Agere sequitur esse (“action follows being” or “activity follows existence”) is a basic principle of Scholastic metaphysics. The idea is that the way a thing acts or behaves reflects what it is. But suppose that a thing doesn’t truly act or behave at all. Would it not follow, given the principle in question, that it does not truly exist? That would be too quick. After all, a thing might be capable of acting even if it is not in fact doing so. (For example, you are capable of leaving this page and reading some other website instead, even if you do not in fact do so.) That would seem enough to ensure existence. A thing could hardly be said to have a capacity if it didn’t exist. But suppose something lacks even the capacity for acting or behaving. Would it not follow in that case that it does not truly exist?
To affirm that conclusion without qualification would be to endorse what Jaegwon Kim calls Alexander’s Dictum: To be real is to have causal powers. (The dictum is named for Samuel Alexander, who gives expression to the idea in volume 2 of Space, Time, and Deity. Kim has discussed it in many places, e.g. here.)
Even if one
thinks this too strong -- say, on the grounds that Platonic Forms might exist
but be causally inert -- one might still endorse a more restricted version of
Alexander’s Dictum. One might hold, for
example, that for material objects to
be real, they must have causal powers.
Trenton Merricks endorses something like this restricted version of
Alexander’s principle in arguing for an eliminativist position vis-à-vis
inanimate macrophysical objects (Objects
and Persons, p. 81). He argues
that for a macrophysical object such as a baseball or a stone to be real, it
must have causal powers. And yet (so he
claims) it is only the microphysical parts of such purported objects -- their
atoms, say (though “atoms” is for Merricks just a placeholder for whatever the
appropriate micro-level objects turn out to be) -- that are really doing all
the causal work. Baseballs, stones, and
the like do not as such really cause anything.
Hence baseballs, stones, and the like do not really exist. It is only atoms arranged baseballwise, atoms
arranged stonewise, etc. that exist.
(Merricks does not draw the same eliminativist conclusion about living
things. At least conscious living things do
in his view have causal powers over and above those of their microphysical
parts, and maybe other living things do too.)
I certainly
don’t agree with Merricks’ eliminativist conclusion. (See Scholastic Metaphysics, chapter 3, especially pp. 177-84. As longtime readers might have already
noticed, it is, from an Aristotelian point of view, telling that even Merricks
thinks that at least the divide between the non-sentient and the sentient, and
perhaps between the inorganic and the organic, mark breaks in nature where
explanations exclusively in terms of microphysics give out.) But in my view, the problem with his position
is not his commitment to a variation on Alexander’s Dictum -- a variation I
think is essentially correct.
The thesis
that for a material object to be real, it
must have causal powers is the key to understanding how occasionalism tends
toward pantheism. Occasionalism is the view that God is not
merely the First Cause -- “first” in
the sense of being the source of the causal power of other, secondary causes --
but the only cause. Common
sense supposes that it is the sun that melts a popsicle when you leave it on
the table outside; in fact, according to occasionalism, it is God who melts
popsicles, ice cubes, and the like, on the occasion when they are left in the
sun. You blame fungus for the dry rot
that destroyed the wall in your garage; in fact, according to occasionalism, it
is God who causes dry rot, on the occasion when fungus is present. And so forth.
Neither the sun, nor fungus, nor anything other than God really has any
causal power, on this view. It is only
God who is ever really doing anything.
Thus, the activity that we attribute to material objects must really be
attributed to God.
But if this
is true, and if it is also true that for
a material object to be real, it must have causal powers, then material
objects aren’t even real. Only God is real. So, if occasionalism is true, then there is a
sense in which, when you think you are observing the sun melting a popsicle, or
a baseball shattering a window, or what have you, what you are really observing
is just God in action, and nothing more
than that. Compare Merricks’ view
that what we call a baseball shattering a window is “really” nothing more than just
atoms arranged baseballwise causing the scattering of atoms that had been
arranged windowwise. Just as, on
Merricks’ view, baseballs and windows dissolve into arrangements of atoms, so
too on occasionalism the world essentially dissolves into God, which leaves us
with a kind of pantheism. You might say
that, given occasionalism, “the sun,” “fungus,” “stone,” “baseballs,” etc. are really
just nine billion names of God (with apologies to Arthur C.
Clarke).
Just to be
clear, Merricks does not even discuss
occasionalism and pantheism, much less defend them. But the parallel between his argument for
eliminativism about inanimate macrophysical objects and occasionalism is
instructive. Consider now another aspect
of Merricks’ position, and a parallel with another view about God’s relation to
the world. Merricks argues that if (say)
a baseball played any causal role in the shattering of a window over and above
the role played by its atoms, then the shattering would be “overdetermined,”
insofar as the atoms alone are sufficient to bring about this effect. But we should assume that no such
overdetermination exists unless we have special reason to affirm it. The baseball would be a fifth wheel, an
unnecessary part of the causal story. So
we should eliminate it from the story. Only
the atoms are real.
Once again,
I certainly don’t agree with Merricks’ eliminativist conclusion. But the problem has to do with his assumption
that the microphysical level is metaphysically privileged (an assumption I
criticize in Scholastic Metaphysics). We need not take issue with Merricks’ rejection
of overdetermination. (Note that the
issue of “overdetermination” has nothing to do with causal determinism. The idea is just that if a cause A suffices all by itself to explain an
effect E, the assumption that there
was some further cause B involved
would make E overdetermined in the
sense of having more causes than are necessary to account for it. Whether the relationship between A and E is one of deterministic causation, specifically, is not at
issue.)
Now, consider
deism, which in its
strongest version holds that God brought the world into existence but need not
conserve it in being. Any view which
allows that the world could at least in principle
exist apart from God’s continuous conserving action essentially makes of
him something like the baseball in Merricks’ metaphysics. In Merricks’ view, the atoms that make up the
purported baseball are really doing all the causal work, and the baseball is a
fifth wheel that would needlessly overdetermine the atoms’ effects. Similarly, if the natural world is,
metaphysically, such that it could in principle carry on apart from God’s
sustaining causal activity, then God is a fifth wheel. His sustaining the world in being would be an
instance of overdetermination. Hence,
just as the baseball should in Merricks’ view be eliminated from the causal
story, so too is God bound to drop out of the causal story given the view that
the world might in principle carry on from moment to moment without him. Just as occasionalism tends toward pantheism,
deism tends toward atheism. If God does
everything, then everything is God; if God does nothing, then nothing is God.
(Once again, Merricks himself doesn’t address any of these theological issues. I’m just using his views for purposes of
comparison.)
So, the
theist is well advised to steer a middle course between occasionalism and
deism, and that is of course exactly what concurrentism
-- defended by Aquinas and other Scholastics -- aims to do. According to concurrentism, natural objects
have real, built-in causal power, but it cannot be exercised even for an
instant unless God “concurs” with such exercise as a cooperating cause. Some analogies: Given its sharpness, a
scalpel has a power to cut that a blunt piece of wood does not; still, unless
the surgeon cooperates in its activity by pushing it against the patient’s flesh,
it will not in fact cut. Given its red tint,
a piece of glass has a power to cause the wall across from it to appear red;
but unless light cooperates by shining through it, the glass will not in fact
do so. Similarly, created or secondary causes
cannot exercise their powers unless God as First Cause cooperates. Because these powers are “built into” natural
objects (as the sharpness is built into the scalpel or the tint built into the
glass) occasionalism is avoided. Because
the powers cannot operate without divine concurrence, deism is avoided.
Not all
models of God’s relationship to the world adequately convey this middle ground
concurrentist position. For example,
comparing God’s relationship to the world to the soul’s relationship to the
body would have obviously pantheistic (or at least panentheistic) implications. As I have argued many times, thinking of the
world as a kind of machine and God as a machinist is also a very bad model. Of course, the world is in some ways like a machine. For example, machines can be very complex,
and the world is very complex. And God
is in some ways comparable to a machinist. For example, machinists are intelligent and
God is intelligent. But that does not
suffice to make the machine/machinist analogy a good one, all things
considered. After all, God is also in
some ways comparable to a soul, and the world is in some ways comparable to a
body. For example, like a soul, God is
spirit rather than matter; like a body, the world is an integrated system. But the soul/body analogy is still a very bad
analogy for the relationship between God and the world (at least from a classical
theist point of view), and the machine/machinist analogy is also a very bad
one.
As I have argued
elsewhere (for example, in my Nova
et Vetera article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth
Way”), the machine/machinist analogy has both
occasionalist and deist implications. The deist implications are easy to see. Machines chug along automatically, and can
continue to do so even if the machinist dies.
Hence if the world is like a machine, it is not metaphysically necessary that there be a
machinist. Naturally, “design arguments”
for the existence of the machinist are at best merely probabilistic
inferences. And naturally, one can, like
Laplace, make the case that the machinist hypothesis is unnecessary. Whether it is or not, though, such a
machinist would not be the God of classical theism, since for the classical theist
the world could not even in principle
exist for an instant apart from God’s conserving activity.
To see the
occasionalist implications requires introducing a further concept. For many Scholastic theorists of causal powers,
and for many non-Scholastics too, the notion of a causal power goes hand in
hand with the notion of immanent finality.
That is to say, a causal power is inherently “directed toward” some particular
outcome or range of outcomes as to a final cause. To appeal to some of my stock examples, the
phosphorus in the head of a match is inherently “directed toward” generating
flame and heat, an acorn is inherently “directed toward” becoming an oak, and
so on. If this were not the case, the
fact that efficient causes exhibit the regularity they do -- the fact that their
effects are typically of a specific sort rather than random -- would not be
intelligible. In short, efficient causality
presupposes final causality. Hence if a material thing had no inherent finality
or “directedness” toward an end, it would have no inherent or “built-in” causal
power either. (Once again, see Scholastic Metaphysics, especially pp.
92-105, for the full story.)
Now the “mechanical
world picture” of the early moderns was more than anything else a rejection of
Aristotelian immanent or “built-in” finality or teleology. There is, on this picture, no directedness or
finality inherent in the material
world. Any final causality or teleology
we might attribute to it is really only in the mind of some observer (whether
human or divine), extrinsic to the material
world itself. Unsurprisingly, the early
moderns also tended toward what Brian
Ellis has called a “passivist” view of nature -- that is to say, a view of
natural objects as passive or devoid of any intrinsic causal power. On this view, natural objects behave in the
way they do not because of any intrinsic tendencies but because God has simply stipulated
that they will so behave, where his stipulations are enshrined in “laws of
nature.” The view of the world as a kind
of artifact -- as, for example, a watch, with God as watchmaker -- is suggested
by, and reinforces, this non-teleological and passivist conception of nature. Just as the time-telling function of a watch
is entirely extrinsic to the bits of metal that make up a watch, so too is all
teleology or finality entirely extrinsic to the natural order.
This picture
of things is implicitly occasionalist. If
the finality or directedness is really all in God and in no sense in the world,
then (given the thesis that causal power presupposes immanent finality) causal power
is really all in God and in no sense in the world. And thus the view is also implicitly
pantheist. For if a material thing has
no causal power, then (given the variation on Alexander’s Dictum we’ve been considering),
it isn’t real. In short: No immanent finality, no causal
powers; no causal powers, no material objects; so, no immanent finality, no
material objects. To abandon an
Aristotelian philosophy of nature is
thus implicitly to abandon nature. What we take
to be nature is really just God in action.
(Homework exercise: Relate this absorption of the world into God to the
tendency in modern theology to absorb nature into grace.)
And so,
unsurprisingly, while some of the moderns went in a deist or even atheist
direction, others went in a radically anti-materialist and even pantheist
direction. Hence the occasionalism and
near-pantheism of Malebranche, the outright pantheism of Spinoza, the idealism
of Leibniz and Berkeley, and the absolute idealism of post-Kantian
philosophy.
Of course,
the machine analogy is often used by people who have no deist, occasionalist,
or pantheist intent -- for example, by Paley and other defenders of the “design
argument,” and by contemporary “Intelligent Design” theorists. And the analogy has an obvious popular
appeal, since the “God as watchmaker” model is much easier for the man on the
street to understand than the Scholastic’s appeal to act and potency,
essentially ordered causal series, and so forth. But metaphysically
the analogy is superficial. Indeed, it
is a theological mess. Its implications
are not more widely seen because those who make use of it typically do not
think them through, being satisfied if the analogy serves the apologetic needs
of the moment. (As I have
pointed out many times, it is the metaphysical and theological problems
inherent in this analogy, rather than anything to do with evolution per se,
that underlie Thomistic misgivings about ID theory.)
To reason
from the world to God is to reason from natural substances to their cause. If the reasoning is to work, one had better
have a sound metaphysics of causality and a sound metaphysics of substance. The machine analogy, and other views which explicitly
or implicitly deny inherent causal power to natural substances, reinforce a bad
metaphysics of causality and of substance.
Glenn,
ReplyDeleteAtman is not other than God in Shankara's thought.
Anyway, I'm not sure this matters. My only point is that on his own terms his gripes about terminology are not absurd or inconsistent, though they may be wrong and they may even be a little bit pedantic.
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteI would like to reply further later, but just to clarify.
I agree that philosophy should be used to rule on philosophical matters within fields. I also agree that those practitioners often fail to realize when they are making philosophical presuppositions not technically part of their fields. That's one reason I disowned much of Lewis's quote. As I ended that comment by writing, my main issue there was with needless insistence on crippling other fields' practices.
Indeed, I think one of the strengths of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition is that it pays more attention to the first-order knowledge of other fields than any metaphysic I have encountered. I will not be surprised if I find that the Scholastic metaphysic is not only contiguous with science, but largely indispensable to it.
*Even more than many claiming scientismists, who upon closer examination turn out to (for example) deny the reality of change.
than many claiming scientism^
ReplyDeleteJeremy,
ReplyDeleteAtman is not other than God in Shankara's thought.
I hadn't said that it was.
(But I see now why you might think I had. The parenthetical list of terms was meant as Shakarian synonyms for "God", and not as Shakarian synonyms for "something other than God". My phrasing could have been clearer; sorry for the confusion.)
ReplyDelete@John West:
ReplyDelete"I will not be surprised if I find that the Scholastic metaphysic is not only contiguous with science, but largely indispensable to it."
With that in mind, please allow me to recommend this and this.
(Wallace's two-volume work Causality and Scientific Explanation is also quite good, but it's out of print and not available cheaply. I was fortunate enough to find an inexpensive used copy some time ago.)
ReplyDeleteI second the recommendation of Wallace on this point. The Modeling of Nature is a work that anyone interested in scholastic approaches to philosophy of science should read at least once.
ReplyDeleteCausality and Scientific Explanation has been on my watch list for some time...
ReplyDeleteI admit, in a move which may well be overhasty, I view Ashley's book with extreme suspicion. One of the reviews, which looks quite informed, gives ample example of why this may be.
Ashley sees Metaphysics as being firmly rooted in empirical natural science, rather than in some intuition of being or some abstraction from sensible experience.
I fail to see what is wrong with the standard Thomist approach of starting from the latter.
Prior to empirical verification, a-prioristic lines of argument yield only hypotheses, which can at best serve as guides for empirical investigation.
God, it's like channeling Karl Popper isn't it...
Of course those are both paraphrases so I shan't jump to conclusions on those alone.
Scott and Brandon,
ReplyDeleteThey had a copy at the university library. Thank you.
Daniel,
Prior to empirical verification, a-prioristic lines of argument yield only hypotheses, which can at best serve as guides for empirical investigation.
My professional area is mathematics. Don't look at me.
Though, I do think correct metaphysical presuppositions help empirical investigation, like having correct coordinates helps strike an unseen target when firing a cannon.
@Daniel:
ReplyDeleteAshley's "empiricism" is broader than you might think. It would be more correct (though this isn't his own way of putting it) that his interest is in ferreting out the absolute presuppositions of experience.
Why is this book a good read?
ReplyDeleteBecause the atoms were arranged in such-and-such a wise, of course.
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteI said I wanted to reply a bit more:
I have always seen philosophy as a science of science, a kind of ‘metaknowledge’ that encompasses and unifies all other fields of knowledge within itself. There's no way 'outside of' philosophy, particularly philosophy as ontology, since taken as a whole it’s just the science of reality. This is why calls for a ‘metaphysics-neutral’ logic are a waste of time
You mentioned something along the lines of your last sentence before. Maybe I misunderstand and you're referring to something specific. Otherwise, I agree. Obviously, having logic somehow apart from reality would be silly.
But I wouldn't want to take it too much further than that. I would be skeptical about attacking the concept of an objective logic, that is still much more basic than most of our other metaphysical claims. After all, metaphysics are based on and justified by reasoning, which presupposes correct logical forms, and I'm sure even the old Greeks had metaphysical presuppositions they risked reading into their logic. In short, I wouldn't want to go too far and send metaphysics spinning into the bog of relativism.
We couldn't even formulate arguments about the importance of logic without logic.
@Scott,
ReplyDeleteYou are too reasonable good sir! God, health and finances permitting an historical overview and critique of Thomist criticisms of the Ontological Argument has potential PHD material written all over it…
On a more serious (or at least relevant) note my main issue with that book description is why the experience of natural scientific praxis should be considered more fundamental than the ‘prescientific’ experience it arises out of. Hence my remark about ‘what’s wrong with abstraction from sensible experience?’.
@John West,
No, sorry I didn't make that very clear. I certainly wasn't suggesting that metaphysics should be more fundamental than/informative of Logic. I am heavily inclined towards the view that at least some of the basic principles of Logic and Ontology are identical i.e. Identity and Non-Contradiction (that should be uncontroversial though), and that trying to bury this metaphysical parallel in an allegedly 'neutral' system is counter-productive.
Indeed some of the most importance developments in modern Ontology i.e. those of Husserl, Frege and early Russell came about precisely as a result of an attempt to extricate Logic and safeguard its objectivity from prior Empiricist or Hegelian commitments. A classic example of metaphysical procrusteanism re Logic might be Quine's essay 'The Case for Psychologism'.
This ties into something I ought to have posted when we spoke about the methodology of Indispensability Theses. I wouldn't deny that concerns about Parsimony should be and have always been important for metaphysical considerations; it’s only that Quinean methods, whatever their conclusions, strike me as leading to ontologies which fallaciously prioritise the Depictive over the Descriptive.
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteActually, I'm confused on a point from that conversation.
During it, you wrote that uninstantiated mathematics in propositions refer to the Divine Nature. But I'm not sure this works. For example, it's plausible there are uninstantiated universals of strange, other-worldly creatures God could have instantiated, but we wouldn't say when using words referring to them in a sentence, that we're able to quantify over something. We would consider them fictions. Perhaps I'm just unknowingly tied to an unexamined linguistic theory, but because of concerns like these I'm still not convinced grounding uninstantiated mathematicals in God gives the ontological stuff required for true mathematical propositions.
Assuming I'm not making some philosophy of language mistake, I'm hoping Peterson's Introduction to Scholastic Realism will clear some of these concerns.
I wouldn't deny that concerns about Parsimony should be and have always been important for metaphysical considerations; it’s only that Quinean methods, whatever their conclusions, strike me as leading to ontologies which fallaciously prioritise the Depictive over the Descriptive.
I wonder if you could expand on this last point. It sounds like you're more concerned by Quinean indispensability's use of a so-called canonical language than by confirmational holism.
A classic example of metaphysical procrusteanism re Logic might be Quine's essay 'The Case for Psychologism'.
He would have to be procrustean to defend psychologism after Frege's air strike on it. I must go find this now.
@Daniel:
ReplyDelete"[M]y main issue with that book description is why the experience of natural scientific praxis should be considered more fundamental than the ‘prescientific’ experience it arises out of. Hence my remark about ‘what’s wrong with abstraction from sensible experience?’."
Exactly what the reviewer himself goes on to say: "[Ashley] understands science as the explanation of empirically perceived sensible reality by the discovery of underlying causes, insisting that properties of a subject under discussion be established by observation, not by deductive reasoning from some putative abstract essences."
The point, as I take it (and the reviewer in question has captured it fairly well though I wouldn't say he's expressed it altogether felicitously), is that we discover the essences of things through a posteriori processes of inquiry, and only after discovering them do we summarize our knowledge in syllogistic, a priori form. The former processes don't simply consist of more or less Lockean "abstraction from sense experience" (they go beyond, say, recognizing "redness" as a property common to all things that appear red to us) and they are fallible (in a way that such "abstraction" is not) in the sense that we might in the future discover addition evidence that we got an "essence" wrong. In other words, Ashley is mainly concerned to deny an oversimplified account of knowledge according to which we "abstract" from some handy bit of sense experience and thereafter are in a position to deduce the real properties of real things from the resulting abstractions.
(Caution: I've read the book just one time and it was early last year, so don't count on my summary to be spot-on in every respect. I did flip through the book in order to support these points, but the book is not unlarge and there is much that I may have not unmissed.)
Is monk68 still around? I know he's a great admirer of Ashley, so if he's reading this, maybe he can confirm, deny, or tweak the understanding I expressed in my previous post.
ReplyDeleteTo put it another way: We don't know all about the essence of ducks just because we've seen two ducks.
ReplyDeleteI think a proton is a good example to give to challenge that assumption. For example, a proton is made up of three quarks; however, the mass of a proton is orders of magnitude greater than three times the mass of a quark. This is due to the binding energy of the quarks (E = MC^2). Furthermore, a quark cannot exist on its own except possibly in Big Bang type conditions (hypothetically). This demonstrates that an object is sometimes "greater" than the mere sum of its parts, and you cannot merely reduce something to its constituents. One could say that the causal interactions between sub-components give a macro level object real causal power due to this synergy. Therefore, "real objects" do exist.
ReplyDeleteI also think it's a bit insulting to Aristotle and Aquinas (as well as ignorant on the part of moderns) to state that philosophers didn't know what they were talking about back in the day because now we know about "atoms". Democritus and the Atomists lived 100 years before Aristotle, so I cannot imagine Aristotle not having at least considered this objection before.