Edward Feser's Blog, page 86

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).

Could a theist deny PSR?

We’ve been talking about the principle of sufficient reason (PSR).  It plays a key role in some arguments for the existence of God, which naturally gives the atheist a motivation to deny it.  But there are also theists who deny it.  Is this a coherent position?  I’m not asking whether a theist could coherently reject some versions of PSR.  Of course a theist could do so.  Ireject some versions of PSR.  But could a theist reject all versions?  Could a theist reject PSR as such?   Suppose that any version of PSR worthy of the name must entail that there are no “brute facts” -- no facts that are in principle unintelligible, no facts for which there is not even in principle an explanation.  (The “in principle” here is important -- that there might be facts that our minds happen to be too limited to grasp is not in question.)  Could a theist coherently deny that?I don’t think so, certainly not on a Thomistic or other classical theist conception of God.  For suppose there are “brute facts.”  Either they would be facts about God or they would be facts about something other than God.  But surely no facts of the latter sort could be “brute facts” if theism is true.  For if some fact about something other than God was a brute fact, that would entail that it had no cause, no explanation, no source of intelligibility of any sort.  That would entail, among other things, that it did not have Godas a cause, explanation, or source of its intelligibility.  Hence it would be something which does not depend on God for its being.  And that would conflict with the classical theist position that (as the First Vatican Council puts it) “the world and allthings which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God” (emphasis added).

But couldn’t a theist hold that while there are no brute facts concerning anything other than God, there are brute facts concerning God himself?  Could he not say that God’s existence is a brute fact, or that God’s having a certain attribute is a brute fact? 
Again, not on a classical theist conception of God.  Suppose God is, as Aristotelians hold, pure actuality with no potentiality; or that he is, as Thomists hold, subsistent being itself.  Then he exists of absolute necessity, and thus has his sufficient reason in his own nature, and thus is not a “brute fact.”  So, to make God’s existence out to be a brute fact, one will have to deny that he is pure actuality or subsistent being itself.  That entails that he is a mixture of actuality and potentiality, and of an essence together with a distinct “act of existence” (to use the Thomist jargon).  But that in turn entails that he is composite rather than absolutely simple.  And that is incompatible with the classical theist position that divine simplicity is essential to theism, as well as with the de fide teaching of the Catholic Church (declared at the First Vatican Council as well as at the Fourth Lateran Council) that God is simple or non-composite.  Even to say that while God exists necessarily, his having some particular attribute is a “brute fact,” would also conflict with divine simplicity.  For if his having the attribute is a brute fact, then he does not have it necessarily but only contingently.  (If he had it necessarily, it would follow from his nature and for that reason would not be a brute fact.)  But if he is necessary while the attribute in question is contingent, then it is distinct from him and thus he is composite and not simple.
Nor, as it cannot be emphasized too strongly, is divine simplicity some eccentricity the classical theist arbitrarily tacks on to theism.  It is at the very core of the logic of theism.  If God were composite then it would make sense to ask how it is that his component parts -- act and potency, essence and existence, substance and attributes, or whatever -- happen to be combined together to form the composite.  It would make sense to ask “What caused God?,” in which case we would not really be talking about God anymore, because we would no longer be talking about the ultimatesource of things.  Even if it were suggested that “God” so conceived has no cause and that it is just a “brute fact” or a matter of sheer chance that the composite exists, we will for that very reason be talking about something that couldin principle have had a cause and might not have existed.  Why anyone would want to call that “God” I have no idea; certainly it bears no relationship to what classical theists mean by “God,” and by virtue of being composite, contingent, etc. it would in fact be the sort of thing classical theists would regard as creaturely rather than the Creator.  You might as well worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So, just as PSR leads to theism, theism leads to PSR.  There is no circularity here, because one could accept PSR even if he didn’t think it leads to theism, and it takes additional premises to get from PSR to theism in any case.  But there is a natural affinity between the views, and this affinity shows how very far away from reality is the stupid caricature of theism as somehow irrationalist.  On the contrary, to see the world as intelligible or rational through and through is implicitly to be a (classical) theist, and to be a (classical) theist is implicitly to see the world as intelligible or rational through and through.  And by the same token, despite the rhetoric of its loudest contemporary proponents, atheism is implicitly irrationalist insofar as it must deny PSR so as to avoid theism. (More on these themes in some of the posts linked to at the end of the previous post.)

Della Rocca on PSR

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR), in a typical Neo-Scholastic formulation, states that “there is a sufficient reason or adequate necessary objective explanation for the being of whatever is and for all attributes of any being” (Bernard Wuellner, Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy , p. 15).  I discuss and defend PSR at some length in Scholastic Metaphysics (see especially pp. 107-8 and 137-46).  Prof. Michael Della Roccadefends the principle in his excellent article “PSR,”which appeared in Philosopher’s Imprintin 2010 but which (I’m embarrassed to say) I only came across the other day.

Among the arguments for PSR I put forward in Scholastic Metaphysics are a retorsion argument to the effect that if PSR were false, we could have no reason to trust the deliverances of our cognitive faculties, including any grounds we might have for doubting or denying PSR; and an argument to the effect that a critic of PSR cannot coherently accept even the scientific explanations he does accept, unless he acknowledges that there are no brute facts and thus that PSR is true.  Della Rocca’s argument bears a family resemblance to this second line of argument.Della Rocca notes, first, that even among philosophers who reject PSR, philosophical theses are often defended by recourse to what he calls “explicability arguments.”  An explicability argument (I’ll use the abbreviation EA from here on out) is an argument to the effect that we have grounds for denying that a certain state of affairs obtains if it would be inexplicable or a “brute fact.”  Della Rocca offers a number of examples of this strategy.  When physicalist philosophers of mind defend some reductionist account of consciousness on the grounds that consciousness would (they say) otherwise be inexplicable, they are deploying an EA.  When early modern advocates of the “mechanical philosophy” rejected (their caricature of) the Aristotelian notion of substantial forms, they did so on the grounds that the notion was insufficiently explanatory.  When philosophers employ inductive reasoning they are essentially rejecting the claim that the future will not be relevantly like the past nor the unobserved like the observed, on the grounds that this would make future and otherwise unobserved phenomena inexplicable.  And so forth.  (Della Rocca cites several other specific examples from contemporary philosophy -- in discussions about the metaphysics of dispositions, personal identity, causation, and modality -- wherein EAs are deployed.)

Now, Della Rocca allows that to appeal to an EA does not by itself commit one to PSR.  But suppose we apply the EA approach to the question of why things exist.  Whatever we end up thinking the correct answer to this question is -- it doesn’t matter for purposes of Della Rocca’s argument -- if we deploy an EA in defense of it we will implicitly be committing ourselves to PSR, he says, because PSR just is the claim that the existence of anything must have an explanation.

In responding to these different examples of EAs, one could, says Della Rocca, take one of three options:

(1) Hold that some EAs are legitimate kinds of argument, while others -- in particular, any EA for some claim about why things exist at all -- are not legitimate.

(2) Hold that no EA for any conclusion is legitimate.

(3) Hold that all EAs, including any EA for a claim about the sheer existence of things, are legitimate kinds of argument.

Now, the critic of PSR cannot take option (3), because that would, in effect, be to accept PSR.  Nor could any critic of PSR who applies EAs in defense of other claims -- and the EA approach is, as Della Rocca notes, a standard move in contemporary philosophy (and indeed, in science) -- take option (2).

So that leaves (1).  The trouble, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be any non-question-begging way of defending option (1).  For why should we believe that EAs are legitimate in other cases, but not when giving some account of the sheer existence of things?  It seems arbitrary to allow the one sort of EA but not the other sort.  The critic of PSR cannot respond by saying that it is just a brute fact that some kinds of EAs are legitimate and others are not, because this would beg the question against PSR, which denies that there are any brute facts.  Nor would it do for the critic to say that it is just intuitively plausible to hold that EAs are illegitimate in the case of explaining the sheer existence of things, since Della Rocca’s point is that the critic’s acceptance of EAs in other domains casts doubt on the reliability of this particular intuition.  Hence an appeal to intuition would also beg the question.

So, Della Rocca’s argument is that there seems no cogent way to accept EAs at all without accepting PSR.  The implication seems to be that we can have no good reason to think anythingis explicable unless we also admit that everythingis.

Naturally, I agree with this.  Indeed, I think Della Rocca, if anything, concedes too much to the critic of PSR.  In particular, he allows that while it would be “extremely problematic” for someone to bite the bullet and take option (2), it may not be “logically incoherent” to do so.  But this doesn’t seem correct to me.  Even if the critic of PSR decides to reject the various specific examples of EAs cited by Della Rocca -- EAs concerning various claims about consciousness, modality, personal identity, etc. -- the critic will still make use of various patterns of reasoning he considers formally valid or inductively strong, will reject patterns of reasoning he considers fallacious, etc.  And he will do so precisely because these principles of logic embody standards of intelligibility or explanatory adequacy.

To be sure, it is a commonplace in logic that not all explanations are arguments, and it is also sometimes claimed (less plausibly, I think) that not all arguments are explanations.  However, certainly many arguments are explanations.  What Aristotelians call “explanatory demonstrations” (e.g. a syllogism like All rational animals are capable of language, all men are rational animals, so all men are capable of language) are explanations.  Arguments to the best explanation are explanations, and as Della Rocca notes, inductive reasoning in general seems to presuppose that things have explanations.

So, to give up EAs of any sort (option (2)) would seem to be to give up the very practice of argumentation itself, or at least much of it.  Needless to say, it is hard to see how that could fail to be logically incoherent, at least if one tries to defend one’s rejection of PSR with arguments.  Hence, to accept the general practice of giving arguments while nevertheless rejecting EAs of the specific sorts Della Rocca gives as examples would really be to take Della Rocca’s option (1) rather than option (2).

Della Rocca also considers some common objections to PSR.  In response to the claim that PSR is incompatible with quantum mechanics, Della Rocca refers the reader to Alex Pruss’s response to such objections in his book The Principle of Sufficient Reason , but also makes the point that appealing to QM by itself simply does nothing to rebut his own argument for PSR.  For even if a critic of PSR thinks it incompatible with QM, he still owes us an answer to the question of where we are supposed to draw the line between legitimate EA arguments and illegitimate ones, and why we should draw it precisely where the critic says we should.  (For my own response to QM-based objections, see pp. 122-27 and 142 of Scholastic Metaphysics.)

Della Rocca also considers an objection raised by philosophers like Peter van Inwagen and Jonathan Bennett to the effect that PSR entails necessitarianism, the bizarre claim that all truths, including apparently contingent ones, are really necessary truths.  Della Rocca thinks van Inwagen and Bennett are probably right, but suggests that the defender of PSR could simply bite the bullet and accept necessitarianism, as Spinoza notoriously did.  And in that case, to reject Della Rocca’s argument for PSR on the grounds that necessitarianism is false would just be to beg the question.

Here again I think Della Rocca concedes too much.  As I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics(pp. 140-41), objections like the one raised by van Inwagen and Bennett presuppose that propositions are among the things PSR says require an explanation, and that for an explanans to be a sufficient reason for an explanandum involves its logically entailing the explanandum.  But while rationalist versions of PSR might endorse these assumptions, the Thomist understanding of PSR does not.

Della Rocca also remarks: 

I suspect that many of you simply will not see the force of the challenge that I am issuing to the non-rationalist. (I speak here from long experience, experience that prompted me to call my endeavor here quixotic.)  Philosophers tend to be pretty cavalier in their use of explicability arguments -- using them when doing so suits their purposes, refusing to use them otherwise, and more generally, failing to investigate how their various attitudes toward explicability arguments hang together, if they hang together at all.  We philosophers -- in our slouching fashion! -- are comfortable with a certain degree of unexamined arbitrariness in our use of explicability arguments.  But my point is that a broader perspective on our practices with regard to explicability arguments reveals that there is a genuine tension in the prevalent willingness to use some explicability arguments and to reject others. 

Amen to that.  As with the urban legend about First Cause arguments resting on the premise that “everything has a cause,” the notion that the PSR is a relic, long ago refuted, is a mere prejudice that a certain kind of academic philosopher stubbornly refuses to examine.  It doesn’t matter how strong is an argument you give for PSR; he will remain unmoved.  He “already knows” there must be something wrong with it, because, after all, don’t most members of “the profession” think so? 
Why, it’s almost as if such philosophers don’t wantthe PSR to be true, and thus would rather not have their prejudice against it disturbed.  Can’t imagine why that might be, can you?

Some related posts: 

Marmodoro on PSR and PC
An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part IV [on “brute facts”]
Can you explain something by appealing to a “brute fact”?
Nagel and his critics, Part VI [on rationalism, PSR, and the principle of causality]
Magic versus metaphysics
Can we make sense of the world?
Fifty shades of nothing
Why is there anything at all?  It’s simple

Meta-comedy

While we’re on the subject of Steve Martin, consider the following passage from his memoir Born Standing Up .  Martin recounts the insight that played a key role in his novel approach to doing stand-up comedy:
In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it... With conventional joke telling, there's a moment when the comedian delivers the punch line, and the audience knows it's the punch line, and their response ranges from polite to uproarious.  What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song...These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines?  What if there were no indicators?  What if I created tension and never released it?  What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax?  What would the audience do with all that tension?  Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime.  But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.  This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

To test my idea, at my next appearance at the Ice House, I went onstage and began: “I’d like to open up with sort of a ‘funny comedy bit.’ This has really been a big one for me... it's the one that put me where I am today.  I'm sure most of you will recognize the title when I mention it; it's the Nose on Microphone routine [pause for imagined applause].  And it's always funny, no matter how many times you see it.”
I leaned in and placed my nose on the mike for a few long seconds.  Then I stopped and took several bows, saying, “Thank you very much.”  “That's it?” they thought.  Yes, that was it. The laugh came not then, but only after they realized I had already moved on to the next bit. (pp. 111-12)
Well, this kind of thing either works for you or it doesn’t.  No doubt Martin’s facial expressions and body language helped make it work on the occasions when it did.  But Martin evidently thought his unorthodox approach to relieving comic tension might play well on the printed page too.  A good example comes from his 1979 book Cruel Shoes .  The piece is titled “Sex Crazed Love Goddesses” and here it is in its entirety:
Little Billy Jackson had to go to the store for his mother to pick up some postage stamps.  When he got there, he found the stamp machine to be out of order, and decided to walk the extra three blocks to the post office.  On the way there, he passed a hardware store, a variety store and a lamp shop.  The line was short at the post office and he got the stamps quickly and returned home.  His dog, “Spider,” bounded out to greet him as his mom waved from the porch.  Billy’s mother was pleased at the job he did and congratulated him on having enough sense to go to the post office when he found the stamp machine broken.  Billy had a nice dessert that night and went to bed. (p. 55)
I know what you’re thinking, but the story is actually better in the book, because it runs to the bottom of the page and it isn’t clear until you turn the page that that was it. 
Well, again, this kind of thing either works for you or it doesn’t.  It got a laugh out of me but it probably helps that I’ve got a taste for the abstract and the absurd.  The joke will be either blindingly obvious to you or utterly opaque.  Either way, here it is: Even though you know it’s a gag piece in a Steve Martin book, the title “Sex Crazed Love Goddesses” cannot fail to raise in your mind the expectation that something salacious is to follow.  Hence as you read this utterly banal and irrelevant narrative about a kid buying stamps, etc., you feel sure that the story is going to shift gears at any moment.  Then it suddenly ends without having done so.  The comic “tension” Martin speaks of breaks precisely when it hits you that it’s never going to break, and that’s what gets the laugh.
In making a joke out of what we expect a joke to be or out of what we expect a story to be, Martin is doing something we might call meta-comedy.   Comedy itself and its conventions become the subject matter.  Notice how the “Nose on Microphone” bit can work only insofar as Martin gets his audience explicitly to think to themselves: “OK, here we all are watching a comedian, and we’re about to hear a really funny comedy bit.  Here it comes…”  Thatis the set-up of the joke, rather than something internal to the joke itself (“A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar…”), as we’d normally expect.  It is only when we become self-conscious about what we thought the joke would be and how it didn’t meet that expectation that the “payoff” can be delivered.  Normally we become “lost in” a joke, just as we become lost in the action of a movie or play and don’t constantly think to ourselves “These are actors, none of this really happened but they are trying to make it convincing” etc.  Martin’s joke works precisely by not letting us forget that “This is a stand-up comedian, and he is trying to make us laugh by telling us jokes,” like a movie or play that “breaks the fourth wall.” 
Similarly, in the case of the Cruel Shoes piece, the joke can work only insofar as we are notlost in the story, but instead start thinking about the conventions of story titles and how they relate to the content of a story: “Why would a story with a title like ‘Sex Crazed Love Goddesses’ be about something as mundane as a kid buying stamps?  Oh wait, that mismatch is the joke…”
Martin’s act during his stand-up days relied on this kind of thing to a very great extent, even if not entirely.  A big part of his shtick required that the audience have it at the forefront of their minds that this guy is a famous comedian who is here to entertain us.  (Consider this bit and this bit from The Tonight Show, as well as various clips of stand-up material you can find on YouTube.) 
Meta-comedy is essentially an instance of what, in a post from several years ago, I called “meta-art” -- art the theme of which is art itself, and the method of which involves a self-conscious stretching of art’s boundaries.  Martin was to stand-up comedy what Duchamp was to visual art, Schoenberg to classical music, and Ornette Coleman to jazz.  Meta-art, art gone self-conscious, is theory-driven in a way just-plain-old-art-without-the-“meta”-thank-you-very-much is not.  (It cannot be a coincidence that Martin was a philosophy major and has long been an art collector!)
This comparison of Martin’s stand-up comedy to other instances of meta-art prompts two reflections.  First, as I indicated in the post just linked to, while meta-art can be interesting, it can also be arid and repetitive and descend into self-parody.  Martin did not rely on meta-comedy entirely, and where he did the results do not always hold up well.  (Most of Cruel Shoes does not hold up well.  I’m not sure how well some of it held up in 1979.)  As he makes clear in Born Standing Up (which is a very good book), Martin was burned out by the early 80s.  The following passage is telling:
The act was still rocking, but audience disruptions, whoops and shouts, sometimes killed the timing of bits, violating my premise that every moment mattered.  The days of the heckler comebacks were over.  The audiences were so large that if someone was calling or signaling to me, only I and their immediate seatmates could hear them.  My timing was jarred, yet if I had responded to the heckler, the rest of the audience wouldn't have known what I was talking about. Today I realize that I misunderstood what my last year of stand-up was about.  I had become a party host, presiding not over timing and ideas but over a celebratory bash of my own making.  If I had understood what was happening, I might have been happier, but I didn't.  I still thought I was doing comedy. (p. 185)
Martin does not put it this way, but it’s as if the meta-comedy had, without his realizing it, gone meta-meta.  People no longer showed up to hear meta-comedy anymore, let alone comedy.  They showed up to see the guy who was famous for doing the meta-comedy.  This couldn’t last, and Martin wisely made a transition into movies -- and, with them, a more conventional brand of comedy.
A second thought, though, is that it is quite remarkable how popular Martin’s stand-up then was given its often esoteric and “meta” character.  Meta-art is typically characterized by its lack of mass appeal.  Indeed, as Born Standing Up recounts, Martin’s act was by no means an overnight success.  But eventually it caught on in a big way.  Why?
One reason, of course, is that, as I have said, Martin’s stand-up comedy was not all of the surreal Cruel Shoes type.  It was a departure from the usual thing, but not a total departure.  (Thelonious Monk perhaps provides a better jazz analogy for Martin’s stand-up than Ornette Coleman does -- I compared Monk and Coleman in another earlier post.)  
A second reason is that the intentional absurdity of some meta-art, while a stumbling block to a popular audience in the case of visual arts, literature, and music, can have mass appeal in the case of meta-comedy because of its similarity to slapstick.  If you present the man on the street with Duchamp’s Fountain readymade as art or an Ornette Coleman piece as music, he will be offended by it.  But if you present it to him as comedy -- say, in a Three Stooges episode where the fellas are hired as musicians and start playing like Coleman, or try sculpture but produce only a urinal -- then he’ll probably love it.  Meta-comedy is just the next step.  “Sure it’s absurd, but then this is supposedto be comedy, so…” And Martin mixed old-fashioned slapstick in with his meta-comedy in any event (both onstage and via movies like The Jerk).  To a popular audience it all might have seemed more like Moe Howard than artistic modernism.
Finally, there is, possibly (especially in light of Martin’s “celebratory bash” remarks), what we might call the “Money for Nothing” factor.  Just as the average guy might both resent and admire the pop star for his ability to attract fame, wealth, and women with (so he assumes) little effort, so too might he be as drawn to, as annoyed by, a guy who acts goofy onstage for a couple of hours and gets tons of money for it.  The stand-up comic in a suit, chatting with Johnny Carson on TV, can have a sex appeal that the sullen and impoverished avant-garde painter or novelist does not.  Meta-comedy is not pretty, but boy its rewards are!

Thomas Aquinas, Henry Adams, Steve Martin

In his conceptual travelogue Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres -- first distributed privately in 1904, then published in 1913 -- historian Henry Adams devoted a chapter to Thomas Aquinas.  There are oversimplifications and mistakes in it of the sort one would expect from a non-philosopher interested in putting together a compelling narrative, but some interesting things too.  Adams rightly emphasizes how deep and consequential is the difference between Aquinas’s view that knowledge of God starts with sensory experience of the natural order, and the tendency of mystics and Cartesians to look instead within the human mind itself to begin the ascent to God.  And he rightly notes how important, and also contrary to other prominent theological tendencies, is Aquinas’s affirmation of the material world.  (This is a major theme in Denys Turner’s recent book on Aquinas, about which I’ve been meaning to blog.)  On the other hand, what Adams says about Aquinas and secondary causality is not only wrong but bizarre.Most important for present purposes, though, is Adams’ motif of drawing parallels between theological tendencies and medieval structures.  The view of those who see the relation between God and man in terms of force is compared by Adams to Mont-Saint-Michel.  The view that the relation is best seen in terms of faith, he compares to Chartres Cathedral.  And he compares Aquinas’s appeal to reason to the cathedrals at Beauvaisand Amiens.  Writes Adams:

The architects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took the Church and the universe for truths, and tried to express them in a structure which should be final.  Knowing by an enormous experience precisely where the strains were to come, they enlarged their scale to the utmost point of material endurance, lightening the load and distributing the burden until the gutters and gargoyles that seem mere ornament, and the grotesques that seem rude absurdities, all do work either for the arch or for the eye; and every inch of material, up and down, from crypt to vault, from man to God, from the universe to the atom, had its task, giving support where support was needed, or weight where concentration was felt, but always with the condition of showing conspicuously to the eye the great lines which led to unity and the curves which controlled divergence; so that, from the cross on the flèche and the keystone of the vault, down through the ribbed nervures, the columns, the windows, to the foundation of the flying buttresses far beyond the walls, one idea controlled every line; and this is true of St. Thomas’ Church as it is of Amiens Cathedral.  The method was the same for both, and the result was an art marked by singular unity, which endured and served its purpose until man changed his attitude toward the universe.
In his book of surrealist humor Cruel Shoes -- first distributed privately in 1977, then published in a longer edition in 1979 -- comedian and onetime philosophy major Steve Martin devotes one of the best pieces in the volume to a fanciful recounting of the “Demolition of the Cathedral at Chartres.”  Here it is in its entirety:
Mr. Rivers was raised in the city of New York, had become involved in construction and slowly advanced himself to the level of crane operator for a demolition company.  The firm had grown enormously, and he was shipped off to France for a special job.  He started work early on a Friday and, due to a poorly drawn map, at six-thirty one morning in February began the demolition of the Cathedral at Chartres.
The first swing of the ball knifed an arc so deadly that it tore down nearly a third of a wall and the glass shattered almost in tones, and it seemed to scream over the noise of the engine as the fuel was pumped in the long neck of the crane that threw the ball through a window of the Cathedral at Chartres.
The aftermath was complex and chaotic, and Rivers was allowed to go home to New York, and he opened up books on the Cathedral and read about it and thought to himself how lucky he was to have seen it before it was destroyed.  (pp. 19-20)
Suppose we depart from Adams a little by identifying Aquinas’s system with Chartres Cathedral instead, and then read Adams’ analogy in light of Martin’s absurd scenario.  What do we get?
What we get, perhaps, is a parable for the nouvelle theologie revolution as described by Rusty Reno in a First Things article a few years ago, which I quoted at length in a recent talk at Thomas Aquinas College.  In the wake of the nouvelle theologie critique of Neo-Scholastic Thomism, Reno writes, “the old theological culture of the Church has largely been destroyed,” while the nouvelle theologie thinkers themselves “did not, perhaps could not, formulate a workable, teachable alternative to take its place…”  Indeed, their own work is not intelligible except within the context of the system they found inadequate, a context they swept away.  Hence, judges Reno, “the collapse of neoscholasticism has not led to the new and fuller vision [they] sought… It has created a vacuum filled with simple-minded shibboleths.”  Some of the nouvelle theologie thinkers -- such as Balthasar and de Lubac -- deplored this simple-mindedness, and the heterodoxy that has come with it.  But it was an unintended consequence of their own theological revolution.  They’re a little like Steve Martin’s Mr. Rivers, wistfully contemplating the loss of a glorious structure they had themselves demolished. 
So thoroughly has the nouvelle theologiecaricature of Neo-Scholasticism and traditional Thomism permeated the intellectual life of the Church that you will hear it parroted in the most unexpected contexts.  For instance, during lunch at a conference some time ago, a couple of well-meaning conservative Catholic academics matter-of-factly remarked how awful the Neo-Scholastic manuals were, how you couldn’t learn Aquinas from Thomists, etc. -- even as they praised my own work and the high-octane Thomism I was defending during the conference!  I thought: “Where the hell do you think I got it from?”
Whenever I encounter this kind of cluelessness, I reach for my copy of Cruel Shoes.

DSPT Symposium

God, Reason and Reality is a new anthology edited by Anselm Ramelow.  In addition to Fr. Ramelow, the contributors include Robert Sokolowski, Robert Spaemann, Thomas Joseph White, Lawrence Dewan, Stamatios Gerogiorgakis, John F. X. Knasas, Paul Thom, Michael Dodds, William Wainwright, and Linda Zagzebski.  The table of contents and other information about the book can be found here.
The Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, CA will be hosting a symposium on the book on November 8, 2014.  The presenters will be Fr. Ramelow, Fr. Dodds, and me.  Further information can be found here.

Review of Jaworski

My review of William Jaworski’s Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction appears in the latest issue (Vol. 88, No. 3) of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly .  You can find a preview of the review here, though unfortunately most of the article is behind a paywall.  (I also say a bit about Jaworski’s approach to hylemorphism, and related contemporary approaches, in Scholastic Metaphysics .  See especially pp. 187-89.)