Edward Feser's Blog, page 33

Year-end open thread

Let’s bring this annus horribilis to an end with an open thread.  That annoyingly off-topic comment of yours I keep deleting?  It’s now on-topic, so bring it.  From Richard Rorty to Get Shorty, from Bend Sinister to Yes Minister, from Tanqueray to Ricky Jay… nothing now stands in your way.  Apart from basic blog etiquette, naturally.  Trolls are still kindly invited to get lost.  (Previous open threads archived here.)

The access problem for mathematical Platonism

Mathematical Platonism takes numbers and other mathematical objects to exist in a third realm distinct from the material and mental worlds, after the fashion of the Forms of Plato’s famous theory.  A common objection to this view, associated with philosophers like Paul Benacerraf, is epistemological.  In order for us to have knowledge of something, say these philosophers, we must be in causal contact with it.  But if numbers are abstract objects outside of space and time, then we cannot be in any such contact with them, because they would be causally inert and inaccessible to perception.  So, if Platonism were true, we couldn’t have knowledge of them.  Yet we do have such knowledge, which (the argument concludes) implies that Platonism is false.  This is known as the “access problem” for mathematical Platonism.

Brown’s defense

Is this a serious problem?  No and yes.  On the one hand, the way the problem is often framed is too underdeveloped and question-begging to worry a sophisticated Platonist.  The idea seems to be that, when we know a chair, for example, that is because light travels from the chair to our eyes, resulting in retinal stimulation, which in turn generates neural activity that brings about a conscious perception of the chair.  But nothing like this is possible where Platonic objects are concerned.

But there are several problems with leaving it at that.  First, as James Robert Brown points out, the objection presupposes that we have a clear and uncontroversial account of how neural processes generate conscious perceptual experiences.  But of course, we don’t, which is why there is such a thing as a mind-body problem.  Now, with occasional exceptions (such as Berkeley), philosophers tend not to take the mind-body problem to be a reason to doubt the existence of the material world.  Though there is no agreement about how conscious experiences can be caused by material objects and processes, they don’t take that to be a reason for us to doubt that there really are material objects and processes, that our experiences are in causal contact with them, and that those experiences therefore give us knowledge of them.  But in that case, Brown quite reasonably concludes, such philosophers can hardly take the absence of an account of how we can get in causal contact with abstract mathematical objects to be a reason to doubt that there are such objects.

Brown also suggests (less plausibly, I think) that quantum mechanics gives us reason to doubt that a causal connection with what is known is really a necessary condition for our knowing it.  He has in mind J. S. Bell’s famous nonlocality result.  Consider an EPR scenario in which two photons arrive at different locations, B and C, from a common source A.  When the photons arrive at their destinations, measurements will show that one has the property spin-up and the other the property spin-down, though nothing about what is happening at A could tell us which photon will have which property.  Furthermore, supposing that B and C are outside of each other’s light cones, information about what is happening at one of these locations cannot get to the other.  Nevertheless, if I know, for example, that the photon that arrives at B has the property spin-up, then I can know that the one that arrives at C will have the property spin-down.  But nothing about any causal relation between A on the one hand and B and C on the other, or between B and C, will have told me this.  And that, Brown says, refutes the assumption that a causal connection is necessary for knowledge. 

But this seems to me not quite right.  After all, if the photons had never been emitted from A, they would not have arrived at B and C, and had I not been there to take the measurement at B, I would not have been able to infer from it what was going on at C.  And these are causal facts.  So, the right conclusion to draw from Bell’s result is not that there are no causal connections at all involved in my knowing what I know, but rather that the causal connections are very weird.  This raises many questions, of course, but I don’t see that they need to be addressed in order to make the narrow point that Bell’s result doesn’t provide a compelling way to respond to the access problem.

Plato’s defense

Another problem with the way the access problem is usually framed is that it rather shamelessly begs the question against Plato himself.  After all, it is hardly as if Plato was unaware of the difficulty of modeling our knowledge of Platonic abstract objects on perceptual knowledge of physical objects.  Indeed, Plato himself insists that knowledge of the Forms cannot work that way.  That’s why he thinks that we must have come to know them prior to embodiment in this life, and why he thinks the soul must be unlike perceptual organs in being immaterial.

In short, Plato is well aware that there is an access problem, but thinks he’s solved it.  Contemporary naturalists don’t like the solution, but part of Plato’s point is that the reality of Platonic objects, and of our knowledge of them, give us reason to reject naturalism.  To object to mathematical Platonism on the grounds that it is hard to square with naturalism is simply to assume, without argument, precisely what is at issue.

Plato would also reject the naturalist’s assumption that explanation is at bottom a matter of identifying relations of efficient causation between material objects.  For Plato, the participation relation that he thinks holds between particular things and the Forms provides another mode of explanation, and teleology yet another.  Of course, the Platonist would have to spell out exactly how Plato’s richer account of explanation can be deployed to solve the access problem.  But the point is that, by simply assuming, without argument, a broadly naturalistic metaphysics and epistemology, the usual way of presenting the access problem does not constitute as powerful an objection as is often supposed, because it simply begs the question against Plato.

Aristotle’s critique

But that doesn’t mean that the mathematical Platonist is out of the woods.  We Aristotelians also reject Platonism, for several reasons, and some of these are relevant to the access problem.  In particular, Aristotle too is critical of the idea that an entity like a Platonic Form could be an efficient cause.  In Metaphysics, Book XII, Part 6, he writes:

But if there is something which is capable of moving things or acting on them, but is not actually doing so, there will not necessarily be movement; for that which has a potency need not exercise it.  Nothing, then, is gained even if we suppose eternal substances, as the believers in the Forms do, unless there is to be in them some principle which can cause change; nay, even this is not enough, nor is another substance besides the Forms enough; for if it is not to act, there will be no movement.

Aristotle’s point here is, first, that something can function as an efficient cause only if it both has an active causal power (which is what a “potency” is in this context), and that power is actually exercised on some particular occasion.  For example, I can cause the pen in front of me to move just by touching it, but I cannot cause it to dissolve just by touching it.  For I have an active causal power of the first sort, but not a power of the second sort.  But in addition to my having the first power, I have to exercise it in order for the pen actually to move.  If I don’t decide to touch the pen, it will just sit there motionless, despite my having the power to move it.

Similarly, Aristotle says, in order for a Platonic Form (or a mathematical object conceived of on the model of a Form) to function as an efficient cause, it would have to have the active causal power to do so, and it would have to be actually exercising that power on some particular occasion.  And Aristotle’s implication is that these conditions don’t hold in the case of the Forms.  They don’t function as efficient causes.  But why not?

Well, think about what, from an Aristotelian point of view, is true of me that makes it the case that I can function as an efficient cause of the movement of the pen.  I am part of a larger system of substances with their own causal powers, the exercise of which contributes to triggering the operation of my own.  For example, the phone rings, which leads me to pick it up, which is followed by somebody on the other end of the line telling me something I want to write down, which leads me in turn to exercise my power to pick up the pen.  All of this unfolds in time and involves my being changed in various ways by the substances I interact with, leading me in turn to bring about changes in them.

These circumstances do not hold of the Forms.  The Forms (and mathematical objects conceived of on the model of the Forms) are eternal and unchanging.  So, nothing could happen to them to trigger the operation of their causal powers, if they have any.  Now, you might respond that God, in Aristotelian-Thomistic theology, is eternal and unchanging, yet he is still said to be an efficient cause.  So why couldn’t the same thing be said of the Forms?

But there is a crucial difference.  There is in God something analogous to intellect and will, but that is not true of the Forms, which are impersonal.  The reason this matters is evident from a point Aristotle makes in On Generation and Corruption, Book II, Part 9, where he writes:

Some… thought the nature of ‘the Forms’ was adequate to account for coming-to-be.  Thus Socrates in the Phaedo first blames everybody else for having given no explanation; and then lays it down that ‘some things are Forms, others Participants in the Forms’, and that ‘while a thing is said to “be” in virtue of the Form, it is said to “come-to-be” qua sharing in, to “pass-away” qua “losing,” the ‘Form’.  Hence he thinks that ‘assuming the truth of these theses, the Forms must be causes both of coming-to-be and of passing-away’…

[But] if the Forms are causes, why is their generating activity intermittent instead of perpetual and continuous – since there always are Participants as well as Forms?

The idea, as I read Aristotle here, is this.  Consider, for example, the Form of Triangle.  It never comes into being or passes away, nor does it change in any other respect.  So, if it is functioning as an efficient cause, its effects – particular triangles – should be similarly temporally unbounded.  They should simply always exist, past, present, and future.  But they don’t – they come into being and pass away.  The point even more obviously holds of living things like Tyrannosaurus Rex, which came into existence at some point and have now gone extinct – even though the Platonic Form of Tyrannosaurus Rex, like every other Form, is eternal.

Now, if we were to attribute something like rationality and free choice to the Forms – as we can to God – we could find a way to make sense of how an eternal cause could have a temporally limited effect.  All we need is the idea there is some reasonwhy the cause saw fit to produce an effect that is temporally bounded in just the way it is.  We don’t need to know what the reason is; the mere fact that there could be one is sufficient to make intelligible the possibility of an eternal cause having such an effect.  (Readers familiar with William Lane Craig’s work might recognize this as among the arguments he gives for the claim that the cause of the beginning of the universe must be personal rather than impersonal.)

But we can’t do this with numbers and other Platonic objects, because, again, they are impersonal.  Hence that way of answering Aristotle’s criticism is not open to the Platonist. 

Aristotelianizing Plato

The problem, to sum up, is that if a thing really has active causal powers, then there has to be something that accounts for how those powers get triggered in the ways they do.  Now, we have such accounts in the case of physical substances (in terms of their relations to other physical substances) and in the case of immaterial mental substances (in terms of their rationality and free choice).  But there is no account available in the case of the purported occupants of Plato’s “third realm” – immaterial but impersonal entities. 

Factor in the Scholastic principle agere sequitur esse (“action follows being”) – that the way a thing acts reflects what it is – and we have the ingredients for an argument to the effect that Platonic Forms would have to be causally inert.  For if there is no way in principle that the causal powers of such Forms could ever be exercised, in what sense would they even have such powers in the first place?

Now, the passages from Aristotle I cited do not address the access problem, specifically, but their relevance to it should by now be obvious.  If mathematical objects conceived of on the model of Platonic Forms would have to be causally inert, then they cannot be what causes us to have knowledge of them.  But then, how do we have knowledge of them?  (Notice that it won’t do to posit some third thing – call it X – that has access to the Forms and then in turn imparts knowledge of them to us.  For that just kicks the problem back a stage.  How could X gain knowledge of the Forms if they are causally inert, and thus cannot be what causes X to know about them?)

Notice that the problem does not arise for the Augustinian position that the Forms (and numbers and other mathematical objects) are to be identified with ideas in the divine intellect.  For then it wouldn’t be the Forms per se that directly act on the world, but rather God, who is not causally inert. 

This position, adopted by later Scholastics like Aquinas and thus sometimes labeled “Scholastic realism” (as opposed to Platonic realism and Aristotelian realism) can be interpreted as a kind of Aristotelianizing of Plato.  Plato posits three realms, the material, the mental, and the Platonic third realm.  Aristotle holds that only the first two are real.  Scholastic realism agrees with Aristotle that there is no third mode of being apart from the material realm and the mental realm.  But it agrees with Plato that truths about mathematical objects and other Forms can’t be grounded in truths about material substances or even in truths about finite mental substances.  Hence it takes the infinite, divine mind to be their ultimate ground.

Exactly how our knowledge of these objects works is another question.  Augustine says it is by illumination, but there are problems with that account.  Whatever the right answer, though, it needn’t be saddled with the difficulties facing Platonism.

Related reading:

Review of Craig’s God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism

Frege on what mathematics isn’t

Rucker’s Mindscape

David Foster Wallace on abstraction

Augustine on divine illumination

Plato’s affinity argument

Five Proofs of the Existence of God, chapter 3

District Attorney Michel Foucault

In the diabolical new disorder of things metastasizing around us, churchmen subvert doctrine rather than teaching it, and public authorities subvert law and order rather than maintaining it.  To be sure, these cancers have been slowly spreading throughout the bodies ecclesiastical and politic for many decades.  What is new is the sudden ghastliness with which an aggressive heterodoxy and criminality have broken through to the surface, making the reality of the disease evident to all but the most deluded of minds. 

What is its source?  Part of the story is natural, part supernatural.  There is, for one thing, the tyrannical degeneracy which is, as Plato warns us, the ironic fate of societies which value freedom and equality above virtue.  And for another, there is the chronic sickness of heresy which has for centuriesperiodically ravaged the Church before being vomited out, and the severity of which can sometimes approximate the predicted final apostasy. 

But all of that is rather “big picture.”  It doesn’t quite answer a more mundane question, to wit: What the hell is going through the minds of these people?  For example, how do persons who have at least a minimal degree of sanity (just enough to hold a job, to use the toilet, etc.) nevertheless convince themselves that abolishing the police would be a good idea?  How do you explain a lunatic like new Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, who has begun to visit upon my beloved city the destruction he inflicted upon San Francisco? 

General observations about the nature of egalitarian or apostate societies don’t suffice.  We want to know what the connecting link is that gets you from general social decadence to a specific official’s decision to stop enforcing the law.  The answer appears to be Critical Theory, broadly construed and in its many malign permutations – once confined to the most intellectually slovenly and irrelevant academic backwaters, but now sweeping through city governments, corporate HR departments, college administrations, and the like by way of an army of activists and bureaucrats whose minds have been rotted out by it.

The most important thinker in this connection is surely Michel Foucault.  Now, Foucault was critical of, and more insightful than, his less subtle Marxist predecessors.  He is also certainly a more interesting thinker than the mediocrities through whom his ideas are often filtered (Critical Race Theorists, et al.) – and, though he was a man of the Left, he was not entirely unambiguously so.  But the fundamental Critical Theoretic project of unmasking the sinister powers and interests lurking behind purportedly innocuous institutions is the Foucauldian project, and he famously applied it to an analysis of the modern penal system.

For Foucault, the purportedly objective systems of knowledge that characterize the mainstream thinking of a society or historical period reflect the interests of whatever power dominates it.  So far this is Marx’s theory of ideology filtered through Nietzsche, and thereby expanded beyond a crudely economic analysis.  A characteristically Foucauldian elaboration of the idea is that this power acts in a “capillary” fashion, seeping down into every nook and cranny of the social order and, indeed, of the individual psyche, in ways of which we are unaware until they are revealed by Critical Theory adepts.  The Critical Race Theorist’s paranoid delusion that absolutely everything is permeated by racism – so that even seemingly innocent remarks and actions are unmasked as “micro-aggressions” and “implicit bias” – is essentially Foucault read through a racial lens.

Foucault himself applied the idea to an analysis of mental illness as well as criminal justice.  Madness is interpreted as a concept by which those who do not conform to bourgeois standards of thought and behavior are designated as abnormal, and the confinement by which they might be controlled is thereby given a rational justification.  The purportedly objective science by which all of this is made intelligible is really a mask for bourgeois power – a way of cementing that power by pathologizing any alternative to bourgeois standards. 

The modern system of penal justice and imprisonment is alleged to perform a similar function.  Foucault interprets it as a manifestation of a broader tendency of bourgeois power not merely to discourage behaviors it regards as abnormal, but positively to mold individuals so that their behavior will come spontaneously to conform to bourgeois norms.  The penal system is in this way continuous with the curricula and examination regime of the educational system, with standard capitalist business practices, and so forth.  It is all of a piece, a system by which bourgeois power extends itself in “capillary” fashion through to the extremities of society.

Now, in an emendation of Foucault’s analysis, sociologist Loïc Wacquant takes this line of thinking in a direction that brings it even closer to the mentality that we are now seeing in state and municipal officials across the U.S.  Wacquant notes, first, that things have not gone the way Foucault’s analysis led him to expect them to.  Foucault had thought that as social institutions in general take on the prison’s function of molding individual behavior in order to make it conform to bourgeois norms, the institution of the prison itself will decline.  Building on an analysis developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant argues that the opposite has happened.

First, he suggests that the welfare state and the prison system should be seen as two means – the first maternal and nurturing, the second paternal and punitive – by which the modern capitalist state “manages” what he calls “urban marginality,” i.e. “the unruly poor” and minority communities.  Now, with the rise, beginning in the 1980s, of policies of a “neoliberal” or free market nature (he might as well have said “bourgeois”), the institutions of the welfare state went into decline, increasing “social insecurity,” especially among poor and minority communities.  And this has led to an expansion of the other, punitive method of “managing” them – to what Wacquant calls a “remasculinization of the state.”   Thus the penal system has expanded rather than declined, contrary to Foucault’s expectation.  And its focus has been on minorities and the poor, specifically, rather than on the molding of attitudes and behaviors in the general population.

Second, Wacquant says, this expanding penal system has not aimed at molding the attitudes and behaviors even of the individuals it does target – once again defying Foucault’s expectations – but rather merely at “warehousing” them, thereby neutralizing the danger they might pose to the “neoliberal” order of things, but in a way that is indifferent to what goes on in their heads.  And the general public is inured to this callous treatment by way of what Wacquant calls “law-and-order pornography” – entertainments that glorify law enforcement officials and demonize their targets (reality shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted, dramas like Law and Order and CSI, and so forth).  Thus,Wacquant says, do we have the structure of a “neoliberal” or capitalist system of “punishing the poor.”

Now, is there something to such Foucauldian analyses of power and punishment?  Well, sure.  But there is also the studied imprecision, massive oversimplification, and tiresome melodrama that seem endemic to contemporary continental philosophy and fields influenced by it.  There is the refusal to think beyond the false binary choice of being either a broadly Randian pro-capitalist or a broadly Marxoid anti-capitalist.  There is the vaguely idealist-cum-voluntarist metaphysics that tends to lie implicit and unexamined behind such analyses.  There is the hermeneutics of suspicion, of which we should always be suspicious.  And all of that greatly overshadows any insight to be found in these analyses.

But yes, there is something to them.  For example, it is true that there is a link between bourgeois and “neo-liberal” economics and politics on the one hand, and the nature of modern penal and welfare systems on the other.  But the link is not what Critical Theorists and other leftists think it is.  The link is that the same individualism that drives the economics and politics destroys the stability of the traditional family, which in turn generates an underclass that is “managed” by the welfare state and the penal system.  The remedy is the restoration of the traditional family.  But of course, the contemporary Left will have none of that, because its hatred for traditional sexual morality is far stronger than its hatred of capitalism. 

It is also true that a just society ought to avoid merely “warehousing” offenders, and that the welfare system ought not to treat human beings as mere “cases” to be managed.  The Left is right to criticize the impersonal bureaucratic nature of modern welfare and penal systems.  But here too it would refuse the correct remedy.  The remedy requires welfare and penal systems to be informed by the spirit of what Catholics call the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.  As Pope Leo XIII taught in Rerum Novarum, in dealing with such problems “no satisfactory solution will be found unless religion and the Church have been called upon to aid,” and without them “human striving will be in vain.”  But if there is anything the Left hates even more than traditional sexual morality, it is traditional religious belief.

It is also true that the basic assumptions about reality that are inculcated through the culture of a society – through its educational system, its entertainments, its corporate culture, and so on – tend to reflect the perspective of the powers that dominate it, and that dissent from these assumptions tends to be pathologized.  But under contemporary capitalism those assumptions have moved ever further to the left, not to the right.  For example, in contemporary academic, corporate, and political culture, there is no one more “pathologized” – treated as a crank, as wicked, as not to be listened to or given a platform – than the person who dares to defend traditional religious belief or traditional sexual morality.  It is by way of this pathologization that secularist and Sexual Revolutionary “power” maintains its hegemony.

The Left does not see the fulfilment of our social nature in the places it is in fact primarily to be found – in the family and the community of faith.  It looks for it instead in collectivist political action, which is inevitably even more impersonal, alienating, and oppressive than market forces.  The Left wants to get us out of the liberal individualist frying pan, but only so that we might fall into the socialist fire.  It’s alterative to “bad” is always “worse.” 

But I digress.  Our topic is the origin of the Bizarro-world approach to law and order of the police defunders and George Gascóns of the world, and I think we’ve found it.  Foucauldian analysis yields a picture of the mental health and criminal justice systems as means by which malign bourgeois power exerts its control, especially over the poor and minorities, by pathologizing behavior.  This paranoid and simpleminded view of the world, first developed with cleverness by a thinker like Foucault, is retailed through second- and third-rate academics who add their own little details to the story.  It is then popularized by the fourth-rate minds who imbibe it in university, then regurgitate it through their activism, their Twitter feeds, their screenplays and journalism, their work as HR bureaucrats or high school teachers, or what have you. 

Eventually this worldview trickles (in “capillary” fashion, you might say) into the head of some dumb politician, who’s read a book or a New York Times profile of some Critical Race Theorist.  He gets it into his head that the way to free the oppressed is to defund the police, or in Gascón’s case to “stop filing first-time misdemeanor offenses associated with poverty and mental health.”  Before you know it, crime skyrockets, and garbage, rats, discarded needles, and human feces line the streets your children can no longer safely walk down.  This actually helps no one at all, least of all the homeless, drug-addicted, and mentally ill – now “warehoused” by the Leftist state below freeway underpasses – or the minority communities whose stores are looted and burned down and whose children are killed in gang crossfires.

But none of that matters to the unmaskers of “power.”  What matters is only ever to épater la bourgeoisie.

What was the Holy Roman Empire?

According to Aristotelian-Thomistic political philosophy, the state is a natural institution.  It has as its natural end the provision of goods that are necessary for our well-being as rational social animals, but would not be otherwise available (such as defense against aggressors).  According to traditional Catholic theology, the state also serves functions relevant to the realization of the supernatural end of salvation, such as protecting the Church. 

However, while these things are true of the institution of the state in general, they do not entail the existence of any particular state.  That is to say, while the natural law and our supernatural end require that there be states, they don’t require that there exists Germany, specifically, or the United States, or China.  For the most part, the same thing is true of empires.  Nothing in natural law or in our supernatural end requires that there be a British Empire, specifically, or a Mongol Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire is philosophically interesting because it did have a special status under natural law and in the supernatural order.  Or at least, it did according to one view.  There is nothing abnormal or contrary to the natural or supernatural order of things that the Mongol Empire or Yugoslavia no longer exist.  But on the view I’m describing, there is something abnormal, and contrary to natural law and the supernatural order, that there is no longer a Holy Roman Empire.  Indeed, on this view of things, given that the natural and supernatural orders require that there be such an empire, it is not quite correct to say that the Holy Roman Empire no longer exists.  It is more accurate to say that it is dormant.

Dante’s peak

This all may sound strange, so let’s try to understand it.  Start with a line of argument developed by Dante Alighieri (who was a philosopher and theologian as well as a poet) in Monarchia.  The state, though taken by Aristotle to be the perfect or complete society, cannot in Dante’s view be the highest level of political order.  For just as there are bound to be disputes between parties within a state, there are bound to be disputes between states.  And there would be an imperfection in the social order if there were no way to resolve these disputes justly (as opposed to simply resolving them by force).  So, there is a need for a higher-level political authority whose role is to settle these disputes – an emperor to which even the different kings are subject.

Now, if this higher-level authority is himself just one higher-level authority among others, then he and those others might also find themselves disputing with one another.  And there would therefore be need for some yet higher-level authority to resolve thosedisputes.  This regress can terminate only in a single highest-level authority – a world monarch or emperor standing at the peak of political authority, with jurisdiction over all kings. 

Dante holds that, because such an emperor would have no equal, and thus no rival, he would be capable of ruling more disinterestedly and thus more justly.  A common recognition of and subordination to his authority – and not merely the force of arms – would also provide mankind with the unity of wills that is the precondition of true peace.

Before continuing, it is worthwhile to pause to consider a potential objection.  You might think such argumentation would justify globalist projects of the kind to which traditionalists are hostile – the United Nations, the Great Reset, and the like.  But you would be wrong.  Remember, reasoning of the kind Dante is engaged in is in the broad tradition of classical philosophy and natural law.  A world empire of the kind he envisions would be one governed by, and governing in light of, that tradition.  For guidance, it would look not to John Rawls, Bill Gates, and the like, but to the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.  And a world empire that governed contrary to that natural law tradition would be a world tyranny – a grotesque counterfeit of what thinkers like Dante envisioned.

The Roman way

Now, the fact that there are unjust states does not undermine the legitimacy of the institution of the state itself.  Similarly, the possibility of an unjust world empire does not undermine the legitimacy of the notion of a world empire per se.  Original sin has corrupted all social institutions, but we can see through it to determine what the uncorrupted versions would look like.

That brings us to the model in terms of which the tradition I’m describing conceptualized the idea of a world empire – the Roman Empire.  Such a model might seem ironic, given that we’re talking about the Christian tradition, and the Roman Empire had persecuted the Church.  Indeed, the New Testament devotes a whole book – the Apocalypse of St. John – to a characterization of that empire as a satanic force of oppression.  Don’t forget, though, that the New Testament – in Romans 13 – also characterizes the very same empire as God’s servant, instituted to uphold justice.  As with any other state, it wasn’t the empire itselfthat was bad.  What was bad were the corrupt ends to which the empire had been put.  And the conversion of the empire to Christianity could remedy this corruption.  Not perfectly, of course (nothing human is perfect).  But through the influence of the Church, grace could heal fallen nature, in the case of the empire as in the case of any other institution damaged by original sin.

That was the idea, anyway.  Now, one reason the Roman Empire suggested itself as a model to medieval theorists of world empire is that it was an actually existing example of such a thing – or an approximation to one, anyway.  A single emperor had jurisdiction over other kings.  A common citizenship, legal code, and language united diverse countries and ethnicities.  A common cult united the different religious traditions – albeit it was, before the conversion to Christianity, a false and idolatrous worship.

But it wasn’t just that the Roman Empire happened to be there as a concrete example.  Scripture was taken to reveal it to have a special world-historical role.  As James Bryce points out in his chapter on the theory of the Empire in his book The Holy Roman Empire, the grounds for this judgement were found in the book of Daniel.  The fourth beast of Daniel’s famous vision, and the legs and feet of Nebuchadnezzar’s, were taken to represent the Roman Empire.  And these images in Daniel are also intended to represent the last of a series of world-dominating empires that would exist before the coming of the Messiah.  The implication, for the Christian theologian, is that any empire that would exist in the heart of Christendom before the time of Christ would in some sense be a revival of the Roman empire – either in a healthy, normative form (a Christianor Holy Roman Empire) or in a corrupted, persecuting form (an empire of Antichrist). 

As early and medieval Christian thinkers saw things, Greek philosophy had prepared the way for the Gospel by discovering through natural reason the fundamental truths of natural theology and natural law.  And in a parallel way, Roman governance had prepared the way for a sound social and political order.  In both the realm of thought and the realm of practice, the pagans had made indispensable contributions that the Church could adopt and perfect.

Houses of the holy

It is often claimed that the Catholic Church abandoned integralism at Vatican II.  And yet Pope St. John Paul II’s Catechism teaches that:

The duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially.  This is “the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ.”  By constantly evangelizing men, the Church works toward enabling them “to infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and mores, laws and structures of the communities in which [they] live.”  The social duty of Christians is to respect and awaken in each man the love of the true and the good.  It requires them to make known the worship of the one true religion which subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church… Thus, the Church shows forth the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies. (2105, emphasis added)

and

Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct… Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man's origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer.  The Church invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against this inspired truth about God and man:

Societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology.  Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows. (2244, emphasis added)

The clear implication of such passages is that the Catholic faith ought to inform the governance of a society, and that when it does not, totalitarian secular ideologies tend to fill the vacuum.  Such teaching is not surprising given the doctrine of original sin.  To suppose that a just society is possible in the absence of any guidance from the faith smacks of a kind of “social Pelagianism.”

But integralism per se is not our topic here.  The point is rather to elucidate the theory of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Catholic doctrinal principles still reflected in the Catechism are those that informed the theory of the empire.

In general, grace does two things.  First, it remedies the defects in the natural order that have resulted from original sin, at least partially restoring what would have existed had the Fall not occurred.  Second, it directs nature to an even higher, supernatural end – the beatific vision.  Now, in theory at least, the Christianization of the Roman system would accomplish such ends.  First, it would remedy the tendency of fallen rulers to govern for the sake of their own glory, or for the sake of acquiring wealth, or for the sake of some other unworthy end.  It would teach them to govern instead for the glory of God and the good of their subjects (that is to say, in obedience to the first and the second greatest of the commandments, respectively).  Second, it would assist the Church in her supernatural mission of saving souls, by protecting her from enemies, both foreign (such as the relentless military assaults on Christendom arising from the Islamic world) and domestic (such as heretical movements like Albigensianism).

Needless to say, this didn’t always work out too well in practice.  But that was the theory.  The practice suffered in part because of a common theological problem – a failure to respect the difference between the spheres of nature and grace.  An occupational hazard of theologians is either to collapse the supernatural into the natural or to absorb the natural up into the supernatural (thus “destroy[ing] the gratuity of the supernatural order,” as Pope Pius XII put it).  Similarly, in politics there is always a danger that the state will meddle in the affairs of the Church, or that the Church will take over functions and judgements that rightly belong to the state. 

The theory of the Empire held that, rightly understood, the Empire and the Church are like body and soul, both necessary for a complete order of things and cooperating with and assisting one another, but each nevertheless having its own distinctive role.  This certainly did not entail a separation of Church and state, any more than the soul and body ought to be separated or kept hermetically sealed off from one another.  But it did entail a distinctionbetween Church and state, and between those matters that are primarily the concern of the former and those that are primarily the concern of the latter. 

At a minimum, though, the Empire would intersect with the Church insofar as the Catholic faith was its official religion, and insofar as the emperors (most famously, those of the House of Habsburg) were always Catholic.  For since the Church, like the individual human being, has a temporal aspect as well as a spiritual one, it needs protection from worldly threats.  The soul needs the body, and the Church needs the Empire.

The emperor’s new clothes

Well, again, that was the theory, anyway.  But in the wake of Napoleon’s triumphs, Francis II, last of the Holy Roman Emperors, renounced the throne and dissolved the Empire (though retaining the office of Emperor of Austria).  This had the advantage of ensuring that the title of “Holy Roman Emperor” was not one that Napoleon could usurp.  But as Friedrich Heer judges in his own book on the Empire, the dissolution of the Roman system was “an act for which [Francis] had no legal justification.” 

Indeed, as I have said, the theory of the Empire implies that it cannot be dissolved, not exactly, because the natural law and supernatural order require that there be such an institution.  The most that can happen is that the Empire becomes dormant, perhaps for a long period of time.  Nor was this unprecedented.  After all, after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, more than three centuries passed before it was (according to the theory) restored by Charlemagne in 800.  (Though of course, the Eastern Empire continued, and Justinian temporarily restored the Western empire in the 500s.)  It has been just over two centuries since Francis’s abdication.  Might some Charlemagne of the future pick up the crown a century or so from now?  Stranger things have happened.  (According to a medieval legend, a Last Roman Emperor will arise to repel the enemies of the faith before the coming of Antichrist.)

What can be said with certainty is that, where the satisfaction of a natural need is frustrated, it will tend to manifest in distorted forms.  Hence, if the Empire is something required for human well-being, we would expect corrupt approximations to it to arise.  And arguably that is indeed what we have seen.

In a recent article, I discussed Plato’s classification of five basic types of regime, one just and four increasingly unjust.  The just regime is that of the Philosopher-Kings, oriented toward the Good and ruled by reason.  The first and least bad of the unjust regimes is timocracy, oriented toward military glory and ruled by the spirited part of the soul (the part moved by considerations of honor and shame) rather than by reason.  Next and worse, we have oligarchy, oriented toward the accumulation of wealth and ruled by the desiring part of the soul, though by desires of a bourgeois (and thus somewhat more disciplined) kind.  Yet worse is democracy, which as Plato understands it is oriented toward the egalitarian satisfaction of desire – no desire being regarded as any better than the others – and is thus ruled by the lowest common denominator of the basest desires.  Finally and worst, we have tyranny, an outgrowth of the anarchy into which democracies tend to collapse.  It involves the most ruthless sort of egalitarian democratic soul imposing its will on the others.

Now, what immediately displaced the Holy Roman Empire was the empire of Napoleon, which can be seen as a timocratic empire, the point of which was to advance the glory of Napoleon himself qua conqueror.  The British Empire, meanwhile, might be seen as having been essentially oligarchic (in Plato’s sense) insofar as its orientation was toward commerce.  That is even more true of the Pax Americana that succeeded the British Empire, the United States being an empire in everything but name.  And as American economic power has increasingly shifted away from an emphasis on manufacturing to the information economy and the dissemination of American popular culture, it has come to approximate something like a democratic empire, an empire of egalitarian desire. 

But the dissolution of national loyalties has also begun to move this empire’s center of gravity outside the United States.  Indeed, it seems that the heart of this evolving oligarchic-cum-democratic empire will ultimately not be found in Washington, New York, Silicon Valley, or perhaps any other specific location.  It will be dispersed throughout the world, a vast network of governments, multinational corporations, and NGOs, whose leaders are all committed to the same basic program – liberation, equality, and an ever increasingly radical sexual revolution.

Plato indicates what this kind of system is likely to morph into, as does St. John.  And while it might be characterized as a Roman empire of sorts, it is more like the pre-Christian version, and most definitely not holy.

Related posts:

Tyranny of the sovereign individual

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

A clarification on integralism

Continetti on post-liberal conservatism

Augustine on divine illumination

Plato held that the Form of the Good makes other Forms intelligible to us in a way comparable to how the sun makes physical objects visible to us.  He also took our knowledge of the Forms to be inexplicable in empirical terms, since the Forms have a necessity, eternity, and perfection that the objects of the senses lack.  His solution was to regard knowledge of the Forms as a kind of recollection of a direct access the soul had to them prior to its entrapment in the body.

St. Augustine inherited this Platonic picture and transformed it.  The Form of the Good becomes God; the other Forms become ideas in the divine intellect; and recollection is replaced by divine illumination of the human mind.  The general idea and motivation of Augustine’s doctrine of divine illumination is clear enough, at least in light of its Platonic background.  But nailing down it precise content is notoriously difficult. 

The Platonic background

How was the Form of the Good supposed to make the other Forms intelligible, on Plato’s account?  Here’s one way to think about it.  A Form is a standard of perfection.  A particular triangle is a better or worse specimen of triangularity the more or less perfectly it participates in the Form of Triangle.  For instance, a triangle drawn slowly and carefully using a ruler is a better specimen than one drawn hastily and sloppily, because it more perfectly approximates the standard that is the Form.  Something similar can be said of all other things and their degrees of approximation to the standards that are the Forms they participate in.

Now, to understand the Form of X (whatever X is) as the standard by reference to which a particular X is a good X is essentially to see the Form as itself an instance of goodness – as participating in the Form of the Good.  In this way the Form of the Good illuminates – it makes intelligible to the eye of the intellect – the other Forms. 

But for Plato, you’re not going to get knowledge of the Form of the Good from acquaintance from particular good things, any more than you’re going to arrive at knowledge of the Form of Triangle from particular triangles.  And thus you’re not going to get it from sensory experience, which can only ever get you acquainted with particulars.  So our knowledge of the Forms must be a kind of drawing out of what was already in us prior to experience.  And since it can only have gotten in us by some sort of contact with the Forms, and we haven’t had such contact in this life, we must have had such contact prior to this life.  Knowledge of the Forms is thus a remembering of this prior contact.

The Augustinian transformation

The skeptical reader might wonder whether Augustine’s alteration of Plato’s general picture is motivated merely by Christian theological concerns, with no independent philosophical rationale.  But that is not the case.  For one thing, during the long history of the Platonic tradition between Plato and Augustine, God had, for philosophical reasons, already long since displaced the Form of the Good as the first principle of all things (even if Augustine’s view of the divine nature differed in important respects from that of predecessors like Plotinus).

More to the present point, potential theological problems with the notion of the pre-existence of the soul were not the reason Augustine rejected the theory of recollection.  The reason had rather to do with inadequacies in that theory as an account of our knowledge of the Forms.  As Peter King notes (in his article on Augustine’s epistemology in the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Augustine), Augustine was keen to emphasize the objectivity of our knowledge of eternal truths of a mathematical sort, and of the Forms in general.  When you and I grasp that 2 + 2 = 4, it is one and the same truth that we both intersubjectively grasp, just as it is one and the same table we are looking at when we both see the table before us.  Similarly, when you and I contemplate the Form of Triangle, it is one and the same objective reality that we both contemplate.  But the most one could be aware of via memory is a subjective mental representation of a Form, not the Form itself.  Hence, recollection of a purported acquaintance with the Forms prior to birth cannot explain how we intersubjectively know them now. 

Something going on now must account for that.  King points out that for Augustine, we also need to account for the way that here and now you can come to understand such eternal truths, in a flash of insight or moment when it “clicks” (as when you figure out a proof or otherwise grasp the connections of logical necessity between propositions).  Mere recollection of something you purportedly learned prior to your soul’s incarnation in the body cannot account for that.  The theory of illumination is meant to explain all of this.

The basic idea

Recall that for Augustine, the Forms are to be understood as ideas in the divine intellect.  Indeed, their necessity, eternity, and perfection provide the basis of an argument for the existence of a divine mind to ground them.  (I develop a modernized version of the Augustinian argument for God’s existence in chapter 3 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God.) 

How, then, can we know the Forms?  For example, how could we know the Form of Triangle from experience of particular individual triangles?  For any such triangle is neither necessary nor eternal, but comes into being and passes away.  It is also imperfect, lacking the perfect straightness of sides that a triangle is supposed to have given its essence.  And any sensory representations or mental images we can form of a triangle are going to have the same defects.  Whatever else we can know of a triangle through sensation and imagination, the necessity, eternity, and perfection of the Form it participates in cannot be known that way.

Now, compare such a triangle to a red object sitting in a dark room, or to a red stained glass window on a moonless night.  The redness is there in the object or the window, but you will not see it without light.  You see the red of the object when light shines on it, and the red of the window when the light shines through it.  Absent such light, the redness will be invisible, even if you can know other features of such objects (by touching them say).  But the presence of the light immediately reveals the redness to the eye.  You might even say: “Aha!  It’s red!”

Similarly, Augustine holds, something analogous to light, but coming from God – in whom exists the Form of Triangle in all its necessity, eternity, and perfection – is what reveals these properties to the “eye” of the human intellect.  You might even have a flash of understanding that yields an “Aha!”

Illuminating illumination

The analogy between divine illumination and Plato’s comparison of the Form of the Good to the sun makes the general outlines of Augustine’s idea clear enough.  But making out the details is difficult.  Exactly what does this “illumination” amount to?  Obviously it does not involve light of the ordinary sort.  But what, then?

For starters, it is useful to keep in mind that we often describe the intellect as seeing that a proposition is true or that the conclusion of an argument follows from its premises.  There is an analogy between what the eye does when it sees a physical object and what the intellect is doing.  And it is not unreasonable to suppose that there might also be an analogy between the meansby which the eye does what it does and the means by which the intellect does what it does.  If the former sort of seeing requires light, so too might the latter sort of “seeing” require something analogous to light.

But by itself that doesn’t tell us much.  The help provided by the analogy with Plato’s comparison of the Form of the Good to the sun is also limited.  Yes, the divine intellect illuminates the Forms for our minds just as the Form of the Good was said to do.  But the manner in which they do so is evidently different, at least given my proposed reading of how this works in the case of the Form of the Good.  I suggested that we read Plato as holding that, just as a tree and a triangle participate in the Form of Tree and the Form of Triangle, respectively, those Forms in turn participate in the Form of the Good.  And this makes those Forms intelligible, in the same way they make particular trees and triangles intelligible.

But seeing this involves (a) grasping the Form of the Good and (b) grasping the relation between the other Forms and it.  That is to say, it involves mental acts precisely of the kind that Augustine is trying to explain.  So, illumination of the kind he is appealing to is evidently different and more fundamental than the kind of which Plato was speaking (at least as I’m reading Plato).  But then, what does it amount to if it isn’t quite what Plato was speaking of?  The doctrine of illumination needs some illumination.

Three interpretations

Over the centuries, there have been three main approaches to spelling out Augustine’s position in more detail.  The first holds that in knowing the Forms, the human mind sees directly into God’s own mind.  The way you grasp the necessity, eternity, and perfection of the Form of Triangle, for example, is by virtue of your mind’s ascending from acquaintance with mere particular individual triangles and becoming acquainted instead with the divine idea of triangularity.  This interpretation is associated with the early modern philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, and is known as “ontologism.”

This interpretation would certainly make it clearer what illumination amounts to.  But unfortunately, it is highly problematic both philosophically and theologically.  The standard objection is that it would seem to imply that we have a direct intellectual grasp of God’s essence, which we clearly do not have.  If we did, we would have complete beatitude and be unable to doubt God’s existence, neither of which is the case.  It is also absurd to think that all people who are able to grasp even basic mathematical truths like 2 + 2 = 4 – which includes those who are utterly foolish and morally depraved no less than the wise and saintly – are thereby able directly to know God’s mind.  (Certainly, Augustine would not have held such a thing.)

A second interpretation holds that “illumination” amounts merely to the fact that God conserves the human intellect in being and concurs with its operation (just as he conserves and concurs with everything else), where the intellect is that aspect of our nature that is uniquely God-like.  This sort of interpretation is sometimes proposed by Thomists as a way of reconciling Augustine’s epistemology with Aquinas’s.  But it is decidedly deflationary, reducing Augustine’s view to just a colorful but very imprecise way of saying what Aquinas would later say with more precision.  Whereas the first interpretation makes the doctrine of illumination very interesting but highly problematic, the second makes it unproblematic but also uninteresting.  It also just isn’t exegetically plausible as a reading of Augustine, who was thinking along Platonic rather than Aristotelian lines.

The correct interpretation is surely the third one, which is a middle ground between the first two.  That is to say, it reads Augustine as making a stronger and more distinctive claim about the nature of illumination than the second interpretation does, but without going to the extreme of saying that the human mind can peer directly into the divine mind.

The basic idea of this third interpretation can be understood by returning to the analogy of the red object and stained glass that are illuminated by sunlight.  When you see the redness of the illuminated object or the glass, it is the object and the glass that you are looking at, not the sun itself.  The sun is not what you see, rather it is that by which you see.  But it is nevertheless something distinct from you, and without the help of which your eye would be unable to detect the redness.

Similarly, light from the divine intellect is what illuminates the Forms for our intellects.  This divine light is not itself what the intellect sees (contrary to the first, ontologistic interpretation of Augustine), but rather that by which the intellect sees.  But still (and contrary to the second, Thomistic interpretation of Augustine), it is something distinct from any activity of the human intellect itself, and distinct from God’s conservation and concurrence with it.  It is an extra divine assistance without which the intellect, relying merely on its own capacities, would be unable to grasp the necessity, eternity, and perfection of the Forms.

Residual obscurity

This is helpful, though more as a way of telling us what illumination does not involve rather than what it does involve.  To be sure, it is clear that it involves a kind of divine causality over and above the conservation and concurrence with the human intellect considered just by itself.  But exactly what is the nature of this causality? 

Gareth Matthews (in his essay on Augustine’s epistemology in the first edition of the Cambridge Companion to Augustine) suggests a further interesting interpretive detail.  As I discussed in a post from a few years ago, Augustine developed an early version of the view that material phenomena are by themselves inherently semantically indeterminate (a thesis much explored by contemporary analytic philosophers like Quine and Kripke).  That is to say, given just the physical facts alone, there can be no fact of the matter about exactly what an utterance, gesture, or physical representation means.  If you add to this the premise that there nevertheless sometimes is a fact of the matter about what they mean, it follows that there must be some additional factor over and above the physical facts.

Matthews suggests that dealing with this issue is another job that Augustine intends the doctrine of divine illumination to do.  Hence, consider a triangle drawn in black outline on a marker board, and also all the physical facts involved in your seeing it and judging it to be a triangle (the causal relations between the marker board and your eyes, the brain activity going on as you look at and contemplate it, the utterances you make as you look at it, and so on).  The semantic indeterminacy arguments developed by Augustine, Quine, Kripke, et al. show that these physical facts alone could not suffice to determine that you are conceptualizing what you are looking at as a triangle – as opposed, say, to conceptualizing it as a triangle with black outlines, specifically, or as a trilateral, or whatever.

And yet there is a fact of the matter about which of these is in reality the way you are conceptualizing it.  Matthews’ suggestion is that divine illumination is at least part of the story about what makes this the case.  You might think of it on the following analogy (mine rather than Matthews’).  Suppose you are trying to get someone to see something in the distance, such as a certain constellation of stars.  He says: “I don’t see it.  Where?”  You grab his head and move it slightly, directing or aiming it toward the specific area of the night sky you want him to see.  Then he does.  “Oh yes, now I see it!”

Matthews seems to be suggesting that divine illumination is analogous to that.  The physical facts, even together with the facts about your own immaterial intellect, are not sufficient to determine that you will conceptualize what you see as a triangle, rather than as a triangle with black outlines, specifically, or as a trilateral.  But the divine intellect “grabs” your intellect, as it were, and directs or aims it in such a way that at that moment you conceptualize it the first way rather than the other ways. 

Naturally, this raises all sorts of further questions.  But it does seem to illuminate a little further the nature of the causality Augustine attributes to divine illumination.

Related posts:

Augustine on the immateriality of the mind

Augustine and Heraclitus on the present moment

Augustine on semantic indeterminacy

The divine intellect

Rucker’s Mindscape

Plato’s affinity argument

The pre-existence of the soul

Links for Thanksgiving

What the hell happened to the Drudge Report?  The Tablet investigates.

The rediscovery of hell.  At First Things, Cardinal Pell abandons Balthasarian wishful thinking.

Never mind 2020.  David Oderberg asks: How did Donald Trump win in 2016?

Reading Religion reviews Steven Jensen’s book on Thomistic psychology.

The AARP magazine on the heartbreaking last days of Stan Lee. 

Popular Mechanics on the improbability of other intelligent life in the universe.

But is there intelligent life in the Penguin Random House breakroom?  Pathetic wokesters break down in tears over Jordan Peterson’s new book.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder nails it in a single tweet.  At BackReaction, Hossenfelder on “follow the science” nonsense and on what we can learn even from flat earth pseudoscience. 

David Greg Taylor’s Blueboy Brown Comics: The Adventures of a Family is ready to go to print.  He’s begun a Kickstarter campaign to get it off the ground.

At Aeon, John Goldsmith on philosopher Franz Brentano.

Carl Olsen interviews Carl Trueman about his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, at Catholic World Report.

At Quillette, Gerald Posner on JFK conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison.

Richard Marshall interviews philosopher of science Steven French at 3:16.

FIRE reports on student attitudes about free speech on college campuses.  The Atlantic reports on professorial worries about infringements on free speech.  At The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, Facebook, and censorship.  Abigail Shrier on transgender activists’ attempts to suppress her book, at Quillette.

At Letter, Alex Rosenberg and Daniel Dennett debate naturalism and purpose.

Steely Dan’s Gaucho came out 40 years ago.  Retrospectives at Glideand Albumism.  The story of Steely Dan’s legendary lost song “The Second Arrangement,” at NQN.

Andrew Sullivan on why wokeness is winning.  At the Times Literary Supplement, Simon Jenkins reviewsHelen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories.  Bret Weinstein and Greg Lukianoff examine wokeness from the perspective of cognitive behavioral therapy.  Lindsay on eight unproven assumptions of Critical Race Theory.

Check out John DeRosa’s recent interviewswith Fr. James Brent, Matthew Levering, Christopher Tomaszewski, Michael Gorman, Gaven Kerr, Fr. Michael Dodds, and many others, at the Classical Theism Podcast.

Baz Edmeades on the myth of harmonious indigenous conservationism, at Quillette.

Anthony McCarthy on fetal pain and humanitarianism, at Quadrant. 

X-ray specs?  Sea monkeys?  Submarines by mail?  Comic Tropes looks at scam advertisements in vintage comic books.

Going undercover with Antifa: an interview at Reason.  At First Things, Mary Eberstadt on the connection between violent protests and fatherlessness.

At Aeon, Michael Strevens argues that a kind of irrationality underlies the success of science.

At The Believer, Stephen Sparks on being a bookseller.

John Marenbon on Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, at Aeon.

Jesse Norman reviewsEdmund Fawcett’s Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition, at Catholic Herald.

Church and Culture radio interview

Last week I was interviewed by Deal Hudson for his show Church and Culture on Ave Maria Radio.  The interview lasts an hour and ranges over my work in general.  You can listen to it here.

You can find links to other radio interviews and the like here.

Tyranny of the sovereign individual

The individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.  But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Aristotle, Politics, Book I

At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher interviews theologian Carl Trueman about his new book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.  Trueman argues that the collapse of traditional sexual morality cannot be understood except as a consequence of a radically individualist conception of the self that has been working its way ever deeper into every nook and cranny of the Western mind through the course of the modern age – including the minds of many so-called conservatives.  Yet too few defenders of traditional sexual morality realize this.  Trueman says:

We assume that the sexual revolution was – is – about expanding the canon of acceptable sexual behavior.  It is not.  It is actually about a fundamental shift in how we understand our humanity.  Sex is now understood as central to identity, not simply an activity.  Unless we grasp that, we will see neither the depth of the problem we face nor be able to engage meaningfully with those who are the revolution’s victims… Our sexual ethics are directly related to our understanding of what it means to be a human person. 

End quote.  I haven’t yet read Trueman’s book, so I don’t know how he develops this point.  But the point itself is absolutely correct.  What follows is one way to elaborate upon it.

Actually, sex is identity

Here’s what everyone used to know about human nature.  It will sound like standard natural law boilerplate, but that’s because natural law systematizes and explains what once was common sense (and still is until people are indoctrinated out of it). 

Man is by nature a social animal, and sex is the fundamental way in which we are social animals.  For a human being is never just “a person.”  A human being is always either a man or a woman.  And men and women, like everything else in nature, each have a teleology – a purpose to which their nature directs them, the realization of which is necessary for their flourishing.  The purpose of a man is to be a father and husband, and the purpose of a woman is to be a mother and wife, with all that these roles entail.  Among other things, they entail having lots of children, and committing yourself for life to the family unit that results.  This unit is the cell from which larger social units are built, and the health of those larger units depends on the health of the cell, and thus on the commitment of men and women to fulfilling their roles as fathers and mothers, husbands and wives.

A man’s life’s work – his vocation or calling – reflects this social nature, and has a twofold purpose.  First and foremost, its point is to provide for his family; and secondly, it is to contribute to the needs of the larger community of which his family is a part (for example, as a butcher, a baker, a plumber, or whatever other role he is especially suited to).  In these ways, a man exists for the sake of others, and he does so no less than (as feminists complain) a wife and mother does on the traditional understanding of sex roles, even if the precise nature of his other-directed calling is different. 

Sexual desire pushes us out of ourselves, then, to bond with another human being, and with that human being to create new human beings and stick together for life for their sake and for each other’s sake.  And as families ally together to form larger social units, an entire political and economic order arises, which reflects the nature and needs of these families. 

Obviously, various qualifications and complications would enter into a complete account, but the point here is just to convey the general idea.  Yet even the exceptions reflect the rule.  Yes, some men forsake marriage and family for the priesthood.  But the priesthood is itself an essentially paternalrole, raised to a higher, spiritual level.  Yes, some women never marry or have children.  But if this is for the sake of the religious life, it is to become a “bride of Christ,” and thereby to take on a spiritualized wifely role.  Whereas if it is a result of happenstance, the traditional attitude regarded such women as “old maids” – those who had, sadly, been unable to fulfill their main calling as women.

All of this is exactly what we should expect given basic biology.  Biologically speaking, the only reason there are two sexes in the first place is so that one of them will function as fathers and the other as mothers.  The paternal model of masculinity and maternal model of femininity aren’t contingent or arbitrary cultural accretions, but reflect the very point of there being men and women in the first place.

Now, Trueman notes that for modern people, sex is “understood as central to identity, not simply an activity.”  But that much is not modern.  That is precisely how people have always traditionally understood sex.  However, what it means to regard sex as central to identity has radically changed.  Traditionally, the idea was that your identity as either a man or a woman – with all that that entails regarding the sex role you should strive to fulfill, regarding what counts as normal sexual desires, what counts as the morally permissible use of your sexual faculties, and so on – is something that nature has determined.  If your desires happen not to line up with nature’s purposes, the problem is with you and not with nature.  Your identity is what nature says it is, not what yousay it is.

That is, of course, the reverse of what modern people mean by understanding sex to be “central to identity” – which is Trueman’s point.  Sex is central to our identity, but it isn’t nature that determines that sexual identity, it is rather we who determine it.  For the traditional attitude, the aim is to conform our desires to nature and the will of its divine author.  For the moderns, the aim is to conform nature to our desires, and the divine author has nothing to say about the matter, if he exists at all. 

We are all Hobbesians now

Now, the deep reason why the modern liberal individualist conception of human beings rejects the traditional understanding of our natural teleology is that it rejects all natural teleology.  Its purest form is, perhaps, Hobbes’s account of the state of nature.  Hobbes held that in our natural condition, there is no fact of the matter about what we ought to desire, no ends toward which our nature directs us.  There are simply whatever desires we happen contingently to have, and none is better or worse than any other.  That is why the state of nature as he understands it is a condition of pure license that inevitably descends into a war of all against all (and thus why he takes his Leviathan state to be necessary to remedy this unhappy condition).

Of course, neither Hobbes nor the liberal tradition in general for most of the three centuries after his time pushed anything like the radical sexual liberationist agenda that has become so familiar in recent decades.  That agenda is simply too contrary to human nature for people to have taken it seriously for most of that time, or to try to implement even if it had occurred to them.  In order for it to become a realistic project – psychologically, politically, and practically speaking – the basic liberal individualist assumptions and their implications needed a long time thoroughly to permeate Western institutions, and the technological preconditions of making those implications practicable (such as the birth control pill, labor-saving devices that made it possible for women to work outside the home in large numbers, etc.) also needed to be realized. 

But the implications were indeed there from the beginning.  If there is nothing in our nature that directs us to any particular ends – if there are only whatever desires we happencontingently to have, and no fact of the matter about what desires we ought to have – then there is no particular identity that nature has given any of us.  Nature has not called us to be fathers rather than womanizers, mothers rather than career women, heterosexual rather than homosexual, etc. because nature doesn’t call us to be anything in particular.  What we are is whatever we happen to want to be.  We are sovereign over ourselves, subject to no demands other than those we chooseto be subject to.

The implications are radically anti-social, at least as traditional morality and the natural law theory that systematizes it understand what it is to be “social.”  For the sovereign individual who is subject to no obligations he doesn’t consent to, that sex tends to produce children is morally incidental to it.  There is no natural obligation toward the children that result from one’s sexual activity, so that they might even be aborted if one wishes.  Nor is there any natural obligation to provide for the woman with whom one has sexual relations, so that she might be divorced, or never married in the first place, if one wishes.  In general, sexual and romantic relationships need not conform to any particular model, but may be fashioned and refashioned in whatever way sovereign individuals agree to.  Sex is no longer about getting out of one’s self and seeking union with others.  It is about using others as one means among many of gratifying the self.

Then there is work.  Work too, under the liberal individualist dispensation, is no longer seen as having a natural teleology – as a vocation by which one is meant to serve others, namely one’s family and the larger society.  That model has been replaced by the idea of the “career,” understood as a matter of self-expression and self-fulfillment – a way of making one’s mark in the world, of gaining its attention and adulation.  The degree to which one magnifies oneself by way of his career – in terms of the wealth, power, fame, or influence one attains – has become the new measure of success.  Hence, whereas on the traditional model, one succeeds as a man if he is able to provide for his family and contribute something of value to his community – something of which the vast majority of men are capable – on the liberal individualist “career” model of work, one has achieved “success” to the extent that one has attained wealth, power, fame, or influence. 

Since relatively few men are able to attain much in the way of wealth, power, fame, or influence, liberal individualist society is bound to create a kind of crisis of masculinity.  To fail to attain these things is to be seen as a “loser.”  Life becomes a mad careerist scramble to be one of the relative few who avoid this unhappy fate.  Men are naturally competitive, but whereas the older model of society moderated this competitiveness, the liberal individualist model exacerbates it.  And since relatively few are able to fulfill the careerist criteria of success, a sense of failure and aimlessness become the lot of an increasing number of men.

Feminism took this ugly, careerist model of masculinity and told women that they should aspire to it as well, and that into the bargain they should also ape the selfish sexual habits of liberal individualist man.  Thus has liberal individualism made of the human being an androgynous, appetitive thing that lives like an animal but worships itself like a god – thereby turning Aristotle’s “either-or” description of the non-social creature into a “both-and.” 

Though, as Trueman rightly says, it is really radical individualism rather than sexual desire per se that is the deep source of the sexual revolution and its ever more extreme manifestations, it is no accident that liberal individualist modernity has become absolutely obsessed with matters of sex, and with destroying all sexual boundaries and taboos.  For it is in our sexuality that the reality of natural teleology, and of our essentially social nature, are most striking and obvious.  Hence, for the sovereign individual to maintain the pretense that there are no norms in nature to which he is answerable nor obligations to others apart from those he consents to, he has to blind himself especially to the teleology of sex.

This, I submit, is the reason why liberals have become increasingly intolerant of any defense of the traditional understanding of the meaning of sex.  It is not because that understanding is obviously false, but rather precisely because it is obviously true.  It takes enormouspsychological effort to convince oneself otherwise, so that, as the claims of sexual revolutionaries have gotten ever more extreme and preposterous, those claims have also been increasingly defended with a pseudo-moralistic fanaticism (in order to reinforce liberal self-confidence in the self-deception) and shrill intimidation (in order to convince others to go along with it).  And it helps that sexual depravity tends to damage the capacity to perceive objective truth or to want to perceive it.

Where Trueman goes wrong

Again, I haven’t yet read Trueman’s book, so I don’t know the extent to which he would elaborate his thesis the way I have.  I also don’t know how he might defend or qualify some of the remarks in the interview that seem to me mistaken.

For one thing, Trueman gives the impression that the shift to an individualist conception of human nature began with Romanticism.  As my remarks indicate, I think it goes back long before that – and not merely back to Hobbes, but to the rise of the early modern “mechanical world picture” that overthrew the teleological conception of the natural world.  Indeed, its deepest roots go back further still, to rise of nominalism in the later Middle Ages.  (These are, of course, themes I’ve been going on about for years.) 

Trueman also thinks that “moralism,” “martial rhetoric,” and the like are mistaken ways for Christians to approach the problem, and that they ought instead to focus on presenting a positive alternative.  Here, it seems to me, Trueman himself has perhaps partially bought into the liberal individualist narrative, just like some of the conservatives he rightly criticizes.  For the stereotype of the Christian who is always going on about sex is itself part of that narrative.  It serves the rhetorical function of painting opponents of the sexual revolution as obsessive prigs, by contrast to whom proponents of sexual liberation can be made to seem levelheaded and tolerant.

The reality is that, these days, the most prominent Christians and conservatives keep their mouths shut about matters of sexual morality, precisely out of fear of being accused of living up to the stereotype.  Indeed, even many who claim to agree with traditional sexual morality nevertheless acquiesce to the conceit that sexual sins are relatively minor and that it is better to talk about matters of social justice rather than sexual morality.  In fact, from the point of view of natural law and Catholic moral theology, a sound sexual morality is the very foundation of true social justice, because the health of the family is the necessary precondition of the larger social orders of which families are the cells.  (As a priest friend of mine once put it, if you want justice, work for chastity.)

Trueman is of course right that modern people do not respond well to moral critiques of their sexual habits and excessive individualism, but that is precisely part of the problem, rather than something to cater to.  The prophets of the Old Testament didn’t think to themselves: “Hmm, the rich don’t respond well to moralizing about their obligations to the poor.  Better to try gently to persuade them by developing a positive vision.”  Nor should they have, because to fail to label greed, callousness toward the needy, and the idolatry of money for what they are is not some alternative way to address the problem – it is simply to fail to address the problem.

Similarly, with millions of children murdered in the womb, millions more left fatherless and consigned to poverty, millions of woman left unmarried and lonely after the men who use them have moved on to marry someone younger, millions of men addicted to pornography – to fail to put forward vigorous moral criticism of all this is simply to fail to tell the truth about it.  And to pander to the modern individualist self by refusing to level moral rebuke is precisely to reinforceit in its idolatrous self-regard rather than to help free it. 

Idolatry is, indeed, the deep problem here – and idolatry of an especially diabolical kind.  The pagan who worshipped Zeus or Odin at least aimed his devotion at something higher than himself, even if not at the true God.  By contrast, the modern self worships nothing nobler than the pathetic bundle of disordered desire it sees in the mirror.  It is like Lucifer, refusing to submit to any external authority and wanting to put itself on the divine throne.  The last thing it needs or deserves is pandering to its intense dislike of being criticized for the way it exercises its “right to choose.”

To be fair to Trueman, there are certainly unsubtle and shallow ways of moralizing about these matters.  But what is needed is a deeper and more intelligent moral critique, not a non-moral one.  Moreover, even the spelling out of a positive vision is going to entail such a moral critique by implication.  For no matter how pretty you paint the alternative picture, the individualist self is going to regard it as at most one further option it may or may not choose, as it sees fit.  If the individualist self asks: “That’s all very nice, but why must I choose it?” there is no way to answer other than frankly to affirm that to fail to do so is to remain lost in idolatrous self-regard and disordered desire. 

It is also only fair to Trueman to note that what I am responding to are some brief comments in an interview, which perhaps do not fully convey his meaning.  It may be that he would not disagree with anything I’ve said here.  I look forward to reading his book and finding out.

Further reading:

Love and sex roundup

Socialism versus the family

Continetti on post-liberal conservatism

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

Masculinity and the Marvel movies

Means, motive, and opportunity

Did Joe Biden win the election fair and square?  Or was there voter fraud sufficient to tip it in his direction?  I won’t be addressing those questions here.  I want to consider the more basic epistemological issue of whether asking them is even reasonable, or instead the mere entertaining of a crackpot conspiracy theory.  At The Catholic Thing, philosopher Mike Pakaluk opines that it is reasonable, and two other philosophers, Rob Koons and Daniel Bonevac, evidently agree.  I think they are right.

Trump’s fiercest critics are hardly in any position to disagree.  For years they insisted with shrill confidence that Trump “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election – even though, as honest lefties like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald vainly tried to warn them, that was a conspiracy theory for which there never was serious evidence.

As longtime readers know, I have been very critical of conspiracy theories.  But it is important to be clear about exactly what one means when using the expression “conspiracy theory” in a dismissive way.  No one denies that there are conspiracies of some kinds – they happen every time two or more criminals work together to rob a liquor store, plan a murder, embezzle from their employer, or commit a terrorist act.  What are seriously problematic – and what I have criticized – are theories that posit conspiracies so vast that they implicitly subvert the epistemic foundations of the theory itself.  They are philosophically problematic in the way that other forms of radical skepticism and the “hermeneutics of suspicion” are.

Claims about election fraud significant enough to tip an election needn’t be like that.  They needn’t assert that “everyone is in on it.”  In fact, they don’t even need to posit a conspiracy at all – at least not one involving coordination between, or even mutual knowledge of, all those who were involved.

Let’s look at it from the point of view of the classic trio of means, motive, and opportunity.  Where all three are present, they don’t establish that a crime did in fact occur, but they do suffice to show that it couldhave occurred, so that it is reasonable to look for evidence that it did.  And I submit that all three are present in the current situation.

Means

One of the problems with conspiracy theories of the crackpot type is that they posit crimes and collusion that are simply way too intricate to pull off.  For example, if your favorite JFK assassination conspiracy theory requires just the right people, in high places and low, spread across the CIA, the FBI, Army intelligence, the mafia, the Time-Life corporation, the anti-Castro Cuban community, Texas oilmen, nightclub owners, etc., doing just the right things at just the right times in just the right places from Dallas to New Orleans to Washington, D.C. – well, it simply strains credulity.  It simply could not have happened, given the way human nature and human society work.  The means are absent for such a vast conspiracy (unlike, say, a theory that requires just a few Mafiosi).

Now, is a voter fraud scenario that could tip a major election as implausible as that?  Not at all.  We know this, because we know that such fraud has in fact happened in the past, or at least plausibly has happened, as even sober mainstream observers agree.  For example, a strong case can be made that Al Franken’s victory over Norm Coleman in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race resulted from voter fraud. 

To be sure, the margin in that case was very small – on the order of a few hundred votes.  However, fraud also plausibly took place in an election that involved much larger margins, namely the 1960 presidential election.  Kennedy won Illinois by about 8,800 votes, mostly owing to results in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago.  He won his running mate Lyndon Johnson’s home state of Texas by about 46,000 votes.  Had he lost both of those states, Nixon would have won the election.  And some mainstream historians and journalists, including liberal ones, think that these states were indeed stolen from Nixon.  For example, Kennedy biographer Seymour Hersh judges that the election was stolen.  Historian Robert Dallek thinks that at least Illinois was stolen, via Daley’s political machine.  Historian William Rorabaugh thinks that Nixon may have been cheated out of as many as 100,000 to 200,000 votes in Johnson’s corrupt Texas.

Whether the 1960 election really was stolen is a matter of controversy, but the point is that mainstream historians agree that it could have happened.  The scenario does not require the kind of conspiracy theory that can be ruled out a priori as impossible.  And it should be noted that it does not necessarily require a centralized conspiracy coordinating efforts across state lines.  The Democratic political machines in Chicago and Texas could act completely independently, each having an interest in doing what they could to make the national election come out in the Kennedy/Johnson ticket’s favor.

Now, the states in dispute in the current election involve similar vote margins – around 11,000 votes in Arizona, 14,000 in Georgia, 20,000 in Wisconsin, 37,000 in Nevada, and 54,000 in Pennsylvania.  Even the 146,000 vote difference in Michigan is comparable to what might have been stolen from Nixon in Texas.  You’d just need there to be enough corrupt like-minded Democratic operatives in these different states to do the kinds of things that Democratic operatives in 1960 may well have done in Chicago and Texas.  And again, they needn’t have been coordinating their efforts.  You’d just need enough people in each state independently judging that voter fraud was a good way to get their favored candidate to win.

Do the mechanics of elections make such fraud less likely now than in 1960?  That’s far from obvious.  Some of the key cities, such as Philadelphia, are notorious today for political corruption, just like Daley’s Chicago was.  There are also new methods of voter fraud made possible by modern voting machines and software – as mainstream outlets were warning back when they feared that Russia might steal the 2016 election for Trump.

The bottom line is that fraud on a scale that could tip the election Biden’s way could plausibly have happened.  The idea cannot reasonably be dismissed out of hand as a “conspiracy theory.”  And again, left-wingers who take seriously the idea that the 2016 election was stolen for Trump are the very last people who have any business dismissing it.

Motive

This one’s easy.  Consider a super-“woke” Democratic operative who is convinced that Trump stole the 2016 election with Russian assistance, and remains a Russian asset.  Suppose he also believes that Trump and his supporters are vile fascists, racists, sexists, and homophobes, and existential threats to racial minorities, LGBT, women, and the Left.  He believes that “systemic racism” thoroughly permeates U.S. institutions in the interests of upholding “white supremacy,” and that Trump’s defeat is crucial to defeating these evil forces.  He believes that the rioting, looting, and burning perpetrated by Antifa and BLM activists is justifiable or at least excusable, despite the suffering it inflicted on innocent business owners.  (No omelets without broken eggs, and all that.)  He believes that institutions like the police are so thoroughly corrupt that they must simply be “defunded,” regardless of the harm this will do to neighborhoods no longer protected from criminals.  (Again, omelets, broken eggs.)  He thinks court-packing and other schemes that would destroy American democratic precedent and secure one-party rule are fine and dandy.  He has such an expansive conception of “violence” that he seriously believes that politically incorrect language and other “micro-aggressions” make others “unsafe.”

Might such a person draw the conclusion that voter fraud to secure a Trump defeat is justifiable – perhaps even a kind of self-defense, indeed, maybe even one’s duty as a “progressive”?  To ask the question is to answer it.

Are there enough people like this to perpetrate the amount of fraud necessary to alter the outcome of the election?  Well, there are certainly a helluva lot more of them now than there were in 1960.  Do the math. 

Opportunity

This one’s easy too.  There is no less opportunity for fraud now than in previous elections.  On the contrary, this year’s novelty of having massive numbers of voters vote by mail (as opposed to the relative few who have done so in previous elections) has greatly added to the opportunities for fraud, as many warned months ago. 

So, the means, motive, and opportunity for voter fraud significant enough to tip an election are at least as present now as in 1960, and arguably more so.  Again, that doesn’t by itself show that such fraud has actually occurred, but it does make it reasonable to investigate the matter.  Those currently insisting on doing so before declaring a winner are not only within their legal rights, they are within their epistemic rights.

Pink on Aristotle’s Revenge

In this week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement, philosopher Thomas Pink kindly reviews my book Aristotle’s Revenge .  From the review:

Edward Feser’s Aristotle’s Revenge is presented as a philosophical defence of Aristotelianism in its robust scholastic form, as exemplified by the work of Thomas Aquinas.  This broadly Thomist Aristotelianism, Feser argues, far from being a block to the study of nature, provides a metaphysics that is the necessary foundation for any science of nature, from physics to psychology.  The “revenge” lies in this fact, and most especially in the indispensability of Aristotelian doctrine to the very understanding of science and scientific investigation itself…

Aristotle’s Revenge defends ideas in metaphysics and philosophy of science that are very much live within contemporary philosophy, whose support goes well beyond those willing to identify themselves as supporters of scholasticism…

[The book] provides a rich and suggestive survey of a venerable and still very significant programme in the metaphysics of nature.

End quote.  Pink raises the important question of how the Aristotelian conception of natural teleology or finality I defend in the book relates to goodness as a natural property.  As he notes, the Scholastics saw these notions as inherently linked, and it was an aspect of their position that early modern thinkers like Hobbes attacked.

Though it is an issue I have addressed elsewhere, I avoided doing so in the book for two reasons.  First, I think that at least a rudimentary kind of teleology can be defended without making reference to the notion of the good, by way of the sorts of arguments I present in the book.  Indeed, I think that defense of this rudimentary notion is a prerequisite to defending the thesis that goodness is a natural property of things (rather than something that would presuppose that thesis). 

Second, as Pink notes, the book is already very long as it is, and addressing the issue of goodness as a natural property would require a book of its own.  (As it happens, David Oderberg has recently published such a book.)