Edward Feser's Blog, page 86

Progressive dematerialization

In the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, it is the intellect, rather than sentience, that marks the divide between the corporeal and the incorporeal.  Hence A-T arguments against materialist theories of the mind tend to focus on conceptual thought rather than qualia (i.e. the subjective or “first-person” features of a conscious experience, such as the way red looks or the way pain feels) as that aspect of the mind which cannot in principle be reduced to brain activity or the like.  Yet Thomistic writers also often speak even of perceptual experience (and not just of abstract thought) as involving an immaterial element.  And they need not deny that qualia-oriented arguments like the “zombie argument,” Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” Thomas Nagel’s “bat argument,” etc. draw blood against materialism.  So what exactly is going on here?Here as in other areas of philosophy, misunderstanding arises because contemporary readers are usually unaware that classical (Aristotelian/Neo-Platonic/Scholastic) philosophers and modern (post-Cartesian) philosophers carve up the conceptual territory in radically different ways, and thus often don’t use key terms in the same sense.  In this case, terms like “matter” and “material” have a very different force when writers like Aristotle and Aquinas use them than they have when Descartes, Hobbes, or your average contemporary academic philosopher uses them.  There are at least three ways in which this is true. 

The matter of the moderns
First, and as I have noted many times, the tendency in post-Cartesian philosophy and natural science is to conceive of matter in exclusively quantitative terms and to regard whatever smacks as irreducibly qualitative as a mere projection of the mind.  This is the origin of “the qualia problem” for materialism.  The reason materialists cannot solve the problem is that since they have defined matter in such a way as to exclude the qualitative from it, qualia -- which are essentially qualitative, as the name implies -- are necessarly going to count as immaterial.  Materialist “explanations” of qualia thus invariably either change the subject or implicitly deny the existence of what they are supposed to be explaining.  (The basic point goes back to Cudworth and Malebranche and is the core of Nagel’s critique of physicalist accounts of consciousness.)
This is a point I‘ve developed at length many times (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, and here) and I won’t belabor it here.  Suffice it to say that for the A-T philosopher, while this is a strike against materialism it isn’t really an argument for dualism unless one accepts the purely quantitative conception of matter in question -- as Cartesians do but A-T does not.  From an A-T point of view, the modern “mathematicized” conception of matter is essentially incomplete.  It’s true as far as it goes, but it’s not the whole truth.  So, the failure of some feature to be analyzable in material terms as materialists and Cartesians understand “material” does not entail that it is not material full stop.  It might still count as material on some more robust conception of matter.  And there is a sense in which, for A-T, qualia are indeed material, at least if we use “material” as more or less synonymous with “corporeal.”  For A-T philosophers regard qualia as entirely dependent on physiology.  Our having the qualia associated with seeing a red object, for example, is entirely dependent on bodily organs like the retina, the optic nerve, the relevant processing centers in the brain, and so forth.
This brings us to the second way in which A-T philosophers carve up the conceptual territory in ways contrary to the assumptions typically made by modern philosophers.  For some modern dualists are bound to object: How, on any conception of matter, could qualia be entirely dependent on such bodily organs?  Don’t attempts to analyze qualia in terms of (say) neuronal firing patterns fail whether or not we think of matter as exhaustively quantitative?  The trouble with such objections, though, is that they think of materiality or corporeality in essentially reductionist terms.  They suppose that to say that such-and-such a feature is corporeal entails saying that it is reducible to some lower-level feature of the body.  Hence when they hear the A-T philosopher say that qualia are corporeal and dependent on bodily organs like the brain, they suppose that the A-T philosopher is claiming (as a materialist might) that an experience of red is “nothing but” the firing of such-and-such neurons, that an experience of pain is “nothing but” the firing of some other group of neurons, etc.
But that is simply a fundamental misunderstanding of the A-T position.  The A-T philosopher entirely rejects the reductionist assumption that lower-level features of a system are somehow “more real” than the higher-level features, or in any other way metaphysically privileged.  Hence he rejects the idea that to affirm that some feature of the world is both real and material is to suppose that it is exhaustively analyzable into, or entirely reducible to or emergent from, some collection of lower-level material features.  (The words “exhaustively” and “entirely” are crucial here.  Naturally, the A-T philosopher does not deny that a system can be analyzed into its parts and that this has explanatory value.  The point is that this is only part of the story.  The parts in turn cannot properly be understood except in relation to the whole, at least in a true substance as opposed to an artifact.  See chapter 3 of Scholastic Metaphysics for detailed treatment of this issue, including responses to the usual objections.)
Within the material world, A-T philosophers traditionally hold that there are at least four irreducible kinds of substance: inorganic substances; merely vegetative organic substances (in the technical Aristotelian sense of “vegetative”); sensory or animal substances; and rational animals or human beings.  Only in the case of the last does the A-T position hold that there is a strictly immaterial or incorporeal aspect.  Non-human animal life is irreducible to vegetative life and vegetative life is irreducible to the inorganic, yet all are still entirely material.  Again, materiality or corporeality simply has nothing essentially to do with reducibility.
So, in order to understand what A-T philosophers mean by “matter” and “material,” the reader must be careful not to read into their statements the exclusively quantitative construal of “matter” or the reductionist construal of “material” that are at least implicit in the usage of the average modern philosopher.  How, then, does the A-T philosopher understand “matter” and “material”?
Degrees of immateriality
This brings us to the third point, which is that from the A-T point of view, matter is to be understood primarily in contrast to form, where the matter/form distinction is a special case of the more general distinction between potentiality and actuality.  Consider a triangle drawn on a whiteboard with a dry-erase marker.  It is a composite of a certain form, triangularity, and a certain kind of matter, ink.  (Metaphysically, things are more complicated than that, since the triangle is an artifact and thus triangularity is an accidental form modifying something already having a substantial form; and the ink, accordingly, is a kind of secondary matter, rather than the prime matter that substantial forms inform.  But we can ignore all that for present purposes.  Again, see Scholastic Metaphysicsfor the full story.)
The ink qua ink is potentially a triangle, or a circle, or a square, or some other figure.  The form triangularitymakes it actually one of these rather than the others.  The form triangularityis of itself universal and one.  That is to say, it is the same one form -- triangularity -- that is instantiated in this triangle, in other triangles drawn on the whiteboard, in triangles drawn in geometry textbooks or in sand at the beach, etc.  By contrast, the specific bit of ink that has taken on that form on the whiteboard is particular, and makes of the triangle a mere particular instance of triangularity among multiple particular instances.  That it is made of this particular bit of ink also makes the triangle changeableand imperfect.  The triangle can be damaged or erased altogether, and even when it exists it does not instantiate triangularity perfectly, insofar as the sides of any material triangle are never perfectly straight, etc.  By contrast, triangularity as such is perfect triangularity, and indeed is the standard by reference to which particular instances of triangularity are judged more or less perfect or imperfect.  Triangularity as such is also permanent.  Individual triangles change and are generated and corrupted, but triangularity as such is timeless and unchanging. 
So, form qua form corresponds in A-T metaphysics to actuality, universality, unity, permanence, and perfection.  Matter qua matter corresponds to potentiality, particularity, multiplicity, changeability, and imperfection.  Now, these characteristics are susceptible of degrees, so that there is a sense in which materiality and immateriality can come in degrees.  The more something exhibits potentiality, particularity, multiplicity, changeability, and/or imperfection, the more matter-like it is.  The more something exhibits actuality, universality, unity, permanence, and/or perfection, the more immaterial it is.  It is in light of this that we can understand how, though A-T regards perceptual experience (and the qualia associated with it) as corporeal, there is nevertheless a sensein which it has an immaterial aspect.
For A-T epistemology, knowledge or cognition involves a kind of union of the knower and the thing known insofar as the former comes, in a sense, to possess the form of the latter.  Now, knowledge or cognition can be either of a sensory sort or of an intellectual sort.  The first sort we share with other animals; the second is the sort we have and other animals do not.  It is the second, intellectual sort of cognition that is in the strict sense immaterial and is thus incorporeal.  But sensory cognition, though corporeal, is immaterial in a loose sense insofar as there is a way in which it involves having the form of the thing known without having its matter.
Consider the perceptual representation of an apple that you form when you look at it.  The color, part of the shape, and the appearance of the texture of the apple are captured in the visual experience, whereas the interior of the apple, its weight, its solidity, and other characteristics are not captured.  By capturing the former without the latter, the visual experience involves a kind “dematerialization,” as it were.  It “pulls” the forms redness, roundness, etc. from the apple so that they exist as qualia of conscious experience rather than in the apple itself, while “leaving behind” the rest of the apple.  But this is not a strict dematerialization, of course, any more than is the “dematerialization” accomplished by a photorealistic still life painting of the apple (which also captures the color, shape, etc. without capturing the interior of the apple, its weight and solidity, etc.).  For just as the painting is itself embodied in canvas and paint, which are material, so too is the perceptual experience embodied in physiological activity, which is also material. 
Now, the loose sort of “dematerialization” accomplished by physiological activity can be more thoroughgoing than the sort involved in a perceptual experience.  The visual experience of the apple is an experience of this particular apple, capturing its particular color, shape, etc.  But a mental image of an apple might resemble many apples -- say, by virtue of more vaguely capturing the color or shape, or by leaving out features such as idiosyncratic indentations or areas of discoloration.  And other representations encoded physiologically (such as those posited by cognitive scientists) might be even further than a vague visual image is from physically resembling any particular thing, as a blueprint or wiring diagram is very far from resembling any actual building or computer.  This distance from the kind of close resemblance between a representation and particular thing represented that is involved in a perceptual experience gives mental images and more abstract neural representational states a kind of generality which can superficially resemble the universality of concepts.  This distance from the particular things thus makes these representations “immaterial” in a loose sense.
Still, strictly speaking, they are material.  And neither neural representations nor anything else material can in principle have the true universality of reference that concepts have, nor the determinate or unambiguous content that concepts can have.  For material representations will of their nature have particularizing features that prevent them from capturing the universality of a concept, and will be systematically indeterminate or ambiguous between alternative possible semantic properties.  Hence, just as you will never get a true circle from a polygon no matter how many sides you add to it, you will never get a true concept from a material representation, no matter how many particularizing features are removed from it, and no matter how many other representations you add to it in a system of material representations in order to narrow down the range of possible semantic contents.  In both cases, you can at best only get a simulation.  To be sure, the simulation might be very impressive.  A polygon with sufficiently many sides can fool the eye and appear to be a circle.  A sufficiently powerful computer program might appear to be intelligent.  But if you examine any polygon carefully enough its non-circularity is bound to become evident, and if you examine the outputs of any computer carefully enough its “sphexishness”is bound to become evident.
The thesis that concepts are in principle irreducible to material representations is something I’ve defended at length elsewhere, most systematically and in greatest depth in my ACPQ article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”  (Some relevant blog posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.)  Anyway, arguing for the immateriality of thought is not the point of the present post.  The point is to note that on the A-T view, whereas sensation and imagination are immaterial in a loose sense, conceptual thought is immaterial in a strict sense. 
Even then there is the qualification to be made that the human intellect must constantly “turn to the phantasms,” as Aquinas puts it -- that is, it depends on sensation for the raw materials from which it abstracts concepts, and it makes use of mental imagery even when entertaining the most abstract concepts.  For instance, the concept triangularitycannot be identified with any mental image of a triangle nor with the word “triangle,” but we tend to form images either of the geometrical figure or of the word whenever we entertain the concept.  (Previous posts with some relevant discussion can be found here, here, here, and here.)  As rational animals we are composites of the corporeal and incorporeal and are thus not entirely divorced from matter even in our intellectual activity.  Only an essentially incorporeal intellectual substance -- an angel, or God -- would be that.
Hence we find in A-T writers a distinction between three degrees of immateriality:
1. The quasi-immateriality or “immateriality” in a loose sense of sensations, mental images, and other neural representations.  These we share with the lower animals.  The “immateriality” is loose because these are all corporeal or intrinsically dependent on matter. 
2. The strict immateriality of true concepts.  These we do not share with the lower animals.  But, though not intrinsically dependent on matter, our intellectual or conceptual activity is extrinsically dependent on matter insofar as we require sensation and mental imagery -- and thus sense organs and brain activity -- as a source of information and as an accompaniment to the act of thinking.
3. The absolute independence of matter of angelic intellects and the divine intellect, which do not require bodily organs even extrinsically.

Interview with the metaphysician

Recently I was interviewed by two different websites about Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction .  Both interviews have now been posted.  The first interview is at Thomistica.net, where the interviewer was Joe Trabbic.  The second interview is at Strange Notions, where the interviewer was Brandon Vogt.  The websites’ respective audiences are very different, as were the questions, so there isn’t any significant overlap between the two interviews.

Augustine on the immateriality of the mind

In Book 10, Chapter 10 of On the Trinity, St. Augustine argues for the immateriality of the mind.  You can find an older translation of the work online, but I’ll quote the passages I want to discuss from the McKenna translation as edited by Gareth Matthews.  Here they are:
[E]very mind knows and is certain concerning itself.  For men have doubted whether the power to live, to remember, to understand, to will, to think, to know, and to judge is due to air, to fire, or to the brain, or to the blood, or to atoms… or whether the combining or the orderly arrangement of the flesh is capable of producing these effects; one has tried to maintain this opinion, another that opinion.
On the other hand who would doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges?  For even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wishes to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to consent rashly.  Whoever then doubts about anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, he would be unable to doubt about anything at all…[T]he mind knows itself, even when it seeks itself, as we have already shown.  But we can in no way rightly say that anything is known while its substance [or: essence] is unknown.  Wherefore, since the mind knows itself, it knows its own substance [or: essence].  But it is certain about itself, as is clearly shown from what we have already said.  But it is by no means certain whether it is air, or fire, or a body, or anything of a body.  It is, therefore, none of these things…

For the mind thinks of fire in the same way as it thinks of air or any other bodily thing of which it thinks.  But it can in no way happen that it should think of that which itself is, in the same way as it thinks of that which it itself is not.  For all these, whether fire, or air, or this or that body, or that part or it thinks of by means of an imaginary phantasy, nor is it said to be all of these, but one or the other of them.  But if it were any one of them, it would think of this one in a different manner from the rest.  That is to say, it would not think of it by means of an imaginary phantasy, as absent things or something of the same kind are thought of which have been touched by the sense of the body, but it would think of it by a kind of inward presence not feigned but real -- for there is nothing more present to it than itself; just as it thinks that it lives, and remembers, and understands, and wills.  And if it adds nothing from these thoughts to itself, so as to regard itself as something of the kind, then whatever still remains to it of itself, that alone is itself.  (pp. 55-57)
Useful discussions of these passages can be found in chapter 6 of Matthews’ book Augustine,and, more recently, in Bruno Niederbacher’s essay “The human soul: Augustine’s case for soul-body dualism” in the considerably revised 2014 second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Augustine.  (The bracketed alternative translation of Augustine’s word for “substance” as “essence” is not my addition, by the way, but is in the McKenna/Matthews translation.  Matthews and Niederbacher both regard this translation of substantia as equally plausible or even more plausible in this particular context.)
In the first two paragraphs quoted we have a version of what is sometimes called “the Augustinian cogito,” insofar as Augustine prefigures (here and in Book XI, Chapter 26 of The City of God) Descartes’ famous Cogito, ergo sum.  You cannot coherently doubt that you live, remember, understand, will, think, know, and judge, since, Augustine argues, the very act of doubting that one does these things itself involvesdoing them. 
Of course, you could doubt that you “live” in the sense of having a metabolism, etc., insofar as you can wonder (as Descartes did) whether you are really a spirit divorced from any body and are merely hallucinating that you have one.  But what Augustine means here is that even in that case you couldn’t coherently doubt that you “live” in the sense of existing as a disembodied, thinking thing.
Augustine also notes that even if one is committed to some version of materialism according to which our mental powers are to be attributed to the brain, to atoms, to some particular kind of arrangement of the flesh, or what have you, one could still at least coherently doubtthat this was the case in a way one cannot coherently doubt that one thinks, wills, etc.  In the remaining passages, Augustine develops this contrast in a manner intended to show that the mind cannot be material in these ways or any other way.  Of course, this approach to arguing for the mind’s immateriality also sounds very proto-Cartesian, though I think Augustine’s arguments here are not exactly the same as any of Descartes’.
Matthews plausibly suggests that, whether Augustine intended it or not, there are two distinct arguments to be found in the last two paragraphs quoted above.  Let’s consider them in order.  In the third paragraph the argument seems to me plausibly reconstructed in the following way (which, I should note, is not necessarily the way Matthews or Niederbacher would reconstruct it):
1. The mind knows itself with certainty.
2. But a thing is known only when its essence is known.
3. So the mind knows its own essence with certainty. 
4. But the mind is not certain that it is the brain, or atoms, or an arrangement of flesh, or anything else that is material.
5. So it is not part of the essence of the mind to be the brain, or atoms, or an arrangement of flesh, or anything else that is material.
What should we think of this argument?  I’m not certain, though some objections that might at first glance seem strong are not in fact decisive.  Matthews notes that functionalists claim that the mind could be realized in the brain but also in other material systems, such as a sufficiently complex computer.  Hence “a mind might know its own essence without knowing what matter it is realized in” (Matthews, Augustine, p. 46).  The point, I gather, is that while the mind can doubt that it is realized in this particular kind of matter or that kind, this may merely reflect the fact that it is realizable in multiple sorts of matter, and does not entail that it could exist apart from any matter at all. 
However, even apart from the deficiencies of functionalist theories of mind, this does not seem to me to be a good objection (though in fairness to Matthews I should emphasize that he considers this as an objection which might be raised against his own reconstruction of the argument, which is not exactly the same as mine).  Augustine’s point is not that there is something special about the particular examples he cites -- the brain, atoms, configurations of flesh, etc. -- that makes it possible for the mind to doubt that it is any of them.  His point is precisely that what is true of them is going to be true of anything material.  The mind, he could point out in response to our imagined functionalist, can doubt that it needs to be “realized” in anything material in the first place.  Even the functionalist would agree that it is at least possible coherently to doubt this, and that is all Augustine needs for the argument to go through (assuming it is otherwise unproblematic).
A functionalist may respond that it is also possible to doubt that the mind is realized in any postulated immaterial substrate.  But as I have pointed out when addressing parallel objections to Cartesian dualism (hereand here), this sort of objection just completely misses the dualist’s point.  In Descartes’ case, he is not (contrary to the stock caricature) postulating a ghostly kind of stuff (“ectoplasm” or whatever) in which thought merely contingently inheres, so that one might coherently suppose it possible in principle for the one to exist apart from the other.  For Descartes, the res cogitans is not merely a substrate which underlies thought, but just is thought.  There is no conceptual space between them by which the functionalist might pry them apart.  Augustine, it seems, is saying something similar.  In knowing with certainty that it thinks, wills, understands, etc., the mind knows its essence, not merely activity contingently related to that essence which might in principle exist apart from it.
Matthews also notes that a critic may object to the claim that a thing is known only when its essence is known.  He cites Aristotle’s example of thunder, which one could know is a noise in the clouds even if he does not know the essence of thunder.  Or we might note that someone could obviously know that water is the liquid which fills lakes and oceans and falls from the sky as rain even if he does not know that water is H2O. 
This is a stronger objection, but in reply it could be noted that premise 2 may not actually be essential to the argument.  Augustine need not claim of everythingthat when it is known, its essence is known.  Perhaps he could simply argue that this is true of the mind, specifically.  For as Niederbacher emphasizes in his discussion of this argument, Augustine takes the mind to have a special immediate access to itself that it does not have to other things.  (Hence Niederbacher calls the argument under discussion “the cognitive access argument.”)  In the preceding chapter, Augustine had written that “when it is said to the mind: ‘Know thyself,’ it knows itself at the very instant in which it understands the word ‘thyself’; and it knows itself for no other reason than that it is present to itself” (On the Trinity, Book 10, Chapter 9, p. 54).  The idea might be that absence of certainty is possible only where our access to a thing is not immediate.  For example, we can be less than certain about the things we see because our access to them is mediated by light, the optic nerve, stages of neural processing, etc., and this opens the door to the possibility of illusion and hallucination.  But the certainty that the “Augustinian cogito” shows that the mind has vis-à-vis itself implies that its access to itself is not mediated.
So, it may be that, given Augustine’s view about the mind’s immediate access to itself, it is steps 3 - 5 that are the really essential ones in the “cognitive access argument,” and the problematic premise 2 can drop out as inessential.  The basic idea would be that given the mind’s immediate access to itself, it has a certainty about its essence that it does not have about whether it is the brain, atoms, etc., so that nothing of the latter, material sort can be part of its essence.
But this brings us close to the thrust of the argument of the last passage from Chapter 10 quoted above, which Matthews judges to be not only a distinct argument but a stronger one.  In this passage, Augustine says of “fire, or air, or this or that body” that we think of them “by means of an imaginary phantasy,” or mental image.  But Matthews suggests that whether we always make use of mental images, specifically, when we think of material things is not really essential to Augustine’s point.  What is essential is rather the claim that we always make use of mental representationsof some sort or other.  Thus the mind’s cognitive access to material things is always mediated in a way Augustine thinks its cognitive access to itself is not. 
Thus we have what I take to be a plausible reconstruction of the overall thrust of the reasoning of the last passage from chapter 10 quoted above:
1. The mind knows itself directly, without the mediation of a mental image or any other representation.
2. But the mind knows material things only via the mediation of a mental image or some other representation.
3. So, the mind is not a material thing.
In defense of premise 1, Augustine would, again, presumably say that if we were to deny it, then we would be faced with the possibility of skepticism about the mind’s own existence.  Yet the “Augustinian cogito” shows that such skepticism is impossible.  So we must affirm premise 1.
In defense of premise 2, we could note that, apart from eliminative materialists, materialists themselvestend to affirm that all thought takes place by means of mental representations of some sort (whether “sentences in the head,” distributed representations, or whatever).  Hence they cannot consistently reject premise 2.  Augustine and materialists of the sort in question are essentially in agreement that in general, thought involves mental representations.  The difference is just that Augustine thinks the “Augustinian cogito” shows that there is an exception in the special case of the mind’s knowledge of itself. 
As Matthews notes, a critic might still object to premise 1 on Freudian grounds.  It might be claimed that in the case of unconscious mental states, the mind knows itself (insofar as it discovers that it has a repressed desire of some sort, say) but that it does not do so directly(since the desire is unconscious).  But as Matthews also notes, this wouldn’t really be a strong objection.  Much of the talk about “unconscious” mental states seems to me pretty loose.  John Searle argues that to attribute a so-called “unconscious mental state” to someone is really just to attribute to him a neural state with the capacity or disposition to cause a conscious mental state.  This seems to me essentially correct.  What is strictly mental is the conscious state caused by the neural state, so that we don’t really have a counterexample to the claim that the mind always knows itself directly.
Given Augustine’s emphasis on the mind’s direct and certain knowledge of itself, the arguments we’ve been examining have, as I have said, a clearly proto-Cartesian flavor about them.  It is worth noting, though, that whatever one thinks of it, Augustine’s reasoning is not the same as that of Cartesian “conceivability arguments” (which I have discussed critically hereand here).  There is no attempt to read off, from what we can conceive, conclusions about mind-independent reality, after the fashion of rationalist metaphysics.  The introspective approach to the study of the mind that Augustine shares with Descartes has no essential connection with Cartesian/Leibnizian rationalism. 

DSPT symposium papers online (Updated)

Last week’s symposium at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley was on Fr. Anselm Ramelow’s anthology God, Reason and Reality .  Some of the papers from the symposium are now available online.  In my paper, “Remarks on God, Reason and Reality,” I comment on two essays in the anthology: Fr. Ramelow’s essay on God and miracles, and Fr. Michael Dodds’ essay on God and the nature of life.  Fr. Ramelow’s symposium paper is “Three Tensions Concerning Miracles: A Response to Edward Feser.”

UPDATE 11/16: Fr. Dodds' paper "The God of Life: Response to Edward Feser" has now been posted at the DSPT website.  Also, a YouTube video of all the talks and of the Q & A that followed has been posted.

DSPT symposium papers online

Last week’s symposium at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley was on Fr. Anselm Ramelow’s anthology God, Reason and Reality .  Some of the papers from the symposium are now available online.  In my paper, “Remarks on God, Reason and Reality,” I comment on two essays in the anthology: Fr. Ramelow’s essay on God and miracles, and Fr. Michael Dodds’ essay on God and the nature of life.  Fr. Ramelow’s symposium paper is “Three Tensions Concerning Miracles: A Response to Edward Feser.”

DSPT interviews (Updated)

Back from another very pleasant and profitable visit to the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley.  Many thanks to my hosts and to everyone who attended the symposium.  The DSPT has just posted video interviews of some of the participants in the July conference on philosophy and theology.  John Searle, Linda Zagzebski, John O’Callaghan, and I are the interviewees.  You can find them here at YouTube.

Update 11/14: The DSPT will be adding new video clips weekly to its YouTube playlist.  This week an interview with Fred Freddoso has been added.

DSPT interviews

Back from another very pleasant and profitable visit to the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley.  Many thanks to my hosts and to everyone who attended the symposium.  The DSPT has just posted video interviews of some of the participants in the July conference on philosophy and theology.  John Searle, Linda Zagzebski, John O’Callaghan, and I are the interviewees.  You can find them here at YouTube.

Walking the web

Bishop Athanasius Schneider is interviewed about the recent Synod on the Family.  On the now notorious interim report: “This document will remain for the future generations and for the historians a black mark which has stained the honour of the Apostolic See.” (HT: Rorate Caeli and Fr. Z) 
Meanwhile, as Rusty Reno and Rod Dreher report, other Catholics evidently prefer the Zeitgeist to the Heilige Geist.
Scientia Salon on everything you know about Aristotle that isn’t so.  Choice line: “While [Bertrand] Russell castigates Aristotle for not counting his wives’ teeth, it does not appear to have occurred to Russell to verify his own statement by going to the bookshelf and reading what Aristotle actually wrote.”
At The New Republic, John Gray on the closed mind of Richard Dawkins.
Recently published: J. Budziszewski’s new Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law .  Details at his website (and while you’re there, check out his blog).
Stephen Read is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine on the subject of medieval logic.
In the Claremont Review of Books, Michael Uhlmann on Catholicism and economics.
Eleven years since the last Steely Dan album.  Something Else! notes that a fine new album could be assembled just from outtakes from previous albums and other rarities.  (“The Second Arrangement”and “The Steely Dan Show”are already classics in my book.)
Several new books of interest reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: Lloyd Gerson’s From Plato to Platonism ; Andrea Lavazza and Howard Robinson’s anthology Contemporary Dualism: A Defense ; and Michael Ferejohn’s Formal Causes: Definition, Explanation, and Primacy in Socratic and Aristotelian Thought.
At Public Discourse, William Carroll discusses religion and evolution, and Francis Beckwith reviews Patrick Lee and Robert P. George’s new book on marriage.
There might be a movie coming out over the next five years that isn’t a Marvel movie.  But I wouldn’t bank on it.  SNL comments in a now famous spoof.

Voluntarism and PSR

Aquinas holds that “will follows upon intellect” (Summa Theologiae I.19.1).  He means in part that anything with an intellect has a will as well, but also that intellect is metaphysically prior to will.  Will is the power to be drawn toward what the intellect apprehends to be good, or away from what it apprehends to be bad.  Intellect is “in the driver’s seat,” then.  This is a view known as intellectualism, and it is to be contrasted with voluntarism, which makes will prior to intellect, and is associated with Scotus and Ockham.  To oversimplify, you might say that for the intellectualist, we are essentially intellects which have wills, whereas the voluntarist tendency is to regard us as essentially wills which have intellects.That is an oversimplification, though.  Voluntarism can come in milder forms which do not subordinate intellect to will but merely tend to put them on a par, and perhaps some writers who can sound like voluntarists really mean only to emphasize the importance of the will without intending thereby to assert anything about its metaphysical relationship to the intellect.  Augustine might be regarded as a voluntarist in a mild sense, and Ockham in a strong sense.  On the other side, even in Aquinas the claim that intellect is prior to will has to be qualified in light of the doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which God’s intellect and will are identical.  All the same, the tendency of the intellectualist is to understand the will always by reference to the intellect, whereas the tendency of the voluntarist is to conceive of the will independently of its relation to the intellect.

The implications of the dispute between intellectualism and voluntarism are many and profound, and I have discussed some of them in various places (e.g. here and here).  One of these implications is theological.  The intellectualist tends to think of God as essentially a Supreme Intellect, as (you might say) Subsistent Rationality Itself.  We might not always understand what he wills and does, given the limitations of our own finite intellects; all the same, in itself what God wills and does is always rational or intelligible through and through, and would be seen to be by a sufficiently powerful intellect.  By contrast, an extreme voluntarist conception of God would regard him primarily as a Supreme Will, indeed as (you might say) Subsistent Willfulness Itself.  On this sort of view, what God wills and does is not ultimately intelligible even in itself, for he is in no sense bound by rationality.  He simply wills what he wills, arbitrarily or whimsically, and there is ultimately no sense to be made of it.  If we borrow some analogies from Plato’s analysis in the Republic of the five types of regime, God as the intellectualist understands him is essentially the Philosopher-King write large, whereas God as the most extreme voluntarist understands him is like the tyrant writ large.
Some of the general theological consequences of these two conceptions of God as they were developed within the context of Christianity have been sketched by Michael Allen Gillespie in his book The Theological Origins of Modernity (which I reviewed here) and by Margaret Osler in Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy .  They are also relevant to what Pope Benedict XVI had to say about the difference between Christianity and Islam in his famous Regensburg lecture.  The Cartesian view that even mathematics and the laws of logic are the product of divine fiat, and could have been other than they are had God so willed, is a specific consequence of extreme theological voluntarism (though Osler thinks there is still a sense in which Descartes was an intellectualist -- again, the relationship between the two tendencies in the work of a particular thinker is not always as simple as it might at first seem).
Another specific theological implication has to do with the relationship between God and morality.  For Aquinas, what is good for us is necessarily good for us because it follows from our nature.  As such, even God couldn’t change it, any more than he could make two and two equal to five.  For the divine intellect knows the natures of things, and the divine will creates in accordance with this knowledge.  To be sure, the natures in question exist at first only as ideas in the divine mind itself; in this sense they are, like everything else, dependent on God.  Still, in creating the things that are to have these natures, the divine will only ever creates in light of the divine ideas and never in a way that conflicts with what is possible given the content of those ideas.  Aquinas’s position is thus at odds with the sort of “divine command ethics” according to which what is good is good merely because God wills it, so that absolutely anything (including torturing babies for fun, say) could have been good for us had he willed us to do it.  This sort of view was famously taken by Ockham, for whom God could even have willed for us to hate him, in which case that is what would have been good for us. 
In the Catholic context, at least a very strong whiff of voluntarism is to be found among those who think the pope could decide to teach -- contrary to scripture, tradition, and the constant teaching of previous popes -- that capital punishment is always and intrinsically immoral, or that it is not after all a mortal sin for a Catholic to divorce and “remarry.”  In fact, according to Catholic teaching the pope is not a dictator and cannot either reverse scripture and tradition or make up new teachings from scratch.  That would be contrary to the very point of the papacy, which is to preserve the “Deposit of Faith” without adding to or taking away from it.  In that sense the pope’s will is, like any other Catholic’s, subject to the Catholic Faith and does not create it.  The Catholic understanding of papal authority is, you might say, intellectualist rather than voluntarist.  Critics of Catholic claims about papal authority often read a voluntarist conception into it, but this is a caricature; Catholics (whether liberal or conservative) who suppose that a pope can teach whatever he wants essentially buy into this caricature. 
In philosophical anthropology, the dispute between voluntarism and intellectualism cashes out in the difference between what Servais Pinckaers calls the “freedom of indifference” and the “freedom for excellence.”  On the former conception of free will, developed by Ockham, the will is of its nature indifferent toward the various ends it might pursue, and the will is thus freer to the extent that it is at any moment equally capable of choosing anything.  The implication is that a will that is strongly inclined to choose what is good rather than what is evil is less free than a will that is not inclined in either direction.  By contrast, on the conception of free will as “freedom for excellence,” which is endorsed by Aquinas, the will is inherently directed toward the good in the sense that pursuit of the good is its final cause.  The implication is that the will is more free to the extent that it finds it easy to choose what is good and less free to the extent that it does not. 
The intellectualist is also naturally going to endorse the Aristotelian conception of man as a rational animal.  Contrast that with a view I recently found expressed by Philip K. Dick in an interview in What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick .  Dick says:
[The] android figure… is my metaphor for the dehumanized person, as you know, who is someone who is less than human -- that essential quality that distinguishes a human being is essentially compassion or kindness, that -- it’s not intelligence.  An android -- or in the film Blade Runner it’s called “replicant” -- can be very intelligent, but it’s not really human.  Because it’s not intelligence that makes a human being; in my opinion it’s the quality of kindness or compassion or whatever -- you know, the Christians call “agape.” (pp. 63-64)
I imagine many people today would find this appealing and regard the traditional Aristotelian conception as too bloodless and insufficiently touchy-feely.  But from an intellectualist point of view Dick’s claim is just muddleheaded.  Love that is truly human is an act of will, which is why it can abide when sentiment wanes.  But will, and thus love, presupposes an intellect which can grasp the object of love qua good or lovable.  Hence man is a compassionate or loving animal precisely because he is, more fundamentally, a rational animal.  But neither, contra Dick’s portrayal of the replicants, could there be such a thing as an intelligent creature incapable of love in the sense of willing the good of another.  For will follows upon intellect, and it is of its nature directed toward what the intellect perceives as good or lovable.  Hence an intellectual creature always loves something (even if the object of its love is sometimes not what it should be). 
To make sense of Dick’s proposal you would, it seems to me, have to be committed to a kind of voluntarism, on which love -- the willing of someone’s good -- could float free of intellect.  (There is at least a family resemblance between Dick’s view and that of Scotus, whose position is summed up by the Catholic Encyclopedia as follows: “Because the will holds sway over all other faculties and again because to it pertains the charity which is the greatest of the virtues, will is a more noble attribute of man than is intelligence.”)
In ethics and politics, a kind of voluntarism is evident in the Hobbesian theses that the good is just whatever one happens to will, and that law is not something the intellect discovers in the nature of things, but rather something the sovereign creates in an act of will.  Hume’s claim that reason is but the “slave of the passions” is in the same ballpark, though of course the will and the passions are distinct.  Such ideas are known to have their echoes in modern social and political life.
Lately (hereand here) we’ve been discussing the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), according to which everything is intelligible.  How could that be the case if it is will rather than intellect that is fundamental?  To be sure, mild or localized versions of voluntarism could in theory be consistent with PSR.  Suppose you thought God’s intellect was prior to his will but that the laws that govern human societies were ultimately grounded in the sheer fiat of legislators.  Then everything might still have a sufficient reason.  The sufficient reason for the existence of some particular law was that it struck the fancy of some legislator to impose it, that it struck his fancy might be given an explanation in terms of his mood that day together with some end he hoped the law would realize, that he was in that mood might be explained by his circumstances together with his physiology at that moment, and the whole chain of causes could trace back to God who willed to set things up this way in light of what his intellect grasped to be good.  But suppose God as First Cause is himself conceived of in voluntarist terms.  Could this be consistent with PSR?
I think not, at least not if the voluntarism is extreme.  Suppose mathematics, the laws of logic, and everything else are the product of divine fiat, where God’s willing things the way he did is in turn in no way intelligible -- that it is unintelligible in itself, not merely unintelligible to us.  Since God’s willing the way he did is the ultimate cause of everything else, it would follow that everything is thus ultimatelyunintelligible.  At the bottom level of reality would be the “brute fact” that this is what God has willed, utterly arbitrarily, and that’s that.  PSR, which admits of no brute facts, would therefore be false.
Now if PSR is false, then the principle of causality is threatened as well, since if things are ultimately unintelligible, there is no reason to think that a potency might not be actualized even though there is nothing actual to actualize it and thus that something might come into being without any cause at all.  But then it would not be possible to argue from the world to God as cause of the world.  Hence it is no surprise that Ockham’s voluntarism went hand in hand with skepticism about the possibility of any robust natural theology and a retreat into fideism.  I’ve also suggested that theism itself, or at least classical theism, cannot be made consistent with a denial of PSR.  For rejecting PSR tends, for reasons given in that earlier post, to lead away from classical theism to a more crude and creaturely conception of God.  Hence it is no surprise that Ockham’s voluntarism was followed historically by such a conception.
Hence extreme theological voluntarism -- motivated though it seems to be by a desire to do honor to God and uphold divine power -- in fact undermines theism.  (Which is not surprising when you think about it, since voluntarist views have this self-undermining tendency elsewhere: Authoritarianism undermines authority by reducing it to lawless tyranny and thus destroying all respect for it; the view that the pope can teach just any old thing he wishes undermines the very point of the papacy and undermines the credibility of papal decrees in general; the Hobbesian idea that the good is just whatever we happen to will is not really an alternative theory of ethics but destroys the very possibility of ethics and replaces it with the notion of a non-aggression pact between self-interested preference maximizers; and so forth.)
Whether milder forms of theological voluntarism would have similar results depends on how they are formulated, but it is hard to see how any view which makes the divine will prior to the divine intellect (as opposed to being merely on a par with it) could avoid a similar result.
No post on voluntarism and PSR should fail to discuss Schopenhauer.  But as the supreme arbitrary dictator of this blog I hereby arbitrarily decree that this post will.  But that is not to rule out a future post on the subject.

Nudge nudge, wink wink

Suppose you go out on a blind date and a friend asks you how it went.  You pause and then answer flatly, with a slight smirk: “Well, I liked the restaurant.”  There is nothing in the literal meaning of the sentence you’ve uttered, considered all by itself, that states or implies anything negative about the person you went out with, or indeed anything at all about the person.  Still, given the context, you’ve said something insulting.  You’ve “sent the message” that you liked the restaurant but notthe person.  Or suppose you show someone a painting and when asked what he thinks, he responds: “I like the frame.”  The sentence by itself doesn’t imply that the painting is bad, but the overall speech act certainly conveys that message all the same.  Each of these is an example of what H. P. Grice famously called an implicature, and they illustrate how what a speaker says in a communicative act ought not to be confused with what his words mean.  Obviously there is a relationship between the two, but they are not always identical.Implicatures can be used to mislead someone without lying to him (and as I have argued in previous posts, such mental reservations can sometimes be morally justifiable).  But as the example just given indicates, they can also be used to “say something without saying it.”  And sometimes they can do double duty.  Suppose a second friend is also present when the first one asks you how the date went, but that this second friend knows the person you went on the date with and you don’t want him to know what you really think.  Suppose also, though, that he is a bit naïve.  If you say “I liked the restaurant,” this time with a little enthusiasm and without the pause or smirk, the first friend might still “get the message” that you didn’t like the person, while the second friend might think you had a good time.

Implicature, sexual morality, and politics
In his 1984 essay “Why Homosexuality is Abnormal,” Michael Levin applies Grice’s notion of implicature to an analysis of the decriminalization of homosexual acts, and other liberal policies vis-à-vis homosexuality.  (The essay originally appeared in The Monist and has been reprinted in several anthologies, such as the third edition of Alan Soble’s The Philosophy of Sex.)  As you can guess from the title, Levin holds that such acts are bad (on sociobiological rather than theological or natural law grounds, as it happens).  But it is worth emphasizing that his application of Grice does not stand or fall with whether or not you agree with him about that.  Levin’s claim is that liberal policies cannot, given our cultural circumstances, be neutralconcerning homosexuality.  They will inevitably “send a message” of approval rather than mere neutrality or indifference.  The essay is thirty years old, and it goes without saying that in the age of “same-sex marriage” things have gone considerably beyond mere decriminalization (which has been a dead issue legally since Lawrence v. Texas).  But his remarks are if anything only more plausible as an analysis of the effects of policies currently being pushed.  Here is what he says:
[L]egislation “legalizing homosexuality” cannot be neutral because passing it would have an inexpungeable speech-act dimension.  Society cannot grant unaccustomed rights and privileges to homosexuals while remaining neutral about the value of homosexuality.  Working from the assumption that society rests on the family and its consequences, the Judaeo-Christian tradition has deemed homosexuality a sin and withheld many privileges from homosexuals.  Whether or not such denial was right, for our society to grant these privileges to homosexuals now would amount to declaring that it has rethought the matter and decided that homosexuality is not as bad as it had previously supposed…  Someone who suddenly accepts a policy he has previously opposed is open to the… interpretation [that] he has come to think better of the policy.  And if he embraces the policy while knowing that this interpretation will be put on his behavior, and if he knows that others know that he knows they will so interpret it, he is acquiescing in this interpretation.  He can be held to have intended, meant, this interpretation.  A society that grants privileges to homosexuals while recognizing that, in the light of generally known history, this act can be interpreted as a positive re-evaluation of homosexuality, is signalling that it now thinks homosexuality is all right… What homosexual rights activists really want [from anti-discrimination laws] is not [merely] access to jobs but legitimation of their homosexuality.  Since this is known, giving them what they want will be seen as conceding their claim to legitimacy.  And since legislators know their actions will support this interpretation, and know that their constituencies know they know this, the Gricean effect or symbolic meaning of passing anti-discrimination ordinances is to declare homosexuality legitimate…
Legislation permitting frisbees in the park does not imply approval of frisbees for the simple reason that frisbees are new; there is no tradition of banning them from parks. The legislature's action in permitting frisbees is not interpretable, known to be interpretable, and so on, as the reversal of long-standing disapproval.  It is because these Gricean conditions are met in the case of abortion that legislation -- or rather judicial fiat-- permitting abortions and mandating their public funding are widely interpreted as tacit approval.  Up to now, society has deemed homosexuality so harmful that restricting it outweighs putative homosexual rights.  If society reverses itself, it will in effect be deciding that homosexuality is not as bad as it once thought.  (pp. 119-20 of Soble)
Whether or not this was a plausible bit of Gricean analysis in 1984, it is surely plausible now.  “Same-sex marriage” and antidiscrimination laws are now routinely defended, not on grounds of neutrality, but on the basis of the decidedly non-neutral judgment that moral (or any other) disapproval of homosexuality can only possibly stem from bigotry, ignorance, religious fanaticism, or plain mean-spiritedness.  As Justice Scalia famously complained, opponents of “same-sex marriage” are now treated as if they were the “enemies of the human race,” and their defeat is widely regarded both as a moral imperative and the inevitable next stage in the progress of civilization.  Meanwhile, whether out of fear, lack of conviction, or both, the most prominent conservatives don’t even bother to address the fundamental moral question anymore, but feebly retreat into considerations of secondary importance, such as federalism or judicial activism.  And even then, everything they say is hedged with panicky assurances of their tolerance and compassion.  The moralistic fervor is now all on the liberal side, and as any serious conservative should know, you cannot beat moralism with quibbles about procedure.
So, the “dominant narrative” on the pro-“same-sex marriage” side is: “We have the moral high ground, history is on our side, and conservatives’ retreat from the moral field, desperate resort to secondary issues, and semi-apologetic, defensive presentation show that deep down they know it’s true.”  Now, judges, lawmakers, and political candidates know that this is the “dominant narrative,” and they know that “same-sex marriage” advocates and society at large know that they know it.  They know also that endorsement of “same-sex marriage,” or even just surrender to it where it is imposed, will be widely interpreted as an acknowledgement that that narrative is correct.  So, under these circumstances, endorsement or surrender will inevitably “send the message” that that narrative is correct, and thus that disapproval of homosexuality has no rational basis, and thus that no one should disapprove of homosexuality.  Of course, a sentence like “’Same-sex marriage’ should be legalized,” considered in isolation, doesn’t entail all that, but that is irrelevant.  The point is that that is nevertheless the Gricean implicatureof such an endorsement or surrender, given circumstances now and for the foreseeable future. 
Now as Grice points out, an implicature can be “cancelled.”  Suppose that after saying “I liked the restaurant” you added, with a smile: “And I really liked [her, him]!” Whereas the first utterance by itself gave the impression that you did not like the person you were out with, that message would be cancelled by this addition.  The implicature associated under current circumstances with an endorsement or surrender on “same-sex marriage” could also be cancelled -- for instance, if a public official who endorsed or surrendered to it explicitly repudiated the “dominant narrative.”  For example, suppose a candidate for political office in a state in which “same-sex marriage” was imposed by the judiciary declined to support a challenge to it either in the courts or the legislature, and explained his position by saying: “I don’t think there’s any way to reverse ‘same-sex marriage’ in this state given public opinion and the makeup of the appeals courts.  But I am utterly opposed to it and would reverse it in a second if I thought that was possible.”  Whatever the merits of this position, it would cancel the implicature that the surrender to “same-sex marriage” would otherwise have.  However, if a politician repeatedly declined to say or do anything that would cancel the implicature, the implicature would if anything only be reinforced.  It will also be reinforced if the only public remarks the politician ever makes about homosexuality and related matters are positive – calls for tolerance and compassion, condemnations of workplace discrimination, etc.
Note that such a politician would not actually have to believe the “dominant narrative” in order for the implicature to be reinforced.  He may decline to cancel the implicature out of naivete, cynical calculation, or cowardice rather than out of conviction.  But he will nevertheless have “sent the message” that the “dominant narrative“ is correct, even if he thinks it is not correct.  And it would be silly for him to claim otherwise by saying (in private): “All I’ve done is to decline trying to roll back ‘same-sex marriage’ and endorsed being civil to fellow citizens who happen to be homosexual.  There is nothing in that by itself that entails that I think homosexual acts are morally justifiable or that I agree that critics of ‘same-sex marriage’ really are bigots!”  That is true, but irrelevant.  The meaning of the sentences he’s uttered, considered in isolation, might not entail all that, but that is simply not the only thing that determines an implicature. 
Implicature, sexual morality, and Catholicism
Now, what goes for politicians goes for churchmen.  It is part of the “dominant narrative” that the opposition of the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies to homosexual acts is, like  such opposition more generally, rooted in ignorance and bigotry, without rational foundation, and ought to be given up.  Bishops and other churchmen know that this is the “dominant narrative,” and they know that homosexual rights activists and society at large know that they know it.  Hence when they make statements that accentuate the positive vis-à-vis homosexuality (emphasizing inclusiveness, condemning discrimination, etc.) and/or imply that the Church has historically been too harsh or put too much emphasis on the issue -- while at the same time saying little or nothing clearly to reaffirm the traditional condemnation of homosexual acts -- the implicature, the message that is sent, is that there is truth in the “dominant narrative.” 
Here as in other cases, it is irrelevant that the specific sentences that are uttered considered by themselves do not strictly entail any concession to the “dominant narrative.”  There needn’t be such an entailment for an implicature.  Nor does it matter that the churchmen in question do not actually agree with the “dominant narrative.”  If you say “I like the frame” or “I liked the restaurant” in the contexts described above, you have in fact said something insulting, whether or not that was your intention and despite the fact that the literal meaning of the words does not by itself strictly entail an insult.  And if a churchman comments on issues concerning homosexuality with nothing but happy talk, he has in fact “sent the message” that there is truth in the “dominant narrative,” even if that is not his intention and despite the fact that the literal meaning of his words might not by itself strictly entail that there is truth in it.  The implicature is only reinforced by the fact that the average listener entirely lacks any theological training and thus cannot be expected to draw fine distinctions, to assess the doctrinal weight of off-the-cuff remarks made in interviews, etc.  Since churchmen know (or should know) how their misleading words are bound to be taken by the average listener, and since the average listener knows that these churchmen know (or should know) this -- and yet the churchmen say these things anyway -- the implicature is further cemented.
Hence while it is true that secular news outlets routinely read too much into such statements and spin them to their own purposes, they are by no means entirely to blame.  They have been given ammunition.  Some conservative Catholic commentators have tied themselves in knots trying to put a positive face on these sorts of remarks, usually via a pedantic emphasis on what is strictly entailed by the literal meaning of a certain remark considered in isolation, while completely ignoring the glaring implicatures.  At best this reflects an astounding naiveté about how language works; at worst it is itself a kind of intellectually dishonest spin-doctoring.  And it does real damage by giving the false impression that to be a Catholic you have to become a shill and pretend not to see the obvious. 
Judging from the Extraordinary Synod on the Family which ended last week, the messages churchmen send via such implicatures may not always be unintentional.  A key topic of debate in the lead-up to the Synod and at the Synod itself was Cardinal Walter Kasper’s proposal that divorced and “remarried” Catholics could be admitted to Holy Communion.  Now, the teaching of the Church is that a validly married person cannot divorce and remarry someone else while his spouse is still living.  Such a “remarriage” is adulterous and thus mortally sinful.  The Church also teaches that to go to Communion while one is in a state of mortal sin is itself mortally sinful.  Hence, to suggest that such “remarried” Catholics might be able to go to Communion is to implicate or “send the message” that such “remarriages” are not mortally sinful after all and that the Church can and should change her teaching on that subject. 
Cardinal Kasper denies that he favors such a change, but again, an implicature can exist even when one does not intend it.  Furthermore, to “cancel” the implicature in this case would require far more than Cardinal Kasper issuing such a denial in a journal article, interview, or the like, because most Catholics have never heard of Cardinal Kasper and will know nothing about such denials.  To cancel the implicature would require that the Church loudly and clearly reaffirm that it is mortally sinful to divorce and “remarry” and that no one in a state of mortal sin should take Communion.  The trouble, though, is that loudly and clearly to say this would offend Catholics who have “remarried,” and the whole point of Kasper’s proposal is to make such people feel “welcome.”  Doing what is required to cancel the implicature would thus make Kasper’s proposed policy pointless.  So, there simply is no plausible way to implement such a policy without “sending the message” that the Church can and should change her teaching.
Whatever Cardinal Kasper intends, though, Cardinal George Pell has indicated that some of the churchmen who favor Kasper’s policy do intend the implicature.  As Cardinal Pell has said:
Communion for the divorced and remarried is for some -- very few, certainly not the majority of the synod fathers -- it's only the tip of the iceberg, it's a stalking horse. They want wider changes, recognition of civil unions, recognition of homosexual unions.  The church cannot go in that direction.  It would be a capitulation from the beauties and strengths of the Catholic tradition, where people sacrificed themselves for hundreds, and thousands of years to do this.
That this is the intention seems clear enough from a now-notorious set of passages from the first draft of the Synod report, which included the following lines:
Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? … Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?...
Without denying the moral problems connected to homosexual unions it has to be noted that there are cases in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners.
End quote.  The tone and indeed the content of this passage (“accepting and valuing their sexual orientation,” “precious support in the life of the partners”) are so radically different from what the Church has said historically -- indeed, it would have been unthinkable as recently as two years ago that such words could ever appear in a Vatican document -- that the bland references elsewhere in the document to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality cannot cancel the implicature that there is some truth in the liberal “dominant narrative” vis-à-vis homosexuality.  And those who would use Cardinal Kasper’s proposal as a “stalking horse” (as Cardinal Pell put it) surely intend their implicatures to do double duty.  When, in the example I gave above, you say “I liked the restaurant,” your more sophisticated friend will know that you did notlike the person you went on the blind date with, while your less sophisticated friend might think you did like the person.  Similarly, when liberal churchmen speak of “accepting and valuing [the homosexual] orientation without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony,” gullible listeners will be reassured that no substantive change is being proposed, while more sophisticated listeners will “get” the real message.
Now, Cardinal Pell, Cardinal Raymond Burke, the African bishops, and others vigorously opposed this passage, which was ultimately rejected by the Synod as a whole.  But the fact that it got as far as it did in the first place itself “sends the message” that the Church might, if not now then in future, be open to the possibility of dramatic change vis-à-vis matters of sexual morality.   Given how far things have gone, effectively cancelling this implicature would require a vigorous reaffirmation both of the content and the permanence of Catholic teaching on sexual morality from Pope Francis himself.  Cardinal Burke has expressed the view that such a papal reaffirmation is “long overdue,” and another bishop has been even more frank about the damage he thinks the Synod has caused.  But such a reaffirmation seems unlikely given that it would conflict with the Pope’s aim of putting less emphasis on these matters and trying to find ways to attract those who disagree with the Church’s teaching about them.
Nudge nudge, wink wink, or Yes Yes, No No?
How have things gotten to this point?  There are in my view two main factors.  The first is what I have identified elsewhere as the chief cause of the collapse of Catholic apologetics, dogmatic and moral theology, and catechesis: the abandonment of Scholasticism.  Thomists and other Scholastic theologians and philosophers, and the churchmen of earlier generations who were given a Scholastic intellectual formation, emphasized precision in thought, precision in language, precision in argumentation, precision in doctrinal and public statements, and extreme caution about novel theses and formulations which might undermine the credibility of the Church’s claim to preserve and apply doctrine, and not manufacture or mutate it.  Say what you will about the (purported) limitations of Scholastic theology and philosophy, there was, in the days when Scholasticism held sway, never any doubt about exactly what a statement from a bishop or from the Vatican meant and about exactly how it squared with Catholic tradition. 
The tendency among some churchmen toward imprecision, and the appearance of a rupture with past teaching, is by no means limited to matters of sexual morality.  On capital punishment, ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, and other issues, even conservative Catholic churchmen have been fudging things for decades, speaking in ambiguous terms or in platitudes that seem to imply that the traditional teaching of the Church is wrong, and giving woolly arguments or no arguments at all instead of explaining how the new statements can be reconciled with past teaching.
For example, for two millennia the Church very heavily emphasized the urgency of conversion to the Catholic Faith as necessary for salvation.  Yet even many conservative churchmen today emphasize “dialogue” over conversion, condemn proselytizing, etc.  How can these attitudes be reconciled?  The question is generally simply ignored.  Modern churchmen often speak as if capital punishment were incompatible with human dignity and as if any Catholic must oppose it.  Yet Pope Innocent III, when reconciling the pacifist Waldensian heretics with the Church, made acceptance of the legitimacy of capital punishment a matter of basic orthodoxy; the Fathers and Doctors of the Church unanimously affirmed its legitimacy even when they were inclined toward leniency, and such unanimity has always been regarded within Catholicism as a mark of infallible teaching; Genesis 9:6 sanctions capital punishment precisely in the name of human dignity; and so on.  How can these attitudes be reconciled?  Again, the problem is generally ignored.  And so on for other issues.  Typically the novel statements are phrased in such a way that they can be given an interpretation that is not strictly incompatible with past teaching.  However, the implicature -- again, even if unintentional -- is that past teaching was mistaken. 
What is common to these examples is that they all tend to implicate a concession to liberalism.  And that brings me to what I think is the second factor behind the tendency of modern churchmen to speak in ways that seem to imply a rupture with the past: the utter hegemony of liberalism in the modern Western world, indeed in much of the modern world full stop.  Now, when I say “liberalism” I don’t mean merely the sort of thing that characterizes the modern Democratic Party.  I mean that broad tradition that begins with thinkers like Hobbes and Locke and whose basic assumptions are taken for granted by moral and political thinkers of almost every stripe today.  What liberals of all varieties -- from Hobbes and Locke to Kant to Rawls and Nozick -- share in common, whatever their significant differences, is an emphasis on the sovereignty of the will of the individual.  For liberalism, no demand on any individual is legitimate to which he does not in some sense consent.  The tendency is therefore to regard any such imposition as an affront to his dignity.  The liberty that the liberal wants to further is freedom from fetters on the individual’s will, whether those fetters are political, social, moral, religious, or cultural.  The individual will is sovereign, its dignity supreme.
Liberalism in this broad sense is the dominant way of thinking and feeling in modern times.  It is, essentially, the compulsory ethos, indeed the religion, of modern times.  It absolutely permeates contemporary political, social, moral, religious, and cultural life.  This is why the arguments even of political conservatives and Christians reputed for orthodoxy are constantly couched in the language of freedom, rights, the dignity of the individual, etc.  The pressure to conform one’s thinking and sensibility to basic liberal assumptions is nearly overwhelming.  Hence any appeal to freedom is considered all by itself a powerful argument, and any objection to a policy or view on the grounds that it conflicts with freedom is considered a powerful objection which it is imperative to answer.  Scratch many a modern conservative or Christian and you’ll find a liberal, in this broad sense of the word “liberal,” underneath. 
Liberalism is the offspring of Ockham’s voluntarism, the prioritizing of the will over the intellect.  Press voluntarism as far as it will go and you are bound to conclude that what the will chooses is more important that what the intellect knows.  Objective truth itself is bound to come to seem an oppressive imposition on the will.  For Aquinas, of course, this has things precisely backwards.  The will is subordinate to the intellect, and has as its final cause the pursuit of the objective truth that the intellect grasps.  And if the objective truth of the matter is that you deserve a punishment of death, or ought to convert to Catholicism, or ought to restrain your sexual impulses, then it is just tough luck for the will if what it wants is something else.  (I speak loosely, of course.  It is not really “tough luck” for the will; such submission is what is truly good for the will.) 
Now as every Thomist knows, there is some truth to be found in more or less any erroneous system of thought.  Hence there is, naturally, some truth in liberalism.  The free exercise of the will really is a good thing.  But it is a good that is subordinate to the higher end for which it exists, namely the pursuit of what is really true and good.  Furthermore, given the hegemony of liberalism in modern times and the consequent pressure to conform oneself to it, even those who do not see themselves as liberals are going to exaggerate the significance of whatever truth there is to be found in it.  Hence the tendency of modern churchmen relentlessly to emphasize the dignity of the individual and to pretend that an appeal to this dignity is somehow the master key to settling every moral and political controversy (when in fact what countsas a respect for human dignity is itself precisely what is at issue in disputes over sexual morality, abortion, capital punishment, etc. -- so that the appeal to human dignity by itself merely begs the question).
The tremendous pressure to conform to liberalism generates an eagerness to seek any way possible, rhetorically and substantively, to find common ground with it.  Now, punishment in general and capital punishment in particular all involve an obvious and unpleasant imposition on the will of the individual.  Hence the tendency of liberalism is to regard punishment, and capital punishment in particular, as an affront to the dignityof the individual.  Making an individual’s salvation contingent upon whether he accepts a certain religion is an even graver imposition on his will.  Hence the tendency of the liberal, if he is religious, is toward universalism.  Sexual desire is extremely powerful and the demands of sexual morality an especially irksome imposition on the will.  Hence the tendency of liberalism is to try as far as possible to eliminate or at least soften and minimize the importance of such demands.  And so forth. 
So, when churchmen find in Catholic tradition, alongside the persistent insistence on the legitimacy of (and in some cases need for) capital punishment, an inclination of some saints and theologians strongly to prefer leniency over resort to the punishment, the temptation is to take the more lenient tendency and run with it, while ignoring the other, balancing element in the tradition.  When they find in the tradition, alongside the doctrine that extra ecclesiam nulla salus, the idea that “invincible ignorance” can save those who are outside the visible structure of the Church, the temptation is strong to emphasize the latter and not worry too much about evangelization.  When they note that the Church has always taught forgiveness of sins and mercy toward sinners, the temptation is strong to talk a lot about that and not say too much about the actual sins themselves, especially if the sins are sexual.  And so forth.  Because the over-emphasized elements really are there in the tradition and the ignored elements are not explicitly denied, actual rupture with the past is avoided.  But because the resulting presentation of Catholic teaching is so one-sided, and one-sided in the direction of flattering liberalism, there is an appearanceof a rupture with the past, an unintended implicatureto the effect that liberal criticism of traditional Catholic teaching is correct.
This is not unprecedented in Church history.  The Arian heresy exerted enormous pressure on the Church.  It had political power, won the support of many bishops, and was difficult to combat because of the ambiguous language in which it was often formulated.  Even Pope Liberius, though he did not bind the Church to error, temporized.  The heresy took centuries to die out completely.  No doubt there were churchmen at the time keen to emphasize the “gifts and qualities” of Arians, to “accept and value” the depth and sincerity of their devotion to the Arian cause, and to affirm the “precious support” Arians provided one another. 
In light of what has happened at the Synod, some orthodox Catholics are inclined to channel Kevin Bacon in Animal House, while others are inclined to freak out.  Both tendencies are mistaken.  The truth is that things are pretty bad, and also that they are not thatbad.  This kind of thing sometimes happens in the Church.  Liberalism will suffer the same fate as Arianism, but it may take a very long time for the Church entirely to flush it out of its system, and things may get a lot worse before they get better.  For the moment and no doubt for some time to come, too many churchmen will continue to respond to the liberal spirit of the age with a nudge and a wink and glad-handing bonhomie.  But in the end the Church will, as she always does, heed the words of her Master: Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ (Matthew 5:37).