Aristotelian proof, and which I responded to in our two online debates and deal with more systematically in my forthcoming Religious Studies article.  So, the hoopla of Schmid’s fans notwithstanding, it doesn’t seem to me that there is much in Schmid’s first two objections that really adds much to the exchanges online and in print that I have already had with Oppy.)

One last matter before we get to Schmid’s third and final line of criticism.  Schmid proposes in passing that there is a tension between the Aristotelian account of causation as the actualization of potential, and the classical theist understanding of creation.  Prior to creation, nothing exists other than God.  So how, Schmid asks, can creation be a matter of actualizing potential?  For prior to creation there is nothing there, distinct from God, with potentiality waiting to be actualized.  And God himself, being purely actual, doesn’t have potentialities waiting to be actualized either.  So how can creation involve the actualization of potential?  Schmid says that this is not a problem for classical theism as such, but rather for reconciling classical theism with the Aristotelian proof.

But Schmid’s mistake here is his implicit assumption that causation as such requires some preexisting substrate that is altered in the act of causation.  And that is, of course, precisely what the doctrine of creatio ex nihilodenies.  Hence if Schmid’s alleged problem really were a problem, it would indeed be a problem for classical theism as such (since classical theism is committed to creatio ex nihilo) and not just for Aristotelian versions of it.

But in fact it is not a problem.  Certainly no Thomist would agree that it is, given the Thomist account of creation as the conjoining of existence to essence, where the latter, considered by itself, is merely potential until the former actualizes it.  Now, this is not a matter of altering some preexisting substrate, since prior to creation there is no substrate.  When we draw hydrogen and oxygen out of water, there is something already there – the water – in which the things we are drawing out preexist in a virtual way.  But creatio ex nihilo is a more radical kind of causation than that.  Actualizing the very essence of a thing by conjoining existence to it is analogous to actualizing matter’s potential to be hydrogen or oxygen, but it is not exactly the same sort of thing as that.  We need to extend our use of the relevant terms (“potentiality,” “causation,” etc.) beyond their application to the sorts of case in which the terms were originally applied (i.e. cases in which a preexisting substrate is altered).  There is nothing unique to Thomistic natural theology about this.  It is precisely the sort of thing we do in physics when, for example, we extend our use of the term “curvature” to apply to space itself (whereas in its original usage, it applies only to the objects that occupyspace). 

Naturally, there are crucial assumptions here – concerning the Thomistic metaphysics of essence and existence, the Thomistic theory of the analogical use of terms, and so on – that require further elaboration and defense.  The point, though, is that Schmid is hardly raising some issue that no one ever thought of before.  On the contrary, there’s a mountain of stuff written on it that Schmid’s remarks simply ignore.  Hence those remarks hardly constitute a serious objection.

(Compare: Suppose I remarked, in an article critical of materialism, that it is difficult to see how consciousness could be explained in materialist terms, and left it at that.  Would that be an interesting objection?  Of course not.  A materialist could justifiably respond: “Well, maybe so and maybe not, but surely you realize that there’s been an enormous amount written on how such an explanation might go!  Do you have anything to say in response to it?”  That’s how Schmid’s remarks on creation are bound to sound to a Thomist, or indeed to any defender of creatio ex nihilo.)

The purely actual actualizer

Schmid’s final main objection is to claim that, even if it is granted for the sake of argument that the sheer existence of the water at t requires a sustaining cause, it doesn’t follow that this cause would be purely actual rather than a compound of actuality and potentiality.  In particular, he claims that all I am entitled to conclude is that there is a first actualizer at t whose own existence is not in fact being actualized by something else.  But that is consistent with the supposition that the existence of this first actualizer could in principle be actualized by something else.  And if it could be, then it would have potentiality, even if it is potentiality that is not being actualized at t.

But this simply makes no sense.  Naturally, if the first actualizer is operating at t, then it must actually exist at t, and not merely potentially exist at t.  But in that case, then (if it is not purely actual) how can it have some potentialto exist that is not being actualized at t?  For if such a potential were there but not being actualized at t, then the first actualizer would not exist at t, and thus not be causing (or doing anything else) at t.  Yet if such a potential is being actualized at t, then we are not really talking about the firstactualizer after all, since in that case there would be something distinct from it that is actualizing its potential to exist (and that other thingwould be the true first actualizer). 

Or is Schmid saying that the first actualizer’s potential to exist at t is actualized, but that there is no cause that is doing the actualizing?  That can’t be right, because in this third objection, Schmid is, at least for the sake of argument, conceding the principle that the actualization of potential requires a cause.  (Or, if instead he rejects this principle, that would really just take us back to his firstobjection to the Aristotelian proof, rather than constituting a third line of criticism.)

So, the objection seems to me to be a muddle.  The subsidiary points Schmid makes in the course of developing it aren’t much better.  For example, he says that, even if the first actualizer were purely actual with respect to its existence, it might still have potentialities in other respects (for example, with respect to changes it might undergo).  But the problems with this suggestion should be obvious from other things I say in Five Proofs.  For one thing, if the first actualizer has potentialities even of the sort Schmid suggests, then it will be composite rather than simple.  But, Thomists argue, anything composite requires a cause, in which case this actualizer will not after all be purely actual even with respect to its existence.  For another thing, the Scholastic principle agere sequitur esse (“action follows being”), which I defend in the book, entails that the manner in which a thing acts reflects the manner in which it exists.  Hence, if something acts only by way of actualizing potentialities, then it would exist only by way of actualizing them; or, if instead it exists without the actualization of potentialities, then so too it actswithout actualizing them.  No doubt Schmid would disagree with all this, but the point is that his objections simply presuppose that it is wrong, and do nothing to show that it is.

Schmid also oddly claims that my own position unjustifiably “presupposes the impossibility of changeable necessary beings” (emphasis added).  But in fact my position presupposes no such thing.  Rather, it claims to demonstrate the impossibility of changeable necessary beings.  (It seems to me that there may be a kind of unintentional rhetorical sleight of hand in Schmid’s remark.  If someone claims to show that X is impossible – whether X is a round square, two plus two equaling five, a changeable necessary being, or whatever – a critic could always say: “Well, your argument is correct only if X is indeed impossible.”  Which is true, but trivial.  It hardly entails that the argument presupposes that X is impossible!)

Now as Schmid acknowledges, the charge that a firstactualizer need not be a purely actualactualizer is in fact one that I anticipate and respond to in Five Proofs (at pp. 66-68).  He quotes a remark I make there to the effect that “the first actualizer in the series is ‘first’, then, in the sense that it can actualize the existence of other things without its own existence having to be actualized… in order for it to exist” (p. 66, emphasis added).  Schmid responds that his scenario is not one in which a first actualizer has some potentiality that has to be actualized in order for it to exist.  Rather, he is simply claiming that it is one in which a first actualizer needn’t in any sense be purely actual.  For example, it might have at t a potential with respect to its existence that is not in fact actualized at t. 

But this simply misses the point I made above.  If a first actualizer has at t a potential with respect to its existence, then it simply will not exist at tunless that potential is actualized.  Hence its potential wouldindeed have to be actualized in order for it to exist.  Again, Schmid’s scenario simply makes no sense.

I appreciate Schmid’s interest in the argument and his attempt to engage with it seriously.  However, on close inspection the attempt seems to me to be riddled with confusions, begged questions, and missed points.

A whole lotta links

At Substack, philosopher Michael Robillard explains how he left academia, and how academia left him.

Anna Krylov warns of the growing politicization of science, in the Journal of Physical Chemistry.  Nautilus on the sometimes contradictory scientific literature. 

At Rolling Stone, hear David Crosby sing Donald Fagen’s new song “Rodriguez for a Night.”

The Spectator on a new biography of Kurt Gödel. 

At the Claremont Review of Books, Joseph M. Bessette on Barack Obama’s latest memoir.

Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, edited by William Simpson, Robert Koons, and Nicholas Teh, is now available in open access.

Joseph Trabbic reviews a recent translation of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, at Catholic World Report.

The New Criterion on the triumph of Thomas Sowell.

Prospect on why George Berkeley was less radical than he seems.

The Guardian reports on a lost memoir that paints an unflattering portrait of John Locke.

Larry Chapp on D. C. Schindler on liberalism and integralism, at Catholic World Report.

Mark Regnerus on the privatization of marriage, at Public Discourse.  At The Spectator, Mary Harrington argues that a sexual counterrevolution is on its way.

Collider on the thirtieth anniversary of The Rocketeer.

Tyler Cowen says that economics is failing us, at Bloomberg.

The crises of the West.  At Substack, N. S. Lyons reflects on the upheaval in France and raises four big questions for the counter-revolution. 

The Guardian reports that Richard Dawkins has lost his Humanist of the Year title over trans comments.  Alexander Riley on the war on sex, at The American Mind.  Mary Eberstadt on the trans-kid craze, at the Claremont Review of Books.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute rounds up some reviews of Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread.

Meet the new Journal of Controversial Ideas.  Daniel Kaufman commentsat The Electric Agora. Also, Kaufman on twenty-five things everyone used to understand.

The latest at John DeRosa’s Classical Theism podcast: Christopher Tomaszewski on the immateriality of the intellect and modal collapse; W. Matthews Grant on free will and divine causality; Matthew Minerd on Garrigou-Lagrange and the principle of finality; and much more.

At Quadrant, James Franklin reconstructs Jesus Christ’s PhD dissertation. 

Michael Pakaluk on John Rawls and the rejection of truth, at Law and Liberty.

At YouTube, Gaven Kerr discusses classical theism and divine simplicity and Kerr and Ryan Mullins debate the divine nature.

The haunted imagination of Alfred Hitchcock, at the New Republic.

Philosopher Charlie Huenemann on the twilight of the idols of good writing.

Robert Royal on the late Jude Dougherty, at The Catholic Thing.

At Philosophical Studies, Ben Page on power-ing up neo-Aristotelian natural goodness.

On Pints With Aquinas, Janet Smith and Fr. Gregory Pine debate the ethics of lying.

David Noe and Jeff Winkle carry out an ongoing discussion about classical civilization atthe Ad Navseam podcast.

“When you measure, include the measurer.”  The Spectator reports that MC Hammer defends philosophy against scientism. 

At Public Discourse, Matthew Berry on nominalism, nihilism, and modern politics.  Patrick Deneen on Michael Sandel and a tyranny without tyrants, at American Affairs.

Curiosity damned the cat

Aquinas tells us that curiosity is a vice.  Before you clutch your pearls, dear village atheist reader, know that Aquinas was notcondemning the pursuit of knowledge as such.  On the contrary, he refers to such pursuit as “studiousness,” and he regarded it is a virtue, not a vice.  “Curiosity,” as Aquinas uses the term, refers instead to intellectual pursuits that are disordered in some respect.  (Compare: The sin of wrath is not anger, but the indulgence of disorderedanger; the sin of lust is not sexual desire, but the indulgence of disordered sexual desire; and so on.  In each case, it’s not the thing, but the abuse of the thing, that is condemned.)

Facilitating wrongdoing

In what cases might the pursuit of knowledge be disordered?  Perhaps the most obvious case is when one’s aim in acquiring knowledge is to facilitate evildoing.  If doing X is morally wrong, and you are trying to learn about Y for the sake of enabling you to do X, then your pursuit of knowledge about Y is wrong.  Of course, that leaves it open that pursuing such knowledge for some other reason might be legitimate.  (For example, if you are doing research on firearms because you are trying to figure out how to commit a certain crime, then you are doing something wrong.  But if you are doing such research because you are trying to figure out how to defend yourself against criminals, then you are not necessarily doing something wrong.)

The easy access to information afforded by the internet has opened the door to unprecedented occasions for this particular kind of curiosity.  Knowledge relevant to carrying out identity theft, finding partners for illicit sexual encounters, organizing a riot, doxing political enemies, and other immoral activities is just a few clicks away.

Manifesting pride

A second way that the pursuit of knowledge can be disordered is when it is motivated by the sin of pride.  The pursuer is, in this case, less concerned with knowledge than with the glorification of self that such knowledge might provide.  Obviously, someone who knows a lot precisely because he wants to be seen by others as knowing a lot would be guilty of this.  But there are other ways that pride can manifest itself in the pursuit of knowledge, which are especially evident in contemporary intellectual life, not least in my own field of academic philosophy.

One of them is the desire to be seen as clever.  Manifestations of this might include developing abstruse lines of argument, with feigned earnestness, for positions one does not really take seriously and one’s readers are not likely to take seriously either; the use of logical symbolism and other technical apparatus in cases where it is not necessary in order to make one’s point; a predilection for one-upmanship and argumentativeness; and, in general, a tendency to treat intellectual life as a kind of game or mental onanism.  (In a recent post, we saw that the Neo-Scholastic philosopher Thomas Harper labeled this tendency the “unreality of thought.”)

Another way pride manifests itself in intellectual matters is in the attitude of the sort of intellectual who takes delight in destroying the convictions of ordinary people, so as to facilitate his feelings of superiority over them.  We see this in the tiresome “everything you think you know is wrong” style of pop science writing, and in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” style of philosophy and social science that purports to “unmask” ordinary innocent beliefs and values as “really” “nothing but” the manifestation of some hidden and sinister motivation (economic class interests, subconscious neuroses, the promptings of selfish genes, the will to power, racism, sexism, etc. etc.).

Trivial pursuit

A third way the pursuit of knowledge can be disordered is when it reflects an excessive interest in matters that are not of ultimate importance.  The highest sort of knowledge concerns the divine first cause and last end of our existence, and of how to prepare our souls so that they might be united to him forever.  The further one’s intellectual pursuits take one from interest in and knowledge of these ultimate matters, the more disordered they are. 

Now, one can certainly pursue scientific or philosophical knowledge in a manner that distracts one from these highest matters.  To be sure, scientific and philosophical inquiry, at least when done well, do put one in some contact with the natures of things and with objective reality in general, even if not always in a way that is oriented to the very highest realities.  But one of the pathologies of modern intellectual life, alongside the ones already mentioned, is a tendency toward hyper-specialization that makes one so doggedly oriented toward a narrow aspect of reality that one’s view of larger matters becomes positively distorted or obscured altogether.  That can cause grave spiritual harm.

Outside of academic life, a similar excessive focus on matters of at most secondary importance is exhibited by those who are hyper-enthusiastic about travel, cuisine, and the like.  And the most absurd manifestation is the rise of “geek culture” – of people who devote enormous amounts of time and energy to learning and thinking about the minutiae of fictional universes from movies, comics, and games, or who obsess over the work and personal lives of favorite actors, musicians, bands, etc.  My point, as longtime readers know, is by no means to disparage such things per se.  But for many people today, such trivial pursuits have gone well beyond a point that is spiritually healthy, and have become a kind of substitute religion. 

Aquinas tells us that curiosity can be a byproduct of the cardinal sin of acedia or apathy toward the pursuit of the highest spiritual goods.  Modern popular culture and its dizzying variety of entertainments have to a large extent become precisely this – a drug that so thoroughly immerses people in fantasy life that they are distracted from pursuing what is necessary for the eternal wellbeing of their souls.

Arrogant amateurs

Aquinas sees an additional manifestation of the vice of curiosity in people who pursue matters that they lack the wherewithal to understand.  I don’t think that what he has in mind here is the sort of person who finds it interesting to learn something about a subject he could never master himself, such as the non-expert who reads popular works of philosophy, science, etc.  That seems to be not only harmless, but an exercise of the virtue of studiousness.  What Aquinas has in mind, I would suggest, is instead the sort of person whose confidence in his opinions about such matters is out of proportion to his actual knowledge or ability.  The problem here is a lack of intellectual humility.  (The difference from the sort of prideful person discussed earlier is that that sort of person typically doeshave the requisite intellectual ability.) 

The internet and social media have afforded unprecedented occasions for this particular manifestation of the sin of curiosity.  Anyone with access to Wikipedia, or even just to the Twitter or Facebook feeds he peruses every day, fancies himself possessed of such expertise on matters of politics, science, and philosophy that he is justified in shrilly denouncing all who disagree with him.

Occult knowledge

Aquinas also classifies interest in divination as a species of curiosity.  Here the idea is that demons are of their nature unreliable sources of knowledge, driven as they are solely by the aim of corrupting souls.  But a disordered interest in the occult in general would plausibly be classified as a kind of curiosity in Aquinas’s sense.  I say “disordered” because not all inquiry into such matters is bad.  For example, Aquinas himself has a lot to say about the nature and activities of demons, and the topic is of both intellectual and spiritual interest.  What I have in mind is rather an interest in the occult that is disordered in that one is attracted to the study of evil powers precisely insofar as they are evil.

For example, there are in modern society subcultures that are excessively fascinated, and indeed titillated, by the demonic, the deviant, and the macabre in their various forms – in satanic symbolism and other forms of sacrilege and blasphemy, in the lives and mindsets of serial killers and the grisly details of their crimes, in pushing ever further out the boundaries of sexual license, and so on – precisely because these things are deeply subversive of normal sensibilities and taboos.  Some people of this type may not believe in the literal existence of the demonic, but are nevertheless drawn to what it represents.  This love of what is subversive qua subversive is gravely disordered, so that the pursuit of knowledge that is driven by that love is also disordered.

When one considers these varieties of the disordered pursuit of knowledge – again, those which facilitate wrongdoing, manifest pride, obsess over trivia, foster aggressive and arrogant ignorance, or evince delight in the demonic and subversive – it is evident that curiosity, as Aquinas uses the term, is not only a sin but an extremely common one.

Indeterminacy and the comics

When I was seventeen, I wanted to be Al Williamson, the legendary science-fiction and adventure strip comic book artist.  Williamson is best known for his work on titles like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy for EC Comics in the 1950s, though in his later years he would be associated with the Star Wars newspaper strip and comic books.  (That was a tough one for me, since I love Williamson but can’t stand Star Wars.)  The uncolored original art for the classic opening panel from EC’s “Space-Borne!” (which you see to the left) gives a good sense of the Williamson style – elegant, lush, heroic.

For a larger sample of Williamson’s work , you might check out his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” for EC’s Weird Science-Fantasy; the amusing “The Success Story” from Warren’s Creepymagazine; his adaptation of the movie Blade Runnerfor Marvel Comics; and “The Few and the Far” from Pacific Comics’ Alien Worlds.  A new book, Al Williamson: Strange World Adventures, offers a pleasing overview of the cartoonist’s career, with a great many pages of original art reproduced on large pages in black and white so that the details of Williamson’s pen and ink work are all visible.

How can I excuse a post on Williamson at a blog devoted to philosophical and theological topics?  The answer is that the book provides (without intending to do so, naturally!) a couple of choice examples of the phenomenon known to contemporary analytic philosophers as the indeterminacy of meaning.  The basic idea, as longtime readers know, is this.  Consider any thought, any spoken or written words or sentences, any symbols, pictures or other representations, and in general anything with any sort of meaning or representational content.  There is nothing about the collection of physical facts concerning such things – for example, facts about the size or shape of written letters, facts about the brain or behavioral patterns, facts about the causal relations between a person and his environment – that can by themselves determine exactly what meaning is to be attributed to a thought or conveyed by an utterance, picture, or other representation.  For any set of physical facts, there will always be alternative possible interpretations one might assign to them.  Physical representations are therefore systematically ambiguous or indeterminatein their content.

This thesis, most famously associated with philosophers like Quine and Kripke, is of interest because of the dramatic conclusions philosophers have drawn from it – albeit different philosophers draw different dramatic conclusions.  Suppose you take the materialist view that there are no facts over and above the physical facts.  Then you will be tempted to draw the conclusion that there just is no fact of the matter about what any of our thoughts and utterances mean.  Suppose instead that you hold that there is and must be a fact of the matter about what at least some of our thoughts and utterances mean.  Then you will be tempted to draw the anti-materialist conclusion that the physical facts are not all the facts there are – and in particular that thought cannot be identified with anything material.  (The latter conclusion, as I have argued in this paperand in several follow-up pieces, is the correct one to draw.)

Here is one example from Williamson’s work that wonderfully exemplifies the phenomenon of indeterminacy.  In 1954, Williamson produced an especially beautifully-illustrated eight page story for The Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe.  But the series was cancelled before the story saw print.  About ten years later, comic book artist Wally Wood decided he wanted it for the first issue of his magazine Witzend.  But, while preserving the art, Wood came up with an entirely new story and dialogue for it, publishing it in black and white under the title “Savage World.”  Over fifteen years after that, the story was once again rewritten (this time by comics writer Bruce Jones), and published in Alien Worlds in a colorized version under the title “Land of the Fhre.” 

So, we have exactly the same series of images, but with three different narratives – three different ways of interpreting the significanceof the images.  There is nothing in the images themselves that determines exactly who the characters are or what they are doing, what the larger background context is in terms of which we should understand the eight-page series of images, and so on.  Something outside the images, namely the intentions of the writer, has to determine all that.

Notice that this does not by itself entail that the images are entirely indeterminate.  At least given the general background context – the general conventions of art, the fact that we are dealing with a comic book story, that it is appearing in a science fiction magazine, etc. – we know that the images represent people and places, that the characters in the later panels in the story are the same as the characters in the earlier panels, and so forth.  (Though torn entirely from that larger context too, the physical attributes of the art wouldn’t by themselves suffice to determine even that much.)

This is a point worth making given an issue related to indeterminacy that arises in the theological context (and which arose in the comments section of a recent post).  As the history of Christian theology demonstrates, the same biblical passages can be interpreted in different ways, and stitched together into theological systems as unlike as the different stories assigned to the same Williamson artwork in my example.  Catholics and Protestants disagree over whether an authoritative institution like the Church is therefore necessary in order to assign to scripture a proper interpretation. 

But the Catholic position in this dispute is too often understood in a cartoonish manner (unfortunately, sometimes even by well-meaning but uninformed Catholics themselves).  The Catholic Church does not maintain that scripture cannot be understood at all apart from the authoritative interpretation of the Church.  She is not making the absurd claim that the words on the page are strictly unintelligible gibberish until the Church tells us what they mean (as if ordinary readers of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek couldn’t make heads or tails of it until some Church official came along to tell us what it was saying!)  Obviously, the general sense of most passages is clear enough.  Rather, what is at issue is how to settle the interpretation of passages that are ambiguous, how to determine exactly what principle lies behind the teaching of this or that passage, how to apply it to concrete or unforeseen circumstances, and so on.

For example, when the Fifth Commandment says “Thou shalt not kill,” the Church is not claiming that this is no more meaningful than “Blah blah blah” until an authoritative interpreter comes along.  Obviously, that would be a ridiculous claim.  The general meaning is clear enough.  But is all killing ruled out?  What does the command imply with regard to self-defense?  The killing of animals?  Capital punishment?  Abortion?  Euthanasia?  Other biblical passages can help to a considerable extent, but they can't settle every single question of this type.  That is why (Catholics argue) an authoritative interpreter is necessary.

Another reason that the Catholic position cannot entail that biblical passages are utterly unintelligible before an authoritative interpreter comes along is that such a suggestion would render meaningless the Church's claim that she only ever teaches in a way that is consistent with scripture.  That obviously entails that there is at least some general meaning to scriptural passages that can be grasped by the reader even before the Church puts forward an authoritative decision on ambiguous cases, application to unforeseen circumstances, etc. Otherwise we'd have a ridiculous and Orwellian situation where the Church can always claim to be consistent with scripture, but only for the trivial reason that she can always just arbitrarily stipulate what scripture means.

An analogy would be the Supreme Court's claim to be the authoritative interpreter of the U.S. Constitution.  No one claims that the Constitution is strictly unintelligible until the court tells us what it means.  The general sense is clear enough.  Rather, the question is how to interpret ambiguous passages, how to determine what general principle underlies this or that part of it, how to apply it to new cases, etc.  That's why the court is needed.  (The difference between the court and the Church is that the court has no special divine guidance and therefore is not infallible – very far from it, obviously!)

Anyway, the “Savage World”/”Land of the Fhre” example provides a nice analogue to this more narrow sort of indeterminacy.  Given the general background conventions of art, the conventions of comic book art specifically, and so on, the attributes of the Williamson artwork are sufficient by themselves to tell us that what we are looking at are people, places, and buildings, that this is an adventure story of some type, that there is some sort of conflict between the characters, etc.  This is analogous to the fact that given the general conventions of the biblical languages, general background knowledge of human life, etc., the general sense of scriptural passages is clear enough (e.g. we know that the Ten Commandments tell us not to kill, steal, or commit adultery, we know at least in a general way what killing, stealing, and committing adultery involve, etc.).

At the same time, the specific details of the plot of the story, the motivations of the characters, etc. cannot all be read off from the artwork alone.  Something outside the artwork – the intentions of the writer and the story he imposes on the images – is needed in order to determine that.  This is analogous to the fact that the precise nature of the general principles expressed in scriptural passages, their application to new cases, what scripture implies vis-à-vis very technical and abstruse theological matters and issues that never arose at the time the Bible was written, etc.  cannot all be read off from scripture alone.  To that limited extent, the precise meaning of scripture is indeterminate apart from the reading given it by an authoritative interpreter. 

Here is another example from Williamson’s career, and recounted in Al Williamson: Strange World Adventures.  Williamson famously collaborated in his early work with a number of artist friends who would also become well-known, such as Frank Frazetta, Angelo Torres, and Roy Krenkel.  Their influence can be felt in Williamson’s 1950s-era work especially, including the examples I’ve linked to.  Now, Williamson was not keen on drawing superhero tales, and one publisher was not happy with the work he did on one such story.  The publisher hired Torres to do another story, in the process telling Torres how little he thought of Williamson’s work.  As a gag, Torres had Williamson do the job, without telling the publisher – and when it was turned in, the publisher praised Torres for it and told him how much better it was than Williamson’s work!

I would suggest that this episode illustrates another theme related to indeterminacy – what philosophers of science call the theory-ladenness of observation.   The idea here is that there is no such thing as observational or experimental evidence that can be described entirely independently of any background theoretical assumptions.  We are always making some theoretical assumptions when we interpret some piece of scientific evidence, and those assumptions can in principle be wrong or at least be open to challenge from incompatible alternative assumptions.  To take a stock example, whether I describe what I observe at sunset as the sun moving relative to the earth or the earth moving relative to the sun depends on which theoretical assumptions I bring to bear on the observation.  And ordinary observation, outside of scientific contexts, is like this too.

The relationship to indeterminacy is, perhaps, obvious.  What is observed does not by itself suffice to tell us its entire significance.  It is indeterminate between different possible descriptions reflecting different possible theoretical background assumptions.  (Note that here too, one needn’t hold that the indeterminacy is complete.  For example, I can know that I am looking at a large, round yellowish-orange object of some kind whether I interpret it as the sun moving relative to the earth, a stationary object relative to which the earth is moving, or for that matter an artificial sun like the kind in the movie The Truman Show.)

The Torres/Williamson episode nicely illustrates the idea.  The publisher evaluated the artwork in light of the background assumption that it was produced by Torres and not by Williamson.  Had he instead assumed from the start that he was looking at a piece of Williamson artwork, he may well have given it a more negative evaluation.  Note that that does not entail that there is nothing in what he is observing that does not reflect the publisher’s background assumptions.  There are images in ink on the paper, people and places and buildings represented there, and so on, entirely apart from the publisher’s assumptions.  But whether he is inclined to notice certain aesthetic and stylistic features, to overemphasize certain weaknesses in the drawing or certain of its strengths, etc. does reflect the assumptions he is making about who drew it.

Related reading:

Pop culture roundup [other philosophical posts on comics, movies, music, etc.]

Five Proofs in Spanish

My book Five Proofs of the Existence of God is now available in a Spanish translation.  It has for some time been available also in German.

For anyone interested in other translations of my books: The Last Superstition has been translated into Portuguese, French, and German.  Philosophy of Mind is available in German.  A book of some of my essays is available in Romanian. 

An exegetical principle from Fortescue

In his book The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451 , Fr. Adrian Fortescue argues that the essential Catholic claims about the authority of the pope can all be found in patristic texts from the period referred to in the title.  You may or may not agree with him about that, but the papacy is not my topic here.  What I want to call attention to instead is a general exegetical principle Fortescue appeals to at the start.  He writes:

Before we quote our texts, there is yet a remark to be made.  Nearly all these quotations are quite well known already.  This does not affect their value.  If a text proves a thesis, it does not matter at all whether it is now quoted for the first or the hundredth time…  Naturally, people who deny [what we believe]… also have something to say about them.  In each case they make what attempt they can to show that the writer does not really admit what we claim, in spite of his words… The case is always the same.  We quote words, of which the plain meaning seems to be that their writer believed what we believe, in some point.  The opponent then tries to strip his words of this meaning… The answer is that, in all cases, we must suppose that a sane man, who uses definite expressions, means what he says, unless the contrary can be proved.  To polish off a statement with which you do not agree by saying that it is not meant, and leave the matter at that, is a silly proceeding.

There is another general issue here.  These early Fathers are witnesses of the belief of their time.  Now, the value of evidence increases as it is multiplied.  We must take the value, not of one text, but of all put together.  Here we have a great number of texts that all make for the same point.  The fact that all do make for the same point suggests the reasonable interpretation of each.  All can be understood naturally, supposing that their writers believed [what we believe]… If you do not admit that, you have to find a different, often a most tortuous, interpretation for each.  The rule of good reasoning is that one simple cause that accounts equally for all the phenomena is to be supposed the real one, unless it be proved false. (pp. 53-54)

For ease of reference, I am going to give the label “Fortescue’s Principle” to the thesis implicit here, though of course I am not thereby suggesting that it was original to Fortescue.  We can formulate it as follows:

Fortescue’s Principle: If a large number of texts from a certain period are all naturally read as teaching that p, and were for centuries afterward commonly understood as teaching that p, then there is at the very least a very strong presumption that they do in fact teach that p. 

This principle is a matter of common sense.  It is, of course, possible that the natural interpretation of some particular text considered in isolation might not be the correct interpretation.  But the probability that it is incorrect decreases dramatically if lots of other texts from the same general time and place say the same thing on a natural interpretation.  To think otherwise, you’d have to believe that writers in general in that time and place just didn’t know how to express themselves clearly, and somehow all tended to misstate things in exactly the same way – which merely adds improbability to improbability.

For example, no one doubts that (say) nineteenth-century socialists were critical of capitalism and that nineteenth-century abolitionists were opposed to slavery.  If some contemporary historian came along and argued that we have for a century and a half been misinterpreting all the relevant statements from that period, no one would take him seriously.  It wouldn’t matter if he produced clever exegesis of this or that particular text that purported to show, based on nuances in linguistic usage, that some reading other than the natural one was possible.  The idea that all the relevant texts have been systematically misunderstood for that long is just too silly to credit.

Something like Fortescue’s Principle is implicit in the First Vatican Council’s teaching that “in matters of faith and morals… that meaning of Holy Scripture must be held to be the true one, which Holy mother Church held and holds” and that “it is not permissible for anyone to interpret Holy Scripture in a sense contrary to this, or indeed against the unanimous consent of the fathers.”  It is not merely contrary to common sense, but contrary to Catholic orthodoxy, to suggest that on some moral or theological matter the Fathers of the Church all misunderstood scripture or that the Church herself has for centuries done so.

All the same, Fortescue’s Principle is routinely violated by theologians who don’t like some doctrine that has always been understood to be the teaching of scripture and the Church Fathers, but who don’t want to be accused of rejecting the authority of scripture and the Fathers.  Worse, such violations of Fortescue’s Principle are shamelessly presented as if they were applications of good scholarly practice, when in fact they are contrary to it.

Here’s how the sophistry works.  First, some revisionist biblical or patristic scholar cobbles together a strained reinterpretation of a text that has always been taken to teach some traditional doctrine.  This is usually done with a great show of learning, heavy going about what the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek “really” says (never mind the fact that two millennia of theologians who also knew the relevant languages understood it the traditional way), and so on.  Then, other revisionist scholars casually and routinely cite this reinterpretation as if it has somehow established once and for all that the traditional interpretation is mistaken (when in fact the very most that can be said is that the novel interpretation might be defensible, though often even to say that much is too generous).  Similarly strained and tendentious reinterpretations of other texts are developed, and then also casually cited by other revisionists as if they too were definitive. 

Before you know it, the revisionist scholars present this jerry-rigged collection of far-fetched reinterpretations as if theyconstitute the settled scholarly wisdom, and as if anyone who dissents from it hasn’t gotten the news or is otherwise out of touch.  Appeals to or defenses of the traditional interpretations are dismissed as hackneyed (“Oh, that again!”), or as shallow and non-scholarly exercises in “proof-texting.”  The whole thing is a gaslighting exercise. 

For example, this is now a stock rhetorical ploy of theologians who don’t like traditional Christian teaching about sexuality, but who’d prefer to avoid contradicting scripture outright.  The tactic is to pretend that all the relevant texts have for centuries been misinterpreted, and that modern scholars have finally revealed their true import.  The proposed reinterpretations have easily been refuted by Robert Gagnon and other scholars, but that matters not a whit to the revisionists.  Their desire is not in the first place to determine whether modern attitudes really are consistent with scripture, but rather to find a way to make scripture consistent with modern attitudes – or at least to kick up enough dust that non-experts can be made to think that there is some doubt about what scripture really says.

Or, to consider examples familiar to regular readers of this blog, consider capital punishment and the doctrine of eternal damnation.  The manifest teaching of scripture and the Fathers is that the state can at least in principlelicitly resort to capital punishment (even if some of the Fathers urged against its use in practice).  As Joe Bessette and I demonstrate in our book on the subject, you simply cannot reconcile the extreme thesis that capital punishment is always and intrinsically immoral (as opposed to ill-advised in practice) with scripture and the Fathers. 

Accordingly, theologians who want to push this extreme position without explicitly rejecting the authority of scripture and the Fathers have tried to come up with novel interpretations of the key texts.  None of these considered individually is terribly plausible, as I have shown in the cases of the reinterpretations defended by writers like Brugger, Griffiths, Hart, Finnis, and Fastiggi.  But even if one or two of them were defensible, the idea that the true import of all the relevant scriptural and patristic evidence has been misunderstood for two millennia is simply too silly for words, a clear violation both of Fortescue’s Principle and of the teaching of the First Vatican Council.

Eternal damnation is also manifestly taught in scripture and the Fathers in text after text after text.  In order to deny this, you have to believe that not just one or two passages, but the entire tradition has been misunderstood for centuries. 

The gaslighting and dust-kicking-up represented by violations of Fortescue’s Principle is in fact not true exegesis at all, but eisegesis – reading some meaning into a text rather than out of it.  It is bad enough when theological modernists engage in this tactic, but as some of the examples cited above indicate, it is occasionally resorted to even by otherwise orthodox Catholics.  Perhaps without realizing it, they thereby abandon a principle which in other contexts they would find essential (as Fortescue himself does) in upholding the basic claims of the Church.

Aquinas and Hayek on abstraction

Common sense and Aristotelian philosophy alike take it that we first know particular individual things (this triangle, that dog, etc.) and only afterward arrive at abstract ideas (triangularity, dogginess, etc.).  F. A. Hayek, who was a philosopher of mind as well as an economist and political philosopher, argued that this gets things the wrong way around.  The theme is most fully developed in his essay “The Primacy of the Abstract” (in his New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas ).  Thomas Aquinas, naturally, upholds the Aristotelian position.  However, though his views differ from Hayek’s in several crucial ways, there is a sense in which he allows that abstractions do have a kind of priority.  A compare and contrast seems worthwhile.  Let’s start with Hayek and then come back to Aquinas.

Hayek on the mind

Here, to oversimplify a bit, is how Hayek’s account goes.  Different neural structures dispose an organism toward behavioral responses to different aspects of possible stimuli.  For example, neural structure A will dispose an organism toward reaching for a round object; neural structure B will dispose it toward reaching for an orange object; neural structure C will dispose it toward halting at a hissing object; neural structure Dwill dispose it toward retreating from a slithering object; and so on.  A stimulus that triggers activity in A, B, and related structures will be experienced as an orange; a stimulus that triggers activity in C, D, and related structures will be experienced as a snake; and so forth.

Now, the dispositions embodied in these various neural structures have an abstract character insofar as they are sensitive to a wide variety of possible instantiations of the aspects in question.  For example, activity in neural structure A might be triggered by the roundness of an orange, or that of a Frisbee, a dinner plate, a bicycle wheel, or what have you.  Hayek characterizes these dispositions as “rules” of action.  And insofar as any particular action (such as reaching for an orange or running from a snake) will result from the aggregate of activity in several such neural structures (A, B, etc.), it can be said to result from what Hayek calls a “superimposition” of dispositions or rules. 

For Hayek, the abstract is prior to the concrete in a couple of related ways.  First, Hayek seems to identify any particular perceptual experience with the activation of the set of dispositions that give rise to a particular action.  For instance, he seems to think of an experience of seeing an orange as identical to the aggregate of the activity in A, B, etc. that triggers the act of reaching for the orange.  Now, we usually think of the perceptual experience of a concrete object like an orange as primary, and of abstractions like roundness, orangeness, etc. as derivative from these experiences of concrete particulars.  But Hayek’s view is that in fact the abstractions come first and make possible the concrete perceptual experience.  Only if abstract dispositions or rules corresponding to roundness, orangeness, etc. are already embodied in the brain can we have a perceptual experience of a particular orange.

Second, Hayek concludes, accordingly, that these abstractions are largely innate, and in that way too prior to any experience of particular things.  That is not to deny that experience plays a crucial role in shaping the mind, but the way it does so, in Hayek’s view, is not by building up abstractions but rather by pruning them away.  That is to say, before we come to interact with the world, a very large number of dispositions to react to various possible aspects of stimuli are already embodied in the brain.  Those dispositions that end up being conducive to the success of the organism’s interactions with the environment are strengthened, and those that do not end up atrophying. 

The idea is similar to the “theory of neuronal group selection” later developed by Gerald Edelman, and to connectionist models in Artificial Intelligence research.  Hayek also compares it to Popper’s philosophy of science, according to which knowledge is not a result of reasoning from particular cases to general conclusions, but rather of drawing out implications of general claims and attempting to falsify them.  Falsified claims are analogous to dispositions that atrophy, and claims that survive falsification are analogous to dispositions that are strengthened. 

Of course, we are typically not consciously aware of being governed by such dispositions or rules; indeed, conscious awareness is precisely a result of their operation.  For this reason, Hayek thinks we can never in principle know all the abstract rules that govern the mind.  For us to be consciously aware of some level of abstract rules, yet higher-order rules must be operating so as to make that act of conscious awareness possible; if those higher-order rules are themselves to become the objects of conscious awareness, yet higher-order rules must be operating; and so on ad infinitum. 

(As a side note, it is worth commenting that this, in Hayek’s view, is the deep reason why we ought to favor a kind of Burkean conservatism in social philosophy.  Moralrules and dispositions are among those that guide our actions, and like other rules they have in his view been put into us by natural selection and cultural evolution.  We cannot, he thinks, fully understand all of these rules any more than we can know all of the other rules that govern the mind.  Hence we ought to be wary of tampering too radically with traditional norms.  For the most part, the rules make us, we don’t make them; and when we try, we end up making things worse, because we don’t have all the information to which biological and cultural evolutionary processes are sensitive.)

Aquinas on knowledge of the universal

In Summa Theologiae I.85.3, Aquinas addresses the question of whether the more universal or abstract comes first in our cognition of the world.  He answers that in one sense it does not, insofar as we first have sensory experience of individual particular things, from which the intellect goes on to abstract universal patterns and thereby form concepts.  That is, of course, standard Aristotelian epistemology.  However, he goes on to say:

The perfect act of the intellect is complete knowledge, when the object is distinctly and determinately known; whereas the incomplete act is imperfect knowledge, when the object is known indistinctly, and as it were confusedly… Now it is evident that to know an object that comprises many things, without proper knowledge of each thing contained in it, is to know that thing confusedly.  In this way we can have knowledge not only of the universal whole, which contains parts potentially, but also of the integral whole; for each whole can be known confusedly, without its parts being known.  But to know distinctly what is contained in the universal whole is to know the less common, as to know “animal” indistinctly is to know it as “animal”; whereas to know “animal” distinctly is know it as “rational” or “irrational animal,” that is, to know a man or a lion: therefore our intellect knows “animal” before it knows man; and the same reason holds in comparing any more universal idea with the less universal.

Moreover, as sense, like the intellect, proceeds from potentiality to act, the same order of knowledge appears in the senses.  For by sense we judge of the more common before the less common, in reference both to place and time; in reference to place, when a thing is seen afar off it is seen to be a body before it is seen to be an animal; and to be an animal before it is seen to be a man, and to be a man before it seen to be Socrates or Plato; and the same is true as regards time, for a child can distinguish man from not man before he distinguishes this man from that…

We must therefore conclude that knowledge of the singular and individual is prior, as regards us, to the knowledge of the universal; as sensible knowledge is prior to intellectual knowledge. But in both sense and intellect the knowledge of the more common precedes the knowledge of the less common.

End quote.  What does all this mean?  Aquinas is saying, first, that we can know something either clearly and distinctly, or confusedly and indistinctly.  Now, consider how this is so in the case of the intellect’s knowledge of the essence of a thing.  A human being is by nature a rational animal.  Accordingly, clearly and distinctly to know the essence of human beings requires explicit knowledge of what animality and rationality are.  But these are more universal concepts than the concept of being a human being.  Hence, clear and distinct knowledge of what a human being is presupposes knowledge of these more universal or abstract concepts, even if a more confused and indistinct knowledge of what a human being is (namely, knowledge which does not involve grasping animality and rationality as the parts of human nature) does not presuppose it.

Similarly, there is a sense in which in sensory perception too, knowledge of more universal or abstract features is prior to knowledge of more concrete ones.  As Aquinas says, we take something to be an animal only because we first take it to be a physical object of some kind, we take it to be a man only because we take it to be an animal of some kind, and so on.

Notice that this does not conflict with the more familiar Aristotelian thesis.  It can still be true that, as Aquinas affirms, we could not have any universal concepts at all unless we had sensory experience of particulars from which to abstract them.  But sensory experience itself involves first grasping more universal features of things rather than less universal features.  And once sensory experience has given rise to a number of concepts, a clearer and more distinct grasp of any one of them presupposes a grasp of more universal ones.

Compare and contrast

To that extent, at least, Aquinas could agree that Hayek is on to something.  Naturally, though, there are crucial differences between them.  The most obvious is that Hayek is a materialist of sorts, and Aquinas is not.  Specifically, Hayek was committed to a version of what would later be called functionalism, according to which any mental state can be defined in terms of its causal relations to the input from the senses that gives rise to it, the bodily behavior that it in turn generates as output, and the other mental states together with which it mediates between these inputs and outputs. 

As Thomists argue, whatever we say about sensory experience, affective states, and the like, the operations of the intellect, specifically (which are characterized by conceptualcontent) cannot in principle be identified with anything material.  One reason for this is that thoughts can have an unambiguous or exact conceptual content, whereas no material system can possibly have that (a claim I have defended at length elsewhere). 

In fact, from a Thomistic point of view, the processes Hayek was describing do not have anything essentially to do with the intellect per se at all (though Hayek wrongly supposed that they did).  Rather, what he was describing (whether correctly or incorrectly) are the processes underlying both sensation and what in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy are called the “internal senses”: the “common” or synthetic sense, which unites the deliverances of the senses into a single experience; the imagination, which forms images or phantasms; the estimative power or instinct, which draws an organism toward something beneficial to it or away from what is harmful to it; and sensory memory.  All of this can exist without intellect, and thus all of it can exist in non-human animals.

But since none of it amounts to genuinely intellectual activity – the grasping of concepts, of the propositions built out of concepts, and of the inferential relations between propositions – none of it really amounts to abstraction in the strict sense, which always does involve concepts.  Hence Hayek and Aquinas are, at the end of the day, not really talking about the same thing after all.

Related reading:

Meta-abstraction in the physical and social sciences

Progressive dematerialization

David Foster Wallace on abstraction

Concretizing the abstract

Think, McFly, think!

Stan Lee meets F. A. Hayek

Hayek on Tradition

Hayek the cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind

Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind

Dave’s armstronging again

Longtime readers might recall Dave Armstrong, a Catholic apologist who, to put it gently, has a tendency to stretch the truth in bizarre ways.  His odd behavior has even inspired a definition:

armstrong, verb.  Boldly but casually to insinuate a falsehood in the hope that others will go along with it.  “Dave tried to armstrong me into a debate.  Can you believe that guy?”

Well, Dave “Stretch” Armstrong is at it again.  Apropos of nothing, he posted an article at his blog the other day suggesting that I have claimed that “Pope Francis favors divorce.”  That’s a pretty serious charge, but of course I have said no such thing.  Like other people, I have said that Amoris Laetitia is problematic insofar as its ambiguities seem to permit divorced Catholics living in adulterous relationships to take Holy Communion under certain circumstances, which would conflict with traditional Catholic teaching.  And like others (including Armstrong himself!), I have criticized the pope for not answering the dubia, and thereby making it clear that that is not what Amoris is meant to teach.  But that is a far cry from accusing the pope of actually favoring divorce.

I posted a comment at Dave’s blog correcting the record.  You might think he would do the decent thing and simply retract his rashly made accusation.  That would have been quick and easy, and it would have been the end of it.

But it seems that that is not the Dave Armstrong way.  Instead, he posted several logorrheic comments attempting to rationalize his mischaracterization of my views by way of telepathy.  That Pope Francis favors divorce is – mind-reader Dave claims to have discerned – what I “really” think even if I have not actually said that, and indeed have denied it. 

Dave also complains, by the way, that in replying to him, I didn’t pay him any compliments on his work in apologetics.

Today Dave has doubled down by posting a second long article reiterating his false allegations.  He has also deleted the comments of another reader who had respectfully disagreed with his original post.  And he has, as of this writing, disabled comments on both posts, apparently so that neither I nor anyone else can challenge him further. 

An argument can be made for simply ignoring this sad spectacle.  The trouble is that, as I know too well from bitter experience, false claims tend to take on a life of their own.  That “Feser accused the pope of favoring divorce” is now bound to become something many people “know” even though it isn’t so.  If some of them instead come to know what kind of a person Dave Armstrong is, that is Dave’s fault, not mine.

A reply to Dreher

Rod Dreher has responded to my recent post about him and Steve Skojec.  What follows is a reply.  Let me start by saying that I appreciate the good sportsmanship evident in his response.  Dreher has made his own personal spiritual crisis central to his writing about his understanding of Christianity and his reasons for leaving the Catholic Church.  There is simply no way one can disagree with him, however gently, without opening oneself up to the cheap and unjust accusation that one is being insensitive to the suffering he underwent.  Dreher does not play that game, which is to his credit.

In this, Dreher is being consistent with the approach he takes elsewhere.  Our culture is highly emotive and subjectivist.  Defending a moral or political position by appealing to one’s personal experience or feelings, and preemptively dismissing all disagreement as cold-hearted or insensitive, is a routine rhetorical tactic.  Dreher has no truck with such sophistry when it is deployed by Critical Race Theorists, transgender extremists, and the like.  It would hardly do for him to play the “I’m offended!” card when his own views and choices are at issue.  I think Dreher realizes this, and thus responds in a reasonable and civil way despite how personal the issue is for him.

To be sure, Dreher does wonder aloud whether I have personally ever suffered any sort of spiritual crisis.  The answer is that I most certainly have.  But first-person spiritual and confessional writing is not my style.  I have nothing whatsoever against it; on the contrary, I have profited much from such writing.  It just isn’t what I do.  More to the point, it really doesn’t matter for what is at issue, which is whether a Catholic should ever leave the Church, on the basis of a spiritual crisis or for any other reason.  You aren’t going to settle that question by having two writers do a kind of dark night of the soul dance-off. 

Now, I certainly agree that compassion is called for when people undergo spiritual crises and suffering of the kind that Dreher and Skojec have undergone.  But it doesn’t follow that we should agree with, or at least refrain from even gently criticizing, any decision that their suffering led them to make, especially when that decision is itself fraught with spiritual implications.  If some spiritual or other personal crisis led someone to become an atheist, or to adopt Critical Race Theory, or to opt for sex reassignment surgery, Dreher would judge this to be a grave mistake.  He might sympathize with the person and refuse to judge or condemn him, but he would still hope that the person would eventually come to see the error of his ways.  Hence Dreher can hardly dismiss out of hand the criticisms of those who believe that by leaving the Church, he has made an analogous mistake.  If feelings and personal experience are not enough to settle the matter in the one sort of case, they are not enough to settle it in the other case either.

Dreher suggests that it is not fair to judge what he has written as if he were a professional philosopher or apologist.  Fair enough.  I certainly don’t think that every Christian has to be an apologist, a philosopher, a theologian, or even much interested in the sorts of technical questions such specialists deal with.  Far from it.  However, it simply doesn’t follow that non-specialists should be immune from criticism when they make a serious theological error – especially when they may lead others into the same error.

Dreher tries to rebut my charge that his departure from the Catholic Church ultimately had a purely emotional basis that cannot survive rational scrutiny.  But it seems to me that his remarks in fact confirm my original judgment.  On the one hand, Dreher tells us that part of the reason for his leaving the Church had to do with doubts about the doctrine of papal infallibility.  But he also admits that he “didn’t think the case against it was a slam-dunk” and that he was “not… able to reach a conclusion that felt solid.”

He also says that he was moved by the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on the theme that “the point of the entire Christian life is theosis.”  But that too hardly provides a reason to abandon the Church for Eastern Orthodoxy, because theosis is also part of the Catholic tradition, even if it is a part that is too often neglected.  (Indeed, as I have described elsewhere, the theme of theosis and its expression in Church Fathers like St. Irenaeus and St. Athanasius had a profound effect on my own thinking when I was moving away from atheism and back to the Church.)

As usual, Dreher’s main emphasis is on how spiritually broken he was and how angry he was at the Church at the time he left it, and on the solace that his Eastern Orthodox parish provided.  But while I believe that we ought to sympathize with what he went through, and that it provides an explanation of his decision, it simply does not provide a justification for it.  Certainly it does not provide a justification for advising others to do what Dreher did. 

As Dreher well knows, an Eastern OrthodoxChristian could, given his own circumstances, find himself in as spiritually arid a condition as Dreher was in, and find solace in a good Catholic parish.  Hence the appeal to contingent personal spiritual circumstances is simply not sufficient to justify leaving the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy (or Eastern Orthodoxy for Catholicism, for that matter).  A theological liberal, who takes matters of doctrine lightly, might regard such an appeal to personal experience as decisive.  But Dreher is not a liberal. 

Stomping one’s foot and decrying how coldly logical, impersonal, and spiritually arid such remarks are (as some readers will no doubt be inclined to do) does not make them any less true.  And again, to sympathize with Dreher and acknowledge the real pain he went through does not entail that one must agree with the decision that it led him to.  It most certainly does not entail that one ought to stand back silently while he encourages others to do what he did.

Nor, in any event, is the accusation of impersonal logicality and spiritual aridity just.  On the contrary, the point of my original post was precisely to remind understandably troubled fellow Catholics of the deeply personal nature of our relationship to Christ and to his Bride, and that this relationship is especially manifest in suffering.  I was urging that we keep in mind always the Christ who was beaten raw and bloody, spat upon, mocked, falsely accused, deserted by his friends, persecuted by religious and political authorities, nailed to a cross, and stabbed, and who suffered agony in the garden of Gethsemane in anticipation of all this.  I was urging that we keep him in mind especially when we undergo suffering ourselves, and that we remember too that our undergoing such suffering is precisely what he predicted for us and asks of us.  I was urging that we remember that he underwent this suffering for his Church.  I was urging that when we think of the Church we ought not to imagine the sinful and disappointing individual human beings who make it up at any particular moment, but ought rather to think of her as Christ’s Bride and our own Mother – so that we do not abandon her any more than Christ did.  And I was urging that we remember that one of the lessons of the Passion is precisely that Christ is at no time as close to us as he is when we suffer.

I do not expect Dreher to be moved by such considerations to reconsider his decision to leave the Catholic Church.  But Catholics who are troubled in the way that Skojec is might be moved by them.  That Dreher was, even if tentatively, recommending that such Catholics follow his own example is what seemed to me to call for a response.