The Legacy of the Enlightenment

I'm just finishing reading The Enlightenment And Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden, an excellent history of the enlightenment as well as Pagden's interpretation of its significance. His last chapter - The Enlightenment and Its Enemies - is a robust defense of the Enlightenment legacy against its critics.  While Pagden is certainly right that the Enlightenment has bequethed us some genuine treasures, in particular the modern theory of rights and constitutional government, he gives the Enlightenment far too much credit. Why, for instance did the Enlightenment happen at all?

What so many of these opponents of Enlightenment have failed even to ask is why the world of virtue and moral authority that had apparently served our ancestors so well should have been overturned in the first place. Why, in other words, did the Enlightenment happen at all? It cannot simply be explained away, as the De Maistres and the Burkes had hoped, as the murderous revenge of disinherited minorities suddenly - and inexplicably - grown powerful. I have tried to offer an answer, not in terms of a conflict between "reason" and belief, between science and religion, but rather in terms of the historical failure of Christianity to continue to provide the kind of intellectual, and consequently moral, certainty that it had once done. By the mid-seventeenth century the entire structure on which all monotheistic beliefs rest, that the universe had been the creation of a divinity who continues to dictate every aspect of its being, had come to seem to many Europeans as threadbare as paganism had once seemed to Plato and Aristotle. In origin, all except the strictly theological aspects of Christianity - all that it could salvage from its Judaic origins - everything that relates to the human, and to life on earth - derived exclusively from ancient pagan sources manipulated by a powerful and often brilliantly imaginative clerical elite. Hence the description of it as "Hellenized Judaism." What the Enlightenment did was to replace this Christianized vision of the human condition with a more appealing, less dogmatic account, derived initially from the same attempt to reshape the most powerful of the ancient philosophical schools.

It is appropriate that Pagden gives a characteristically Enlightenment-style argument in defense of the Enlightenment. What makes it peculiarly Enlightenment is its use of history as a category that stands in judgement of all other modes of thought. By the mid-seventeeth century, Pagden tells us, the ancient view of God as Creator and Sustainer of the Universe had "come to seem to many Europeans as threadbare as paganism..." (that's my emphasis.) What is significant, and what justifies the Enlightenment, is the historical fact that the ancient view came to seem threadbare; whether it actually was threadbare, whether that perception was in accord with the truth of the matter, is irrelevant. History has spoken and the "age of theology" was over and the "age of reason" had begun.

The difference between Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, and the Enlightenment thinkers on the other, is that paganism (and by that I assume Pagden means the sophists and pre-Socratics) was more than merely apparently threadbare to Plato and Aristotle. They provided extensive arguments to show that the older pagan philosophy actually was threadbare and inadequate. Enlightenment thinkers by and large could not be bothered with such details. Descartes, for instance, merely informs us that he found the scholastic philosophy he was taught in school unbelievable and decided to chuck it overboard and start afresh. The great polemicists of the Enlightenment like Voltaire, and like their contemporary counterparts Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, didn't and don't actually refute their medieval nemeses. Instead, they heap scorn on traditional philosophy and theology, flattering their readers that they are too smart to believe such nonsense, and hope no one sees the bluff.

It is understandable why they took this approach. The sense of the Enlightenment thinkers was that the ancient ways of thinking had played themselves out and a new approach was needed. Whether this was true or not, coming to terms with  someone like Thomas Aquinas to the point of genuinely demonstrating the bankruptcy of his thought is potentially the task of a lifetime. But that very task, through the length and difficulty of its execution, would thwart its purpose - which was not to spend a lifetime in scholastic thought, but to move beyond scholasticism to something new.  The whole point of the Enlightenment was to get out of the (so they thought) suffocating thicket of medieval thought.

But "moving beyond" St. Thomas is not the same as refuting him. Ironically, instead of trying to sidestep the scholastics, St. Thomas might have served as a model for a genuine movement of Enlightenment rather the icon of medieval obscurity he became. For St. Thomas actually performed the task mentioned in the last paragraph - the task of moving beyond an older school of thought via a thorough refutation of it. And this brings me to Pagden's counterfactual account of history.

Pagden imagines what might have happened had the Protestant Reformation never taken place:

Luther, who was burned as a heretic in 1521, has gone down in history as nothing more than yet another troublesome friar hankering after the purity of the early Church. Christianity, although rarely ever at peace, remains united. The discovery of America has led to some flutters of uncertainty within the universities, but any thought that it might present a challenge to the traditional view of the laws of nature or God have been successfully repressed. There have been no French Wars of Religion, no English Civil Wars. The Revolt of the Netherlands, lacking ideological cohesion and foreign aid, has been swiftly suppressed. There has been no Thirty Years' War. Spain continues to be the richest, most powerful nation in Europe and remains locked in an unending struggle with France. Copernicus and Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and Mersenne succeed in creating a new kind of Renaissance, which flourishes for a while under moderately tolerant regimes. Thomas Hobbes, however, although he enjoys some small success as a mathematician, eventually follows his father into the Church and dies, like him, an embittered alcoholic. John Locke is an obscure doctor at Christ Church, Oxford, renowned only for the silver tap he succeeded in inserting into the Earl of Shaftesbury's lower intestine without killing him in the process. Newton achieves recognition as a gifted astrologer and competent administrator and some notoriety as a somewhat heterodox theologian. By the end of the century the "Scientific Renaissance," as it later came to be called, as been silenced, the heliocentric theory and Descartes's atomism between them having proved too much for the Church to tolerate. The next generation has nothing to build on. The "mighty Light which spreads itself over the world," which Shaftesbury had seen in 1706 and which he believed must ensure that "it ... is impossible but Letters and Knowledge must advance in greater Proportion than ever," is instead a steadily darkening cloud. Western Christendom drops behind its centuries-old antagonist to the east, the Ottoman Empire. In 1683 Vienna falls to the armies of Sultan Mehmed IV. Russia, or "Muscovy," as it still calls itself, backward and divided, is easily defeated and overrun in January 1699. Spain and France still control the western Mediterranean and dominate most of northern Europe. But threatened by the seemingly irresistible Ottoman armies, they become increasingly theocratic and resistant to any innovation, from mechanical clocks to vaccination, which, they fear, might offend their ever-unpredictable God... Lacking any capacity for scientific or social innovation, the European powers not already under Ottoman control steadily decline until finally, in May 1789, Sultan Selim III marches into Paris. Within a few years what the English ecclesiastical historian Edward Gibbon had predicted in 1776 has come true, and "the interpretation of the Koran is now taught in the schools of Oxford and her pupils demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet." United in one massive religious and political community, which reaches from the Himalayas to the coasts of Scotland, the Ottoman Empire survives into the twentieth century... 

An utterly implausible flight of fancy? An illusion? Perhaps, but something not wholly dissimilar did, in fact, befall the Islamic world. During the reigns of the Caliphs al Mansur (712-75) and his successors Harun-al Rashid (786-809) and al-Ma'mun (813-33), an entire school of Hellenizing philosophers, jurists and doctors greup: men like the surgeon Abul Qasim Al-Zahravi, known as "Albucasis"; the mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi, after whom a crater on the far side of the moon is now named; Abu or Ibn Sina, called "Avicenna" in the West, the author of a vast treatise that brought together all the medical knowledge of the ancient Greek world then available, from Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen; Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, physician, astronomer, mathematician, physicist, chemist, geographer, and historian, who in 1018 made calculations, using instruments he had created himself, of the radius and circumference of the Earth that vary by as 15 and 200 kilometers from today's estimates. The best known in the West, however, was Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd, or "Averroes" as he was called by his Latin readers, who was so highly regarded in the Christian world that he became known simply as "The Commentator" (just as Aristotle was known as "The Philosopher)... But Averroes was not only the greatest of the Arab Muslim scholars and perhaps the most influential of all Muslim philosophers, he was also the last. In the late twelfth century the Muslim clergy began a concerted onslaught on translation from the Greek and against all forms of learning that did not derive from either the Qur'an itself or from the sayings of the Prophet...

Pagden mentions Averroes "Latin readers", among whom were Thomas Aquinas, but doesn't seem to see the implication for his counterfactual history. At the time St. Thomas was reading Averroes, Platonism was the reigning philosophical school in Christendom and set the terms within which the Christian Revelation was interpreted. Aristotle was, in the twelfth century, a recent, revolutionary discovery. His major works had been lost in the West and only became known when translations from the Arabic (which themselves were translations from the Greek) became available. Not only because he was a pagan philosopher, and not only because he contradicted Plato in fundamental ways, but also because he came via the Arabs - complete with Muslim gloss by Averroes and Avicenna - Aristotle was greeted with a great deal of ecclesiastical skepticism. So much skepticism that the teaching of Aristotle was banned by the Church for decades, with his advocates like Aquinas also coming under a cloud of suspicion.

But Thomas Aquinas was not Descartes or Voltaire. He criticized the reigning philosophical regime from the inside, showing that he was its master and knew it better than did its defenders. He also demonstrated that, for those who love the truth, there was nothing to fear from Aristotle. For the truth cannot contradict itself. If the Gospel is true, whatever is true in Aristotle cannot contradict it, despite superficial appearances. Far from his faith being in conflict with reason, Aquinas's faith was a spur to an intellectual revolution in Christendom: His faith that Christianity was true meant that Christianity could have nothing to fear from the truth wherever it is encountered, even if it comes through pagan philosophers and Muslim translations.

Something similar could have happened with the revolution of thought that occurred in the Enlightenment. Like Aristotle and before him, Plato - who was also initially resisted as a pagan interloper ("what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?") - Enlightenment style thinking would have gone through some bumps and bruises but what was good in it would have eventually been accepted by the Church. This, in fact, was what was happening with Galileo. He initially had the support of the Pope, but through a series of unfortunate circumstances and scheming by the established bureaucracy, found himself on the wrong side of an ecclesiastical ban - just as had happened to Aristotle. But, unfortunately, Galileo was not St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was not merely brilliant, but also humble, pious, charitable and selfless - a saint. Galileo, in contrast, was vain and egotistical, and it is interesting to wonder how things might have turned out if the Galilean personality was more Thomistic. Nonetheless, the Church would have come around to Galilean physics eventually, as it had come around to Plato and then Aristotle.

In Pagden's counterfactual history "by the end of the century the 'Scientific Renaissance,' as it later came to be called, has been silenced, the heliocentric theory and Descartes's atomism between them having proved too much for the Church to tolerate." But there is no precedence for this in the (even by then) long history of the Church. The Church successfully absorbed Plato and other Greek thinkers, the pagan Latin intellectuals like Cicero and Virgil had been taught for centuries (and even figured as heroic figures in works like The Inferno), and only relatively recently Aristotle had been absorbed through his Islamic commentators. Pagden's alternative, anti-intellectual history, a history where the truth is "too much for the Church to tolerate", is without precedent in Christian history.

A crucial difference between the Church's approach to truth and the Enlightenment's is that the Church was not willing to absorb new truth at the expense of old. It is certainly true that scholastic-type thinking was in many ways proving a hindrance rather than a help at the dawn of the modern age, and the temptation to clear the thickets by slashing away wholesale at traditional thought is understandable. But it is surely an unwise thing to destroy that which you don't really understand,  for you may very well destroy a cultural inheritance that was gained by centuries of effort, and that could be gained no other way. And that is what happened with the Enlightenment, which in its efforts to get on with the scientific revolution, destroyed the ancient philosophical inheritance of the Greeks. The result is the modern world: Scientifically unsurpassed but philosophically bankrupt. The Church, in its efforts to avoid losing the accumulated wisdom of centuries in the hurry to get on with novel investigations, surely slowed the pace of scientific progress, and did so consciously; but it is a mistake to confuse a commitment to a measured pace of scientific progress with an opposition to scientific progress altogether, which is Pagden's mistake.

Pagden's counterfactual military history has a contradiction in it. He uses the history of the Ottoman Empire as an example of what might have happened had the Enlightenment not occurred in the West, but then has the Ottomans defeating the West because of the subsequent lack of innovation in the West.  But if the Ottomans are the actual historical exemplar of a culture that lacks Enlightenment and stagnates for lack of innovation, wouldn't the lack of Enlightenment in the West simply have resulted in a stalemate between East and West, rather than the Western triumph that actually occurred?

In fact, the Western superiority in innovation long predated the Enlightenment. This is ably documented in the works of Victor Davis Hanson (e.g. The Western Way of War, Carnage and Culture, The Soul of Battle) among others. All the way back to the ancient Greeks, the West showed a unique openness to innovation, particularly in military matters, that provided a sometimes subtle but persistent military superiority with respect to the East. The only way the medieval Crusades were possible was that Western technological superiority - both in arms and in logistical support - allowed far smaller Christian armies to compete on level terms with Islamic hordes.

The Enlightenment did not happen out of the blue, but was made possible by the medieval innovations that pre-dated it. Innovations in agriculture like the plow and the harness, which made medieval farms far more productive than their ancient (or Eastern) counterparts, contributed to population growth; medieval navigational innovations like the compass and the sextant made possible the voyages that discovered new worlds, and medieval inventions like modern banking made possible their financing.

The truly interesting counterfactual history would be one in which the Enlightenment acknowledges its debts to the past and remains within the innovative tradition going back to the Greeks, rather than constructing a mythology of the past that justifies its own revolutionary, and philosophy destroying, origin.

Dawkins and God-like Aliens

I've finally gotten around to reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, a book I've had on my shelf for awhile. It's actually an enjoyable read as Dawkins has a nice style and some good humor. All your favorite village atheist arguments are here ("I just go one god further" among other favorites).

In his third chapter, Dawkins discusses the possibility of alien civilizations and the level of their technological development with respect to us. Apparently as a way of undermining the possibility of proof by miracle, Dawkins asserts that such a civilization might have technology so advanced that to us it appears magical:

Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as missionaries were treated as gods (and exploited the undeserved honor to the hilt) when they turned up in Stone Age cultures bearing guns, telescopes, matches, and almanacs predicting eclipses to the second.

The first thing to be said about this is that theologians - even medieval ones - can surely imagine things beyond the power of superhuman aliens, specifically creation ex nihilo, which is in principle beyond the technology of any alien no matter how advanced, as it is beyond the power of technology per se. (I am not quite as demanding; I would be impressed simply with the Lazarus-like raising of someone from the dead. I do not believe this is possible whatever the technology.) More interesting is Dawkins's notion that the technical achievements of aliens would seem "supernatural to us." Surely they would not seem so to Dawkins, would they? Isn't the anticipation of the possibility of advanced alien technology enough to innoculate Dawkins from drawing any unwarranted supernatural conclusions? And us as well, since he's just done us the favor?

It is not insignificant that when selecting someone from the "Dark Ages" to transport into the modern age, Dawkins selects a peasant and not, say, one of his despised theologians or philosophers. Yes, Jacques the Crass might be overawed by modern technology, but would Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna or to go way back, Socrates?*  The reason Stone Age folks took explorers for gods is because primitive peoples know no distinction between nature and supernature. Reality is an unreflected continuum and to be a god really is to just be a superpowerful creature, not different in kind from any other creature. In that respect, it might not be too much to say that the Stone Age people were not actually wrong in thinking missionaries were gods. If the "gods" are just the most powerful creatures immanent in the universe, then the explorers with their guns and telescopes qualify. But Thomas Aquinas did not believe in such "gods" and was in possession of a thoroughly articulated philosophy of nature including the distinction between nature and supernature. If men showed up doing extraordinary things, he would certainly not conclude they were "gods", nor would he necessarily conclude that they were from God. Which brings us to Dawkins's comments about Moses and Jesus.

Dawkins doesn't seem to notice that the remarkable thing about both Moses and Jesus was that they weren't strangers come doing strange things, like missionaries visiting a primitive tribe, but apparently ordinary, familiar men doing extraordinary things. "Is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?" (Matt. 13:55).  There is a "provenance" associated with both men that puts their extraordinary actions in context.  For the distinguishing mark of God is the union of power and wisdom; God is not just powerful, He is good. Jesus Christ did not begin his earthly ministry until the fullness of time, that is until he had fulfilled things in all righteousness. He was born and raised a faithful Jew so that when it came time for Him to fulfill His mission, He did it as a Jew known among Jews, not as a wonder-working stranger. What is the source of His power, then? It is nothing of this world, because we know the carpenter's son and his history; he is just like us.

And unlike an exploitative missionary or explorer, Christ did not serve himself with His miracles but others. This is an area where Thomas Aquinas might prove superior even to Richard Dawkins. While Dawkins is impressed purely with power (what tricks can you perform?), Aquinas is more interested in the question of what good you can do. Thus it's all the same to Dawkins whether a god proves himself with hydrogen bombs or telephones; Dawkins even seems uninterested in what a godlike person might actually do with bombs or telephones. Is someone just as godlike if he destroys the world with h-bombs or saves the world with an h-bomb by blowing up an asteroid about to collide with the Earth? Is he just as godlike if he tells lies over the telephone or if he tells truths? Not to Thomas Aquinas. The question of what one does with power is at least as important for Thomas as the question of whether one has power in the determination of the relationship of the extraordinary to divinity. The stranger who arrives among us performing astonishing tricks that serve no other purpose than to impress us should be treated with robust suspicion; the man among us whom we have known as a friend, neighbor and good man, who then performs extraordinary feats in the service of God and his neighbors, even to his own demise... well, he may be worth paying some attention.

*And even then, Dawkins may be selling the medieval peasant short. There is a wonderful movie made a few years ago named The Visitors, about a medieval French knight and his servant (Jacques the Crass) who are time-transported into the contemporary world (see the French version; the English remake is bad). The medieval Frenchmen are certainly bewildered by modern technology (on first seeing an automobile, the servant calls it a "Devil's chariot"), but they are not for a moment tempted to see anything supernatural about modern people. The medieval peasant may have interpreted certain modern technologies as involving a recourse to magic, but that doesn't mean modern people are magical - only that they are depraved enough to make use of the occult.

Philosophy and Joining

Is it necessary, or at least helpful, to the philosophical vocation to remain aloof? The Maverick Philosopher's motto is to "study everything, join nothing".  As he explains:

"Join nothing" means avoid group-think; avoid associations which will limit one's ability to think critically and independently; be your own man or woman; draw your identity from your own resources, and not from group membership.

It does seem at first sight that remaining "unjoined" indeed helps the philosopher remain objective in his quest for the truth. But on the other hand we have the example of Socrates who, far from being unjoined, was perhaps the antithesis of the aloof philosopher. He was at one time a soldier in the Athenian army and was respected for his bravery in battle; even as he critically examined Athenian religion, he scrupulously followed its duties, down to making sure religious rituals would be followed on his demise (his last words were "we owe a cock to Asclepius", Asclepius being the god of medicine.) More deeply, he viewed his vocation not merely as a personal, independent search for truth, but in the context of his duty as an Athenian citizen:

For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me. I dare say that you may feel irritated at being suddenly awakened when you are caught napping; and you may think that if you were to strike me dead, as Anytus advises, which you easily might, then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you gives you another gadfly. And that I am given to you by God is proved by this: - that if I had been like other men, I should not have neglected all my own concerns, or patiently seen the neglect of them during all these years, and have been doing yours, coming to you individually, like a father or elder brother, exhorting you to regard virtue; this I say, would not be like human nature. And had I gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid, there would have been some sense in that: but now, as you will perceive, not even the impudence of my accusers dares to say that I have ever exacted or sought pay of anyone; they have no witness of that. And I have a witness of the truth of what I say; my poverty is a sufficient witness. (The Apology)

Socrates was not an autonomous philosopher pursuing a personal career, but a man on a mission fulfilling a duty given to him by God for Athens. For Socrates, then, the philosopher is by nature "joined"; this is the reason he refuses to flee Athens when given the chance to escape prison while awaiting his execution.

But does not his commitment to Athens make Socrates "biased"? I think it is a mistake to view Socrates's relationship to Athens as a "commitment", which is a word with an arbitrary flavor to it. Socrates was born and raised in Athens, and only left it when serving in the Army. He was raised by Athenian parents, educated in the Athenian fashion, and is Athenian through and through. His identity is Athenian whether he wishes it to be or not; he is "joined" to Athens not so much in that he has made an arbitrary decision to reside in Athens, but that his being is Athenian to its core. Were he to attempt to adopt a perspective that was somehow independent of Athens, he would merely be kidding himself, for such a perspective is mythical - and Socrates knew it. Man is by nature a creature embedded in culture; culture isn't like a coat he can discard for a new one (or, worse, no coat at all), but is part and parcel of his identity.

The philosophical quest, then, is one that must be conducted in and through culture. Rather than attempting an impossible abstraction from culture in an attempt to avoid bias, the philosopher is better advised to plunge more deeply into culture. The example here is St. Thomas Aquinas, who generated the supreme synthesis of medieval philosophy by embracing to the full his cultural identity as a Catholic and as an inheritor of Greek rationalism.

But suppose Thomas had been born a Muslim rather than a Catholic? Then he may have become an Averroes or Avicenna, Muslim philosophers whom he engages in his Summa. He may have perhaps even come to the point of converting to Catholicism. But the only subjectively true (in Kierkegaard's words) way to do this would have been by embracing his Muslim faith and critiquing it from within, as Socrates critiqued Athens from within. This is why philosophers of divergent faiths like Avicenna and Aquinas could respect each other, for their respective embrace of their cultures served as an indirect communication of their shared subjective understanding. The philosopher who attempts to remain aloof is not a part of this unspoken community; the attempt itself shows that he is confused at a much deeper level than that of objective doctrine.

This also shows us the answer to the perennial conundrum: If you had been born in Iran, you would be a Muslim, and if you had been born in India, a Hindu. You were born in New York of Catholic parents, so how can you claim that Catholicism is the one true religion? It is quite true that if I had been born in India, I would have likely been a Hindu, and it would have been right and proper to embrace that religion through my education. But I hope I would have taken a Socratic attitude with respect to it, and discovered the truth on the far side of a "joined" critique of it.

Mind/Brain and the Evidence

Dr. Steven Novella, in this post on his blog, distinguishes between the questions of whether the brain causes the mind and exactly how the brain causes the mind. Citing David Chalmers, he states that it is not necessary to answer the latter question to establish the former. There can be evidence of causal linkage that does not require an exhaustive knowledge of the nature of that causal linkage. Novella summarizes the evidence that he thinks conclusively establishes the causal dependence of mind on brain in the form of the following predictions:

If the brain causes mind, then:
1- Brain states will correlate to mental and behavioral states.
2- Brain maturity will correlate with mental and emotional maturity.
3- Changing the brain’s function (with drugs, electrical or magnetic stimulation, or other methods) will change mental function.
4- Damaging the brain will damage the mind – producing specific deficits that correlate to the area of the brain damaged.
5- There will be no documentable mental phenomena in the absence of brain function.
6- When the brain dies, mental function ends.

Novella thinks that all six predictions have been well-established empirically.

We should remember that the traditional philosophical case for the immaterial mind does not deny that much of mental phenomena has a physical origin. In fact, the philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition insist that only one specific mental faculty - the intellect - requires an immaterial foundation. So if we are concerned with evaluating the classical philosophical case for the immaterial mind in terms of contemporary neuroscientific evidence, the only interesting evidence is that which relates to the intellect. Evidence that emotions or the sense of self have a physical origin may be interesting but it is irrelevant to the classical philosophical position, since the classical philosopher (and here I am taking Aquinas as the exemplar) did not deny such a thing. The interesting evidence relates to the question of whether the intellect is purely a material function of the brain.

Why did the classical philosophers make an exception for the intellect? Because the intellect is that which understands universals, and it is hard to see how a universal effect can have a material cause. Consider the emotion of anger. If I am angry, the emotion is restricted to me; even if you are simultaneously angry, your experience of the emotion is your's alone and my experience is mine alone. Each is a singular. There is no conceptual problem with thinking the emotion has a purely physical origin, since we encounter singular effects from material causes every day. I turn on my stove and it heats this pot of water, but not every pot of water in the universe. I throw a baseball and it breaks a window, but not every window in the universe, let alone every possible window in the universe. But instead of being angry, suppose we instead think about the emotion anger. (And I will italicize anger when referring to the idea of anger rather than the experience of being angry.) Now any number of emotions, and perhaps no emotion at all, may accompany our thinking about anger. We may be sad, happy, indifferent or, yes, angry when thinking about anger. Thinking about anger is something radically different than having the emotion anger.

But more importantly, when I think about the idea of anger, the idea doesn't merely apply to my own emotion, but your's and everybody else's as well. I may only be able to experience my own anger, but I can think about everybody's anger, and I can think about them all at the same time. Furthermore, you and I can engage in a conversation about anger and discuss exactly the same thing; I can only experience your emotion of anger as analogous to a similar emotion of my own, but we can both think about one and the same idea of anger.

This is close to what contemporary philosophers of mind call the problem of "intentionality", but it is not quite it. The problem of intentionality refers to how an idea can be about something, e.g. how my conscious thinking about the moon can be about the large rock orbiting the Earth and not just about itself. What I am talking about is the classical problem of universals, which is not so much about how thoughts can be about things, but about how different thoughts can be about the same thing as well as how a single thought can be about an infinite number of things (as my thinking about anger can be about everyone's personal experience of anger.)

Let's consider Novella's first line of evidence in terms of the intellect rather than conscious states that have a non-controversial physical origin (like emotions): "Brain states will correlate to mental and behavioral states." It is easy to see how this is possible with emotions like anger. I am not familiar with the specifics of the evidence, but it is not hard to imagine some particular regions of the brain becoming active in a specific way when one is angry, and a different region when one is happy (or, perhaps, the same region in a different way.) Now consider what might happen when you think about anger rather than become angry. Is there some specific pattern of neural firing that accompanies the state of thinking about anger? Is this pattern identical across subjects? Such identity doesn't matter so much in the case of emotion, since we need not require that your emotion of anger be identical to my own. But if we are to think in the abstract about anger, and have a conversation about it, then we do require that our ideas of anger be exactly the same, not only in terms of being just like each other, but in terms of being exactly the same idea. Suppose that measurements show that, physiologically, your thinking of anger is not exactly the same as my thinking of anger. Does this shows that your idea of anger is not exactly the same as my idea of anger, in which case our conversation (and perhaps all conversations) involve a fundamental misunderstanding because we aren't really talking about the same ideas when we think we are? Or is there some way in which we are still talking about exactly the same idea of anger even though the physiology between us is not precisely identical? The former alternative involves a whole train of unpleasant philosophical consequences, and the real challenge is to establish, even in principle, how the latter alternative might be true. If the physics is all there is, and the physics is not identical, it is difficult to see how we can say the ideas are identical. Or, put in empirical terms, if an idea is a "brain state", then variations in brain states just are variations in ideas; saying two ideas aren't the same is the same as saying two brain states aren't the same and vice versa. But I am convinced that we can talk about identically the same ideas, whatever the similarity of our brain states, which is one reason Novella's summary of evidence does not yet convince me.

Suppose, however, that physiologically your thinking of anger is identical to my own to some degree of precision. In other words, the neuroscientists are successful in identifying a brain state correlated to anger that is identical among all human subjects. Another problem surfaces, and it is easier to see in the case of mathematical ideas. I am thinking of the number "one", which presumably correlates to a brain state. Now I think of the number "two", which presumably correlates to a different brain state. The brain is a finite physical organ; it is capable of assuming a vast but not infinite number of states. How many states can the brain assume in theory? A trillion? A quadrillion? A trillion trillion trillion? Whatever the number is, and let us call it a trillion for the sake of argument, what does it mean if I think of the number a trillion plus one? If thinking of a number corresponds to a brain state, then the potential numbers I might think about are finite, since the brain is finite. But this is clearly false; since I might potentially think about any number - and in particular, the number one more than whatever you say is the number of brain states. It must be true, then, that multiple numbers correspond to identical brain states in my thinking. How does, the materialist, then, account for a diversity of numbers derived from identical brain states? It is hard to see how the materialist case could possibly be sustained, since the distinction of numbers in this case would seem to require something immaterial - which is why the classical philosophers thought the intellect (that which conceives ideas) must be immaterial, even if the rest of mental life could be accounted for physically.

These sorts of questions are the real challenge (as far as I am concerned) for the materialist, and the classical philosophical case for the immaterial mind hasn't even been challenged until they are addressed. There are some conclusions to be drawn here about the interesting directions of scientific investigation. Instead of investigating brain state correlation to things like emotions or the sense of self - which even Aquinas held could have a purely physical basis - the investigation should correlate brain states to intellectual states. What is the brain state correlating to the thinking of the number "three?" Or thinking about the Pythagorean Theorem? Or thinking about the theory that the mind has a purely material basis? If we can stimulate brain states like emotions artificially, can we also stimulate intellectual states artificially? Can we stimulate someone to think of the number "three?" Or to think of the Pythagorean Theorem? I would find the results of such research extremely interesting. (I strongly suspect, of course, that there is no way to stimulate the brain to think of the number "three", precisely because multiple numbers (in fact, an infinity of numbers) must correspond to identical brain states. Merely physical stimulation would be "underdetermined" as far as what number would be thought.)

Maverick Philosopher on Hylemorphic Dualism

Edward Feser and Bill Vallicella (aka the Maverick Philosopher... isn't a philosopher by definition a maverick? Or can one truly be a philosopher yet follow the herd?) have been dueling over hylemorphic dualism. Vallicella thinks that the Thomistic doctrine that the soul is a subsistent form doesn't hold water. His latest is here.

The problem with the Mav's analysis can be located here:

Obviously, this won't do. Well, why not just say that the soul does not think, that only the compound thinks? One might say that soul and body are each sub-psychological, and that to have a psyche and psychic activity (thinking), soul and body must work together. Soul and body in synergy give rise to thinking which qualifies the whole man. But this makes hash of substance dualism. For one of the reasons for being a substance dualist in the first place is the conceivability of disembodied thinking. (We'll have to look at Kripke's argument one of these days.) Disembodied thinking is obviously inconceivable if it is a soul-body composite that thinks. Second, if it takes a soul and a body working together to produce thinking, then the soul is not a mind or thinking substance -- which again makes hash of substance dualism.

and followed by here: 

In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, chapters 49-51, we find a variety of arguments to the conclusion that the intellect is a subsistent form and so not dependent for its existence on matter. This is not the place to examine these arguments, some of which are defensible. Now since the intellect is that in us which thinks, the same ambiguity we found in Cartesian dualism, as between pure dualism and compound dualism, is to be found in Aquinas. Is it the composite that thinks, or a part of the composite?

Bill conflates the Cartesian thinking substance with the Thomistic intellect. But the the Thomistic intellect is not a thinking substance; the Thomistic intellect is the organ of knowledge, albeit an immaterial one. Like any organ, it only functions (except in extraordinary circumstances) in the context of the human being of which it is an integral part. Just as the eye doesn't see nor does the ear hear unless it does so in its organic role in the human body, neither does the intellect know except in its organic role in the human being - except under extraordinary circumstances. These extraordinary circumstances are when the soul, separated by death from the body, nonetheless comes to know through direct infusion of knowledge by God. In death, the subsistent form of human being still remains in existence, but it is "inert", utterly incapable of independent action detached from the material body of which it is a form, and this includes an activity like thinking.

For the Thomist, there is no immaterial "thinking substance" like there is for the Cartesian. The subject of thinking, in the sense of an active process of reasoning is, for the Thomist, the particular human being, a composite of body and soul. Thinking involves the imagination, among other things, and the imagination is a function of bodily organs. There is no thinking as such after death. But there can be knowing, and a subject of knowing, should God grace a subsistent human intellect with infused knowledge.

Contra Bill's statement that one of the reasons for being a substance dualist is the conceivability of disembodied thinking, the Thomist is not a substance dualist because he is worried about disembodied thinking. He is a substance dualist because he recognizes that knowledge of universals cannot be the function of a material organ (which is the substance of the arguments the Mav cites in the Summa Contra Gentiles). St. Thomas is strictly disciplined in his conclusions from this fact: He has only proven that man must have an immaterial organ to know universals, not that man can think in a disembodied state. In a disembodied state he is a potential knower, but has no way to become an active knower absent the grace of God.

So man, the composite of body and form, is the subject of thinking. Within him, his immaterial intellect is the subject of knowing (universals). When he dies, the composite no longer exists, so there is no longer a subject of thinking. But there remains a subject of knowing.

Logical vs Metaphysical Necessity

One of the problems I have with analytical philosophy is the tendency to fail to distinguish between logical and metaphysical necessity. Or, more precisely, it is to invert the priority of being and logic.

The Maverick Philosopher wrote a post the necessity of God that exemplifies this tendency.

The MP refers to "philosophers in the tradition of Anselm and Aquinas" who define God as a necessary being, and he takes them both to mean the same thing - logical necessity. But St. Thomas rejected Anselm's Ontological Argument precisely because he understood the necessity of God to be a metaphysical necessity, not a logical necessity.

Logical necessity refers to the relationships of the terms of propositions to each other. Thus a "logically possible world" is one that involves no propositional self-contradiction. No logically possible world can contain married bachelors, because bachelors are by definition not married. But there is no self-contradiction in supposing that a body can be at two different places at the same time; for example, that you could be in Boston and Binghamton simultaneously. That it is not possible for you to be in both Boston and Binghamton at the same time is a consequence of your incarnate nature; it is the nature of bodies as such that they occupy one and only one place. It is a metaphysical necessity. Thus "John is in Binghamton and in Boston" is logically possible, but metaphysically impossible.

When Thomists discuss the necessity of God, they mean that God is metaphysically necessary, not logically necessary. There is no logical contradiction involved in denying the existence of God. But it is to assert a metaphysical impossibility. The Thomistic arguments for God are all different ways of revealing this metaphysical necessity.

In Defense of the Intelligibility of Thomistic Metaphysics

In this post I referred to a post by the Maverick Philosopher in which he questions the intelligibility of Thomistic metaphysics. The critical passage in the Mav's post is the following:

The idea is that one and the same item — humanity in our example — can exist in two ways. It can exist in particular concrete things outside the mind, and it can exist in an abstract and universal form in minds. But in and of itself it is neutral as between these two modes of existence. Taken by itself, therefore, it does not exist, and is neither particular nor universal. In itself, it is neither many in the way human beings are many, nor is it one, in the way in which the universal humanity in the mind is one.

So this Thomist essence is an item that is some definite item, though in itself it does not exist, is neither one nor many, and is neither universal nor particular. I hope I will be forgiven for finding this unintelligible.

The best way I have found to think about essence in the Thomistic sense is as a way of being. I see the street sign in front of me that says Porter St.; I notice that it is in the form of a rectangle, and therefore has four right angles. To that extent, at least, the street sign has being in the way of four. It is also a physical being located at a certain place in time and space, and is subject to material division, and so it has being in the way of body. I could keep going along these lines, describing the many different ways in which the street sign manifests being. But, no matter how far I go along these lines, I am not bringing anything into existence in describing the variety of ways of being. In other words, a way of being is not itself a being, at least in the sense that the street sign is a being. A way of being is just that, a way of being. It is the difference between the plans for Fenway Park and Fenway Park itself. The plans for Fenway Park describe one way of being a baseball stadium; Fenway Park itself is a being that is being in the way of its plans. Similarly, four is a way of being or a plan of being; the Porter St. sign is an actual being that is being in the way of four.

We describe the Porter St. sign according to a variety of ways of being, but what of that sign in itself? In itself, it is not an amalgamation of ways of being; it is what it is simply. The analysis of being in terms of ways of being is a peculiarity of the way of knowing of a rational animal (our way), a way St. Thomas calls "composing and dividing." Our nature is not such that we can know being simply and directly; we can't immediately know the way of being the Porter St. sign. Our initial impression of being is confused and opaque ("Something is there, but I don't know what it is...") and, over time, as we analyze being in terms of its ways, it unfolds its nature to us. But it would be a mistake to confuse the multiplicity in our way of understanding being with a multiplicity in being itself.

That can happen if we confuse the two meanings of the word is. As St. Thomas discusses in his On Being and Essence, we use is (being) in two ways: In one way, as a fundamental existential predicate, and in another way, as indicating truth through a relationship of ideas. In my terms, the first way of using is is when it is used to say that something is actually fulfilling a particular way of being, and the second way is when it is used to express relationships among ways of being. For example, if I say the Porter St. sign is four in the second way, what I mean is that the way of being the Porter St. sign includes the way of being four. If I mean it in the first sense, I mean the actual Porter St. sign is actually fulfilling the way of being four. Similarly, If I say Hamlet is a man in the second way, I mean that Hamlet's way of being, if he is, is that of a man. I can say the same thing in the same way, with the same meaning with respect to Socrates: Socrates is a man. But in the first way, the statements are not equivalent, because Socrates actually fulfills the way of being man in a manner that Hamlet does not, since Socrates is an actual man and Hamlet only a fictional character.

Much of philosophical history can be traced to not getting this right, as Etienne Gilson demonstrates in his Unity of Philosophical Experience and Being and Some Philosophers. It is tempting, on seeing that Socrates is a man and Plato is a man share the idea man, that the beings of both Plato and Socrates "participate" in the idea of man, which is itself some third thing above and beyond the beings of either Socrates or Plato. The temptation results from the failure to take account of the multiple meanings of the word is.

Returning to the Maverick Philosopher, he wonders about the nature of the existence of the "item" called "humanity." But humanity is not an item, as though it has substantial being in its own right. It is only a way of being, and has existence either in its fulfillment in actual men, or in abstraction as a plan for being. To wonder about some third way it might exist is to misunderstand the nature of essence. Similarly, the plans for Fenway Park exist in the actual Fenway Park by way of fulfillment, or in blueprints in the builder's office. There doesn't need to be any third way beyond these ways to make sense of things.

Essences are universal in the sense that blueprints universally apply to whatever actual things are built according to their plans. But blueprints are only useful as a means to an end, and essences in the universal sense in which they exist in the mind are only useful as a way for the human mind to know being. An intellect, like that of an angel, that knows being simply and directly has no need of universals.

Is Thomistic Philosophy Unintelligible?

The Maverick Philosopher recently wrote a post leveling against St. Thomas perhaps the most serious charge that can be made against a philosopher - unintelligibility. It's one thing to say that a philosopher is wrong; quite another to say that he is unintelligible. Such a philosopher doesn't even rise to the dignity of error, in the words of C.S. Lewis's tutor (as quoted in Lewis's autobiography.) The charge is so serious because philosophy is an ongoing conversation and voyage of discovery; even when a philosopher is wrong, he is still contributing to the conversation and furthering the ongoing cultural project even if only as an example of a potential mistake. The philosopher who is unintelligible, however, is merely creating noise and hindering the philosophical project; in other words, he is not really a philosopher at all but only a counterfeit.

Of course I do not think St. Thomas, or the moderate realism he represents, is unintelligible. I will provide a detailed defense of St. Thomas in a coming post. For now, I would like to make a broader point about the general approach to great philosophers. St. Thomas Aquinas has been an inspiration for, and deeply studied by, many profound thinkers since his days in the thirteenth century. If we study him ourselves for some period, but find him unintelligible, should we suppose that the flaw is in ourselves or in St. Thomas? Great philosophers are great precisely because time has demonstrated that they possessed an uncommon power of insight, which is why philosophers through the ages refer to them again and again. Now St. Thomas may appear unintelligible to us because he is in fact unintelligible; but he may also appear unintelligible because we as yet lack the uncommon power of insight which he possessed. Again I ask... which is more likely?

This point holds for all of the great philosophers through history - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, etc. These philosophers all more or less disagreed with each other in various ways, but what makes them all outstanding is the uncommon insight they possessed. Their disagreements arise from the fact that their insight, while uncommon, is not always uniform. Kierkegaard, for example, may have penetrating insight into psychology and the subjective nature of existence, yet fail to have the fundamental metaphysical insight that St. Thomas had; while St. Thomas, for his part, might lack the psychological insight of a Kierkegaard. In any case, I find the dismissal of any great philosopher as unintelligible to be at least a very bold, and perhaps even a foolish move, for it implies that the great philosopher was speaking nonsense even in his own terms. And to know that, we must possess an insight into the philosopher's philosophy at least as profound as the philosopher himself, for there is really no other ground from which to justly make the charge of unintelligibility. And, for the last time, we must again ask ourselves the question: Is it more likely that I have penetrated to the depths of Thomistic philosophy and found it nonsense, or that I don't really understand what St. Thomas was talking about?

Courtier's Reply and the Homework Defense

Edward Feser has an article here on what he calls the "New Philistinism." He's referring to the New Atheists who, he says, claim to refute classical theistic arguments, but, in fact, don't really understand them. What is worse, the atheists are apparently obdurate in, and even proud of, their ignorance. For their part, the atheists have coined a term for the theistic charge of ignorance - the "Courtier's Reply." The term refers to the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes", and refers to an imagined court official's reply to the claim that the Emperor has no clothes: "Have you not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots?, etc." (in Feser's words.) The point the atheists are making is that the theistic charge of ignorance is really an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the atheist critique rather than answer it. The theist sends the atheist off on a research project which, of course, is never complete as long as the atheist remains in his atheism. If the atheist does not find St. Thomas's arguments for God convincing, it must be because he has not yet read Gilson or Maritain on St. Thomas. If he has read Gilson and Maritain but is still not convinced, it is only because he is yet ignorant of the writings of Anton Pegis on St. Thomas, and on and on.

I have some sympathy for the atheist's point about the Courtier's Reply, which I have long known by my own name, the Homework Defense (I think the Courtier's Reply is a much more elegant name.) It's a standard move of Darwinists, who reflexively refer you to places like talkorigins.org whenever you raise questions about Darwinism. I know from my own experience that the homework never ends; or if you do faithfully manage to fulfill the homework assignment, your interlocutor is no longer interested in discussing the point and has moved on. Later, when you raise the same question with some other Darwinist, the previous homework assignment is rarely satisfactory; the new Darwinist will have a whole new assignment that must be completed before you are even qualified to ask any questions about Darwinism, and on it goes. One begins to suspect that the point of the homework assignments is not a genuine effort to further the conversation, but merely to deflect the questioner. This has been my experience with Harry Potter fans as well. It's not enough that I read the first one, two, or three books in the series before I am permitted to have an opinion about it. I've got to read the entire series through, as well as all kinds of secondary literature as well. (Potter fans don't seem to realize that this requirement undermines positive as well as negative criticism of the series prior to its completion. Yet much of the secondary reading I am assigned was written prior to the publication of the final book in the series. If John Granger could proclaim how wonderful the Potter series was way back in 2002, why couldn't I criticize it?)

The way to avoid all this back and forth about homework is to take the approach of Socrates: Deal with the arguments themselves and forget about the middlemen. What is important about St. Thomas's Five Ways is not who said them or when, but the content of the arguments themselves. That content stands on its own independent of whatever the historical origin of the arguments might be, the historical origin merely being "accidental" to the truth of the arguments. (This point comes from Kierkegaard, but it is true whether SK or Bozo the Clown said it, isn't it?) So instead of demanding that atheists further their research into St. Thomas, they should be directly presented with a clear formulation of the arguments themselves, and be asked to address those.

That is the way I use Kant in the philosophy of mind. The value of Kant is that he provides a set of approaches and questions about the mind that cannot be resolved by the standard, materialistic philosophy of mind popular today. But there is little point in criticizing someone's philosophy of mind by demanding that they research Kant; instead, research Kant yourself and ask pointed questions based on the inspiration Kant gives you. If you wish to credit Kant with the ultimate origin of your questions, fine, but that origin has nothing to do with their pertinence as questions.

God, the Good and the Evil

Terrific, deep exchange on the subject of God and evil over at Just Thomism.

Philosophy and Freedom

It's been a long time since I've visited the blog of the Maverick Philosopher; I like the redesign Bill has done since I last visited. One thing that hasn't changed is his motto:

"Study everything, join nothing."

My latest visit reminded me that I've always instinctively recoiled from the motto. What Bill precisely means by it is explored more fully in this post. For my part, the motto seems to exclude from philosophy exactly that which I hope to get from it and, perhaps, what is crucial to philosophy as classically conceived. This post is an exploration of this theme.

In the dialog Crito, Socrates is waiting in prison for his execution and is offered a chance to escape. Crito agrees with him that the question of escape is ultimately one of justice, so they must consider the question of whether it is just for Socrates to escape. Socrates, briefly attempting to justify escape, considers the question in terms we would probably find natural:

"Or shall I answer the Laws, 'The reason is that the state wronged me, and did not judge the case right?'"

Socrates replies in the voice of the Laws, and his response is essentially this: It is not the prerogative of Socrates and Crito to judge whether the state has decided the case correctly. The Law and the State exist prior to Socrates, in many senses of the term, and the decision to even consider the possibility that escape might be justified betrays a misunderstanding of human existence. Socrates "joined" the City by the fact of his birth, and existence comes with duties and obligations that bind the philosopher as much as anyone else:

"First of all, did we not bring you into life, and through us your father took your mother, and begat you? ... Well, the laws about feeding the child and education in which you were brought up. Did not those which had that duty do well in directing your father to educate you in mind and body?... When you had been born and brought up and educated, could you say in the first place that your were not our offspring and our slave, you and your ancestors also? And if this is so, do you think you have equal rights with us, and whatever we try to do to you, do you think you also have a right to do to us?"

The response Socrates gives in the voice of the Laws is not merely a legal response. It is a philosophical one. If the vocation of the philosopher is to know and live the truth, then that vocation is betrayed when the philosopher does not acknowledge the duties and obligations that human existence necessarily involves. But it is more than this. We are by nature social animals; the obligations of country, family and religion are not arbitrary or heteronomous impositions on human nature. They are essential components to any human existence. It is natural for us to be joined to others and under the obligations of state, family and religion (among others). For the philosopher to know and live the truth about himself, he must know and live the truth about the social nature of human existence. In other words, "joining" is not something the philosopher should flee but something he should embrace, for it is only in "joining" that he can experience, or even know, the full truth about human being.

This doesn't say it quite right, because "joining" implies some prior state of human existence, absent obligation, and from which the person chooses or not to "join." The philosophical point I am making is that there is no such prior, obligation-free state of existence. Our existence is that of one already joined. This is why Socrates, even though he philosophically challenged the religion of Athens, nonetheless fulfilled its obligations. He understood that the philosophical vocation is not a free pass to ignore duty and obligation; more deeply, since duty and obligation are natural to human existence, the philosophical vocation can only be fulfilled by experiencing duty and obligation in its depths, not avoiding it wherever possible. The Socratic challenge to religion occurred from within religion and was itself an expression of religion purifying itself. Indeed, this is the only way true reform can happen, and was the path later followed by St. Thomas Aquinas and Soren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard has this to say about the difference between the classical and the modern philosopher:

"In Greece, as in the youth of philosophy generally, it was found difficult to win through to the abstract and to leave existence, which always gives the particular; in modern times, on the other hand, it has become difficult to reach existence. The process of abstraction is easy enough for us, but we also desert existence more and more, and the realm of pure thought is the extreme limit of such desertion.

In Greece, philosophizing was a mode of action, and the philosopher was therefore an existing individual. He may not have possessed a great amount of knowledge, but what he did know he knew to some profit, because he busied himself early and late with the same thing." [Concluding Unscientific Postscript, The Subjective Thinker 2.]

When he speaks of the individual and existence, Kierkegaard's meaning includes the duties and obligations specific to a person's individual existence. Socrates knew, "to his profit", that he was born and lived as a citizen of Athens and that his philosophical vocation could not entail a flight from Athens, but rather must involve an exploration of the mystery of obligation in his own specific, subjective context in Athens. We may, indeed, see Socrates' entire philosophical career as a fulfillment of his philosophical obligation to purify Athens from within; his willingness to die in Athens rather than escape, fully aware of the philosophical meaning of this submission, representing a "joining" to the city of unprecedented depth.

The monastic vocation of St. Thomas Aquinas, similarly, was not in tension with his philosophical vocation. St. Thomas, like Socrates, was one of those individuals born with the natural wisdom to "remain in existence" and embrace duty rather than "abstract" himself from it. It was only because he remained aware of the subjective truth of human existence in his monastic vocation, that his philosophical vocation had the effect it did. Like Socrates, St. Thomas offered a philosophical challenge to the religion of his day, offering a Christian interpretation of Aristotle that challenged the reigning Platonism. Although St. Thomas's doctrines were initially proscribed by the Bishop of Paris, his philosophy was later embraced by the universal Church, in no small part because of the manifest holiness of the man St. Thomas (see Etienne Gilson's the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas on this.) St. Thomas's reformation of Christian philosophy was more easily accepted because, coming from St. Thomas, a man who clearly fulfilled the meaning of Christian existence in his own life, it was easier to trust that his philosophy was authentically Christian as well.

Returning to the motto ("Study everything, join nothing"), we may ask what "everything" includes. Does it include the human things - friendship, love, faith, hope, duty, honor, responsibility, justice, among others? I submit that none of these things can be understood from the outside; from studying them without joining them. And joining them means joining some human community of which they are an aspect. Plato held that the young should not be taught philosophy because they do not have the experience to make it meaningful. They don't have the "data" of philosophy, as it were. The data only comes from life, and the more "joined" that life the better. Socrates was a military veteran and St. Thomas an avowed mendicant friar.

I think my last foray over to the Maverick Philosopher involved the book Into the Wild. If you don't recall, this is the story of Chris McCandless, a young man eventually found dead living on his own in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan countryside. McCandless was an intelligent and passionate young man, and his foray into the Alaskan wilderness was not his first adventure of this type. McCandless was clearly a man "looking for something" in the philosophical sense, and his extreme adventures were an attempt to break through to some philosophical or spiritual state of being. He was a young man of some virtue, and his story is reminiscent of medieval figures like St. Francis of Assisi, abandoning all in favor of a higher vocation. But the strongest impression I got from reading Into the Wild was the essential immaturity of what McCandless was attempting. What all his adventures had in common was that they strictly avoided any obligation or responsibility. This is what separates him from someone like St. Francis. Sometimes McCandless would take odd jobs (like mucking out cattle pens), and although he was always well-regarded in his work, he would never stay in the same job for long. My impression was that as soon as he began to develop some local ties, to become "rooted" in a community, he would see that as a signal to move on. This is the modern mistake of seeing the meaning of freedom in freedom from obligation and responsibility, of not being "joined" to anything. But such "freedom" involves a distortion of the meaning of human existence, Unfortunately, philosophers in the old mold of St. Thomas or Socrates are rare in the modern university, so McCandless never learned this lesson despite his formal philosophical education. Even more unfortunately, a passionate soul like McCandless will finally only find frustration in such a free-floating existence; instead of finding true meaning in the free submission to something greater than himself, he will seek it in ever more radical and dangerous individual experiences, experiences that may eventually become lethal.

The banner on my blog is not intended as a rejoinder to the Maverick Philosopher's motto, but it functions as one nonetheless. The subjective thinker does not wish to study without joining, but to understand himself in the context of his concrete existence, with its relationships, obligations and duties. He wishes to think philosophically, that is in terms of abstract universals like "justice", "friendship" and "love", but with reference to the specifics of his own existence - "to understand the abstract concretely."

Wiping out with St. Thomas

The Boston Sunday Globe has a good article on a TV show my family loves - "Wipeout" - and brings in none other than St. Thomas Aquinas for some perspective:

Slapstick equals humility, and humility - as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out - equals truth. St. Thomas would have cautioned that salvation remains a serious business: it’s called the Fall of Man, after all, not the Wipeout of Man. But as a sideshow to the obstacle course of righteousness, we can enjoy “Wipeout.”

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.