Dude, where’s my Being?

It must be Kick-a-Neo-Scholastic week.  Thomas Cothran calls us Nietzscheans and now my old grad school buddy Dale Tuggy implicitly labels us atheists.  More precisely, commenting on the view that “God is not a being, one among others… [but rather] Being Itself,” Dale opines that “this is not a Christian view of God, and isn’t even any sort of monotheism.  In fact, this type of view has always competed with the monotheisms.”  Indeed, he indicates that “this type of view – and I say this not to abuse, but only to describe – is a kind of atheism.”  (Emphasis in the original.) 

Atheism?  Really?  What is this, The Twilight Zone?  No, it’s a bad Ashton Kutcher movie (if you’ll pardon the redundancy), with metaphysical amnesia replacing the drug-induced kind -- Heidegger’s “forgetfulness of Being” meets Dude, Where’s My Car? 

Now, to be fair, Dale isn’t directly commenting on Neo-Scholasticism, specifically, nor even on Thomism more generally.  He’s responding to Paul Tillich as channeled through James McGrath.  All the same, while (as I have noted before myself) Tillich got certain things seriously wrong, he is from the point of view of traditional Christian theology -- and certainly from the point of view of Thomism and other forms of Scholasticism -- spot on correct to hold that “God is not a being, one among others… [but rather] Being Itself.”  As Orthodox blogger Fr. Aidan Kimel remarks:

I was surprised by [Tuggy’s] statement.  Right off the top of my head, I can think of three Christian theologians of antiquity who identified divinity and Being—St Gregory of Nazianzus, St Augustine of Hippo, and St Thomas Aquinas.  I can also think of three Christian theologians who preferred to speak of God as “beyond Being”—Dionysius, St Maximus the Confessor, and St Gregory Palamas. And not one had a problem identifying their God with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

(By the way, don’t miss Fr. Kimel’s old seminarians’ joke while you’re over there.)  Fr. Kimel goes on to note that Dale is evidently committed to what Brian Davies calls “theistic personalism” (and what Norman Geisler calls “neo-theism”) rather than to the classical theism that has traditionally been at the core of Christian (and Jewish, and Muslim, and purely philosophical) theology.  (Fr. Kimel offers some further remarks on theistic personalism in a follow-up post.)

Dale, for his part, essentially confirms this characterization of his position.  Indeed, he sounds positively Feserian in the brash confidence of his assertions, glibly averring in the combox of a follow-up post of his own: “Feser’s ‘theistic personalism’ is just what most philosophers call ‘theism,’ i.e. monotheism.”

Now, if by “most philosophers” Dale means “most contemporary philosophers who subscribe to Faith and Philosophy and Philosophia Christi, and who hang out in the faculty lounge at Calvin College or Biola,” he may well be right, and by a comfortable margin.  But, ecumenical guy that he is, I’m sure he wouldn’t want to leave out readers of ACPQ and The Thomist, or the lounge dwellers at Fordham or CUA.  And when we factor those votes in, things start to look more like the 2000 presidential election rather than the 2008.  Then there is the consideration that the American Philosophical Association has, I believe, recently declared it discriminatory to leave metabolically challenged philosophers out of one’s Appeals to Authority-cum-Majority.  And when we factor in all the dead guys, it’s a Reagan-in-‘84-style landslide for the classical theists, both in quantity and quality.  We classical theists have Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, Aquinas, Scotus, and about a gazillion other Scholastics, Neo-Platonists, and Aristotelians.  Not to mention a lot of early Protestants, and not a few later ones.  Dale’s got Plantinga, Swinburne, Hartshorne, and the SCP email list.  Really smart guys and gals, to be sure, but… well, there it is. 

Here’s what else I think Dale’s got: a bad case of presentism.  (And like Dale, I say this not to abuse, but only to describe!)  This presentism is obvious enough from the straight-faced, flat assertion that God-as-Being-Itself is “not a Christian view of God” and indeed “is a kind of atheism.”  If your standard of what counts as “a Christian view” is the conventional wisdom in contemporary American academic philosophy of religion circles, then I suppose such a claim could pass the laugh test.   But if your standard is what most Christian philosophers and theologians have held historically, then Dale’s assertion is just a howler.  One would think that someone who makes a claim that implies that the position of (say) Thomas Aquinas -- whose favored description of God was ipsum esse subsistens or Subsistent Being Itself -- was “not a Christian view” and indeed amounts to “a kind of atheism,” would do so just a little more tentatively.

Another indication of presentism is what Dale says when he offers a philosophical critique of the notion of Being Itself.  He writes:

“Being itself” is of dubious intelligibility. When I think of all the beings in space and time, to me, they do not seem to be one whole anything. Nor does there some [sic] to be some stuff of which all are made. It positively seems possible that there be no things in space and time and [sic] all. Were this to be so, would Being Itself still be there? I assume not. If not, then Being Itself would seem to be a contingent and dependent entity. If such a thing existed, it would seem that it’s [sic] existence would be explained, if it is explained, by something else.

But even if we grant that “Being Itself” is a meaningful term, it’s not clear why we should believe in such a thing. We can of course consider appeals to mystical experiences…

End quote.  Now, anyone familiar with Thomism, Neo-Platonism, and classical metaphysics more generally is bound to find all of this as mystifying as Dale finds Being Itself.  It just bears no interesting relationship whatsoever to what philosophers in these traditions actually mean by “Being Itself.”  Dale seems to think that the notion of Being Itself is the notion of the collection of all the individual spatiotemporal beings there are taken together (“all the beings in space and time” making up “one whole”); or that it is the “stuff” out of which they are all made. 

This is sort of like saying that Plato’s Form of the Good is the collection of individual good things within time and space taken as one big lump, or a kind of “stuff” out of which such good things are made; or that triangularity is identical with the collection of actual triangles, or with the ink, graphite, chalk, etc., with which we draw triangles.  This would, of course, be a ludicrous travesty of the notion of a Form or a universal.  Not that Being Itself is a form or universal -- it isn’t.  But a Platonic Form is a far better first approximation than anything that seems to occur to Dale.  Indeed, of all the four causes -- formal, material, efficient, and final -- Dale has picked precisely the one (material cause) on which no Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic metaphysician would model Being Itself!

For Aquinas, it is in terms of efficient and final cause, especially, that we are to think of Being Itself, insofar as God is our first cause and last end.  And here we come to Dale’s astounding remark that “it’s not clear why we should believe in such a thing.”  As if the various Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomistic arguments for God’s existence had never been written!  And as if these arguments for the existence of that which is Being Itself were not at the very same time the answer to the question of what it means to say that there is such a thing as Being Itself.  For in fact the two questions cannot, for the classical metaphysician, be separated. 

To follow out the logic of the Aristotelian theory of act and potency is (the Aristotelian maintains) to see why there must be (and to see what it means to say there must be) a purely actual cause of the actualization of all potentiality.  To follow out the logic of the Neo-Platonic analysis of composition and multiplicity is (the Neo-Platonist maintains) to see why there must be (and to see what it means to say there must be) a source of all reality which is absolutely simple or non-composite and necessarily unique.  To follow out the logic of the Thomistic analysis of essence and existence is (so the Thomist maintains) to see why there must be (and to see what it means to say there must be) a cause of the existence of things whose essence just is existence.  And all of these arguments have the implication that the ultimate explanation of things cannot in principle be “a being” among other beings but Being Itself.  (I’ve defended such arguments in several places, e.g. here, here, here, here, and here.)

Dale has to know that arguments of this sort exist, and yet he writes as if no one has ever given an argument for the existence of, or an account of the meaning of talk about, Being Itself, other than perhaps an appeal to mystical experience.  It’s as if he thought: “The notion of ‘Being Itself’ doesn’t fit anything that pops into my head as I write this blog post.  Nor do I remember hearing it talked about in any of the papers I sat in on at the last APA meeting.  Nor do I much feel like reading a bunch of Neo-Platonic and Thomist stuff.  So, the notion of Being Itself is of dubious intelligibility. Q.E.D.” 

In the combox of this particular post of Dale’s, a couple of his readers -- including one who sympathizes with his views -- implore him to grapple seriously with the arguments of Thomists. In response to the first, Dale writes:

Would it make an sense to ask such a being [i.e. Pure Actuality] a question? Argue with it? Could it communicate its thoughts to us? Could such a being love humans so much, that he sent his Son to be a sacrifice for our sin?

I take it, the answer is, No. Such a being can’t be affected, can’t respond. Can’t intend to communicate, literally can’t feel compassion or intentionally do anything. I take it, then, that such a “God” is a rival ultimate being to the God of the Bible, the heavenly Father.

End quote.  As if Thomists hadn’t heard, and answered, such objections many times over!  (See especially, among recent analytic philosophers of religion, the work of Brian Davies.  I’ve addressed such issues in some of the posts collected here.)

In response to the second reader -- who agrees with Dale but is unsatisfied with a glib dismissal and asks him actually to engage with the Thomist analysis of being -- Dale writes:

Honestly… past experience has made me wary of diving into that particular philosophical mud pit.  And time and energy are finite.

Well.  Hard to know what to say in response to that, other than to confirm for the reader that, yes, that came from a Christian philosopher’s combox and not (say) Jerry Coyne’s.

Nor do Dale’s responses (or lack thereof) to the arguments of the other side alone leave something to be desired.  He seems utterly oblivious to the grave difficulties facing his own, theistic personalist or neo-theist, point of view.  Consider his description of God as “a self” and his explanation of what this amounts to:

a self – roughly, a being with a point of view, knowledge, and will – which needn’t be human. An alien, a god, a spirit, a ghost. So, thinking of a God as a self needn’t get anywhere near true anthropomorphism (e.g. God is a dude with a beard who lives on a mountain). 

The trouble with this is that it simply misses the point entirely to think that one has sidestepped the problems classical theists are calling attention to merely by avoiding characterizing God as “a dude with a beard who lives on a mountain.”  The real problem is what Dale does admit to, namely calling God “a self” and “a God.”  Part of the problem here is the stuff about “having a point of view.”  God doesn’t have a “point of view”; that utterly trivializes divine knowledge, as if it were merely a matter of being extremely perceptive or maximally well perched.  But put that aside, because contrary to a common misunderstanding, the classical theist does not deny that God is personal.  (See, again, the posts collected here.)  When the theistic personalist says that “God is a person” or “God is a self,” the problem is not so much words like “person” or “self,” but rather the word “a.”  Making of God an instance of a kind is the key problem.  If God is that, then he is not the ultimate reality, because he will be metaphysically less fundamental than the kind he instantiates, and less fundamental than whatever it is that accounts for the kind’s being instantiated in him. 

Since I’ve addressed this aspect of the dispute between classical theism and theistic personalism at some length in my recent exchange with John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, I’ll direct the interested reader to the last installment of that exchange.  Plus, since I like Dale, I don’t want to beat up on him any further. 

Instead I’ll sit back and watch David Bentley Hart do it.  In his recent book The Experience of God, Hart complains that contemporary analytic philosophers have uncritically swallowed the Fregean notion that existence is entirely captured by the existential quantifier; that they have become so dogmatically attached to this supposition that they are unable even properly to understand the arguments of classical metaphysicians vis-à-vis being and essence; and that the whole exercise is in any event metaphysically pointless since we still need to know what makes it the case that “There is an x such that…,” and the Fregean notion of existence simply doesn’t address this question (which is, for the classical metaphysician, the question).  I think he’s largely right on all three counts.  (I say this as someone who was trained as an analytic philosopher, and as someone who has had my own public disagreements with Hart on other matters.)  Too many contemporary philosophers have simply lost sight of the very question of the being of things -- and thereby lost sight, really, of what philosophy is, or so we old-fashioned metaphysicians would say.

I also warmly endorse Hart’s comments on theistic personalism:

Many Anglophone theistic philosophers who deal with these issues today… reared as they have been in a post-Fregean intellectual environment, have effectively broken with classical theistic tradition altogether, adopting a style of thinking that the Dominican philosopher Brian Davies calls theistic personalism.  I prefer to call it monopolytheism myself (or perhaps “mono-poly-theism”), since it seems to me to involve a view of God not conspicuously different from the polytheistic picture of the gods as merely very powerful discrete entities who possess a variety of distinct attributes that lesser entities also possess, if in smaller measure; it differs from polytheism, as far as I can tell, solely in that it posits the existence of only one such being.  It is a way of thinking that suggests that God, since he is only a particular instantiation of various concepts and properties, is logically dependent on some more comprehensive reality embracing both him and other beings.  For philosophers who think in this way, practically all the traditional metaphysical attempts to understand God as the source of all reality become impenetrable…To take a particularly important example: There is an ancient metaphysical doctrine that the source of all things -- God, that is -- must be essentially simple; that is, God cannot possess distinct parts, or even distinct properties, and in himself does not allow even of a distinction between essence and existence… [M]y conviction [is] that the idea is not open to dispute if one believes that God stands at the end of reason’s journey toward the truth of all things; it seems obvious to me that a denial of divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism, and the vast preponderance of metaphysical tradition concurs with that judgment.  And yet there are today Christian philosophers of an analytic bent who are quite content to cast the doctrine aside, either in whole or in part.  (pp. 127-128)

For the reason why a denial of divine simplicity -- which is the core of the theistic personalist critique of classical theism -- is “tantamount to atheism,” see again my recent reply to Leslie and Kuhn.  Suffice it for present purposes to note that if Dale wants to play “pin the atheist label on the fellow Christian,” it is evidently a game made for two.  Or as we Thomists like to say in good Scholastic Latin, nyah nyah.