Method and Dialectic

In the comments section of this post on atheistic teleology over at Edward Feser's blog,  I had an extended discussion with an intelligent non-Aristotelian regarding the nature of final causes. As often happens in these cases, my interlocutor demanded in one of his comments that I present and defend a method for investigating final causes as a necessary prerequisite to continuing the discussion. As he put it, how could we know we are tracking the truth and not merely indulging in wishful thinking without an established method up front? I resisted, for I well knew that the insistence on an a priori establishment of method involves a host of philosophical assumptions (and mistakes, in my view) that pretty much give the store away to Enlightenment style thinking vs an Aristotelian approach. As an alternative, I proposed dialectic, which my interlocutor interpreted as a form of method (naturally, as he thinks thought must begin with method), and a poor one at that. Well, he was right to the extent that dialectic is a pretty shabby thing if it is interpreted as a degenerate form of the modern methodical approach. But it isn't such a degenerate form; it is a genuine intellectual alternative to method and is necessarily distorted if it is interpreted under the category of method. In fact, it is more accurate to conceive of the modern insistence on method as itself a degenerate form of dialectic.

We can see this through two people, one at the beginning of modern thought and the other a contemporary modern thinker. The first is Descartes, who it may be argued was the foundational thinker of modern thought by establishing the insistence on method as an intellectual first principle. The other is Daniel Dennett, a champion of method in contemporary thought and the supposed scourge of Cartesianism in the philosophy of mind. But as I argue in this post, Dennett is mistaken in seeing dualism as a foundational principle of Cartesianism; it is method that is the foundational principle and it is the insistence on method that has the consequence of dualism. This is why the contemporary philosophy of mind is so haunted by Cartesianism and why thinkers like Dennett, the more they struggle to free themselves of Descartes through method, only find themselves more tightly bound to him.

The problem with insisting on method as primary in thought is that it isn't. It isn't personally, as we all explore and come to know the world as youth without an a priori method in hand. It isn't historically, as there was an undeniable body of knowledge accrued through cultural accumulation over millenia. Nor was it even true of the seventeenth century philosophers who began to insist on the primacy of method. Descartes begins his Discourse on Method not with a method, but with an extended justification of his insistence on method in terms of his historical views and personal experience. He dismisses the philosophical tradition with this comment:

I will say nothing of philosophy except that it has been studied for many centuries by the most outstanding minds without having produced anything which is not in dispute and consequently doubtful and uncertain. (Discourse on Method, First Part)

He then goes on in the Second Part to describe the rules of his method and later, in the Fourth Part, summarizes the method thusly:

... I thought that I should take a course precisely contrary, and reject as absolutely false anything of which I could have the least doubt, in order to see whether anything would be left after this procedure which could be called wholly certain.

When he began implementing his method, Descartes doubted many things, but not everything.  He certainly didn't doubt his original historical assessment of philosophy as doubtful and uncertain, his main justification for method in the first place. If he had, he might have considered points like this: If the mere fact of disputation is sufficient to condemn something as uncertain, then uncertainty is a self-fulfilling prophecy, for we can render something uncertain merely by disputing it. And this, in a just historical irony, is exactly what later happened to Descartes and his method.

The point is that Descartes did not doubt everything because he couldn't. However skeptical he wished to become, Descartes remained a man nonetheless, an embodied knower forced to found his thinking in common sense and nowhere else. There is an entire worldview of thought and history buried in the first part of Descartes's Discourse; his insistence on method has the effect of protecting that worldview from criticism (dialectical criticism) or even acknowledgement that it exists. This is why the insistence on primary method can be considered a debased form of dialectic. All it does is hide the non-methodical assumptions from view and protect them from dialectical criticism. It doesn't transcend dialectic or protect itself from the pathologies of a degenerate dialectic, but only provides the illusion of transcending dialectic by assuming dialectical conclusions without argument.

We can see why philosophy has gotten such a bad reputation in the modern world. The reason is that modern philosophers, beholden to method, find it nearly impossible to engage on the issues that really separate them. For those issues involve the pre-methodical views of the world they must have and that inform their selection and establishment of method. In that earlier post I mention John Searle, who in his books on the mind states flatly his assumption that the fundamental particles described by physics are also the metaphysical fundamentals of reality, and that anyone who disagrees with this should be summarily dismissed. Searle, like Descartes, makes an a priori insistence on method in thought, only Searle's method is the method of science rather than the method of universal doubt of Descartes. But in any case, science is a product of the mind, and to insist a priori on the non-negotiability of the metaphysical significance of science is to already cast in concrete certain conclusions about the mind, e.g. that the mind is such that its methodical conclusions are more certain than any other conclusions it might make. Naturally, the view of the mind baked into Searle's assumptions about the metaphysical meaning of science is not indisputable, but disputing it is very difficult, because Searle has made his scientistic assumptions a barrier to entry to conversation (if you don't accept them, you are not worth talking to). Searle is not unusual but typical in this regard. And since not every thinker will make the same pre-methodical assumptions, discussions between modern thinkers have the flavor of circling the real issue in dispute without ever quite getting to it; for the disputants assume that "real thought" can only begin with their preferred approach, and when it becomes clear that the disputant does not share the same pre-methodical assumptions, bad faith or naivete is concluded.

In the dialog in response to the post on Feser's blog, my disputant insisted that I propose a method before we could discuss the metaphysical ordering of final causes. Without that, he asserted, we could be the victims of wishful thinking, psychological bias, and have no way to know whether we were tracking the truth. Now if I were to accept his demand, I would be implicitly agreeing to his views on wishful thinking, psychological bias and the rest as pre-methodical established facts, for those facts would stand in judgment of any method I might propose. But my insistence is that final causes and their ordering are primary facts about nature that stand in judgment of method rather than vice versa. For instance, why are we concerned with wishful thinking at all? Wishful thinking is a form of error, that is, failure to fulfill the final cause of the intellect to know the truth. Methods are to be judged in light of the extent to which they fulfill the final cause of the mind to know truth. But if the final cause of the mind is doubtful, what objective reason is there to prefer truth to error? Moreover, to allow facts like wishful thinking to implicitly stand in judgment of facts like the final cause of the mind is to already concede the case against final causes; for if final causes are not basic facts of nature at least as transparent as facts about wishful thinking, then they are nothing at all, or at best the illusions modern thinkers think they are.

The point is not that the brief analysis I just gave is a knockout argument in favor of final causes, but that the real point of disagreement between us is at a level that can only be resolved dialectically rather than by an a priori assertion of method. Were I to give into his demands for method, I would be conceding the case against final causes at the outset. The discussion would then be a playing out of that logic to its inevitable conclusion against final causes, or dawn in the eventual realization that the real argument is to be found in the category of pre-methodical facts of nature rather than post-methodical conclusions, at which point the original concession would have to be rescinded (perhaps generating an accusation of bad faith).

I brought up Daniel Dennett in the conversation, and he is a good example of how pre-methodical facts are unconsciously assumed in the development of method that is then used to bludgeon all rivals. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett develops a method for exploring consciousness called "heterophenomology." Like Descartes, prior to explaining and deploying his method, he gives reasons for its development. For Descartes, the villain was the endless disputes of philosophers; for Dennett it is "introspection:"

Or perhaps we are fooling ourselves about the high reliability of introspection, our personal powers of self-observation of our own conscious minds. Ever since Descartes and his "cogito ergo sum," this capacity of ours has been seen as somehow immune to error; we have privileged access to our own thoughts and feelings, an access guaranteed to be better than the access of any outsider...

But perhaps this doctrine of infallibility is just a mistake, however well entrenched. Perhaps even if we are all basically alike in our phenomenology, some observers just get it all wrong when they try to describe it, but since they are so sure they are right, they are relatively invulnerable to correction. (Consciousness Explained, p. 67)

The qualification "some" Dennett puts in front of "observers" may seem inconsequential, but it is crucial to the further development of his project. But more on this in a moment. The idea is that Dennett plans to put the subjective experience of consciousness under suspicion. Rather than accepting at face value what subjects say about their consciousness, Dennett will take a step back and only commit to saying that, when a subject describes his consciousness, we can only strictly conclude that what they are describing is how their consciousness seems to them, not necessarily how their consciousness really is. It may be that how their consciousness really is may coincide with how it seems to them, but then again it may not. Dennett uses the example of anthropologists encountering a primitive tribe. The natives speak of a being called Feenoman, whom the anthropologists gradually figure out is a kind of forest god. The "heterophenomenological fact" here is the fact that the natives are truly and sincerely speaking of Feenoman. But that Feenoman is fictional rather than real is something known to the anthropologists and not the natives; in other words, the anthropologists are able to discern how the native's world seems to them (Feenoman is just as real as anything else) compared to how it really is (Feenoman is fictional). More deeply, the cause of the natives belief in Feenoman is not the existence of the real Feenoman (as the natives think), but some other complex of causes unrelated to an actual Feenoman (since their isn't one).

Dennett's plan is to extend this procedure beyond native beliefs in forest gods to the contents of consciousness in general. His ultimate target is the experience of the unitary "I" itself, which Dennett calls the "Cartesian theater", and he claims in good heterophenomenological fashion to only seem to be real rather than really be real. The procedure is to interview subjects about their experiences of consciousness, and remain objectively neutral as regards their veridical nature until a complete account has been given. The interviewer is happy to grant the subject the authority to define how his conscious experience seems to him, but certainly not how his subjective experiences ultimately relate to reality. This is done later in an analogous manner to the anthropologist described above. And if he finds, like the anthropologist, that there are no objective reasons to believe in the reality of some element of the subject's conscious experience, and he can provide an alternative causal explanation for the subject's seeming to experience it, then the element in question can be reasonably dismissed as illusion. At the end of process, you end up with what is really true about consciousness, results the interview subject should then accept as a generous gift, but usually rebels against because his cherished beliefs in things like the self and gods are shown to be illusions.

Now I mentioned that it is critical that Dennett used the phrase "some observers" in the paragraph quoted above. This is because of the problem of the Prime Interviewer, a problem latent in the heterophenomenological procedure but not acknowledged by Dennett. With respect to subjects who do not meekly submit to heterophenomenological conclusions but have the temerity to question its authority to debunk consciousness, Dennett has this to say:

If you want us to believe everything you say about your phenomenology, you are asking not just to be taken seriously but to be granted papal infallibility, and this asking too much. You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you, and we are giving you total, dictatorial authority over the account of how it seems to you, about what it is like to be you. (p. 96, emphasis in original.)

Well, who has the authority to pronounce on how things really are, and not just how they seem? The interviewer, naturally. But the interviewer is just a man like the subject, and so presumably subject to the same cognitive suspicion as everyone else. He is only authoritative about what things seem like to him, not how things really are. If he is to legitimately serve as a heterophenomenological authority, it stands to reason that he must have already gone through a prior heterophenomenological vetting so that he could know what is real and what is illusion with respect to his own consciousness. No doubt you can see the infinite regress coming, and at some point there must be a Prime Interviewer, an individual whose consciousness is itself not under suspicion so it can serve as the methodical anchor for all other consciousnesses. In the paragraph quoted above, if Dennett had written that "Perhaps even if we are all basically alike in our phenomenology, all observers just get it all wrong when they try to describe it.." rather than just "some" observers, the problem of the Prime Interviewer would have been made explicit. If all observers get it wrong, how can the method get going? No points for guessing who gets the mantle of implicit Prime Interviewer in Consciousness Explained.

The method Dennett describes in Consciousness Explained is really just a way of privileging certain pre-scientific, pre-methodical scientistic assumptions by baking them into the cake of his method, then demanding that all other accounts of consciousness submit to the strictures of his method, which of course means that his pre-methodical account of things must triumph. Dialectic has not been transcended through method; it has merely been avoided through pre-methodical assumptions, and will inevitably reemerge when those assumptions are disputed. Which is why Dennett must order his reader to accept his results.

There are of course cases in which it is appropriate to establish a method and remain suspicious of conclusions not arrived at methodically. But the establishment of method cannot substitute for a dialectical justification of the method itself. And, finally, method cannot be the first thing in thought, for method is not self-evident, otherwise everyone would have it and there would not be disputes about methods. This is one of the many ironies of the modern age. The Enlightenment insistence on method was supposed to put an end to the endless dialectical wranglings of philosophers; instead it just substituted endless wrangling about method, a wrangling that is worse than dialectical because the dialectics were assumed and then forgotten in assumptions about method.

The Singularity of the Cartesian Ego

A peculiar property of the Cartesian ego is that there can be only one of them.

I think, therefore I am. The Cartesian Ego springs into existence. My own thinking is the one indubitable fact; it is the fact in terms of which all other facts are conditioned.

What about your thinking? Unfortunately for you, while I cannot doubt the reality of my own thought, it is quite possible for me to doubt the reality of your thought. Your being, and whatever thought it might involve, is just another item in my world, a world in which all being has existence only in light of the certainty and existence of my own ego; my own I think.

Even if I condescend to grant that you go through a similar process of radical doubt and discovery of the certainty of the thinking subject, and give you the name "Cartesian Ego", I am only using the title equivocally, the way a King might grant the title "King" to a visiting potentate. You may be a King in your kingdom, but in my kingdom, you are just another person subject to my rule. And the difference between an earthly kingdom and the Cartesian Kingdom is that the Cartesian Kingdom is, by definition, co-extensive with the world. So I can't help but think of you as a king without a kingdom; my kingdom must stretch from one end of the world to the other. "This town isn't big enough for the two of us."

So when philosophers and scientists go hunting for the Cartesian ego in brain studies, Cartesian Theaters, or philosophical zombies, the situation is comical. The only place you might encounter the Cartesian Ego is in the mirror - the one place the Cartesian Ego hunters always fail to look.

Why Descartes Haunts the Philosophy of Mind

If there is a premier villain in the modern philosophy of mind, it is Rene Descartes. John Searle calls him a "disaster", Antonio Damasio devotes an entire book to exposing Descartes' Error, and Daniel Dennett has spent his career trying to put a wrecking ball through the "Cartesian Theater." Yet Descartes doesn't seem to go away. His ghost keeps rattling his chains like the Jacob Marley of the philosophy of mind.

The reason is that the modern project of the philosophy of mind is Cartesian through and through. Daniel Dennett, despite his protests, is about as Cartesian as he could possibly be. The modern philosophy of mind, in fact, never seriously challenges Descartes. Philosophers attack Descartes' dualistic conclusions, but authoritatively assert the foundational elements of Cartesian philosophy that drove Descartes to dualism. These same foundational elements set the modern philosophy of mind on a path to dualism, and like a man trying to go to Los Angeles after setting his GPS for New York, modern philosophers spend their efforts trying to avoid the conclusions their first principles dictate they must eventually accept.

In Ch. 2 of Consciousness Explained, for example, Daniel Dennett gives reasons why dualism will never work as a philosophy. The dualist won't be able to explain how the immaterial mind can interact with a physical body anymore than Caspar the Ghost can explain why he can move through walls yet hold up a house when it is about to fall down. Dennett's criticisms hit the mark, but it doesn't address the reasons Descartes became a dualist in the first place. Cartesian dualism follows directly from the methodical first principle of Cartesian philosophy:

"I thought that I should take a course precisely contrary, and reject as absolutely false anything of which I could have the least doubt, in order to see whether anything would be left after this procedure which could be called wholly certain. Thus, as our senses deceive us at times, I was ready to suppose that nothing was at all the way our senses represented them to be... But I soon noticed that while I thus wished to think everything false, it was necessarily true that I who thought so was something. Since this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so firm and assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were unable to shake it, I judged that I could safely accept it as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.

I then examined closely what I was, and saw that I could imagine that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place that I occupied, but that I could not imagine for a moment that I did not exist.... therefore I concluded that I was a thing or substance whose whole essence or nature was only to think, and which, to exist, has no need of space nor of any material thing or body. Thus it followed that this ego, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is easier to know than the latter, and that even if the body were not, the soul would not cease to be all that it now is." 

The essence of Cartesianism is in the first paragraph, not the second, which is merely a conclusion from Cartesian first principles. Those first principles are 1) The assertion of method as foundational to true philosophy, and 2) The selection of radical doubt as the method of choice. We have become so used to the Cartesian first principles that we tend to see past them and take them as self-evident first principles of thought itself. But they are not self-evident at all; at least they were not for Descartes. He spent the first part of the Discourse on Method justifying his beginning philosophy in method and radical doubt (which, once that doubt is asserted, makes one wonder about the cognitive status of the first part of the Discourse, since it is asserted prior to and without the benefit of the method.) To the extent that we see the basic task of the philosopher as to "doubt things", or think that we need special training in order to philosophize, we have adopted the Cartesian approach to philosophy. For "special training" is nothing other than education in technical method, and that doubt should be a first principle of philosophy is itself open to philosophical doubt.

Daniel Dennett begins Consciousness Explained by introducing the "brain in a vat" thought experiment, which he admits is a modern version of Descartes' Evil Demon. You've no doubt heard this before: How do you know that you are not merely a brain in a vat, with electrodes hooked up to your neurons, making you think reality is something completely different than it truly is? It's easy to see that this is another way of posing the possibility that "nothing at all was the way our senses represented them to be." Dennett rapidly concludes that you are not a brain in a vat, arguing from scientific considerations of the difficulty of pulling off something like the brain in the vat hoax on a real brain. Of course, Dennett's destruction of the vat doesn't really work, because his argument depends on his knowledge of the way the real world really works; in other words, his argument starts with his brain outside the vat in the real world. Like David Copperfield, he only appears to have gotten himself out of the vat. He was already out the whole time.

But that is beside the point. It doesn't matter whether the brain in the vat experiment pans out. The basic Cartesian principle is that the radical falsity of experience is a possibility that must be addressed and overcome at the very outset of philosophy; Descartes himself overcomes this radical doubt, although in a way different than Dennett. The point is that any philosophy that feels it must start with the overcoming of radical doubt is starting on the Cartesian railroad. 

The second fundamental principle of Cartesian philosophy is that philosophy can only be conducted in the light of method. The point here is to undermine "folk philosophy" or the naive trading of opinions that was supposed to be characteristic of traditional philosophy. Instead of lolling around the agora engaging in idle conversation, the modern philosopher rolls up his sleeves and gets results. In Descartes' words, the ancient philosopher only argued the truth; the modern philosopher discovers the truth. 

Descartes' method of choice was that of applied universal doubt, but the selection of the particular method is not so important as the decision that philosophy itself can only begin with method. The latter principle is the distinguishing one of Cartesian philosophy. Since Descartes' time, philosophers have tried various experimental combinations of doubt and method; criticizing each other's doubt as not being real doubt, or each other's method as being poorly applied or wrongly selected, but the presumption that philosophy must begin with some form of doubt and method has been more or less tacitly assumed throughout the history of modern philosophy. 

The contemporary philosophy of mind generally begins in straightforward Cartesian terms with the assertion of method, in this case scientific method. There is nothing wrong with referring to scientific results in philosophy, of course, but what distinguishes the approach as Cartesian is that science is brought in through authoritative assertion rather than argument. This is the way John Searle does it in Mind, A Brief Introduction:

"The view implicit in this book, which I know want to make explicit, is that science does not name an ontological domain; it names rather a set of methods for finding out about anything at all that admits of systematic investigation... There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation in it. As far as we know, its most fundamental principles are given by atomic physics and, for that little corner of it that most concerns us, evolutionary biology. The two basic principles on which any such investigation as the one I have been engaging in depends on are, first, the notion that the most fundamental entities in reality are those described by atomic physics; and, second, that we, as biological beasts, are the products of long periods of evolution, perhaps as long as five billion years."

So if we are able to discover anything about the mind systematically, it must be through the methods of science, which has already established atomic physics and Darwinian evolution through the application of method. The interesting Cartesian question is: What is the relationship of the subsequent philosophy of mind to the mind that authoritatively established method and its results in the first place? Can the philosophy of mind call into question the mind that established its foundation in method? It is the same question that can be asked of Descartes, and it brings to light the inevitable tendency of Cartesian thought towards dualism.

In his Discourse on Method, Descartes proclaims his method in Part II after a preamble in both Parts I and the beginning of Part II. The method is supposed to cast all prior notions into doubt so as to find the one indubitable starting point of philosophy. But if the method does this, what happens to the cognitive status of the preamble? Is it not cast into doubt as well? The preamble consists of Descartes' reasons for abandoning the traditional approach to philosophy and inventing a new approach. It involves his views on the historical futility of philosophy and the uselessness of what he learned in school. But if we are to doubt all prior notions, should we not also doubt the uselessness of traditional philosophy and the worthlessness of what Descartes learned in school? Should not Descartes doubt that he ever was in school, or that he ever learned philosophy? Such doubt would, of course, undermine Descartes' justification for his revolution in philosophy. It would bring his project to a standstill. In fact, Descartes does not really doubt everything; he doesn't doubt his own appreciation of the history of philosophy or his confidence in establishing a radically new basis for philosophy. His assertion of the Method merely hides his earlier conclusions, which were not established by the method but are nonetheless beyond all doubt. The mind that established those conclusions, and that authorized and created the Method, is itself also hidden from view. But although it is hidden, it still lurks in the background, and will never go away because it is more certain than the Method itself. This is the ghost that reasserts itself in the form of Cartesian dualism; the Cartesian ghost is the true knower who established and underwrites the Method through which all other beings are granted existence. The Cartesian world is a world of beings who are granted existence through method; but, as Descartes realized, the Thinking Being who conducts the Method is not itself granted existence through Method, for it must already be for the Method to happen at all. So the thinking being is not a body or extensive being in the world like all others, it is an immaterial being transcending the world entirely. Thus we arrive at dualism.

The contemporary philosopher of mind follows the same path as Descartes, with the method of empirical science substituted for the method of empirical doubt. But the result is the same. For John Searle, the true "fundamental entities" populating the world are those established by the methods of atomic physics. What of the scientific mind that creates, establishes, and conducts atomic science, and proclaims in its name the true fundamental entities? This Thinking Being is clearly less dubitable than the atomic particles it proclaims, and it is also beyond the reach of the philosophy of mind, for the philosophy of mind starts with the scientific mind behind it as the authoritative voice of method. But although hidden, the scientific mind is still there, and haunts the contemporary philosophy of mind in the form of the Cartesian Ghost. Daniel Dennett won't find the Cartesian Ghost in his Cartesian Theater; he'll find him in the scientist who establishes the scientific results with which Dennett starts the philosophy of mind.

The only way to exorcise the Cartesian Ghost is to stop repeating the spell that calls him forth from the grave: The insistence on doubt and method as first principles of philosophy.

The Mind is More Than the Brain: A consideration of Ch. 49, Book II of the Summa Contra Gentiles

The following is an essay I wrote four years ago, did nothing with, and might as well publish here.

The Mind is More Than the Brain: A consideration of Ch. 49, Book II of the Summa Contra Gentiles

All references from the Summa Contra Gentiles are from the edition published by the University of Notre Dame Press, 1975

Is modern neuroscience on the verge of a definitive proof that there is no such thing as the immaterial mind? That what we call "ourselves" is really just an illusion of brain chemistry? According to John Derbyshire of the National Review (Dec. 13, 2004), novelist Tom Wolfe thinks so. From Derbyshire's review of I Am Charlotte Simmons:

Our understanding of brain function has gone much further than most non-scientists realize. Nowhere in that understanding is there any trace of a notion of the conscious self. According to Wolfe, practically no working neuroscientist believes that such a thing exists. The "I" that is the first word of Wolfe's title may, science tells us, be an illusion; and the fate of his heroine suggests that this is indeed so.

Derbyshire himself is skeptical of the immaterial "I" and is worried about the social consequences:

The vulgar metaphysic we all carry round with us includes the vague idea of a self, an "I," imagined as a little homunculus crouched inside our heads an inch or so behind the eyes, observing and directing all that goes on in our lives. It seems probable that this is as false as the medieval notion of the sky's being a crystal sphere. Yet if the self is indeed an illusion, then what is to prevent that dissolution of all values foreseen by Nietzsche? In Charlotte Simmons's world, a world without the self, what is virtue? What is wisdom? What is responsibility?

When I read such things, I am reminded of G.K. Chesterton's criticism of modern philosophy as the sort of thing that, if indulged in persistently, leads inevitably to the insane asylum. Socrates said that flute playing implies the existence of a flute player, and I am sure he would agree that understanding implies the existence of an understander. But the modern thinker exists in a bizarre world where there can be an "understanding" but no "notion of the conscious self", in other words, no understander, which is just what the conscious self is. This is a world where we must bow reverently when "science tells us" things because the abstraction "science" is more real than the self-consciousness of the scientists who do it. Chesterton wrote that the modern mentality is less an argument that can be rationally refuted than a spell that must be snapped. Indeed, how do you argue with a man who claims that he heard on the radio that he has no ears? Or with a scientist who says he understands that he has nothing with which to understand?

There is irony in the fact that the acknowledged founder of modern thought, Rene Descartes, based his thinking on the one thing he thought impossible to doubt, the "I", the very thing now questioned by modern scientists. But have scientists answered Descartes? Descartes thought the "I" was impossible to doubt because only something that exists can be deceived. If the "I" doesn't exist, then it can't be deceived. If it does exist, then it can be deceived about many things, but not about its own existence. I might have a dream, but my dream doesn't have dreams. Only really existing things can have real thoughts about anything, whether true or false. The modern scientist says that the "I" is an illusion, but never explains how an illusion can have real thoughts, let alone come to know itself as an illusion.

A further irony is that modern thinkers like Derbyshire view the self as a medieval notion to be cast off with other outdated ideas, like the heavens as a crystal sphere. But, as already noted, the notion of the "self" the moderns wish to debunk really started with their patriarch Descartes, not Aristotle or Aquinas. Furthermore, the notion of ourselves as merely a dream of the brain is nothing but a spin on the even more ancient idea that the world is nothing but the dream of God. And the answer given by medieval philosophers is the same in either case. If we are merely the dream of God, then God might know it, but we wouldn't, or anything else for that matter. A dream is not an agent, that is, something that can do something of itself. And if the self is an illusion of the brain, then the brain might know it, but the "I" wouldn't or anything else. The "I" would be known but not know. Common sense is on the side of the medievals: Dreams and fantasies are things experienced, not things that have experiences.

But the modern scientist thinks he can trump all this common sense with "science." By plugging in supercomputers, turning on high-powered microscopes, and firing up the Bunsen burner, he thinks he can get behind the self with technology. Aquinas might politely tell him that he can no more do this than get behind his own shadow. The shadow and the "I" keep tagging along, no matter how the modern scientist twists and turns. Take, for instance, Derbyshire's suggestion that the "self" is a "vague idea", part of a vulgar metaphysic that "we" carry round. One might ask: What do you mean by "we", pale face? If the "I" is suspect, who is this "we" that carries him around and suffers so patiently his commands in directing "our lives?" Is he suspect as well? Of course, the "we" is really nothing but the "I" in disguise reflecting on itself, as can easily be seen by putting the sentence into the personal singular instead of the plural:

The vulgar metaphysic I carry round with me includes the vague idea of a self, an "I," imagined as a little homunculus crouched inside my head an inch or so behind my eyes, observing and directing all that goes on in my life.

It immediately becomes clear that the true "I" is actually the I that is the voice of the sentence, not the homunculus "I" of the vulgar metaphysic. The only thing proven by his statement is that Derbyshire has mistaken the "I" of his vulgar metaphysic for the self of serious philosophical reflection. The fact is that any statement made by anyone about anything is made by an "I", and there is no gainsaying the voice of assertion. The "I" is the ground of experience, any experience, be it climbing the Alps, dreaming of soccer glory, philosophizing, conducting scientific investigations, or claiming that the "I" itself is an illusion. Derbyshire's homunculus "I" may be an illusion, but the "I" that proclaims it so certainly can't be.

The problem for moderns is that they forget that there is no such thing as "science", except as an abstraction. There exist scientists, "I"s like you and me, who do fruitful and laudable work in empirical investigation. But the scientific method has not granted them a supernatural (indeed superdivine) power to step outside their own consciousness and judge it an illusion. From what ground does the neuroscientist announce that the self is an illusion? Anything he says, does,or thinks occurs only in the context of his self-consciousness and is a product of that self-consciousness. Thus, when the neuroscientist announces that the self is an illusion, the first thing we should wonder about is not what happens to virtue, wisdom, and responsibility, but what happens to science. If there isn't a self around to be virtuous, wise, or responsible, then there isn't a self around to make scientific judgments. Or does Charlotte Simmons's self suddenly become solid the day she gets a Phd in biology?

Why are scientists so keen to dismiss the self? Lately they have been able to map mental activity onto brain activity with increasing accuracy. A subject plays the piano and one area of the brain becomes active. He watches TV and a different area becomes active. A certain area of his brain is stimulated and he feels a particular emotion. A different area is stimulated and he feels a different emotion. Moreover, various mental activities become impossible in the case of brain injuries. One lesion makes a patient unable to read, another makes him mistake his wife for a hat. The mind is so intimately involved with the brain that the scientist suspects that the mind is nothing but the brain. There is no independent "I" in there. The flickering neurons are all there is.

To which Aquinas might say: So what? That the mind and the body are intimately involved is obvious to common sense and is a fundamental principle of Thomistic philosophy. I will my right arm to rise and the appendage on that side goes up. It does not follow that "willing my arm to rise" is nothing but the physical phenomenon of "right arm rising." I think "2+2=4" and a certain area of my brain becomes electrically active. It does not follow that "2+2=4" is nothing but the physical phenomenon of "certain part of the brain becoming electrically active." The electrical activity in the brain is the effect of thinking "2+2=4", not the thought itself, as my arm rising is the effect of willing that phenomenon, not the willing itself. Nor does it prove anything that brain lesions inhibit mental activity. It was a commonplace of medieval philosophy that a sick man can't think straight.

At this point the modern thinker says: Aha! Just like a medieval, inventing fantastical beings where none are needed. Why invent this "I" that has "effects" in the brain? We can already explain much of mental activity as electrical activity in the brain. Eventually we will explain all of it, having finally finished chasing the self through ever narrower and darker passageways of the brain, in the words of Mr. Derbyshire.

But has the modern scientist explained thoughts like "2+2=4" in terms of brain activity? Mapping thoughts to brain activity is one thing, explaining it as brain activity is quite another, and we finally come to the subject of this essay, Ch. 49 of Book II of the Summa Contra Gentiles, "That the intellectual substance is not a body." In this Chapter St. Thomas gives several arguments why what he calls the "intellectual substance" (and we would call the "mind") cannot possibly be a physical body. His arguments, as always for St. Thomas, are concise and to the point. And also typically for St. Thomas, a quick read of the chapter shows that the thrust of the argument does not depend on crystal spheres or any particular results from medieval physics. Whether true or false, the argument stands on its own and is not dependent on the vagaries of empirical science, ancient or modern. Consider the argument in paragraph 6:

Moreover, if the intellectual substance is a body, it is either finite or infinite. Now, it is impossible for a body to be actually infinite, as is proved in [Aristotle's] Physics. Therefore, if we suppose that such a substance is a body at all, it is a finite one. But this is also impossible, since, as was shown in Book I of this work, infinite power can exist in no finite body. And yet the cognitive power of the intellect is in a certain way infinite; for by adding number to number its knowledge of the species of numbers is infinitely extended; and the same applies to its knowledge of figures and proportions. Moreover, the intellect grasps the universal, which is virtually infinite in its scope, because it contains individuals which are potentially infinite. Therefore, the intellect is not a body.

One reason people are so quick to conflate the mind and brain is because of the analogy with digital computers. The billions of neural connections in the brain seem like the billions of electronic connections in a computer. And the electrical activity the neuroscientist observes in the brain seems to bear a resemblance to the electronic activity of a computer. Since computers obviously don't have an immaterial "I", maybe the brain doesn't either. The computer/brain analogy is seductive, but St. Thomas has put his finger on a fatal problem with it. A computer represents a number by using a particular electrical pattern involving high voltage (denoted by "1") and low voltage (denoted by "0"). The number "5", for example, would be represented by the electrical pattern 1-0-1 and the number "6" by 1-1-0. Larger numbers need larger patterns: The number "8" is 1-0-0-0, "63" is 1-1-1-1-1-1 and "25000" is 1-1-0-0-0-0-1-1-0-1-0-1-0-0-0. But a computer has limited electrical resources and therefore a limited number of patterns. No matter how big a computer is or how fast its circuits, there will always be numbers that are too large for it to represent. Similarly, our brains, simply by the fact of being physical, necessarily have a limited number of neural connections and so a limited number of patterns with which they could represent numbers. As St. Thomas points out, our minds are not limited in the size of the numbers they can think about. Give me any number, and I can always think of a larger one. (Don't confuse imagining a number with thinking about one. Imagining a number means forming a picture of that many things, like forming a picture of a dozen eggs in your head. Our capacity to do that is very limited, but we can think about things even if we can't imagine them. I can't imagine a million coins, but I can think about the number 1,000,000. I do so everytime I use 1,000,000 in an arithmetic calculation.) There is no limit to the size of the numbers our minds can think about. It follows that the mind that thinks about number cannot be physical.

St. Thomas also makes reference to our knowledge of "figures and proportions". I can think about triangles, squares, pentagons, etc. (Again, there is a difference between thinking about a figure and imagining one.) In fact, the number of different figures I can think about is unlimited. But if the thought "triangle" is nothing but a particular electrical pattern in the brain, then the number of figures I can think about would be limited, since the number of electrical patterns in the brain is limited, however large. This is a variation on the argument in the last paragraph and the conclusion is the same: The mind can't be physical because of the unlimited nature of its thoughts.

Consider the argument in paragraph 8:

Also, the action of no body is self-reflexive. For it is proved in [Aristotle's] Physics that no body is moved by itself except with respect to a part, so that one part of it is the mover and the other is the moved. But in acting, the intellect reflects on itself, not only as to a part, but as to the whole of itself. Therefore, it is not a body.

This argument always makes me think of computers in film. Back in the 50's and 60's, computers were cast as "Giant Brains", brilliant machines tended by acolytes in white lab coats and capable of thinking brilliant thoughts. Later, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the villainous computer HAL not only is intelligent but assumes a will of its own, taking over the space mission and killing the astronauts. This theme continued in 1983 in Wargames, where a computer attempts to start a nuclear war on its own initiative. The latest installment in this genre is the Matrix series, where computers not only take over but force human beings to live in an artificial reality. What's fascinating about these movies is how silly they look in retrospect. The "giant computers" from the 50's, for example, had less computing power than a modern handheld calculator that you can buy for $10 at Walmart. And the infamous WOPR computer from Wargames is left in the dust by a Dell desktop PC that you can buy for a couple of hundred bucks. Nobody these days would believe a movie where a handheld calculator manifests brilliant insight or your $300 desktop takes over your life. Our intimacy and familiarity with computers has demystified them. How many times have we wished our computer would show some intelligence when a day's work is lost because of a trivial operating system error? Everyday use has brought home the truth about physical bodies of which Aristotle and St. Thomas speak: It is the nature of physical beings that one part of it is the mover and the other is the moved. I move the keys on the keyboard and a program is moved to access the harddrive. The movement on the harddrive in turn moves the program to display data on the monitor. Any break in the chain and the computer doesn't work - and the longer the chain, the more opportunities for it to break, which is why computers become more frustrating with complexity, not less. We see that the intelligence attributed by people in the 60's to computers is a superstition. Computers don't have the unity necessary to intelligence. The keyboard knows nothing about the harddrive, the harddrive knows nothing about the CPU, and the CPU knows nothing about the monitor. They are just electrical components obeying the laws of physics, moving when they are moved by another. The unity of the computer is all from our perspective. We connect harddrives, monitors, keyboards and CPUs, call it a "computer" and think of it as "one thing" doing something, but this is really a reflection of the unity of our own intelligence and not a unity in physical nature. Now if the mind is nothing but the brain, from where comes the unity of our thought? The brain, like a computer, is a collection of parts. But the mind is self-reflexive, that is, the mind acts on itself. It has the peculiar characteristic that it not only knows the thing known, but itself in the act of knowing it, and that with the whole of itself. When I know 2+2=4, I not only know the mathematical truth, but the fact that I know it, and it is the same mind that knows both things. This makes the mind both the mover and the thing moved. How can this be if the mind is a physical body? It is all well and good that neuroscientists can detect electrical signals in the brain when a subject thinks 2+2=4 or 4+4=8. But if they claim that these electrical signals are thought itself, they need to explain the unity of the mind in terms of electrical signals, an impossibility to my thinking.

The argument of paragraph 9 also depends on the self-reflexive character of the mind:

A body's action, moreover, is not terminated in action, nor movement in movement - a point proved in [Aristotle's] Physics. But the action of an intelligent substance is terminated in action; for just as the intellect knows a thing, so does it know that it knows; and so on indefinitely. An intelligent substance, therefore, is not a body.

The self-reflexive character of the mind is one of those facts that is so obvious it is often overlooked. It is expressed in John Derbyshire's rumination about the "I" that "we" carry around. The "we" that is the voice of the sentence is the same "I" that is under discussion. We could write a further sentence where "we" discuss the voice of John Derbyshire's sentence, in other words, where "we" discuss the "we" that is thinking about the "I". This process could be carried on indefinitely and is implicit in any act of knowledge. What it means is that the result of the minds act of knowing is another act of knowing, ad infinitum. But no body can act in this way. Suppose, to the contrary, that thoughts really are nothing but electrical signals in the brain. Then since knowing something implies that we know that we know it, the electrical signal of knowing it will give rise to another electrical signal that is the physical manifestation of knowing that we know it. This signal will give rise to yet another one, and on indefinitely, and the brain would soon fry itself. Therefore the mind cannot be not identical with the brain.

The preceeding arguments are probably the ones most accessible to the modern mind. But it is the argument from paragraph 4 that I find most persuasive:

Again, the principle of diversity among individuals of the same species is the division of matter according to quantity; the form of this fire does not differ from the form of that fire, except by the fact of its presence in different parts into which the matter is divided; nor is this brought about in any other way than by division of quantity - without which substance is indivisible. Now, that which is received into a body is received into it according to the division of quantity. Therefore, it is only as individuated that a form is received into a body. If, then, the intellect were a body, the intelligible forms of things would not be received into it except as individuated. But the intellect understands things by those forms of theirs which it has in its possession. So, if it were a body, it would not be cognizant of universals but only of particulars. But this is patently false. Therefore, no intellect is a body.

Let us suppose that the mind is nothing but the brain. Then my thoughts are nothing but patterns of neurons firing in the brain. My idea of "fire", for example, would then be some particular electrochemical pattern in my brain. Your idea of fire would be an electrochemical pattern in your brain. Common sense tells us that we can have a conversation about "fire" and talk about the same thing. Yet how can this be so? No two physical objects are identical in every respect. Even if the pattern for "fire" in your brain is similar to the pattern for "fire" in my brain, it won't be precisely identical in every respect. The space between the neurons will be slightly different and the timing of the neural firing will be slightly different in each brain. If the idea of fire is nothing but the physical pattern in each of our brains, then our ideas of "fire" will necessarily differ as well.

Well, maybe our ideas of fire are slightly different, you argue. Isn't that why people get in arguments? If that were the case, then arguments could never be resolved because we could never get our ideas of fire to be exactly the same. But we do, at least occasionally, resolve arguments in terms of mutually understood ideas. The point can be better made with a mathematical idea, say the number "2". What would happen if scientists hooked up their equipment and monitored each of our brains while we both thought of the number "2"? Would they get exactly the same readings on both our meters, down to the thousandth decimal of brain current? Would a picture of our brain activity show exactly the same thing, down to whatever resolution the scientists cared to go? Obviously not, and surely our ideas of "2" are not just approximately the same, but identical, otherwise mathematics is impossible. The fact that physical activity from one brain to the next is never exactly identical but we can nonetheless think of identical things shows again that brain activity is an effect of thought, not thought itself.

The problem with the material mind is even deeper than this, however. Even if it could be shown that brain activity might be precisely identical from one brain to the next, this would still do nothing to account for how two different brains could think of the same thing. As St. Thomas notes, material things are divided according to quantity. This apple differs from that apple because this apple has this matter and that apple has that matter. What makes this apple this apple is the particular matter of which it is constituted. In other words, matter is by its nature a source of individuation. So if we say that our minds, and therefore the ideas resident in them, are purely material beings, then they are also purely individual beings. Your idea of “2” is not the same as my idea of “2” because the matter in your head is not the same matter that is in my head. The fact that we can hold a conversation and talk about the same number “2” shows that “2”, and the mind that knows it, cannot be material.

An opponent might respond to the above arguments with something like this: Yes, the patterns in your head are not identical to the patterns in my head, and the matter in your head is not the same matter in my head. But that’s beside the point. The fact is that the pattern for “2+2=4” in your head is functionally equivalent to the pattern for “2+2=4” in my head, and that is all that is necessary. The voltage levels and electronic chips in computers vary slightly from machine to machine, yet they are functionally equivalent because they run the same software. If we think of software as the analog of the mind, then we can talk about “2” even if our minds are nothing but matter because we have functionally equivalent representations of “2”.

The flaw in this argument can be found by analyzing more closely the notion of function. When two things fulfill the same function they answer to the same purpose. A bow and arrow and a rifle can both serve the function of killing deer. The numbers “2” and “4” can both serve the function of producing an even number when multiplied by any other integer. An airplane and a ship can both function to get you across the Atlantic. Notice that the same things can be equivalent for some functions but not equivalent for other functions. A ship and an airplane are not functionally equivalent if the function is to go deep-sea fishing. The point is that the notion of “functional equivalence” implies a process or activity whose meaning is already known and taken for granted, and that provides the context for the functional equivalence. Thus to say that the material patterns for “2+2=4” in your head and my head may be different but functionally equivalent is to take for granted that the biochemical processes in the brain are in themselves mathematically meaningful, which is the very point at issue. Here is another way to look at it: What the notion of function does is displace meaning to the function level. Meaning is shifted from the element that serves the function to whatever it is that assigns meaning to the function itself. If a certain pattern in the brain serves the function of “2+2=4”, then it is serving the purpose of some other part of the brain when it wishes to use the notion of “2+2=4”. How are those parts of the brains related in our two brains? Are they also functionally equivalent? Then their meaning, too, is displaced and they must get it from yet another part of the brain, etc., etc. At each step we don’t solve the problem of how two materially distinct beings (the patterns in your head and my head) can yet be identical, but only apparently solve it by displacing it with the notion of function. But the buck will have to stop somewhere, and unless there is some point at which the processes in two different brains are not merely functionally identical but identical pure and simple, then the previous arguments stand. What about computers? Computers are purely functional, material beings with no intrinsic meaning. Computers are functionally equivalent because we human beings assign functional meaning to them with our non-material minds. “2+2=4” is functionally equivalent but electrically different in each computer because we find it so.

God, Prayer and Making a Difference III

The third part of this thread, the first two parts being here and here.

In this third part, I consider the proposition "The future of our society as one of honor, decency and virtue does not depend on religious faith." The more detailed version, from the Secular Right blog, is:

"We take for granted that parents will teach children manners, or assume that if they don't, schools will act as a back-stop. But what if neither the family nor schools perform the duty? I see no connection between belief in a supernatural being and public etiquette. Rather, the cultivation of manners rests on an understanding of how fragile social order is, and how it needs to be constantly buttressed by instruction and correction."

How will this cultivation of manners take place? It must be the instruction of those without manners, by those who do have manners. But why should the unmannered take instruction from the mannered? The ill-mannered are, at least in that respect, poorly educated. So the question resolves itself into the general question of why the uneducated should submit to an education by the educated. Now even the uneducated can see the value of a technical education, for the products of our empirical sciences are manifest to the ignorant, but technical education is not at issue; the question is one of the education of manners and morals, or what was once the point of education classically understood. It is only the wise, however, who understand the value of wisdom. The most serious aspect of ignorance is that it is ignorant of the evil of ignorance - which is why the Socratic breakthrough, which involved not only the knowledge of Socrates' own ignorance, but his understanding of its deep significance, was necessary to the founding of true education.

There can be only one reason why the uneducated should submit to education: faith. If they could see and understand the benefits of education, see the connection between manners and the fragility of society, to that extent they would not be ignorant. Heather MacDonald has it backwards. It is not the cultivation of manners that rests on an understanding of the fragility of the social order, but the understanding of the fragility of the social order that rests on the the cultivation of manners.

Faith is a virtue. I am not here speaking of the supernatural virtue of Faith with which we may be infused by the grace of God, but of the ordinary, mundane virtue of faith. Faith is not an intellectual conclusion, or an arbitrary act of the will, but a virtue - a quality of character that contributes to the fulfillment of our nature. Faith is necessary to education because the ignorant cannot see the value of education prior to being educated. So they must believe that education is worthwhile until the point comes that they can see that it is worthwhile. Faith, even faith bordering on or passing over to religious faith, was the keystone of classical education. When Socrates heard that the Oracle of Delphi had proclaimed him the wisest of men, he was puzzled because he knew himself to possess no wisdom. Were he a man of no faith, he would have simply dismissed the Oracle as mistaken and forgotten about it. But his faith - his belief that the Oracle would not speak falsely - led him to hold in tension the Oracle's prophecy and the knowledge of his own ignorance. He embarked on a quest to resolve the tension by finding a man wiser than himself. Of course, the result of his quest was the discovery that the supposed wise men thought they knew many things they did not, while Socrates was not subject to this vice, this being the basis for the Oracle's proclamation. The faith of Socrates was not a consequence of the self-education that occurred on his quest, but a pre-condition of it.

Aristotle typically begins his works with a review of the history of thought on the question he is addressing. This is a testimony of faith, a record of the fact that Aristotle, like Socrates, researched all the wise men he could find in the belief that they had something to teach him, before assuming the audacity to add his own novel contributions. St. Thomas Aquinas, the apex of the the tradition of classical thought, began his career in an act of faith in a vow of obedience to the Dominican Order. He spent his life absorbing everything anyone could teach him, not just from Christian teachers like Albert the Great or Duns Scotus, but also from pagans like Aristotle, Jews like Maimonides, and Moslems like Avicenna and Averroes. In expanding and correcting the tradition, he spoke as the voice of tradition, a result of his original act of faith.

The modern world, which I will arbitrarily take as beginning in the sixteenth century, self-consciously removed the central place of faith in intellectual life, and, eventually, in life in general. In fact, it has come close to making faithlessness (for which it misuses the word "skepticism") its supreme virtue. Descartes can be compared to Socrates on this score. After receiving a modest education, Descartes, as a young man, concluded it was all drivel and dismissed the intellectual tradition at a stroke, an act of breathtaking intellectual pride. Instead he searched for a principle on which he could hang his life and thought with absolute certainty; in other words, in complete independence and without a scintilla of faith. Socrates embarked on a quest for the wise man, Descartes on a quest for the indubitable first principle of philosophy that would relieve him of any need for wise men. The result, of course, was the cogito ergo sum and, more significantly, the establishment of faithlessness at the heart of philosophy.

Descartes did not succeed in constructing his philosophy of certainty, as thinkers after him were soon to point out. But instead of concluding that Descartes was mistaken in his original act of faithlessness, they joined him in it, concluding only that Descartes had not been faithless enough. Since then, the story of modern philosophy has been the story of philosophers undermining each other, with each proclaiming a newly discovered set of "first principles" that undermine all prior philosophers, with succeeding philosophers returning the favor by dismissing that philosopher as "naive." Thus Kant undermines both Descartes and Hume, Hegel undermines Kant, and Nietzsche undermines everyone. Hobbes proclaims the sure foundation of civil order in the discovery of the "state of nature", only to be told by Rousseau that he didn't really discover the state of nature - a feat that Rousseau, naturally, feels he himself accomplished. What they all have in common is the original Cartesian principle that philosophy starts in faithlessness. Albert Camus distilled the modern tradition (if a tradition that is defined as a continual undermining of itself can really be thought of as a tradition) when he proclaimed in The Myth of Sisyphus:

After so many centuries of inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this is true for all our knowledge. With the exception of the professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

Camus, like Descartes, wrote this as a young man. This was how he started his career, not how he ended it. Socrates began his philosophical career by asserting his own ignorance and searching for the wise man;  the modern man asserts the ignorance of anyone who might teach him, and like Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and the rest of the dreary train, sets out to "revolutionize" thought by reconstructing Thought from the ground up, in his own image. Finally we reach Camus who does not attempt to reconstruct Thought - having surveyed the wreckage - and simply tries to find a way to live without thought. The modern thinker prides himself on his "skepticism", but he is not at all skeptical of the one thing needful - himself. Socrates is the philosopher so desperately needed by the modern world. 

It is easy to see the effect of all this on education and the transmission of manners and civility. It has taken a long time to play out, but destructive ideas held initially by an intellectual elite eventually filter down and through society as a whole. Finally we reach the point where the average person absorbs the faithlessness that was once an intellectual vice restricted to a few intellectual "pioneers", and massive cultural damage ensues. Everyone is a Cartesian ego now, a self-subsisting intellectual principle that demands that everything submit to it on its own terms. The decrease of civility is only a symptom for which modern philosophy is the disease; the cure is a return to faith at the center of culture.

We have lost the virtue of faith that is vital to education. Why should a student put faith in a teacher, when the teacher holds faithlessness as a first principle? A student will place faith in a teacher to the extent that the teacher has faith, and for that the teacher must relate himself to a being worthy of faith; for a grown man, that can only be God. That is the connection between belief in a supernatural being and public etiquette.

"Criton, we owe a cock to Asclepios; pay it without fail."

 - the dying words of Socrates.