Edward Feser's Blog, page 40

The other way to lose a war

Rod Dreher commentson the U.S. deal with the Taliban to withdraw, at long last, from Afghanistan.  He writes: “The Taliban whipped… the United States… We simply could not prevail.  The richest and most powerful nation in the world could not beat these SOBs.”  Well, that’s obviously not true in the usual sense of words like “whipped” and “beat.”  Suppose you effortlessly beat me to a bloody pulp and I fall to the ground, desperately panting for air and barely conscious.  You put your boot on my neck and demand that I cry “Uncle.”  I refuse, despite your repeated kicks to the gut, and after fifteen minutes or so of this you get bored and walk away.  It would be quite absurd if, wiping the blood off my face and pulling myself up to my wobbling knees, I proudly exclaim: “Did you see how I whipped that guy?” But of course, I know what Dreher means, and he’s not wrong.  One way to lose a war is militarily.  The U.S. did not lose the war in Afghanistan in that sense.  Indeed, it’s very hard for the U.S. to lose wars in that sense.  The other way to lose a war, however, is to define “victory” in so ambitious – and ultimately non-military – a way that military success becomes irrelevant.  If you establish before our fistfight begins that you will only count yourself to have defeated me if you get me to say the word “Uncle,” then as long as I refuse to do that, you will have lost, no matter how badly you beat me up and indeed even if you kill me.
The trouble with the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that “victory” was widely conceived of on the World War II model – unconditional surrender followed by the radical reconstruction of the enemy’s social, political, and economic orders along the victor’s preferred lines.  Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued (in her essay “Mr. Truman’s Degree”) that that was not a reasonable standard even in the case of World War II.  It was certainly not a reasonable standard in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.  Those should have been conceived of from the start as punitive strikes rather than Wilsonian crusades.  Replacing the wicked leaders of these countries was justifiable in principle, but the goal should have been “something less bad” rather than an approximation of American capitalist liberal democracy.
Some critics like to chalk up prolonged American engagement in places like Afghanistan and Iraq to warmongering or realpolitik or some other sinister motivation.  In my opinion, that is the reverse of the truth.  The fault of those who advocate such engagement isn’t worldly cynicism, but otherworldly idealism.
Here we might draw a comparison with the problem Anscombe was addressing.  She rightly condemned as intrinsically evil the World War II policy of massacring civilian populations so as to compel enemy governments to capitulate.  But she also laid the blame for this policy at the feet of an attitude that is also evil, but is widely regarded as good: pacifism.  The pacifist foolishly condemns all killing as such, and therefore all war as unjust.  This is an error, and a grave one because it is utterly impracticable, and trying to implement it would lead to the widespread oppression and killing of the innocent. 
When pacifism is widely admired, however, those who nevertheless reject it as impracticable conclude that doing what is goodis impracticable and that it is practically unavoidable to do evil.  That is to say, they conclude that all killing is wrong but that we nevertheless have to do this sort of wrong in order to resist oppressors and killers.  And then the sky is the limit.  Such people will go on to conclude that if killing enormous numbers of innocent people is necessary in order to realize some aim they judge to be good (such as securing the unconditional surrender of the enemy) then this is what should be done.  Hence Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc.
In Anscombe’s view, then, pacifism thereby leads to morerather than less killing of the innocent.  It is held up as a noble ideal when in fact it is simply a grave moral error that has obscene unintended consequences.  The correct attitude is to recognize the natural law principle that it is only the intentional killing of the innocent, rather than all killing as such, that is morally wrong, and then to formulate principles to guide us in determining the conditions under which the killing of evildoers is called for, the means by which this might legitimately be done, the circumstances when risk of unintended civilian deaths can be justified by double effect, and so forth.  That is what traditional just war theory does. 
Now, what I want to suggest is that there is an analogous error in too much modern American thinking about matters of war.  The idea seems to be that war is such an obscenity that only a grandiose end can justify it.  On this view, merely repelling an aggressor or deterring his future evildoing is not good enough.  The endgame must always involve tyrants being overthrown, oppression banished, happy voters standing in queue, children dancing in the streets, etc.  Hence, when we see that some particular war is indeed necessary, the tendency is to try to turn it into a World War II style liberation and reconstruction.
Part of the problem with this is that realizing a grandiose end tends to require far more killing than is necessary for a more limited aim – and the more unrealistic and therefore unattainable the grandiose end is, the more ultimately pointless is the killing.  Another problem is that even a crushing military victory comes to seem ultimately like a defeat as long as the grandiose end remains unrealized.  Hence military engagement becomes interminable.  “If we leave before the job is done [i.e. the enemy’s country looks more like an American-style democracy and market economy] it will all have been for nothing!”
The pacifist would outlaw all war, whereas the Wilsonian would pursue “war to end all wars.”  The first is utopian about means, the second is utopian about ends.  And both only end up making wars more common and longer and bloodier than they need to be. 

Agere sequitur esse and the First Way

Aquinas’s First Way is also known as the argument from motion to an Unmoved Mover.  The most natural way to read it is as an argument to the effect that things could not change at any given moment if there were no divine cause keeping the change going.  But some Thomists have read it instead as an argument to the effect that changing things could not even exist at any given moment if there were no divine cause keeping them in being.  That’s the reading I propose in my book Aquinas and my ACPQ article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways,” and it’s a line of argument I develop and defend in greater depth in chapter 1 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God . On my way of presenting the argument, it begins with change, not because this is the phenomenon the argument is ultimately most concerned to explain, but rather because it provides the clearest way to introduce the distinction between actuality and potentiality.  Change entails the actualization of potential, but so too does the sheer existence of a thing at any moment.  The latter is what the argument, as I present it, is ultimately most concerned with.  But it is much easier for most readers to get an initial handle on the concept of the actualization of potential by considering change than it is by considering the existence of a thing at a moment. 
Now, does that mean that at the end of the day, a divine cause really explains at most only the existence of a thing at a time, and that this cause does not after all explain change?  Should we say that God merely keeps things in existence but that, for all Aquinas can show, their changes require no divine explanation?
No, that doesn’t follow, and it isn’t true.  Recall the principle agere sequitur esse or “action follows being,” which I defend and deploy in Five Proofs (and which I’ve had occasion to discuss in a recent post and in various earlier posts).  As I’ve argued there and elsewhere, the principle, together with other considerations raised by arguments like the argument from motion, entails a concurrentist account of God’s relationship to the world.  Given that action follows being – that the way a thing operates reflects its mode of existing – we can conclude that a thing would have no causal efficacy at all without God’s cooperation or concurrence with its activity, just as a pen could not write without your cooperation or concurrence with it (by holding and moving it).  For if a thing could act or operate apart from God’s action, then since the way a thing acts reflects its mode of being, it could also exist apart from God’s action.  And that is ruled out by arguments like the argument from motion, developed the way I develop it.  (See Five Proofs for the details of this defense of concurrentism.)
Since change always involves a potential being actualized by some efficient cause, change too, and not merely the existence of things, thus requires a divine cause (to cooperate or concur with the efficient cause).  The overall picture is therefore much like that of what I characterized above as the first and more natural reading of the First Way.  But the line of argumentation is less direct.  It isn’t a straight shot from the reality of change to the conclusion that the Unmoved Mover must keep change going.  It’s rather an argument from the sheer existence of things to the conclusion that the Unmoved Mover must keep them in existence, and then a combination of this result with the principle agere sequitur esse to yield the further result that the activity of things, and thus their bringing about of change, requires divine concurrence.
That’s not to say that the more direct sort of argument is not correct.  It’s just that that’s not the sort of argument I’ve been the most interested in defending.
Here’s another observation.  Aristotle’s own version of the argument from motion to an Unmoved Mover is often interpreted as an explanation precisely of change rather than the existence of things.  The idea (on this interpretation) is that Aristotle thinks an Unmoved Mover is necessary in order to account for why the world continues to change from moment to moment, but he does not take the sheer beingof the world from moment to moment to require such an explanation.  (I put to one side the question of whether this is a correct interpretation of Aristotle.)
The principle agere sequitur esse would arguably afford a path even from this version of the Unmoved Mover argument to the conclusion of the version I defend.  If action follows being, then if change – and thus the action of things in the world – requires an explanation in terms of a divine cause, then the sheer being of things must require such an explanation too.  For if things could exist apart from such a cause, why couldn’t they act apart from it? 
If this is correct, then the three dimensions of our discussion – the being of a thing, the action of a thing, and the link between being and action enshrined in the principle agere sequitur esse – are thus so tightly interconnected that the differences between interpretations of the argument from motion may be moot.  We can reason from the being of things to the existence of an Unmoved Mover, and the principle agere sequitur esse will then tell us that the action of those things too requires the Unmoved Mover.  Or we can reason from the action of things to the existence of an Unmoved Mover, and the principle agere sequitur esse will then tell us that the being of those things too requires the Unmoved Mover.  We end up at the same place, by neighboring routes.
Related posts:
A first without a second
Final causality and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover
Prior on the Unmoved Mover
Four causes and Five Ways
Oerter on motion and the First Mover
Dharmakīrti and Maimonides on divine action

Morgan on Aristotle’s Revenge

At The Imaginative Conservative, Prof. Jason Morgan kindly reviews my book Aristotle’s Revenge .  From the review:
In 456 very well-written pages… (followed by a treasure trove of a bibliography), Dr. Feser shows in Aristotle’s Revenge that, point for point, Aristotle got science right, or as right as he could given the limitations in instrumentation and communication with other researchers during his time.  Scientists since the so-called Enlightenment have been trying to detach Aristotle’s greatest insight, the telos of things, from the world around them.  But the telos is the linchpin of the material world, so without it, everything, as is apparent from most philosophy lectures one attends nowadays, or nearly any philosophy book one reads, falls apart… [T]he most compelling part of Aristotle’s Revenge is section six, “Animate Nature.”  Here, Dr. Feser goes a very long way toward restoring the life sciences to their proper relation to purpose and cause…
[O]ne of the greatest services of Aristotle’s Revenge, and of Dr. Feser’s work in general, is the clarity that Dr. Feser brings to discussions about terms and concepts.
End quote.  Morgan gives special attention to the criticisms of Intelligent Design theory that I raise in that chapter.
Morgan also offers a suggestion for improvement:
I think that Dr. Feser’s call for a return to a teleological view of the cosmos could be even stronger with a more clearly-defined deployment of, for example, the term “species.”  Dr. Feser goes to great lengths in part six of Aristotle’s Revenge to distinguish among various uses of the term, setting, for example, “logical species” off from the very different (but often conflated, to disastrous effect) “philosophical species.”  This is helpful and correct, but I would suggest that Dr. Feser’s readers seek out the works of Peter Redpath, John Deely, and Charles Bonaventure Crowley for even deeper insights into the work that genus and species – not the terms, but the Aristotelian-Thomistic realities – really do. 
Fair enough.  Aristotle’s Revenge interacts with an enormous body of literature, but so vast is the subject matter that there is much more I could have covered.  I thank Prof. Morgan for his suggestions and for his review.

The socialist state as an occasionalist god

Hobbes famously characterized his Leviathan state as a mortal god.  Here’s another theological analogy, or set of analogies, which might illuminate the differences between kinds of political and economic orders – and in particular, the differences between socialism, libertarianism, and the middle ground natural law understanding of the state.
Recall that there are three general accounts of divine causality vis-à-vis the created order: occasionalism, mere conservationism, and concurrentism (to borrow Fred Freddoso’s classification). Occasionalism holds that God alone has causal efficacy, and the apparent causal power of created things is illusory.  It seems to us that the sun causes the ice in your lemonade to melt, but it is really God causing it to melt, on the occasion when the sun is out.  It seems that it is the cue ball that knocks the eight ball into the corner pocket, but it is really God who does so, on the occasion when the cue ball makes contact with it.  And so on.  Created things no more act than puppets do.  Just as it is really the puppeteer who moves the puppet around the stage by means of its strings, with the puppet doing nothing, so too it is God who brings about every effect in the world.  Indeed, created things are more like shadow puppets than the kind moved about by strings.  The latter sort of puppet might have at least an indirect causal efficacy by virtue of accidentally knocking into other things, but a shadow puppet cannot do even that much.  And neither can any created thing, according to occasionalism.
Mere conservationism, by contrast, holds that created things not only have causal power, but exercise it completely independently of God.  God merely conserves them in existence as they do so, while playing no role in their efficacy.  Though God keeps the sun in existence, it is the sun and the sun alone that causes your ice to melt.  Though God keeps the cue ball in existence, it is the cue ball and the cue ball alone that causes the eight ball to move.  And so on. 
Concurrentism is a middle ground position.  It holds, contra mere conservationism, that God not only conserves things in existence, but also must concur or cooperate with their activity if they are to have any efficacy.  But it also holds, contra occasionalism, that created things do have real efficacy, even if not on their own.  To borrow an example from Freddoso, when you use a piece of blue chalk to write on the chalkboard, the chalk would be unable to have this effect if you were not moving it.  Left to itself, it would simply lie there.  All the same, its nature makes a real contribution to the effect insofar as the letters would not be blue if the piece of chalk were not itself blue.  Or consider a battery-powered toy car.  The motor really does move the wheels of the car and thus the car itself, but would not be able to do so if not for the battery that powers it.  God is like you in Freddoso’s example or like the battery in mine.  He must concur or cooperate with the cause if it is to have its effect, but the cause nevertheless makes a real contribution of its own.
One reason to prefer concurrentism to these alternatives derives from the Scholastic principle agere sequitur esse or “action follows being.”  On this principle, what a thing does reflects what it is.  If created things don’t really do anything, as occasionalism holds, then it seems they have no reality at all.  God alone is real, and when we observe what we take to be created things in action, what we are really observing is God in action.  Occasionalism thus collapses into pantheism.  Hence if pantheism is false, so too occasionalism must be false. 
If, by contrast, created things can act entirely apart from God, then it seems (given that action follows being) that they can exist entirely apart from God.  Divine conservation would go out the window with divine concurrence.  Mere conservationism thus collapses into atheism, so that if atheism is false, so too mere conservationism must be false. 
Concurrentism would thus stand as the only way rightly to understand the relationship between God and the world given that agere sequitur esse.  The world has real causal efficacy of its own because its existence is really distinct from God’s, but it nevertheless requires God to concur in its causal activity just as it requires God to conserve it in existence. (For more on all of this, see Five Proofs of the Existence of God , especially pp. 232-46.)
Now, what does all this have to do with the varieties of political order?  Again, I would propose that there is an analogy here with the relationship between socialism, libertarianism, and the traditional natural law understanding of the state.  In a lecture on socialism and the family that I gave about a year ago, I noted that socialism involves centralized governmental ownership of the basic means of production and distribution, and that the ownership of a thing, in turn, entails having a bundle of rights over it.  Hence, the more rights a government claims over the basic economic means of a society, the more it claims de facto ownership over them, and the closer it approximates to a socialist system.  Socialism can come in degrees.  (Listen to the lecture for qualifications and details.) 
That is a point about the economic aspect of socialism, but as I noted in the same lecture, there is also an ethos or moral vision associated with it.  In particular, it is a collectivist ethos according to which the basic economic means are owned and utilized by government for the sake of society as a whole, rather than for the sake of any individual or group within society.  One could develop this ethos further in at least two ways.  One could take society to be a kind of organism of which individual citizens are like mere dispensable cells or organs, to be sacrificed for the good of the whole if necessary in the way that an organ or cells can be shed for the sake of the preservation of the body.  Totalitarian forms of socialism approximate this extreme form of collectivism.  Alternatively, one could take all individual citizens to have inherent and equal value, and therefore not to be sacrificed for the good of the whole even if they are expected to work for the good of the whole.  Egalitarian forms of socialism would correspond to this less extreme form of collectivism.
Now, when you use something that I own and you use it only in the ways that I direct you to use it, I can be said to be acting through you.  You function merely as my agent.  Your acts are really my acts insofar as you serve as a kind of extension of myself.  For example, a lawyer or employee might function this way.  Similarly, the more rights a socialist state would claim over both the resources that its citizens use and over decisions about the ways that they may use them, and the more such a state regards citizens as mere organs or cells of the social whole, the more fully it can be said to treat citizens merely as extensions of itself. 
Here, I would suggest, we have something analogous to occasionalism, with the socialist state serving as a rough analogue to the occasionalist understanding of God and individual citizens roughly analogous to created things as conceived of on occasionalism.  The more fully the citizens have to follow the directives of the state, the more akin they are to the inefficacious physical objects of occasionalism – mere puppets of which the state is the puppeteer.  It is really the state that acts through them, just as for the occasionalist it is really God rather than the sun making the ice melt.  And a totalitarian socialist state that treats society as a whole as if it were the only real substance, with individual citizens merely its cells, is analogous to an occasionalism that has collapsed into pantheism.  Only society really exists, with the citizens being its appendages, just as on pantheism only God really exists and the things and events of our experience are really nothing more than his manifestations. 
Now consider the opposite extreme from this point of view.  Suppose you take the libertarian position that the state has absolutely no rights over any resources, or any say over how they are to be used, other than the bare minimum necessary in order to carry out the “minimal state” or “night watchman state” functions of protecting individual rights to life, liberty, and property.  It is individual citizens who own almost all resources and have the right to decide how they are to be used, sold, given away, or otherwise exchanged in free market transactions.  Government serves only to keep the system humming by enforcing contracts and punishing rights violations. 
This, I submit, is roughly analogous to the mere conservationist model, on which God merely keeps things in existence from moment to moment while they operate completely independently of him.  And the more extreme anarcho-capitalist version of libertarianism, which privatizes everything and abolishes the state entirely, is, by extension, analogous to deleting God from even a conserving role vis-à-vis the world, resulting in atheism.
Now, in an earlier post I have expounded the traditional natural law conception of the state, which can be seen as a kind of middle ground position between socialism and libertarianism insofar as it is guided by the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity – principles which reflect our nature as rational social animals.  As socialanimals, we come into the world not as individualist atoms having no need for or obligations toward others, but rather as members of communities – the family first and foremost, but also the local community, the nation, and ultimately the human race as a whole.  As rational animals, we require a considerable range of freedom of thought and action in order to realize the ends toward which we are directed by our nature, including our social ends. 
Solidarity and subsidiarity balance these considerations.  As organic parts of larger social wholes, our flourishing as individuals goes hand in hand with that of those larger wholes, just as the flourishing of a part of the body goes hand in hand with that of the whole organism.  The eye or the foot can flourish only if the whole body does, and the whole body can flourish only insofar as parts like the eye and foot do.  Just as these parts must do their part relative to the whole body, so too must the individual do his part relative to the family, the nation, etc.  And just as the whole organism must guarantee the health of its parts, so too do larger social orders have an obligation to each individual member.  Solidarity thus rules out a libertarian or individualist model on which we have no obligations to others other than those we consent to.  That would be like the eye or foot having no natural ordering to the good of the body as a whole, or the body as a whole having no natural ordering to the good of these parts.
On the other hand, given our rationality, the organic analogy is not a perfect one.  Each of us has a capacity for individual thought and action that literal body parts do not have, and which entails that we are more than mere cells or organs of a larger social body.  Literal body parts cannot understand themselves and their relation to the whole body, or choose whether and how to fulfill their roles relative to the whole.  We cando so, and to flourish as rational agents we thus require as much freedom of thought and action as is consistent with our need for and obligations to larger social orders.  There is also the consideration that the organic analogy is stronger the more proximate is the social whole of which one is a part.  Our needs and obligations relative to the familyare stronger than our needs and obligations relative to the nation, and our needs and obligations relative to the nation are stronger than our needs and obligations relative to humanity as a whole.  Hence the natural law model entails a special regard for family and nation over the “global community,” even if the latter deserves some regard as well.  Subsidiarity thus rules out any socialist absorption of the individual into a communal blob.  It also requires that larger level social orders (such as governments) interfere with the actions of lower level orders (such as families and individuals) only where strictly necessary.  The presumption is in favor of freedom of action, even if this presumption can in some cases be overridden.
Now, this natural law model of society is, I would suggest, roughly analogous to the concurrentist model of the created order’s relation to divine action.  As rational animals, we really do act on our own rather than as mere extensions of society, just as created things really do have causal efficacy of their own rather than being nothing more than manifestations of God’s action.  As socialanimals, we nevertheless really do depend on larger social wholes for our capacity to act as rational creatures, just as created things depend on God for their capacity to act at all.  The natural law model is a middle ground conception of the relation of individual and society falling between the socialist and libertarian extremes, just as the concurrentist model is a middle ground conception of the relation of created things to God falling between the occasionalist and mere conservationist extremes.  Or to extend the analogy in a slightly more fine-grained way, the sequence:
pantheism, occasionalism, concurrentism, mere conservationism, atheism
is roughly analogous to the sequence:
totalitarian socialism, egalitarian socialism, natural law, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism
I suggest only that there is an interesting parallelism here, and not that the analogy could be pushed much further than what I have already said.  And it goes without saying that there are all sorts of ways that the analogy might break down.  Nor am I claiming that there are any interesting practical implications of this analogy.  It just struck me that there is an analogy here, that’s all.  It is also important not to misunderstand the point of the analogy.  I am not claiming that the state is divine, or that there is necessarily any special connection between anarcho-capitalism and atheism, or any special connection between socialism and pantheism!  None of those things is true, and none of them follow from the analogy. 

Sandstad and Jansen on Aristotle’s Revenge

At the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, philosophers Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen review my book Aristotle’s Revenge .  From the review:
Feser’s book adds to a growing body of literature on neo-Aristotelian approaches in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.  However, Feser stands out from other analytic neo-Aristotelians with his in-depth knowledge and discussion of 20th and 21st century neo-Thomistic literature, and one can learn a lot from reading this book… The book is certainly written in an accessible style and language, which makes it readable also for undergraduate students, and even a popular audience could find much of the discussion valuable… Maybe professional philosophers will be interested in reading some of Feser’s polemics, for instance, against structural realism, reductionism, or non-presentist views of time. Finally, the book can serve as a reference point for metaphysicians and philosophers of science interested in learning about neo-Thomistic approaches in these fields… [I]t will certainly be exciting for scholars of Aristotle or Aquinas to see how these theories are used to elucidate the exciting discoveries of modern physics, biology and neuroscience.
On the book’s treatment of specific topics, they write:
Feser’s account is not a mere repristination of neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism but is also tailored to deal with current scientific ideas.  Some of Feser’s discussions are of particular interest.  For example, Feser’s mereological take on formal and material causation is highly original…
Another exciting topic… is that of potentiality.  One idea original to the new book is that kinds of natural substances can be ordered along a scale of potentiality, according to how many potentialities they have… Highest on the scale is prime matter, which has the potential to become anything.  Lower on the scale are fermions, even lower is water, and very low on the scale are, e.g., cows and other higher forms of life.
End quote.  Unlike a couple of other recent reviewers, Sandstad and Jansen have no difficulty focusing on what the book is actually about:
The book is not a historical scholarly work on Aristotle; it does not discuss different interpretations of Aristotle; and it only references a couple of works by Aristotle scholars.  Rather, the book is a systematic work within metaphysics, philosophy of science, and what Feser calls ‘philosophy of nature’ – which is basically a more traditional term for what is currently called ‘metaphysics of science’.
End quote.  Sandstad and Jansen raise some interesting points of criticism as well.  For example, commenting further on what they call the “scale of potentiality” that I say exists in nature, they write:
Feser seems not to distinguish sufficiently between potentialities, possibilities, and dispositions...  In cases like the fermions, what has many potentialities has very few dispositions, while for cows or humans, it is the other way around.  
End quote.  This is a good point, and the distinctions Sandstad and Jansen are drawing here are very important and essential to a thorough and precise hylemorphic analysis of various kinds of substance.  In fact I do develop these distinctions myself in Scholastic Metaphysics , in chapter 1 on act and potency.  I do not deploy them in the specific passages on which Sandstad and Jansen are commenting, because my intention there was not to provide an analysis of cows, fermions, etc. per se, but rather to make other points. 
For example, when I describe the scale of potentialities in matter in the context of discussing quantum mechanics (at pp. 312-15 of Aristotle’s Revenge), the point is to note how as we descend down the levels of physical reality, including those that feature in the micro-level description afforded by modern physics, we arrive at ever closer approximations to the notion of prime matter.  When I describe the scale of potentialities in matter in the context of discussing evolution (at p. 426), the point is to note how one of the aspects of a transformist account of the origins of species might be said to be implicit in hylemorphism. 
I don’t think my neglect of the distinctions Sandstad and Jansen call attention to affects the specific points I was making in passages like these.  All the same, they are right to note that a fuller account of various kinds of substance would have to bring those distinctions in.
To be sure, they continue their criticism as follows:
This also points to a limitation of Feser’s idea of virtual existence: Saying that it is possible for a fermion to be part of a cow is not the same as saying that the fermion has a disposition to be part of a cow.  There is a further problem.  On the one hand, all ‘higher’ forms of being are already ‘virtually’ contained in prime matter – which means that there are powers in prime matter that allow for the generation of the other forms of being… On the other hand, Feser insists that substances (like fermions, copper or cats) bring with them new and irreducible powers.  It is not obvious how he can resolve this tension.
End quote.  I’m not certain that I see what the first problem is that Sandstad and Jansen are trying to call attention to here, but if I do understand them correctly, it seems to me that once again they may be ignoring the specific intentions I had in the passages on which they are commenting. 
For example, when I say that the parts of a true substance are within it virtually (such as a fermion being virtually within an ordinary physical object), what I am trying to do is to explain ideas like the difference between substantial form and accidental form (where the parts of a thing which has only an accidental form are in it actually rather than merely virtually).  I am not, in that context, offering a complete analysis of the active and passive potencies of fermions and the like in general, or of the ways that what is true of them in one context (e.g. as constituents of a cow) might not be true of them in another (e.g. outside a cow).  It is perfectly true that such an analysis is important, but it just isn’t what I am concerned with in the specific passages in question.  An account might be incomplete without being incorrect(as I am sure Sandstad and Jansen would agree).
Similarly, there is no conflict between the claim that various kinds of physical substance are contained potentially within prime matter, and the claim that higher forms of physical substance have powers that the lower forms lack.  For we have to keep in mind the complexity that a complete account of the efficient causes of a thing has on the hylemorphic story.  For a certain kind of physical substance to come into being, you need not only the presence of matter having the appropriate potencies, but also the presence of an efficient cause able to actualize those potencies.  For example, a rag soaked in gasoline has the potential to catch fire, but a momentary gentle cool breeze passing over the rag won’t actualize that potential.  You need another kind of efficient cause to do that.
In the same way, though there is a sense in which both copper and cats are present potentially in prime matter, different kinds of efficient cause are necessary in order to actualize those potentials.  This is precisely because copper and cats have different causal powers, and those causal powers are due in part to the efficient causes of these things, and not just to their material causes.  Now, in the specific passages that I think Sandstad and Jansen might have in mind here (e.g. the one at p. 426), what I am doing is, again, simply noting how part of a transformist story of the origin of species (though not the whole of such a story) lies in the hylemorphic notion of matter and the different potencies that different kinds of matter have.  But I am not claiming that an appeal to the wide range of potencies present in prime matter is sufficient for a transformist story.  It is not.  (I do say more about what the efficient-causal side of the story would have to look like, just a little later on in the book at pp. 428-32.)
A further objection raised by Sandstad and Jansen is the following:
Another problem is that Feser often confuses the metaphysical and the epistemological aspects of science.  For instance, the Aristotelian doctrines are often argued to be indispensable because the phenomena otherwise would be unintelligible… Similarly, the principle of sufficient reason is about intelligibility, rather than anything metaphysical.
End quote.  Here I would certainly plead not guilty.  For one thing, I simply reject Sandstad’s and Jansen’s assertion that the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) has no metaphysical significance.  Indeed, PSR plays such a central role in rationalist and Neo-Scholastic metaphysics that it is surprising that Sandstad and Jansen would make this assertion so flatly, without at least acknowledging that their opponents are bound to regard it as tendentious or even question-begging.
Recall that in the view of Thomists and other Scholastics, being and truth are both transcendentals, and thus convertible.  Truth is just being considered as intelligible, and given the convertibility of the transcendentals we can infer that anything that has being must accordingly be intelligible – in which case PSR has metaphysical significance.  It tells us the way reality is, not just how we have to think about it.  (For further discussion, see my treatment of PSR at pp. 137-46 of Scholastic Metaphysics.) 
Offering examples of my alleged conflation of metaphysics and epistemology, Sandstad and Jansen write:
[I]n his discussion of reduction in chemistry, Feser argues that the identification of the lower levels presupposes a prior grasp of the higher levels... Further, Feser accepts Locke’s point that “real essence, you might say, ‘piggybacks’ on nominal essence”… But, this dependence seems to be merely epistemological, namely to know the real essence of a thing one must first know its nominal essence.
End quote.  But in fact, the points I am making in these passages are by no means merely epistemological.  When critics of reductionism in chemistry note that the micro-level phenomena the reductionist focuses on are unintelligible apart from the macro-level description, the point is that the micro-level phenomena simply wouldn’t exist in the specific way they do apart from the macro-level facts.  It isn’t merely the epistemological point that we wouldn’t know about the former apart from the latter.  It is a deeper, metaphysical point to the effect that the former wouldn’t objectively be there in the first place apart from the latter.  Indeed, it is this deeper, metaphysical fact that explains the epistemological situation. 
Similarly, the point about Locke is that unless there really were something objectively out there that corresponded to the nominal essence (of gold, say), there just wouldn’t objectively be a real essence (the chemical facts about gold) of the kind that we in fact find to be correlated with that nominal essence.
All the same, the relationship between the metaphysical and epistemological considerations here is an important issue, and perhaps one that I should have addressed more thoroughly so as to forestall objections like the one Sandstad and Jansen raise.
Though it is not clear that it is meant as a criticism, Sandstad and Jansen also write:
[W]hile Feser occasionally criticises theories in the current literature (such as Ladyman’s ontic structural realism), he more often engages with older views, such as the early moderns, or logical positivism, or Russell and Quine; or literature from the 80s and 90s.
As a result, it is not easy to identify the intended audience. 
End quote.  Now, I don’t know why it would be mysterious who my intended audience is, because I think that should be clear not only from the content of the book, but from the preface and indeed the back cover copy.  The book is about the relationship between modern science and the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in metaphysics, and it interacts with the literature in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science that elucidates that relationship.  Its intended audience, then, includes anyone who might be interested in this topic, such as analytic philosophers who are interested in the current neo-Aristotelian revival in metaphysics, Thomists who are curious about what is going on in analytic philosophy, or people working in ethics or philosophy of religion curious about how the metaphysical assumptions underlying ideas like traditional natural law theory or Scholastic natural theology might be defended in light of modern science.
I’m also not clear why it is odd that I would treat the “older views” referred to by Sandstad and Jansen.  For example, to understand the dispute between the Aristotelian and mechanistic conceptions of nature, you have to know something about the early modern origins of that dispute.  To understand why it is of great importance whether special relativity presupposes verificationism, you have to know something about the many grave problems raised against verificationism by critics of logical positivism.  To understand the nature and implications of epistemic structural realism, you need to know something about Russell’s version of that view and the debate it engendered.  And so on.  Everything I put into the book is meant to play some role in furthering its overall project.  Whether some of these issues and ideas are “older” or not much discussed by contemporary writers seems to me irrelevant.  Indeed, part of my point is that they should be more discussed.
But I don’t want to make more of this issue than Sandstad and Jansen themselves do.  And I thank them for their kind words about the book and for their thoughtful and stimulating criticisms.

Discussion with Graham Oppy

Earlier today on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Capturing Christianity program, I had a very pleasant and fruitful live exchange with Graham Oppy.  You can watch it on YouTube.  This is the second exchange Oppy and I have had on the show.  The first was last July, and you can still watch that on YouTube as well.  In that earlier exchange we discussed my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  The book comes up in the latest exchange as well, as does Oppy’s Religious Studies article “On stage one of Feser’s ‘Aristotelian proof.’”

Review of Kerr

My review of Gaven Kerr’s excellent book Aquinas's Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia appears in the current issue of The Thomist (Vol. 83, No. 2).

Preternatural theology

Natural theology is traditionally distinguished from revealed theology.  Natural theology is concerned with knowledge about God’s existence and nature that is available to us via the use of our natural cognitive faculties, such as by way of philosophical arguments.  It does not require an appeal to any special divine revelation, whether embodied in scripture, the teachings of a prophet backed by miracles, or what have you.  There might happen to be teachings in some source of special divine revelation that overlap with the deliverances of natural theology, but what makes something a matter of natural theology is that it can at least in principle be known apart from that. Revealed theology is concerned with knowledge about God that is available by way of some special divine revelation, distinct from anything we know by philosophical arguments or the like.  It has a source that is supernatural in the sense of being beyond what the natural order of things is capable of producing.  That is why a miracle (a suspension of the natural order) is, in Catholic theology, taken to be a necessary condition for our knowing that something really has been divinely revealed.  The content of revealed theology might include matters that are also knowable by way of natural theology, but typically it involves matters that could not in principle be known that way.
To illustrate, an argument from motion to the existence of a divine prime unmoved mover would be an example of natural theology.  You don’t need scripture or the guidance of a prophet or the Church in order to construct such an argument, which is why a pagan thinker like Aristotle could discover it.  By contrast, that there is more than one Person in God (the doctrine of the Trinity) is an example of revealed theology.  We can know it only because it has been specially revealed, where the genuineness of the revelation is backed by miracles (such as Christ’s resurrection).  The doctrine of divine simplicity would, according to Catholic theology, be an example of something that we know both from natural theology and revealed theology.  It is knowable by purely philosophical arguments, which is why it could be arrived at by pagan thinkers like Plotinus.  But it is also a dogma of the Church, in the sense of being a teaching that Catholicism holds to have been taught infallibly under divine guidance.
Now, though in the abstract this distinction is clear and neat, in practice matters of natural and revealed theology can have a great influence on each other, and the boundaries between them are not always sharp.  Sometimes this is because revealed theology influences natural theology.  How could that be?  Well, natural theology, like any other human enterprise, can involve error.  For example, Plotinus correctly reasons to the conclusion that God must be simple or non-composite, but wrongly concludes that this rules out attributing to him anything analogous to intellect.  Hence he locates intellect in a secondary divine hypostasis.  The Catholic theologian guided by divine revelation would judge this to be an error of philosophical reasoning, and argue that in fact it is a matter of sound natural theology that both simplicity andintellect must be attributed to God.
You might think this is a cheat, but it is not.  For one thing, the Catholic theologian would give philosophical arguments for the conclusion that there is intellect in God – that is to say, arguments that in no way appeal to divine revelation, but only to purely philosophical considerations.  For another thing, even some pagan philosophers (such as Aristotle) would agree on attributing both simplicity and intellect to God.  Hence, appeal to divine revelation is not necessaryfor attributing both simplicity and intellect to God, even if it might guide this or that individual thinker in arriving at that conclusion.  It is not like the doctrine of the Trinity, which could not be arrived at on purely philosophical grounds.
Having said that, natural theology can guide the way that revealed theology is articulated.  For example, though the doctrine of the Trinity could not have been known through purely philosophical arguments, once we have it in hand as a result of divine revelation, philosophical analysis can affect how we understand it.  For example, it might tell us that such-and-such a way of formulating the doctrine must be wrong, because the formulation would entail polytheism, and polytheism can be known to be false both as a matter of natural theology and as a matter of revealed theology.  Or we might find that certain philosophical concepts and terminology (substance, essence, etc.) are indispensable in articulating the doctrine.
Given that grace builds upon nature rather than destroying it, we should expect that matters of supernatural or revealed theology and matters of natural theology are in practice closely interwoven even in the sources of divine revelation, and that is indeed what we find.  For example, the law given through Moses contains many components that are matters of natural law (such as the commandments against murder, stealing, and adultery) in addition to components that are matters of temporarily operative special divine law (such as the sacrificial system).  Catholic doctrinal definitions taken to be protected from error by way of special divine assistance sometimes incorporate terminology having a philosophical provenance (such as “transubstantiation,” or the characterization of the soul as the “form” of the body).
Now, all of this is intended as stage-setting for an explanation of the concept expressed in the title of this post.  What do I mean by “preternatural theology”?  What is preternatural is what is beyond the power of some part of the natural order to produce, and yet is not strictly supernatural insofar as it can be caused by some other part of the created order and not only by God. 
A stock example would be the phenomena associated with demonic possession.  Take the strange abilities exhibited by the Linda Blair character (or rather, by the evil spirit possessing her) in the movie The Exorcist – suddenly speaking in languages previously unknown to her, levitating above her bed, causing objects in her room to move without touching them, etc.  There is an obvious sense in which these are not natural.  In the ordinary course of events, these things don’t happen and people don’t have the power to make them happen.  On the other hand, they are in various respects not strictly supernatural either.  For one thing, they are not miracles, insofar as God is not the one making them happen.  For another, they are not all of themselves naturally impossible (for example, there is nothing per se impossible about a person speaking Latin, even if the Linda Blair character shouldn’t have been able to do it).  And they are produced by a demon, who is part of the natural order broadly construed just as much as we are.  The created world includes the angels and demons, and thus what they do is not of itself supernatural in the sense of being beyond the natural order altogether. 
Now, the possibility and indeed reality of a purely natural theology is something commonly and traditionally affirmed in Catholic teaching.  Human beings completely outside the orbit of Christian revelation can and sometimes do have at least an imperfect knowledge of God.  And yet scripture tells us that “all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens” (Psalm 95:5, Douay-Rheims version), and that “the things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:20).  How can these claims be reconciled?
The way they can be reconciled is by seeing that just as truths of natural theology and truths of revealed theology are often intermixed, so too can truths of natural theology and errors of what we might call preternatural theology be intermixed. 
Hence, consider religions like Hinduism and Islam.  Hinduism features the worship of multiple deities, such as Vishnu and Shiva, and both the fact of this multiplicity and some of the details of the cults of these gods are simply incompatible with Christian doctrine.  At the same time, there is an impressive philosophical tradition within Hinduism that includes both arguments for the existence of a divine creator and the teaching that there is a single ultimate divine reality of which the multiple deities are only manifestations.  Islam claims to be based on a special divine revelation, and that too is a claim that no Christian can accept.  But Islam too has an impressive philosophical tradition that includes powerful argumentation concerning the existence and attributesof God.
Someone could consistently both hold on scriptural grounds that the distinctive theological claims of such religions have a diabolical preternatural provenance, and allow that the errors due to that provenance are nevertheless intermixed with truths of natural theology.  A message might seem to be from God while in fact being from the devil, and yet a person who wrongly accepts that message might also have some genuine knowledge about God by way of independent philosophical arguments.  A pseudo-revelation can be mixed in with truths of natural theology, just as a genuine revelation can be mixed in with truths of natural theology. 
There are two extreme views to be avoided, then.  One error (made by some traditionalists) would be to suppose that, because a certain non-Christian religion is based on a pseudo-revelation, its adherents cannot have any genuine knowledge of God of a natural theology sort.  The other error (made by some liberals) would be to suppose that, because adherents of a certain non-Christian religion evidently do have some genuine knowledge of God of a natural theology sort, that religion’s purportedly revealed doctrines must really be at worst merely confused expressions of this natural theology and therefore more or less innocent.  In other words, the propositions:
(1) Religion R contains some false theological beliefs of diabolical origin, and
(2) Religion R contains some true theological beliefs grounded in natural theology
are consistent with one another.  One cannot appeal to (1) as a reason to reject (2) and one cannot appeal to (2) as a reason to reject (1).  This is important to keep in mind when considering issues such as whether adherents of different religions are talking about the same thing when they use the word “God.”
Further reading:
Christians, Muslims, and the reference of “God”
Islam, Christianity, and liberalism again
Canine theology
Geach on worshipping the right God
Point of contact

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

I have never been remotely attracted to Marxism.  Its economic reductionism, vision of human life as a struggle of antagonistic classes, hostility to the family, and the hermeneutics of suspicion enshrined in its theory of ideology, are all repulsive and inhuman.  Other elements, such as the theory of surplus value and prophecies about the withering away of the state and the idyll of life under communism, are sheer tosh.  These flaws are grave and real whatever one thinks about capitalism.  Indeed, opposition to Marxism is in my view a prerequisite to being a serious critic of capitalism, for Marxism contains none of the good that is in capitalism, much of the bad that is in it, and adds grave evils of its own to boot. All the same, let’s give that old rascal Karl Marx his due, because that is the point of this series.  As with Nietzsche, Sartre, and Freud, Marx’s atheism exhibits far more gravitas than that of any of the New Atheists.  The reasons are twofold.  First, the brand of philosophical naturalism that underlies Marx’s atheism is less crude than that of Dawkins and Co.  Second, as with the other Old Atheists, you won’t find in Marx the chirpy naïveté about the consequences of naturalism and of abandoning religion that you see in the New Atheists.
Red Aristotelianism
Marx was, of course, a materialist, as are the New Atheists.  Now, materialism is often associated with a rejection of teleology.  This was the case with the ancient atomist form of materialism, which rejected explanations in terms of what Aristotelians call final causality, in favor of those appealing only to efficient causality.  It is true also of the materialism of New Atheists like Alex Rosenberg, who insists that teleology can play no role in genuinely scientific explanations. 
An interesting feature of Marx’s materialism is that he evidently took teleology to be precisely part of the explanatory toolkit of the materialist, as Allen Wood plausibly argues in his book on Marx.  (See especially pp. 104-11.)  It is sometimes assumed that the specific way this is so is that Marx took history to have communism as its inevitable culmination, but as Wood notes, the positing of a grand goal of that sort is not the fundamental way in which Marx makes use of the notion of teleology.  Naturally, as an atheist, he also did not have in mind divine directedness – nor direction by any human mind nor any other sort of mind, for that matter.  What he had in mind, fundamentally, is simply the idea that material systems reliably exhibit tendencies toward certain outcomes, and that identifying the outcome toward which a component of the system aims or for the sake of which it operates is a crucial part of explaining it.  For example, Marx deploys this mode of explanation when he claims that certain kinds of social relations exist within an economic system in order toallow it to make efficient use of its productive powers, or that moral and religious ideas prevail in a society in order to uphold its basic economic structure.
In other words, the notion of teleology Marx deploys is an essentially Aristotelian one, even if he applies it in ways Aristotelians would not necessarily agree with.  And as Wood points out, the basic soundness of this general mode of explanation does not stand or fall with the soundness of this or that particular application Marx makes of it.
Writers like Scott Meikle have also argued that a kind of Aristotelian essentialism underlies Marx’s social theory.  The consequence is that Marx understands human well-being in a way that is at least in very general terms Aristotelian.  As Wood writes, “the good life, for both Marx and Aristotle, consists chiefly in the actualization of one’s powers” (p. 37).  The difference – needless to say, not a small one – is that Marx’s conception of human nature and of human powers is far more narrowly economic than Aristotle’s, and the economics in question is, well, Marxist.
Though a materialist, then, Marx’s conception of the material world is not quite as desiccated as that of a Democritus or a Rosenberg, and thus affords more metaphysical common ground with the Aristotelian theist, and even with the Aristotelian natural law theorist – albeit they reach very different conclusions about morality.  But that brings us to the next point.
Marx contra moralism
One of the more preposterous features of New Atheist rhetoric, and of secularist rhetoric in general, is the shrill moralism with which it often condemns religious believers.  For in at least many cases, the metaphysical presuppositions of the one flinging the rhetoric undercut any grounds for moralism of any kind.
I am not appealing here to the idea that atheism can’t support moral judgments insofar as morality rests on arbitrary divine commands.  Morality doesn’t rest on arbitrary divine commands.  What I have in mind instead are other philosophical presuppositions of morality that at least many secularists reject.  For example, morality presupposes free will.  Some New Atheist types (such as Jerry Coyne) make a big show of the claim that free will is an illusion.  But no one who denies free will has any business pouring contempt on religious believers, or on anyone else, for their alleged moral and rational failings.  For if free will is an illusion, they can’t help what they do, any more than the rain can help falling.
Or consider evolutionary theories of knowledge, such as Dawkins’ “meme” theory, on which concepts and beliefs are characterized as competing by way of an analogue of natural selection.  Ideas spread insofar as some concepts and beliefs get themselves replicated and others die out, just as some organisms survive and reproduce and others fail to do so.  If this is all that cognition amounts to, then truth and falsity go out the window.  An idea might become widespread even though it is false or it might disappear even though it is true, and it is survival value rather than truth or rationality that determines what happens.  Indeed, even a belief’s appearanceof being more true or rational might itself be an illusion that persists because of its survival value.  Now, if this sort of view were true, there would be no point in condemning religious beliefs as false or irrational, or praising atheist beliefs as true and rational.  What matters is ability to replicate, and religious ideas – as New Atheists are always complaining – are very good at that.
I would also argue that morality is impossible without teleology of some kind, even if just the thin kind Marx is willing to countenance.  For, as Aquinas notes, the notion of the good is inextricably linked with the notion of an end.  Goodness is on analysis always a matter of realizing an end, and badness a matter of failing to realize it.  Hence if there is no teleology of any kind in the objective world, there can be no objective goodness and badness, and thus no objective morality.  In which case, while an atheist system of morality might be possible for an atheist who affirms teleology (as Marx does, and as Thomas Nagel at least toys with doing), no atheist who regards teleology as an illusion has any business engaging in moralism.  Some atheists realize this (Rosenberg, for example) but many do not.
Now, Marx is not guilty of this particular error, or at least not entirely.  For though, like anyone else, he often falls into criticizing others in terms that seem to imply moral disapproval, his official stance is to eschew moral categories when defending his characteristic positions.  Famously, his critique of capitalism is not a critique on grounds of justice, and he was dismissive of socialists who made their case on moral grounds. 
The irony is that, given his essentialism and teleology, he could, unlike other atheists, develop a kind of natural law approach to ethics and try to defend socialism that way.  But he does not do so, because of his economic reductionism.  For Marx, the cultural “superstructure” of law, morality, politics, religion, etc. necessarily reflects the economic “base” of a society.  For example, modern notions of property rights, of the duty to honor contracts, etc. reflect the needs of a capitalist economic order.  They are necessary to keep the motor running, as it were.  Similarly, the assumption that slavery was legitimate reflected the economic structure of Roman society, the assumption that serfdom was legitimate reflected the economic structure of feudal society, and so on.
Now, for Marx, there is nothing else for morality to bethan something like the rules of a society’s economic game.  There is no set of moral principles that transcends different possible economic systems and by reference to which they might be judged, any more than there is a set of meta-rules governing board games, by which Monopoly and Risk might be judged.  But that means that there is no way, from within an economic and social order, to criticize that order on moral grounds.  Criticizing capitalism on socialist moral grounds, but from a position within the capitalist economic order itself, is for Marx like playing Monopolywhile trying to justify certain moves by appealing to the rules of Risk.  It’s just muddleheaded.  Hence his rejection of attempts to critique capitalism from a moral point of view.  Indeed, he even goes so far as to deny that capitalism is unjust.  Injustice is not the problem with it, in his view.  To be sure, he thinks it is harmful in various ways, but he doesn’t think those harms can be objected to on moral grounds.  Rather, they are something like the monkey wrench in the motor of capitalism that is going to bust it apart from within and transform it into socialism.
For Marx, then, morality is an inherently conservativeinstitution, always reflecting the deepest assumptions of the established order of things.  To appeal to morality in critiquing an established order as a whole (rather than merely this or that part of it) is precisely to play by the rules of that order, and thereby to set oneself up for defeat.  It’s like appealing to the rules of Monopoly to justify condemning the entire game of Monopoly as illegitimate – something not just mistaken but incoherent.
Now, this would apply to any moral critique of religionas well, since that too is part of the superstructure that reflects the economic base.  Marx’s position would entail that a sweeping moral condemnation of religion is as incoherent as a moral criticism of capitalism.  When religious believers complain that atheist critics who appeal to morality are living on borrowed capital, I think Marx would have to sympathize.  He would have to regard that particular brand of atheistic criticism as no less naïve than the moralistic brands of socialism of which he is so dismissive.
Against bourgeois atheism
Of course, Marx famously characterizes religion as the opium of the people, but it is extremely superficial to think that he is here issuing a glib zinger, after the fashion of some pimply atheist teenager mouthing off on Reddit.  Let’s take a look at the context of the remark, in Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.  He writes:
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification.  It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.  To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.  The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
End quote.  Now, notice that while Marx certainly regards religion as a tissue of falsehoods, there is no contempt here whatsoever for the religious believer.  Quite the opposite.  To see how and why, let’s note a few things about Marx’s analysis and its implications.
First, Marx is here giving a teleological explanation of religion.  He is saying that it serves a certain function in the economic order of a society, namely that of making that order intelligible to the oppressed members of that society in a way that reconciles them to it and affords them an illusory kind of happiness despite their oppression. It is part of the superstructure that is supported by, but also in turn reinforces, the base.
Second, there can be no question, then, of peeling away religion and understanding it in isolation from the larger order of which it is a part, or of discarding it while keeping the rest of that order intact – any more, say, than one could understand a heart in isolation from the whole organism, or chuck it out while keeping the rest of the organism alive.  Religion and its larger social context, especially its economic context, are a package deal.  Its disappearance presupposes the disappearance of that entire larger context.
Third, religion is for that reason not fundamentally a matter of some misguided or dishonest leaders taking advantage of ignorant masses, and its remedy is not to be found in exposing those leaders or in intellectuals correcting their errors.  It goes much deeper than that, into the very roots of the social order, so that the leaders and the intellectual class are just as much shaped by it as the masses. 
Fourth, while Marx’s “opium” remark is certainly intended to compare religion to a drug-induced stupor, the accent is clearly not on the stupor itself but rather on the conditions that make the stupor attractive and indeed necessary – which, Marx emphasizes, involves “real suffering.”  Imagine a man whose leg is being amputated and whose agony is soothed only by the use of literal opium.  Suppose you take the opium from him, bring him out of the euphoria he was feeling, and convince him that whatever experiences he was having were delusional – while all this time the doctors continued sawing on his leg.  Given Marx’s analysis, this is analogous to what undermining religion while keeping the rest of the existing social order in place would involve.  And telling religious people what fools they are is comparable to lecturing the man whose leg is being sawed off about what a fool he is for taking opium and believing the delusions it afforded him.
The difference between Marx and your typical New Atheist should be obvious.  For the New Atheist, religion is the cause of our unhappiness, and getting rid of it the key to securing happiness.  For Marx, religion is a palliativefor our unhappiness, unhappiness which can only be increased if religion is taken away while the sources of our unhappiness remain.  For the New Atheist, religious believers are objects of scorn and condemnation.  For Marx, they are objects of pity and concern.  For the New Atheist, eliminating religion is basically a matter of educating people (by means of books, etc.) about an intellectual error they are making.  For Marx, it is a matter of nothing less momentous than an entire social order giving way and being replaced by something so radically different and historically unprecedented that we cannot now even imagine it, where this utopian transformation can ultimately be secured only by impersonal economic processes rather than propagandistic efforts on the part of individuals.
In short, given Marx’s analysis, the New Atheist keen on destroying the convictions of ordinary religious believers is, to the extent he succeeds, cruel – but also wasting his time insofar as he is not going to succeed in any large-scale way so long as the overall existing social order persists.  For a serious Marxist, it can only add insult to injury that Dawkins and Co. peddle their wares like any capitalist, at $15.95 a pop, thereby getting rich while the condition of the masses remains unchanged.  And affluent secularists’ broadcasting banalities like “There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” is essentially an update of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake.”
As Denys Turner remarks in his essay on Marx and religion in The Cambridge Companion to Marx , Marx “appeared to believe that simple atheism – atheism that rests on the straightforward negation and reversal of what theism claims – is as ideological as the theism it all too simply rejects” (p. 336).  Just as the communism of the future will in Marx’s view simply move beyond the moral categories in terms of which human beings now evaluate their actions, so too will it move beyond the dispute between religious believers and their critics.  Turner concludes: “Marx’s atheism is not anti- but posttheistic.  It is therefore postatheistic” (p. 337).
Lessons for conservatives
That is all well and good if you buy Marxism.  But is there anything even us devoutly non-Marxist types might learn from Marx, other than the interesting implications of his false premises?
Not a whole lot, in my view.  As with so many modern thinkers, what’s true in Marx (such as his Aristotelianism) isn’t new, and what’s new (such as the specific application he makes of Aristotelian ideas) isn’t true.  And much of it isn’t just untrue, it’s awful.  In my opinion, there’s too much of Marx’s distinctive errors lurking behind most of his insights to make them salvageable.  For example, it seems to me that you have to buy too much into his economic reductionism (and bad Marxist economics to boot) to find much of value in, say, his account of exploitation and alienation under capitalism.  That’s not to say that there isn’t any such thing as exploitation and alienation under capitalism, but only that if there is, Marx’s analysis isn’t too helpful in identifying it.  I suspect that because Marx uses words like “alienation” and “exploitation,” and it seems plausible that capitalism can be alienating and exploitative in some sense, people wrongly suppose that there must be real insights on these topics lurking in Marx.  (For discussion of some senses in which capitalism can indeed be said to have alienating and exploitative features, see my Claremont Review of Books essay “Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism.”)
However, that is not to say that there is nothing at all of interest in Marx.  Roger Scruton, in The Meaning of Conservatism , plausibly suggests that Marx was onto something in his analysis of “commodity fetishism.”  Scruton distinguishes the consumption of property from its possession, where the former involves treating property as a mere means, while the latter involves treating it as an end in itself.  Think of the way that people can be attached to an heirloom, to a work of art, or to a piece of land or a home, and desire to preserve it and pass it down as a heritage for their children – whether this is something grand like an aristocratic estate (think of Lord Grantham’s attitude to Downton Abbey), or a more humble abode of the sort most of us have to settle for.  This sort of example illustrates what Scruton means by the possession of property, the enjoyment of it for its own sake.  By contrast, property is merely consumed when it is used for the sake of something else, usually only temporarily.  Pencils and paperclips, candy bars and soft drinks, and stocks that are bought and then sold as soon as sufficient profit can be drawn from them, would be examples.
Both consumption and possession are innocent in themselves, but the essence and legitimacy of property as an institution, Scruton argues, is to be found primarily in possession.  For we cannot flourish as the embodied creatures we are without the stable extension of ourselves constituted by home and other possessions.  The Marxist attack on property presupposes a conception of property primarily in terms of consumption – property thought of essentially as a commodity – but property-as-mere-commodity is not property as such, but rather a corrupt or degenerate form of the institution of property. 
However, Scruton thinks Marx is right to hold that under capitalismproperty tends to be conceived of primarily in terms of consumption or commodity rather than in terms of possession.  Indeed, the individualism and consumerism of capitalist societies tend to lead to treating everything as a commodity, and thus as a means rather than an end in itself.  Think of the way people talk of their “brand,” of “selling themselves,” of the re-description of prostitution and pornography as “sex work,” of the home as something to “flip” for a profit rather than to possess and pass on, of “starter marriages” no less than “starter homes,” and on and on in a culture of increasingly ephemeral attachments rather than rootedness.  The very idea of intrinsic value tends to dissolve into the cash nexus.  Mass production reinforces this tendency, since it facilitates our thinking of things as essentially indistinguishable, disposable, and replaceable.
Marx didn’t think this wholly bad, because it contributes to the erosion of traditional morals and institutions and thereby helps prepare the way for the socialism he welcomed.  But precisely for these reasons, no conservative can approve of it.  That doesn’t entail that a conservative must oppose capitalism full stop, and Scruton doesn’t.  But neither should any conservative regard capitalism as an unmixed blessing, nor acquiesce to the libertarian tendency to make of the market a model for political and social relations in general.
“Capitalism,” after all, is a sweeping term that is used to label all sorts of phenomena, some good and some bad.  Too many of capitalism’s critics foolishly try to attack it at its strongest point.  They follow Marx in the by now manifestly falsified claim that capitalism leads to greater material impoverishment.  In fact capitalism has greatly increased general material prosperity.  The real problem – and it is a much more serious problem than many modern American conservatives want to acknowledge – is that it tends to do so at the cost of impoverishing us spiritually. 

Aquinas 101

The Thomistic Institute has added to the great work it is already doing by introducing Aquinas 101, “a series of free video courses… that help you to engage life’s most urgent philosophical and theological questions with the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas.”  Here are four brief and lucid examples: Fr. Dominic Legge on the problem of evil, Fr. James Brent on the principle of non-contradiction, Fr. Thomas Joseph White on the abiding relevance of Aquinas, and Fr. Gregory Maria Pine on how to read the Summa Theologiae.  Check them out and enroll today!