At the heart of the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas is the idea that we come into contact with reality through the senses. But what if our senses are not a reliable source? Perhaps our senses are deceiving us, and everything we perceive isn’t real but is merely an illusion like in the movie The Matrix.

Descartes

This skepticism of sense knowledge was part of René Descartes’s methodic doubt, which many radical skeptics have adopted. Descartes argued:

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive me, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once (Meditations, I, pp. 12f.).

Descartes’ point is, if our senses have deceived us before, how do we know our senses aren’t deceiving us now? One example Descartes gives as evidence our senses deceive us is the fact that objects at a distance look smaller than what they actually are.

But this is not deception. The sense of sight is reporting accurately what it perceives, namely the person appears small at a distance and then appears big when close up. As D.Q. McInerny says, “This is the sense of sight functioning just as it should, in order to give me a proper knowledge of distance” (Epistemology, 192). Error would come in only if one made the judgment, “That man is small and then becomes big.” Truth and falsity do not reside in sensory perception but in the act of judging that perception.

St. Thomas Aquinas makes the point this way:

Truth and falsity exist principally in the soul’s judgment. . . . Hence, a thing is not said to be false because it always of itself causes a false apprehension, but rather because its natural appearance is likely to cause a false apprehension (Questiones Disputatae de Veritate 1:10; emphasis added).

Another problem with Descartes’s reason for doubting sensory perception is that he relies on only one sensory power. It’s often the case that in order to test whether one sense is deceiving us, we must use another sense.

To use an example that many radical skeptics do to justify their doubt of sense knowledge, I may perceive the stick partially immersed in water as crooked. How do I determine if what I perceive is actually the case? I pick up the stick. When I do so I judge the stick is not actually crooked. But notice that in order to make a correct judgment about the stick, I employ another sensory power—namely, touch—that I must trust in order to make the proper the judgment.

With regard to Descartes’s example, in order to make a proper judgment about the size of the man walking up the street, Descartes would have to make contact with him through the sense of touch and measure him in order to determine that he is not small, which requires trust in sense knowledge.

Furthermore, Descartes’s recognition of the man’s small stature as unusual presupposes his trust in his previous sensory experience of the man’s tall stature. As Ralph McInerny notes, “[Descartes] must trust his senses in order to doubt them” (A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas, 37).

So, if it’s reasonable to trust sense knowledge, and the senses put us into contact with the world outside the mind, then we can have certitude that what we perceive is objectively real.

Dreams

The appeal to dreams is another way radical skeptics attempt to undermine trust in the senses. Taking their cue from Descartes again, they argue, “How do I know I’m not dreaming right now?” We can respond in two ways.

First, we experience ourselves being awake. As such, the skeptic must shoulder the burden of proof and not merely make an assertion (as Descartes did) but give reason to believe we’re not awake.

Second, in order to determine if our experience is a dream state, one must be able to identify a dream state. But as the philosopher Kenneth Gallagher explains, one can identify a dream state only by comparison with our waking consciousness:

It would be literally nonsensical to ask: how do I know that waking is not what I ordinarily mean by dreaming, because if it were, I wouldn't know what I ordinarily mean by dreaming (The Philosophy of Knowledge, 41].

Conjecture about whether waking is dreaming is literally of no practical use. If our waking is dreaming, then there is no point in talking of dreaming.

Malignant power

Some skeptics may argue that our defense of sense knowledge assumes our sensory and cognitive faculties are real. Following in the steps again of Descartes, they argue, “What if our perception is merely the product of a malignant being manipulating our sensory and cognitive powers, thus making our experiences and knowledge mere illusions?”

Look, just because it is logically possible that we are being deceived by a malignant power does not mean it is plausible. Logical possibility means only that there is no logical contradiction. Plausibility is present whenever there are good reasons for thinking something to be the case. Are there any good reasons to think we are being deceived by a malignant power? The obvious answer is no.

Second, the only possible way to settle the question is to use the very faculties that are being called into question. It is impossible to reflect upon our sensory and cognitive faculties apart from their activities. As the late philosopher Peter Coffey writes:

[C]ognitive faculties cannot be tested or examined in themselves and abstracting from their activities: whatever we know or can know about the nature of the mind and its faculties we can know only through their activities: there is no other channel of information open to us (Epistemology vol. I., 93).

If doubting our cognitive faculties presupposes their use, then there is no way to question their validity.

Finally, the objection is subversive of the argument itself. If the skeptic is correct, then it’s possible the soundness of the skeptic’s argument is yet another illusion generated by the malignant power.

Conclusion

The attempt by radical skeptics to undermine the perennial philosophy of knowledge as found in Aristotle and Aquinas can be a major stumbling block for the pursuit of truth. But showing how one cannot doubt the senses without trusting them, and eliminating the possibility of our waking state being a dream state along with the possibility of manipulation by a malignant power, can remove the stumbling block and open the path to knowledge of the real.
 
 
(Image credit: The Creators Project)

St. Justin Martyr, a second century philosopher and Christian apologist, once reflected that Platonic philosophy added “wings” to his mind.¹ He was referring to the way that Plato’s theory of ideas freed his reason, allowing his thoughts to rest not just upon the sensible things of this earth, but rather permitting him to contemplate the unseen yet essential realities that undergird and give meaning to all of existence.

Justin is a witness to the way that truth can lift our minds and let us soar to the heights of wisdom. However, according to Pope Benedict XVI, the prevailing approach to truth today resembles a windowless bunker more than it does the freedom of a bird soaring in open skies.²

We are an intellectually one-sided society. While we pride ourselves (and rightly so) on the great achievements we have made in the fields of science, especially the trifecta of biology, physics, and chemistry, we have forgotten what St. Justin Martyr and other great thinkers like St. Augustine knew so well and found so life-giving: truth is much broader, deeper, higher, and richer than mere scientific fact.

Today we are guilty of thinking that the highest form of truth is data. This mentality is evident in our informal conversations and can be especially found in the works of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, who, for example, reduces the intellectually fruitful idea of human love to a chemically-induced brain state.³

We are more dedicated to dividing things into their smallest quantifiable units than with learning what they mean as a whole.

This is the bunker into which we have put ourselves, a myopic view of human reason that considers scientific certainty and practicality alone to be worthwhile and valid, while all other modes of thought, like philosophy and theology, are considered to be ambiguous and inconclusive enough that it is better not to waste time with them anyway.

Our understanding of reason’s scope is severely limited. We have a concrete roof over our heads that prevents our minds from rising to contemplation of God, and at the same time the walls of our bunker shield us from the deeper questions of meaning that constantly assault our consciousnesses, justly demanding our attention. But how did we get into this intellectually intolerant, close-minded bunker mentality? And, more importantly, how do we get out?

How We Got into the Bunker

Probably one of the single most significant intellectual events of human history was the 18^th century Enlightenment, which brought about a number of exciting advances in the technological fields and opened up broad new avenues of scientific exploration. But the Enlightenment was also the point at which human thought began taking decisive steps down the stairway which leads to the bunker of reason that we live in today.

Especially under the influence of Rene Descartes, thinkers like David Hume and, later, Auguste Comte, declared the age of “speculative thought” (metaphysics and theology) at an end; they considered themselves the harbingers of a new age of the primacy of science. Science, they said, was at last gaining the competency to adjudicate moral matters and provide direction for man’s true purpose: the mastery of nature and of himself. Each of these three thinkers represents a step further down into the bunker of restrictive reason in which we live today.

Descartes’ rationalism is a constitutive piece of Enlightenment thought and is one of the first steps into today’s bunker of reason. He advocated the “practical philosophy” of math and science with the aim of making men “lords and masters of nature”.⁴ Descartes prized the role of human thought more in its capacity for making than for meaning.

Then, in a philosophical move sometimes known as “Hume’s fork”, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume took human thought on a second step into the bunker of reason when he argued that all the objects of human reason or enquiry can be divided into two kinds, “Relations of Ideas” and “Matters of Fact”. The former category contains the sciences of geometry, algebra, and arithmetic. The latter category contains synthetic propositions based on experiences to which one is accustomed, such as, “The sun will rise tomorrow.”

However, all Matters of Fact are dependent upon relationships between cause and effect, and Hume holds the skeptical position that there is no real logical necessity that certain observed effects will always come from associated causes. Therefore, according to Hume, there is in fact no real way of knowing anything other than the first category of reason, the sciences.⁵ Hume is one of the founding fathers of empiricism, an approach to human reason that says that truth can only be found when there is empirical (sensible) evidence to apprehend.

Aided by the growing influence of the intellectual trends of the Enlightenment, a third and decisive step into the bunker of reason was taken by the 19^th century French thinker, Auguste Comte. Comte proposed what he called “positive philosophy”, an approach to reason which recognizes as truthful only those pieces of knowledge that are positive facts. For Comte, logic is the sole vessel of truth.

Comte claimed that the history of human thought moves through three general states. First, there is the theological state, then the metaphysical, and finally the positive state. It is only in the third state that humans can actually be said to have knowledge and get at the truth.⁶ Theological and metaphysical ideas belong to an age when humans didn’t know any better and basically made up ideas about the universe since they were without the aid of science.

According to Comte, theology is the innocent but ignorant childhood of the human mind, while metaphysics represents the slightly more serious—though no less empty—youth of human thought. And the positivistic approach to reason is, of course, adulthood, human reason come to full stature. Comte concludes, “All competent thinkers agree with [Francis] Bacon that there can be no real knowledge except that which rests upon observed facts.”⁷

With this succession of thinkers, human thought has been gradually narrowed down such that it consists only of science and logic when it once was directed to responding to questions of ultimate meaning. We have entered the bunker of empirical fact and slammed the door shut behind us, sealing ourselves off from thoughts of heaven and from any type of rationally inquiry that does not yield factually certain results.

How We Can Get Out of the Bunker

The first step necessary for getting out of the bunker of restrictive reason is to realize how the thinkers who got us in here are wrong.

Therefore, when looking at the conclusions of the rationalists, skeptics, empiricists, and positivists, we should ask: is this really the great achievement of human reason—that it is no longer concerned with anything but dry facts? Can science really answer all of man’s exigent questions? Are all non-scientific questions ultimately meaningless or unanswerable?

In truth, the life of every man and woman is marked by questions and challenges that are deeper and of far greater significance than practical questions of science and math. Questions about the meaning of death, love, and the existence of God are part of the heritage of human thought not because pre-historical humans did not have modern scientific tools but because these questions belong to human nature and thus stretch across the boundaries of time.⁸

By emphasizing practical thought over reflective thought, Descartes and his successors displaced certain important human questions. For example, the meaning of death used to be an important point of reflection for humans, but today death is often just thought of as a biological fact. Yet, those who are committed to intelligent, contemplative thought about human existence cannot let such a significant reality be swept aside so easily. After all, death is not just a biological phenomenon irrelevant to human meaning but is, in the words of Pope Benedict, a “human phenomenon of all embracing-profundity.”⁹

Death raises questions of human purpose: Why must we die? Does anything happen after death? How do I interpret the death of a loved one? These questions occupy our thoughts; they define our relationships with others, the scope of our plans, our sense of meaning in life, and thus our very existences. So to offhandedly reject death’s philosophical and theological relevance as we often do today is intellectually reprehensible.

Hume and Comte put all their trust in empirical data and the pure objectivity of the rational subject, but one must have pre-scientific notions of truth before one can trust empirical facts. G.K. Chesterton writes, “Reason is itself a matter of faith.”¹⁰ That is, I only trust that empirical facts are true because I believe that I am capable of knowing the truth. This conclusion is not scientific but philosophical. So there is a priority of philosophical—even creedal—truth over empirical fact. The former precedes the latter and cannot be blithely ignored.

Philosophy must ground science and oversee it, or else science becomes detached from questions of meaning and its own purpose. The reflective question, “What is truth?”—and all that comes with answering it—is deeper than the fields of biology, physics, and chemistry, since our work in those scientific fields must be grounded in our understanding of truth and the meaning of our endeavors.

How many of us today spend any amount of time considering the attainability of truth and other questions of meaning? Perhaps we remain in the bunker of safe, certain, scientific reason and neglect such questions simply because they are hard to resolve. Or perhaps it is because modern technological means can provide us with thousands of answers to these questions. And the plurality of available answers is almost overwhelming enough to cause one to believe that there simply are no answers and that he or she must choose a path arbitrarily or ignore questions of meaning entirely. We sometimes think, “If no one can agree on it, there must be no good answer.”

However, when tempted by this intellectual apathy, perhaps we can learn from St. Justin Martyr, who not only found liberation in discovering answers to many of his questions but was pushed to seek for truths even deeper than Platonic philosophy. And he eventually found them.

In Laudato Si, Pope Francis shows us how we can begin to follow the path of St. Justin and free our minds from the bunker of restrictive scientific reason. He writes that we must refuse to resign ourselves to the dull, calculative approach to the world that prevails today and must instead “continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything.”¹¹ To be really human is to wonder at the meaning of our lives and the beauty and tragedy that surrounds us. Wonder bursts the prison of calculative reason and sets before us the exhilarating questions of human existence: “Who am I?” “Why do I exist?” “Where am I going?”

This blog post is not the place to offer answers to man’s great questions of meaning, but it is the place for me to urge you not to believe the lie that there are no answers to be found. These questions don’t belong to just a certain body of “intellectuals” but to every man and woman. So let’s allow ourselves to be awash in wonder at everything that is incalculable in human life and reclaim the place of reflective thought. Let us together step out of the bunker of restrictive reason and into the light of day, stretch our wings, wonder, seek, and find.
 
 
(Image credit: Inhabitat.com)

In late 1644, the Minim friar Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) travelled to Florence and assisted Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647) in repeating his famous barometric experiment. When Mersenne returned to France, he shared Torricelli’s discovery with his network of correspondents, “giving rise to flourishing experimental and theoretical activities,”¹ including the famous work on the weight of air conducted by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). This is one of many contributions Mersenne would make to the scientific enterprise.

Called “an architect of the European scientific community”² and “one of the most important figures in the history of modern thought,”³ Mersenne is virtually unknown to non-historians, although mathematicians may recognize his name from Mersenne Primes.⁴

Mersenne was one of the greatest facilitators and correspondents in the history of science, acting as a “clearing house for scientific and philosophical information in the decades just prior to the appearance of the first learned journals.”⁵ In 1635, Mersenne created the Académie Parisienne, a precursor to the Académie des Sciences.

One of Mersenne’s closest collaborators was Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Both men had attended the Jesuit College at La Flèche, although Descartes was several years younger. Later, Mersenne would assist in the publication of Descartes’ Discourse on Method, and, after Descartes relocated to the Dutch Republic, Mersenne would keep the Father of Modern Philosophy updated on French intellectual developments, while acting as “Descartes’ mouthpiece to the republic of letters.”⁶ Furthermore, it was in Mersenne’s quarters that Pascal met Descartes,⁷ a meeting of the minds in the truest sense.

In addition to Torricelli, Pascal, and Descartes, Mersenne’s friends and correspondents included the mathematicians Pierre de Fermat⁸ and Girard Desargues,⁹ philosopher Thomas Hobbes,¹⁰ and the churchman-astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc.¹¹ In total, Mersenne corresponded with 140 key thinkers from throughout Europe (and as far away as Tunisia, Syria, and Constantinople),¹² and his compiled correspondence now fills 12 volumes.

Mersenne, however, offers us much more. He made several other important contributions to the scientific enterprise, especially in the fields of acoustics, scientific methodology, telescope and pendulum theory, and in the study of the motion of falling objects.

Mersenne is often credited as one of the founders of acoustics. In this field, he pioneered “the scientific study of the upper and lower limits of audible frequencies, of harmonics, and of the measurement of the speed of sound,¹³ which he showed to be independent of pitch and loudness.” Furthermore, he “established that the intensity of sound, like that of light, is inversely proportional to the distance from its source.”¹⁴ His work in acoustics is immortalized in his eponymous three laws describing the relationship between frequency and the tension, weight, and length of strings.

As one of the most influential proponents of the mechanistic philosophy of nature,¹⁵ Mersenne’s contributions to scientific methodology are also significant. Mersenne, who was inspired by Francis Bacon,¹⁶ was an ardent defender of the rationality of nature, as well a strong opponent of magic and the occult.

His “insistence on the careful specification of experimental procedures, repetition of experiments, publication of the numerical results of actual measurements as distinct from those calculated from theory, and recognition of approximations marked a notable step in the organization of experimental science in the seventeenth century.”¹⁷ The Catholic Encyclopedia (a sympathetic voice, to be sure) goes as far as identifying the work of Mersenne and Galileo in experimenting with the weight of air as “the beginning of the development of the experimental method”¹⁸ (This experimentation was not his only connection to the great Italian scientist: Mersenne translated Galileo’s work on mechanics¹⁹ and helped to spread Galileo’s ideas in France).

In his work with pendulums, Mersenne discovered that “the frequency of a pendulum is inversely proportional to the square root of its length.”²⁰ He also discovered the length of a seconds pendulum, and (against Galileo) that pendulum swings are not isochronous. Furthermore, Mersenne’s suggestion to Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) that the pendulum could be used as a timing device partially inspired the pendulum clock.²¹

Mersenne did much more than contribute significantly to the scientific enterprise. He engaged and embraced the best ideas and minds of his time. In his century of genius, the power of the human mind reached new heights in its ability to understand the laws of nature. Against this backdrop, Mersenne championed the unity of truth.²²

Encouraged by his order and always a loyal son of the Church,²³ Mersenne was operating at the heart of the Scientific Revolution. And he demands the attention today of both Catholics and atheists.
 
 
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

Two fantastic articles at Strange Notions in recent weeks have turned from the question of God to the question of the human self. In “Atheism and the Personal Pronoun,” Patrick Schultz explores what he calls a “doorstop” argument for the soul: under materialist atheism, we are mindless machines, but given that every one of us is inescapably a subjective “I,” materialist atheism looks false. In “Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine,” Matthew Newland counters this argument by looking at brain-mind causality, naturalistic “emergence,” and split-brain research, concluding that the conscious mind may very well be a kind of “city” of proto-minds operating in unison. I find points of agreement in both pieces, but would like to reframe the question from a third perspective. (If nothing else, I hope this whole discussion is a reminder that there is room in the Catholic Church for vastly different conclusions on some very fundamental questions.)

There’s an old Irish joke that Richard Dawkins recounts as well as anyone in The God Delusion:

“A journalist, researching for an article on the complex political situation in Northern Ireland, was in a pub in a war-torn area of Belfast. One of his potential informants leaned over his pint of Guinness and suspiciously cross-examined the journalist: “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” the Irishman asked. "Neither," replied the journalist; “I'm an atheist.” The Irishman, not content with this answer, put a further question: “Ah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?”

The absurdity of the joke is that the Irishman is so entrenched in the local standoff that he can’t help but see a hapless outsider as belonging to one side or the other. As far as he’s concerned, there is no third option.

This is a perfect analogy for what has happened with modern philosophy of mind. Instead of Catholics and Protestants, we have rationalists and empiricists; instead of Jesus, our common reference point is Descartes. And instead of unbelievers, we have those who doubt the wisdom of the epistemological turn inaugurated with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”

That turn, like it or not, wields enormous influence on all of Western thought and culture, especially modern philosophy. On the continent, Descartes’ fellow rationalists were all hugely influenced by his epistemology, and though they came to different conclusions, all continued the angelic quest for the foundations of reason. Across the English Channel, the empiricists also put on the mantle of epistemology, but were skeptical about “innate ideas”, seeing in man only a bundle of sense perceptions. Kant, awoken from his “dogmatic slumber” by Hume’s skepticism, attempted to rectify these two traditions with his Critique of Pure Reason, catapulting us further into rarefied spiritual air with the German and British idealists – which, in turn, capitulated us into the logical positivism that has dominated the Anglo-American universities until just recently. Even today, most maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, from Chalmers’ p-zombies to Dennett’s Cartesian theater, are situated in the same contextual snare. Like quicksand, the more we wrestle with Cartesian notions of the self, the deeper he sinks us into the epistemological tradition—and round and round we go.

Schultz and Newland, too, both reference Descartes in their articles. Schultz, echoing Aquinas, notes that the soul is “an animating principle” of the body, but the analogy of emptied suits and the language of a brain “belonging” to a soul both conjure, however slightly, the shadow of Cartesian rationalism.

In reaction to this, Newland proposes to “exorcise” the “ghost from the machine” by exploring Whitehead’s empiricism, positing a bundle of “little minds” that emerges from its “environment, structure, and chemical reactions.” Newland mirrors the arc of empiricism in one other crucial way: the invocation of an Aristotelian “soul” feels redundant. What is this “soul” if not an unnecessary metaphysical tier tacked on to what’s already been broken down and explained? This seems to be the arc of naturalism from Locke to Dennett where our spiritual side is concerned: the effervescent “soul” becomes as wispy and feckless an appendage as a phantom limb. It seems cleaner and more efficient to just cut it off and move on.

These two systems, often in very subtle ways, tend to push us to one side or the other whenever we approach the self, dragging us into an endless tug-of-war over one and the same epistemological rope. Henri Bergson, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, sought a way out through the concept of intuition, arguing that the two traditions were “dupes of the same illusion,” both “equally powerless to reach the inner self.” Jacques Maritain, a young student at the Sorbonne, had been in suicidal despair over the positivist view of life until he sat in on Bergson’s lectures. Eventually, he and Étienne Gilson, another student of Bergson’s, initiated a twentieth century revival in Scholastic metaphysics, abandoning their master’s philosophy but continuing his attack on the Cartesian-Kantian bloodline.

This revolt was not some isolated French fashion. As Charles Taylor shows in his essay "Overcoming Epistemology", recent philosophy has seen a succession of attempts from both analytic and continental thinkers to get out from under the crushing weight of the epistemological tradition. There is the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (carried forward today by Jean-Luc Marion) and the existentialism which sprouted from it; there is the late turn in Wittgenstein’s thought away from logical analysis toward ordinary language; there is neopragmatist Richard Rorty’s hugely influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature published in 1979; and there is Taylor’s own book, Sources of the Self, which looks to the “moral sources”—cultural, historical, and religious as well as philosophical—that inform our modern notions of the self.

What that self finally is for each of these thinkers obviously varies greatly. But Taylor argues that what’s more important is what they have in common:

"We argue the inadequacy of the epistemological construal, and the necessity of a new conception, from what we show to be the indispensable conditions of there being anything like experience or awareness of the world in the first place. Just how to characterize this reality, whose conditions we are defining, can itself be a problem, of course…For all this extremely important shift in the center of gravity of what we take as the starting point, there is a continuity between Kant and Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or Merleau-Ponty. They all start from the intuition that this central phenomenon of experience, or the clearing, is not made intelligible on the epistemological construal, in either its empiricist or rationalist variants."

In other words, we need to step out of the stream of consciousness and out into the broader valley surrounding it. We need to, like the atheist in the Irish joke, proclaim our freedom from the provincial dilemma which creeps up in increasingly subtle ways. It’s not the Cartesian ghost we need to exorcise, but the epistemological séance that conjured it in the first place.

That reorientation of man back toward our being-in-the-world—one that simultaneously resists the perennial impulse toward reductionism—is well underway. We see, to use Bergson’s phrasing, an empiricism “worthy of the name” on the horizon, one which is “obliged to make an absolutely new effort for each object it studies.” Gilson’s formulation—with its eye squarely on the wisdom of classical philosophy—rings true for all of us, and is as good a place as any to start:

“Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good, and who enjoys them as beautiful.”

 
 
(Image credit: Culture CPG)

What is a soul? Or to be more precise, what is a human soul?  Or to be even more precise, what is a human being?  For that is really the key question; and I sometimes think that the biggest obstacle to understanding what the soul is is the word “soul.”  People too readily read into it various erroneous notions (erroneous from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, anyway)—ghosts, ectoplasm, or Cartesian immaterial substances.  Even the Aristotelian characterization of the soul as the form of the living body can too easily mislead.  When those unfamiliar with Aristotelian metaphysics hear “form,” they are probably tempted to think in terms of shape or a configuration of parts, which is totally wrong.  Or perhaps they think of it in Platonic terms, as an abstract universal that the individual human being participates in—also totally wrong.  Or they suspect that since it is the form of the living body it cannot coherently be said to subsist apart from that body—totally wrong again.   So let us, for the moment, put out of our minds all of these ideas and start instead with the question, what is a human being?

To ask what a human being is is to ask what the nature of a human being is.  What makes human beings the kinds of things they are?  What makes them distinctive?  What sets them apart from other kinds of thing?  To answer this it is useful to consider those kinds of thing which, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, come just below and just above human beings in the hierarchy of reality: non-human animals, and angels.

An animal is something which by its nature not only exercises vegetative powers like taking in nutrients, growing, and reproducing, but is also capable of sensation and imagination, of appetite, and of locomotion or the ability to move itself in response to the promptings of appetite and in pursuit of what it senses or imagines.  Particular kinds of animals will, given their natures, exhibit this repertoire in their own distinctive ways.  For instance, land animals will exercise their locomotive powers by walking, hopping, or slithering, fish by swimming, and (most) birds by flying; and each will do so by means of its own distinctive organs -- legs, fins, wings, and so forth.

Now of course, not every single individual animal will perfectly exercise the capacities that are natural to it, or even actually possess the organs that are its natural means of exercising them.  A dog might injure or lose a leg, or even fail to develop legs in the first place because of some prenatal defect.  But it is still of the nature of such a dog to have legs, and to walk and run with them.  In the extreme case, we can even imagine a dog which (as a result of an accident, say) has lost not only its legs, but its sense organs and higher brain functions, and is kept alive through intravenous feeding -- reduced, in effect, to a portion of its vegetative functions.  All the same, the nature of such a dog, no less than that of a healthy dog, is to have sense organs, legs, and all the rest.  That the dog has been prevented from realizing that nature doesn’t change the nature itself; and should the dog be somehow restored to health and functionality, it is precisely those doglike attributes that it had lost that would be restored to it, rather than some other attributes.

Consider now an angel, which stands on the other side of the metaphysical divide marked by human beings.  An angel is, by nature, a creature of pure intellect, which entails—given that, as Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers argue, intellect is necessarily immaterial—that an angel is essentially immaterial.  (The wings, white robes, and long blonde hair are symbolic—suitable for children’s prayer books but not for metaphysics!)  Being immaterial, angels cannot be damaged or physically malformed the way an animal can.  (Of course, angels can be morally defective—there are fallen angels, after all—but that is a failure of will, which is an immaterial power that follows upon intellect.)   Indeed, being immaterial, they have no tendency toward corruption at all.  They are of their nature immortal.

And now we come to human beings.  A human being is by nature a rational animal.  That is to say, a human being is something which by its nature exercises both the animal powers of nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, appetite, and locomotion, and the intellectual and volitional powers possessed by angels.  Hence it exercises powers of both a material and an immaterial sort.  For that reason it is to a large extent capable of damage and malformation, as an animal is; but not completely so.  In particular, a human being can be damaged to such an extent that it completely loses the organs of its animal and vegetative powers, and thus cannot exercise them at all -- to such an extent that only its intellectual and volitional powers remain.  But those intellectual and volitional aspects of human nature, precisely because they are immaterial and thus do not depend on any corruptible material organ, cannot themselves perish, any more than they can in the case of an angel -- though they would be impaired given that the human intellect’s normal source of data is the sense organs, which are material, and given that its activity is normally carried out in conjunction with imagination, which is also material.

Now what we’d have in the case of a dog which had lost its legs, its sense organs, and its higher brain functions is the stub of a dog, the bare minimum consistent with the dog’s surviving at all.  The nature of such a poor creature would not have changed, but it would have been reduced to realizing only the smallest fragment of what would naturally flow from that nature.  You might almost say that it had been reduced to little more than the nature itself, with almost nothing in the way of a manifestation of that nature.  And a human being damaged to such an extent that it could exercise none of its animal capacities and retained only its intellectual and volitional faculties in an impaired state would, you might say, be a stub of a human being, the bare minimum consistent with a human being’s surviving at all—a human being reduced to little more than its nature, with almost nothing in the way of a manifestation of that nature.  The key difference would be that whereas the severely damaged dog of our example could also go on utterly to perish, this stub of a human being could not.  It is immortal, though the full human being is not, which is why resurrection is necessary.  (To be sure, God could annihilate this “stub,” just as He could annihilate anything; but as with an angel, nothing in the natural order could destroy it, because, being immaterial, it would have no inherent tendency toward corruption.)

Now such a stub of a human being is what a soul is, or a disembodied soul anyway.  This is why Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers often call a disembodied soul an “incomplete substance”—not because they are trying incoherently to fudge the difference between a Cartesian res cogitans and the idea of the soul as a kind of form, but because a disembodied soul relative to a living human being is like a legless, senseless, brain-damaged dog relative to a healthy dog.  The severely damaged dog is in an obvious and natural sense an incomplete substance, and the disembodied soul is an incomplete substance in just that sense—it is an incomplete, damaged human being.

This is also a way to understand the sense in which the soul is the substantial form—that is to say, the nature—of a human being.  A nature or substantial form is not a Platonic abstraction.  It exists in a concrete individual thing, as its principle of operation and the source of its properties.  It is there as long as, and only as long as, the individual thing itself is there.  But when the operations and properties in question are prevented from being manifested, what we are left with in effect is the principle or source without that which flows from it.  Thus to reduce a human being to the bare minimum consistent with its being there at all is to reduce it as far as possible to its nature or substantial form—that is, to its soul alone.

Some might insist that if the intellectual and volitional powers of a human being persist in even an impaired form after the animal powers have been destroyed, this must be because the former inhere in a substance distinct from that in which the latter inhere, as Descartes held.  But this is like saying that since the stub of a dog would continue to exist in the absence of its legs, eyes, ears, etc., it follows that the stub in question (an eyeless, earless, brain-damaged torso) and the legs, eyes, ears, etc. are all distinct substances.   And they are not; rather, they are all aspects of one substance—the dog itself—and can be made sense of only by reference to that one substance.  Similarly, that the impaired intellectual-cum-volitional stub of a human being would continue to exist in the absence of its animal powers does not entail that the stub in question and the animal powers must be grounded in distinct substances.  They are not; rather, they too are aspects of the one substance—the human being himself—and can be made sense of only by reference to that one substance.

I've noted before that those beholden to scientism tend to reify abstractions—to abstract the mathematical structure of a concrete physical system and treat it as if it were the entirety of the system, or to abstract the neurobiological processes underlying human action and treat them as if they were the whole source of human action.  I also noted that while those prone to scientism are notorious for this, Cartesians are guilty of reifying abstractions too.  Specifically, they abstract from the one substance that is a human being its intellectual aspect and its animal aspect and make of them two substances—putting asunder, as it were, what God and nature had joined together.  And when they finally recombine them, what they are left with is nothing human at all, but a bizarre shotgun marriage of angel and animal, or ghost and machine.  But sometimes a man is just a man.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 
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W. Norris Clarke’s article, “A Curious Blind Spot in the Anglo-American Tradition of Antitheistic Argument,” first appeared in The Monist in 1970.  It was reprinted in his anthology titled The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old, which was published posthumously in 2009.  I recently read the essay, and I did so with embarrassment and gratification.  Embarrassment because I found that something I’ve been harping on for a few years now had already been said by Fr. Clarke over 40 years ago.  Gratification because I found that something I’ve been harping on for a few years now had already been said by Fr. Clarke over 40 years ago.

The stock caricature in question is, of course, the “Everything has a cause, so the universe has a cause” argument.  As I’ve pointed out many times on my blog (e.g. here and here), no major proponent of the idea of a First Cause ever actually defended this argument.  Indeed, all the major proponents of arguments for a First Cause would reject the claim that “everything has a cause,” and on entirely principled, rather than ad hoc, grounds.  Hence the stock retort to this caricature has no force whatsoever against their actual arguments.  That stock retort is of course to ask, “If everything has a cause, then what caused God?” and then to suggest that if God need not have a cause, then neither need the universe have a cause.  Maybe, those who attack this caricature suggest, it is the universe itself (or the event that gave rise to it) that is the first or uncaused cause.

The “curious blind spot” Clarke is referring to is contemporary Anglo-American philosophers’ inability or unwillingness to see that in routinely trotting out this objection they are attacking a straw man that bears no interesting relationship whatsoever to what writers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al. actually said.

On my own blog, I’ve given many examples of philosophers who attack the straw man First Cause argument.  They include Bertrand Russell, Steven Hales, Nigel Warburton, and (as I showed in a post discussing several examples at once) Daniel Dennett, Robin Le Poidevin, Graham Priest, Michael Martin, Simon Blackburn, Jenny Teichman and Katherine Evans.  Clarke offers several further examples from philosophy textbooks of the mid twentieth century, including John Hospers’ widely used An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis.  As Clarke indicates, Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian may be the source from which many subsequent writers learned this caricature and the stock reply to it.  Clarke also notes that Russell in turn seems to have gotten the idea from John Stuart Mill, who in turn got it from his father James Mill.  Clarke thinks that David Hume, who in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion attacks something like the stock straw man First Cause argument, may be the first well-known writer to do so.  Clarke writes:

"Let it first be agreed without qualification that if one does admit the principle “Every being has a cause,” then the refutation is inescapable and devastating.  But the very ease of this refutation, if nothing else, should have aroused some suspicions in the minds of its users, one would have thought, as to whether their supposed opponents were actually using this principle.  And it is in itself a highly suspicious fact that no one among the many in this Hume-Russell tradition whom I have read ever quotes any specific theistic philosopher who does make use of it.  So constant is this pattern, in fact, that I am willing to wager that this family trait is found also in those I have not yet run across." (p. 55, emphasis added)

As I have noted in the earlier posts cited, the pattern in question certainly has continued in the 40 plus years since Clarke wrote.  Critics regularly attack the straw man without citing anyone who has ever defended it.  (Le Poidevin even admits that no one has actually defended it!)  After falsely accusing proponents of the First Cause argument of contradicting themselves by denying that God has a cause, Hospers smugly writes:

"Many people do not at once see this because they use the argument to get to God, and then, having arrived at where they want to go, they forget all about the argument..." (quoted by Clarke at p. 52)

But who exactly are these “many people”?  The critics do not tell us.  It’s tempting to conclude (paraphrasing Hospers) that these critics do not see that no one has ever really defended the straw man they attack because, having arrived at where they want to go -- a way of dismissing Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al. tout court and thereby avoiding commitment to a divine First Cause -- they forget all about what these writers actually said.  Says Clarke:

"We can only conclude, then, that the Hume-Russell tradition of anti-theistic argument, on this point at least, somehow got off to a bad start by completely misunderstanding and misrepresenting the very argument it was trying to refute, and that it has continued to repeat itself ever since, talking only to itself, and without ever bothering to inquire whether the supposed other party to the debate was still there at all, or had ever been there.  In a word, it has become a tradition in the worse sense of the word, truly in a rut and apparently unaware of it." (p. 59)

Confirming evidence of this is provided by Steven Hales’ response to my recent criticism of him for peddling the straw man.  Prof. Hales wrote:

"I do find it surprising that Professor Feser chooses to hang his hat on the Cosmological Argument of all things, an argument that the vast majority of contemporary philosophers consider risible, but I suppose that no interesting philosophical argument is ever truly dead."

But of course, the reason “the vast majority of contemporary philosophers consider [the argument] risible” is precisely because what they know of it is the straw man version peddled in books like Hales’ rather than what proponents of the cosmological argument have actually said!  It’s a vicious circle.  “We know the cosmological argument in general is too silly to be worth taking seriously because the version we learned from the textbooks is so easily refuted; and we know there aren’t any other versions worth looking into, because the cosmological argument in general is too silly to be worth taking seriously.”  This tells you nothing about the value of the cosmological argument, and everything about the value of the conventional wisdom in academic philosophy.

In fact, as Clarke notes, Aquinas explicitly denies that everything has a cause.  He held that “to be caused by another does not appertain to a being inasmuch as it is being; otherwise, every being would be caused by another, so that we should have to proceed to infinity in causes -- an impossibility…” (Summa Contra Gentiles II.52.5).  For writers like Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas and other Scholastics, it is not the fact of something’s existence as such, or of its being a thing per se, that raises causal questions about it.  It is only some limitation in a thing’s intrinsic intelligibility that does so -- for example, the fact that it has potentials that need actualization, or that it is composed of parts which need to be combined, or that it merely participates in some feature, or that it is contingent in some respect.  Hence these writers would never say that “everything has a cause.”  What they would say is that every actualization of a potential has a cause, or whatever is composite has a cause, or whatever has a feature only by participation has a cause, or whatever is contingent has a cause.

Accordingly, when they arrive at God via a First Cause argument, there is no inconsistency, no sudden abandonment of the very premise that got the argument going.  Rather, the argument is that the only way to terminate a regress of actualizers of potentials is by reference to something which is pure actuality, devoid of potentiality, and thus without anything that needs to be, or even could be, actualized; or it is that a regress of causes of composed things can be terminated only by something which is absolutely simple or non-composite, and thus without any parts whose combination needs to be, or indeed could have been, caused by anything; or that the only way to terminate a regress of things that cause other things to participate in being is by reference to that which just is being itself rather than something which merely has or participates in being, and thus something which neither needs, nor could have had, a cause of its own being; or that the only way to terminate a regress of causes of contingent things is by reference to something absolutely necessary, which by virtue of its absolute necessity need not have, and could not have, had something impart existence to it; and so forth.

Whatever one thinks of these sorts of arguments, there is no inconsistency in them, nor any ad hoc exceptions to general principles.  The only way to accuse them of either fault is by reading into them the silly straw man argument that their proponents would reject.

How did the Hume-Russell straw man tradition ever get started in the first place?  I noted in another blog post that Descartes’ “preservation” argument, an eccentric and now little-known variation on the cosmological argument, implies that there is a sense in which everything has a cause -- though it does not explicitly appeal to that claim as a premise, and it does not make an exception in the case of God since it regards Him as self-caused.  Clarke discusses this argument in some detail and shows that while Descartes’ development and defense of the argument in the Replies is complicated and confusing, at the end of the day even he does not appear to be saying quite the sort of thing that the Hume-Russell straw man attributes to First Cause arguments.  What Descartes is saying is something closer to a version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), on which everything has an explanation.  And in the case of cosmological arguments that appeal to PSR (like Leibniz’s), the Hume-Russell style objection cannot get off the ground, because these arguments do not and need not make any exception in the case of God.  They hold that absolutely everything has an explanation.  In the case of contingent things, the explanation lies outside the thing, and in the case of a necessary being, the explanation lies in the thing’s own nature.  Again, whatever one thinks of such arguments, there is no inconsistency in them, nor any ad hoc exception to a general principle.

Clarke suggests that Descartes blurred the distinction between a cause and a sufficient reason, and that Spinoza (who also thought of God as self-caused) did the same.  What they really meant was something like “Everything has an explanation,” where they make no exception in the case of God.  But since they use the language of “cause,” it sounds like they are saying that “Everything has a cause” in the usual sense of an efficient cause which is distinct from its effect.  And of course that is the sort of cause that God is traditionally said not to have, and which Descartes and Spinoza themselves would deny that he has (even if they think he does have a “cause” in the sense of a sufficient reason).

Clarke suggests that what Hume did was essentially to confuse these two senses of “cause,” taking the rationalist claim that “everything has a ‘cause’-in-the-sense-of-a-sufficient-reason” to be identical to the claim that “everything has a ‘cause’-in-the-sense-of-an-efficient-cause-distinct-from-itself. “  In fact no defender of the cosmological argument ever made the latter claim, but since Descartes and Spinoza made the former claim it seemed to Hume as if someone had made it.  He then essentially made the further step of attributing this thesis to proponents of the cosmological argument in general.  And then, since proponents of the cosmological argument in general do deny that God has a ‘cause’-in-the-sense-of-an-efficient-cause-distinct-from-himself, the claim that proponents of the argument were contradicting themselves seemed to have force.  But as Clarke says:

"Thus the First Cause argument for the existence of God which the Hume-Russell tradition so devastatingly attacks is indeed an inviable metaphysical monster.  But it is a monster of their own fabrication, not that of any reputable theistic philosopher.  It is actually a kind of hybrid of both the traditional Scholastic and Cartesian rationalist traditions, which would make sense in neither and be repudiated by both." (p. 62)

Clarke goes on to note that while Hume may have had some excuse for this error given the confusing nature of Descartes’ terminology, “it is much harder to excuse his successors in this tradition, with all the resources of historical scholarship and linguistic analysis at their disposal, for perpetuating this confusion” (p. 62).  And again, Clarke wrote this over 40 years ago.  In the decades since, lip service to and indeed genuine knowledge of the history of philosophy has dramatically increased within Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and still this absurd caricature of the cosmological argument are routinely and matter-of-factly peddled by academic philosophers.

And unfortunately, the Hume-Russell straw man has so deeply distorted general understanding of the cosmological argument that even some theists -- indeed, even some sympathizers with the cosmological argument -- feel they have to treat it as if it had something to do with the arguments of Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al.  Consider Alex Pruss’s article “The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.  In general it is (as, of course, Alex’s work typically is) excellent.  But Alex says that “a typical cosmological argument faces four different problems,” one of which he describes as follows:

"The third difficulty is the Taxicab Problem, coming from Schopenhauer’s quip that in the cosmological argument, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is like a taxicab that once used is sent away.  The difficulty here is in answering what happens when the explanatory principle… gets applied to the First Cause.  A popular formulation is: 'If God is the cause of the universe, what is the cause of God?'  Typical solutions argue that the case of the First Cause is different in some way that is not merely ad hoc from the cases to which the explanatory principle was applied." (pp. 24-25)

Alex goes on to argue that this “problem” can indeed be solved, but I think he should never have treated it as a “problem” for the argument in the first place.  Suppose critics of Darwinism routinely asserted that Darwinians claim that a monkey gave birth to the first human baby, and also routinely went on to ridicule this claim as evidence of the “risibility” of Darwinism.  Would it be a good idea for a defender of Darwinism to say that “a typical Darwinian argument faces four different problems, one of which is the Monkey Problem,” and then go on to offer a solution to this “Monkey Problem”?  Of course not, because the “Monkey Problem” is a complete fabrication that no version of Darwinism ever needed a “solution” to.  The proper response would be relentlessly to hammer this point home, not to dignify the objection by treating it as if it were something other than an attack on a straw man.  That only reinforces the misunderstanding in question in the very act of trying to resolve it.  But the same thing is true of the bogus “Taxicab Problem.”  (By the way, I think something similar could be said of the other three “problems” Alex refers to in his article.  They all concern issues that defenders of cosmological arguments are typically addressing head on from the start, not “problems” that remain to be solved after the arguments have been given.)

I’ll give Fr. Clarke the last word, by quoting a passage that I think conveys the correct attitude to take toward those who attack the Hume-Russell straw man.  I think a willingness to assent to what Clarke says here provides a useful test of the competence and intellectual honesty of any atheist and of any professional philosopher:

"[W]e are here in the presence of a philosophical tradition that is truly in a self-repetitive rut, a tradition that has long since ceased to look outside of itself to check with reality and see whether the adversary it so triumphantly and effortlessly demolishes really exists at all… [I]t would seem to be high time that those who still follow this particular tradition of antitheistic argument should have the grace and humility to acknowledge that their argument is dead, and let us get on with more substantive problems with regard to philosophical argument for and against the existence of God." (pp. 62-63)

 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.

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Pew Forum recently released the results of their study on religion in America. In accord with many surveys over the past fifty years, this poll showed that the vast majority (over 90%) of Americans believe in God but that an increasing number prefer their own spiritual experience to the dogmas and doctrines of traditional Christianity. Also, there is, among Americans, a general acceptance of positive, life-affirming beliefs but a deep suspicion of negative ideas such as divine judgment and hell.

The director of the Pew Forum summed up the findings as follows: Americans are wary of dogmas precisely because we live in such an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse society. To place a stress on doctrine, it seems, would lead to conflict and, at the limit, violence in such a pluralistic context. Another commentator observed that the embrace of positive beliefs is a concomitant of the premium that we place on choice and the right to choose. After all, who would ever opt for belief in hell and judgement? I would like to say a word about each of these points.

The reticence about making religious truth claims in the public forum is, of course, a consequence of the Enlightenment. Almost all of the philosophers and social theorists of the modern period—from Descartes and Spinoza to Kant and Thomas Jefferson—were mortified by the wars of religion that followed the Reformation, and they accordingly wanted to find a means of controlling religious violence. Their solution, adopted in most of the modern political constitutions, was to tolerate religion as long as it remained essentially a private matter, something confined to the hearts of individual believers. The result of this “peace treaty” was what Richard John Neuhaus characterized as “the naked public square,” that is to say, a political forum stripped of properly religious assertions and convictions. The events of September 11th simply confirmed for many in the West the wisdom of this arrangement. Since religious people cannot defend their claims rationally, the argument goes, the public appearance of religion will always be accompanied by some form of direct or indirect violence.

I have always found the either/or quality of this analysis tiresome: either religious antagonism or privatization; either September 11th or bland toleration. Our problem is, as Stanley Hauerwas put it, that we have forgotten how to have a good argument about religion in public. The most dramatic indication that rational discourse has broken down is, of course, warfare between the disputants. Once conversants have resorted to fisticuffs, we know that the careful process of marshaling evidence, presenting argument and counter-argument, responding to objections, and avoiding contradictions, has been abandoned. But there is another sure sign that rationality has been left behind, and that is the slide into an anything-goes, your-opinion-is–just-as-good-as-minde sort of toleration.

Truth claims, by their very nature, are public because truth, by its very nature, is universal. It would be ludicrous to say that 2+2= 4 for me but not for you or that adultery is wrong for me but not for you. Therefore, if I were to tolerate your view that 2+2 just might be equal to 6, or that adultery is, depending on the circumstances, acceptable, then I have stepped out of the arena of rationality and public argument, and I’ve essentially given up on you. It’s glaringly obvious that the perpetrator of violence is a disrespector of persons, but the perpetrator who "tolerates" irrational views is just as disrespectful, since he’s despaired of reason.

And now just a brief observation about our unwillingness to accept the tougher, more “negative” features of the religious traditions. In a thousand different ways, we reverence choice in our culture. We choose our political leaders, the products we purchase at the store, the kind of films that we watch, the sort of people with whom we associate. And we revel in the wide variety of choices available to us. But there are certain realities that are so basic in their goodness, beauty, and importance that they are not so much chosen as given. Beethoven’s 9th symphony, the Swiss Alps, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the French language, and moral absolutes are goods that give themselves to us in all of their complexity and compelling power. We don’t choose them; they choose us. We don’t make demands of them; they impose a demand upon us. We wouldn’t presume to excise those sections of Beethoven that are “unpleasant,” or those features of French that are too difficult, or those dimensions of morality that are hard to live up to.

Similarly, Catholics hold, religious truth is a supreme value of this type. Catholics can't, therefore, speak of choosing sections of revelation that they like, while leaving behind that which bothers them. Rather, like the atheist embracing Beethoven’s 9th symphony, we must let it, in all of its multivalence and complexity, claim us. Challenging ideas, I know, for us Americans, but important ones if we're to re-inaugurate a healthy, rational, public square.
 
 
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