Hitting the metaphysical snooze button

One of the major themes of The Last Superstition is the significance of the early modern philosophers’ replacement of the classical teleological conception of nature with an anti-teleological or mechanistic conception. Another major theme is how utterly oblivious most contemporary intellectuals are to the nature and consequences of this revolution – about the motivations that lay behind it, its true relationship to modern science, the surprising feebleness of the arguments used to justify it, and the new and intractable problems it opened up. Most of all, they show little awareness of the deep conceptual problems inherent in the attempt to give a thoroughly mechanistic account of the world, as contemporary naturalism seeks to do. (I argue in the book that the very program is incoherent, so that naturalism, as usually understood anyway, is demonstrably false. I also provide positive arguments to show that a teleological conception of nature is rationally unavoidable – as are the theism and natural law conception of morality that the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition derives from it.)

What is remarkable is how, just over a half-century ago, the problematic character of the modern mechanistic understanding of nature was as evident to many prominent intellectuals as it is utterly invisible to their descendants. Nor am I referring merely to Neo-Scholastics and other Thomists. In the book I quote a lengthy passage from the September 1948 Atlantic Monthly in which the then-prominent empiricist philosopher W. T. Stace – not someone with a religious or Aristotelian ax to grind – described the early moderns’ replacement of a teleological conception of the world with a mechanistic one as “the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world,” and one which in his view necessarily undermined the foundations of morality. Moreover, he realized that this revolution was purely philosophical in character, not scientific, despite its often being conflated with (and thereby deriving an unearned prestige from) the discoveries of early modern science.

Stace thought the meaninglessness of human existence entailed by this picture of the world was something we would have to try to learn to live with. (Good luck with that.) But other thinkers of the day saw that the problems with the mechanistic conception of nature went well beyond its unhappy moral implications. They saw that it was philosophically inadequate, that it simply did not do justice to what we know about the world – indeed, to what we know about the world in part through modern science itself. They often also saw that the criticisms the early moderns had made of their medieval predecessors were superficial and unfair – and again, I’m speaking of non-Aristotelian and non-Thomistic writers here, not those with a Scholastic or Catholic stake in the controversy.

Take, for example, Alfred North Whitehead. In Science and the Modern World, based on his 1925 Lowell Lectures, he judges that the mathematical-cum-mechanistic conception of the natural world, for all its undoubted practical benefits in allowing for the prediction and control of events, is as a metaphysical theory “quite unbelievable,” the outcome of mistaking “high abstractions” for “concrete realities” (pp. 54-55). Groundlessly treating the idealizations of quantitative empirical science as if they constituted an exhaustive description of the natural order has generated an endless “oscillation” of modern philosophy between the three equally unacceptable extremes of Cartesian dualism, materialism, and idealism, as philosophers hopelessly try to make sense of the place of mind in a mechanistic world (p. 55).

Confusing the abstract and concrete is only half the problem, though, in Whitehead’s view. The other half is the difficulty the anti-teleological mechanistic revolution opened up for the understanding of causation and inductive reasoning. As I discuss at length in TLS, for the Scholastics, the main way in which final causality manifests itself in the natural world is as the concomitant of efficient causality. If some cause A regularly generates some effect or range of effects B – if fire regularly generates heat, ice cubes regularly cause the surrounding air or water to grow cooler, and so forth – this can only be because there is something in the nature of A by virtue of which it “points to” or “aims at” B specifically, as to a goal or natural end. If there is no such “pointing” or “aiming” in A – that is to say, if the generation of B is not the final cause of A – then the fact that A is an efficient cause of B, the fact that it reliably generates B specifically rather than C, D, E, or no effect at all, becomes unintelligible. This is, from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, precisely why efficient causation became so problematic in modern philosophy: the denial of formal and final causes (i.e. the denial that things have natures in virtue of which they are directed toward certain ends) was bound to result in the skeptical puzzles of David Hume. (Actually, the problem of causation goes back, naturally enough, to Ockham and the early nominalists; in his “originality” as in so many other ways, Hume is vastly overrated.)

Whitehead takes a similar view, arguing that the problem of induction is generated by a mechanistic conception of matter on which for any material particular, “there is no inherent reference to any other times, past or future” (p. 51). Hence, “if the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so that the first invention of it must be entirely arbitrary, it follows at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing entirely arbitrary connections which are not warranted by anything intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects. Some variant of Hume’s philosophy has generally prevailed among men of science. But scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the philosophic mountain.” (p. 4)

By “faith” having “risen to the occasion,” what Whitehead means is that in the absence of any objective, intelligible connection between causes and effects, the scientific enterprise can have no rational foundation, so that scientists who embrace the mechanistic philosophy of nature and the Humeanism that is its sequel in effect carry out their work on the basis of a groundless commitment. Contrary to the standard caricature of the moderns vs. medievals dispute as a conflict between sober rationality and blind faith, Whitehead regards the moderns as the fideists and the medievals, whose Aristotelian metaphysics made nature intelligible through and through, as the partisans of “unbridled rationalism” (p. 9). Indeed, “the clergy were in principle rationalists, whereas the men of science were content with a simple faith in the order of nature… This attitude satisfied the Royal Society but not the Church. It also satisfied Hume and has satisfied subsequent empiricists.” (p. 51)

“Accordingly,” Whitehead says, “we must recur to the method of the school-divinity as explained by the Italian medievalists” if we are to avoid skepticism about induction (p. 44); in particular, we must return to something like the Scholastic idea that universal natures can be abstracted from particulars. Of course, Whitehead himself was no Aristotelian or Thomist, putting forward as he did his own novel process metaphysics. But he saw that something had to be put in place of the inadequate mechanistic philosophy of nature of the moderns, and that there were at least elements in the medieval picture that it replaced – in particular its acknowledgement that teleology is an objective feature of the world – that needed to be revived.

Another writer of this period who perceived the inadequacies of the mechanistic revolution is E. A. Burtt, whose The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (first published in 1924, revised in 1932) is a classic study of the history of that revolution, and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand it. One of Burtt’s themes is the way in which the mind-body problem and the problem of skepticism are natural outcomes of the mechanistic view of nature, which so radically divorces the common sense “manifest image” from the “scientific image” (to borrow Wilfrid Sellars’ language) that there seems no way in principle to bring them back together again. Another theme is the way in which the moderns insisted on forcing reality to fit their method rather than making their method fit reality, and how such “wishful thinking” and “uncritical confidence” underlay their wholesale chucking-out of Scholasticism in favor of a new, purely quantificational conception of nature.

I quote Burtt at some length in TLS and won’t repeat the quotes here. Another writer who briefly made some of the same points was Basil Willey, who tells us in The Seventeenth Century Background (1934) that “this [modern] science has achieved what it has achieved precisely by abstracting from the whole of ‘reality’ those aspects which are amenable to its methods. There is no point in denying that only thus can ‘scientific’ discovery be made. What we need to remember, however, is that we have to do here with a transference of interests rather than with the mere ‘exantlation’ of new truth or the mere rejection of error.” (p. 23) In other words, the fact that a science which focuses only on those aspects of nature which can be analyzed in mechanistic-cum-mathematical terms succeeds mightily in uncovering those aspects (as modern science undeniably has) tells us absolutely nothing about whether nature has any other – non-mechanistic, non-mathematically-quantifiable – aspects. The early moderns by no means disproved the metaphysics of the Scholastics; they simply changed the subject. “Galileo typifies the direction of modern interests, in this instance, not in refuting St. Thomas, but in taking no notice of him.” (p. 25)

Then there is R. G. Collingwood, who in the thirties, in his lectures on The Idea of Nature (and as Marjorie Grene reminds us in her 1964 essay “Biology and Teleology”), saw contemporary biology moving back in the direction of something like Aristotle’s understanding of teleology, apart from which the internal development of an organism is unintelligible (whatever one says about the Darwinian explanation of adaptation, which is an independent question). Grene herself thought Collingwood’s prediction “startling,” certainly from the perspective of 1964, though she sympathized with his view that irreducible biological teleology was real, and presented some considerations in its defense. (Grene’s essay is available in her collection The Understanding of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology.)

Of course, the reason Grene found Collingwood’s prediction startling was that by the mid-1960s few were decrying the crude mechanism of modern philosophy of nature, certainly within academic philosophy and Anglo-American intellectual life in general. To be sure, Great Books advocates like Mortimer Adler and Robert M. Hutchins had been calling for renewed attention to writers like Aquinas throughout the thirties, forties, and fifties, as had Neo-Thomists like Maritain and Gilson. And even into the early sixties, books like Floyd Matson’s The Broken Image – now totally forgotten (though it received a nice blurb from no less than F. A. Hayek) – decried what the mechanistic revolution had done to our conception of human nature and political science. But these attitudes were getting further and further from the mainstream, and by the end of the sixties were entirely passé. Though modern intellectuals seemed for a thirty-year period mid-century to be waking from their dogmatic slumbers vis-à-vis the mechanistic revolution of the early moderns, they eventually hit the metaphysical snooze button, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

Why? Good question. No doubt the reasons are complex, but I would conjecture that the dominant factor within Anglo-American academic philosophy was the influx of European intellectuals into American universities during the thirties and forties, as they fled Nazi tyranny. In philosophy, a great many of these people were beholden to logical positivism and related ideas, and their crude scientism was passed on to their students – students who by the 1960s were dominating the field. In light of the work of Quine, Kuhn, and other critics of positivist dogmas, this scientism would eventually be softened somewhat. But these critiques were generally internal, and did not challenge scientism at the most fundamental level (despite their having resulted in recent decades in a revival of metaphysics as a sub-field within analytic philosophy). In particular, they did nothing to restore awareness of the problematic character of the mechanistic conception of nature inherited from the early moderns.

Or at least, nothing until recently. Fortunately, the alarm clock seems to be ringing once again. As I note in TLS, a return to notions surprisingly similar to the Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas of formal and final cause (even if not always under those labels) can be seen in various areas of contemporary philosophy, and in writers who have no particular interest in A-T metaphysics as such nor any theological ax to grind. To take just a few examples: In philosophy of science and general metaphysics, there is the “new essentialism” of philosophers like Brian Ellis, Nancy Cartwright, Crawford Elder, and George Molnar; in philosophy of biology there is a renewed respect for teleology in the work of writers like Andre Ariew and J. Scott Turner; in philosophy of action there are defenses of the irreducibly teleological nature of action by writers like Scott Sehon and G. F. Schueler; in ethics there is the neo-Aristotelian biological conception of the good defended by thinkers like Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson; and a general trend toward “non-reductionist” forms of naturalism can be seen in philosophy of mind and other sub-disciplines within philosophy.

Again, not all of these writers would see in their views a return to Aristotelian themes, nor would most (or even any) of them support the use to which Thomists would put those views. But however inadvertently and piecemeal, these trends do in fact constitute a revival, sometimes under novel language, of some of the metaphysical ideas of the Scholastics. And of course there are yet other contemporary analytic philosophers whose work is self-consciously Thomistic or Scholastic – for example, John Haldane, David Oderberg, Gyula Klima, Christopher F. J. Martin, James Ross, and other writers sometimes characterized (though not always by themselves) as “analytical Thomists.”

Willey writes: “As T. E. Hulme and others have pointed out, it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one’s own habitual assumptions; ‘doctrines felt as facts’ can only be seen to be doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician.” (p. 12) The lazy naturalism and scientism that inform most contemporary intellectual life, and which underlie the New Atheism, are precisely such “doctrines felt as facts,” prejudices to which most secularists do not even realize there is any rational alternative. Even with the metaphysical alarm clock ringing once more, today’s dogmatic slumberers may just hit the snooze button yet again. But maybe not. We live in hope.

Conservatism, populism, and snobbery

In honor of the soon-to-be-beatified John Henry Newman, I'm reprinting this post of November 29, 2005 from the late, lamented Right Reason blog, in which the Cardinal is prominently quoted.

Conservatives are accused of all sorts of things, and sometimes the accusations are flatly incompatible. For instance, liberals often allege that conservatives want to do away with government almost entirely, though they also frequently claim that conservatives want to impose a police state in the name of national security or religious fundamentalism. How can both these accusations be true? The contradiction, many liberals would say, is not on their part, but on the part of conservatives. Conservatives, they allege, are inconsistent (unless they are just insincere) in claiming to uphold both small government and national security, both liberty and traditional morality. Some libertarians too would accuse conservatives of being either muddleheaded or insincere, and in particular of being disguised liberals or even socialists, since despite their talk of freedom conservatives typically refuse, either in rhetoric or in practice, to advocate the sort of minimal state preferred by Ayn Rand or Robert Nozick. To a certain kind of libertarian mind, if you favor even a modest social safety net, or airport weapons searches, or the criminalization of heroin, you are on all fours with Clement Attlee, and maybe even Joseph Stalin.

The truth, of course, is that conservatives are neither closet anarchists nor closet totalitarians. Nor are they muddleheaded. Indeed, if anyone is muddleheaded, it is those critics of conservatism who refuse to see that their way of dividing up the territory of possible views in political philosophy is too crude and simple-minded -- who assume, for example, that if you favor limited government, you must therefore also favor legalized abortion, or legalized pornography, or the rejection of all taxation, on pain of inconsistency. In fact, conservatives simply adhere to principles (natural law, Burkean, or whatever) that happen to entail, quite systematically and coherently, a view of the proper scope of state power that rejects both the extreme of statism and the opposite extreme of pure laissez-faire. When concepts like rights, freedom, property and the like are properly understood, they will, from the conservative point of view, be seen to rule out equally both anarchism and socialism, both libertarianism and egalitarian liberalism, and to favor something different from all of them. It might be that conservatives are mistaken, but they aren’t contradicting themselves or being disingenuous simply by virtue of defending a conservative (as opposed to liberal or libertarian) point of view.

Another area where inconsistent accusations are frequently hurled at conservatives is that of culture. Conservative critics of the modern university are often said to be beholden to an outmoded and elitist vision of the canon more suited to the Victorian era than the Age of Hip-Hop, and blind to the merits of incorporating studies of popular culture into the curriculum. In the sphere of religion, those who favor more traditional liturgical forms (e.g. Catholics attached to the Tridentine Mass) are dismissed as insensitive to the need for a more egalitarian spirituality of the sort enshrined in the substitution of the vernacular for Latin and the replacement of Gregorian chant with folk guitars and hand-clapping. At the same time, conservatives are also frequently accused of being the enemies of high culture and the champions of populist vulgarity. After all, aren’t those who vote for conservative parties more likely to attend a NASCAR event than an opera? Don’t conservatives want to cut funding for PBS while giving tax breaks to Wal-Mart?

An irony in this is that such charges are just as plausibly made against the very liberals who so glibly fling them at conservatives. It is liberals, after all, who have promoted the most vulgar of tastes in churches and classrooms – it wasn’t conservatives who gave us “clown Masses” and Porno 101 -- while also heaping contempt on those whose interest in public television goes no farther than Sesame Street, or who much prefer a Big Gulp to even a Beaujolais. The same people who take the most absurd pains to find deep meaning in the thuggish grunts of rappers like Tupac Shakur and Eminem seethe in their hatred for what they imagine to be the pop culture preferences of evangelical Christians, Southerners, and the denizens of trailer parks and shopping malls. Liberals are hardly outdone by conservatives in combining snooty elitism with egalitarian philistinism.

In any event, what we have here is once again a failure to understand that conservatism represents an alternative to the various attitudes it is falsely accused of embodying. Conservatism is neither populist nor snobbish, any more than it is either laissez-faire or statist. It does not believe that the common man is always right, and it does not believe that he is always wrong. While it is suspicious of the fleeting passions of the multitude, it is equally suspicious of those who would dismiss the deepest feelings of the mass of mankind as just so much ignorance and bigotry waiting to be socially engineered out of existence. The reason has to do with conservatism’s distinctive conception of moral and social knowledge, and with its organic view of society. The conservative takes respect for both untutored common sense and learned reflection, and indeed for both the common man and the learned man, to be essential to a well-ordered society.

Conservatism regards tradition as the distillation of the moral and social wisdom of centuries, and as embodying more information about the concrete and complex details of human life than is available to any single human mind or even any single generation. This by no means makes tradition infallible, but it does entail that there is a presumption in its favor, that traditional practices are more likely to serve human interests than anything someone might dream up from the comfort of the faculty lounge or seminar room, and that the burden of proof therefore lies with the moral or social innovator rather than the defender of tradition. (See here for a detailed exposition of one version of this sort of view, and a defense of it against several common misunderstandings.)

Now it is an occupational hazard of intellectuals to overestimate the power of individual human intelligence, and for this reason they are excessively prone to overestimate their ability to improve upon traditional institutions and practices. Non-intellectuals, by contrast, are more likely to have their deepest values shaped by long-standing tradition rather than by sustained reflection. As a result, intellectuals are bound to be more hostile to tradition and non-intellectuals more sympathetic to it, which entails, however seemingly paradoxically, that from the conservative point of view the average person is more likely than the intellectual is to be wise in the ways of the world, at least where morality and other aspects of everyday practical life are concerned. (Hence William F. Buckley’s famous line to the effect that he’d rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.)

Of course, the average person can sometimes be seriously wrong, but often this is a consequence of his having been led astray by some demagogic intellectual or pseudo-intellectual: the frustrated socialist agitator Mussolini and the frustrated artist Hitler are two vivid examples, and of course, demagogic communist pseudo-intellectuals are a dime a dozen (witness Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Che Guevara, et al.). Unruly and fleeting emotions stirred up in the face of immediate crises are not where the conservative sees the wisdom of the common man. Rather, it is in those sentiments that remain largely unaltered generation after generation, and through periods of calm as well as periods of emergency, that the average person is far more to be trusted than the intellectual. For these are the attitudes which, by virtue of their harmony with tradition, are most likely to reflect the truth about the human condition.

John Henry Newman had as refined and learned a mind as any, and yet he famously wrote that “I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be” (and this during the Victorian era, long before our flaccid therapeutic age). Part of what he meant is that the serious fervor and devotion that serious religion has always demanded of the believer if he is to be saved is hard to maintain when one is constantly worried that he might offend the sensibilities of others who believe differently, or if religion is watered down into a thin humanistic social justice ethic that differs little from its secular rivals. But the point has more general application, and is a sober one too, Newman’s colorful language notwithstanding. Even if traditional morality has, as the conservative insists, a rational presumption in its favor, it is also very demanding, and there are always temptations to fudge it wherever possible. It takes real deep-in-the-gut conviction on the part of the mass of mankind if it is generally to be respected, and this entails that it be treated as a sacred and unquestioned obligation rather than a negotiable debating position. If the justification for traditional morality is rationally superior to the justification for its overthrow, its real-world motivation nevertheless must, as a matter of sociological fact, be visceral rather than intellectual. Thus intellectuals, even conservative intellectuals, cannot be trusted to maintain it as faithfully as the common man; indeed, there is even a danger that, if the conservative intellectual too readily endorses his liberal critic’s insistence that a rational case for it must be made, he might inadvertently undermine its force by making it seem to be just one alternative among others. A truly conservative program, then, cannot rest content with the defense of conservative policy on social-scientific and abstract philosophical grounds; it must also be a defense of the epistemological credentials of the “prejudices” of the average person (in the sense of “prejudice” emphasized by Burke, viz. one’s instinctive sense of what is proper and improper, rooted in everyday human experience rather than abstract reason) and thereby of their right to hold the views they do on the basis of such “prejudice.”

At the same time, rough pub dwellers and street sweepers are not the people Newman, or any other sane person, wants writing his philosophy books. Nor, since tradition, and thus the prejudices of the common man, can sometimes be wrong, can they simply be given the last word (even if, to paraphrase J. L. Austin on ordinary language, they are the first word). The learned have their proper place in society too, which sometimes involves correcting the errors of the vulgar -- even if only on the basis of more ultimate premises that the learned share with the vulgar, rather than on the basis of some novel metaphysic and ethic spun from whole cloth. And that the learned, and everyone else, have their place brings us to the other component of the conservative attitude toward culture, the organic conception of society mentioned above. For the conservative, it is not the business of the learned condescendingly to scorn the tastes and attitudes of the multitude, and it is not the business of the multitude ignorantly to despise the subtleties of the learned. Every person plays a necessary function in the body of society, and his tastes and cultural practices will naturally reflect his position in the overall order. The reflections of philosophers and poets give guidance and inspiration to the community, but the common sense of the average person provides ballast, ensuring that the rarefied speculations of intellectuals never range too far from the hard earth of ordinary human experience. Here, as in other areas of human life, the conservative tends to see those in different walks of life as complementing each other rather than competing with each other: men need women, and women need men; the young need the old, and the old need the young; labor needs capital, and capital needs labor; and so forth. As Russell Kirk put it (quoting Marcus Aurelius) “We are made for cooperation, like the hands, like the feet.”

From the conservative point of view, it is pathological to think that vulgar tastes – and especially ones that are not merely vulgar, but positively immoral, as is the case with vast swaths of what passes for popular entertainment today -- ought to be set on a par with refined ones, as if comic books and epic poetry were merely different kinds of “texts” to which a scholar might devote his attention. But it is also folly to suppose that everyone could be made to appreciate literature, fine art, and music if only funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were increased. (Indeed, the two tendencies work in symbiosis: egalitarians pretend that everyone is capable of the most refined learning, and to prove it, they redefine what counts as “refined learning” so that college courses in “rock history” and “hip-hop culture” can help a young “scholar” more easily “earn” a bachelor’s degree.) Action movies and race cars, cheeseburgers and milk shakes have their place, just as much as philosophy and poetry, fine food and fine wine. To scorn the latter is to be a vulgarian; to scorn the former is to be a snob. Things go wrong when either the vulgarian or the snob has the upper hand. They go very badly indeed when vulgarians and snobs share power, as they do in modern Western society, which seems to be ruled jointly by the Rupert Murdochs and NPR bureaucrats of the world. Things go well when both common and refined tastes are afforded their due respect as necessary parts of the overall social order -- that is to say, when the conservative sensibility prevails.

Trinity Sunday

And now, dear friends, let us elevate our minds to higher and nobler things. Today is Trinity Sunday. We Christians worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confusing the Persons nor dividing the substance. But how can this be? Isn’t this doctrine either self-contradictory or unintelligible?

It is neither. Suppose, following Richard Cartwright in his important paper “On the Logical Problem of the Trinity,” we take as a summary of Trinitarian orthodoxy the following set of propositions:

1. The Father is God.
2. The Son is God.
3. The Holy Spirit is God.
4. The Father is not the Son.
5. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. There is exactly one God.

Is this not an inconsistent set? Not as it stands, it isn’t. For we need to know (among other things) what the force of “is” is in each of these propositions. (Bill Clinton wasn’t all wrong, as it turns out.) If (1) is glossed as “The Father = God” and (2)-(6) are interpreted accordingly, then we would of course have an inconsistent set. But that is not how Trinitarian theologians understand “is” in this context; that is to say, they are not using it to express what modern logicians understand by the identity relation. If instead we interpret (1)-(3) as “The Father is a God,” “The Son is a God,” etc., and (4)-(6) alone in light of the identity relation – so that (1)-(6) are understood to assert that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct members of a class of “Gods” – then, again (given (7)), we have an inconsistent set. But, again, that is not what Trinitarian theologians mean by “The Father is God,” etc.

Doesn’t that exhaust the possibilities? By no means. As Cartwright notes at the end of what is a decidedly skeptical essay, there are at least ten other possible construals of “is” that would have to be considered before one could judge that the doctrine contains an implicit self-contradiction. But suppose we considered those ten, and any others that might be brought forward, and none of them yielded an internally consistent set. Would that show that the doctrine is self-contradictory? No, because there might still be a construal on which they are consistent, but one which we have not stumbled upon, perhaps even one we will never stumble upon.

But doesn’t that avoid self-contradiction at the cost of intelligibility? It depends on what you mean. Something could be unintelligible in itself, or unintelligible only for us. What is unintelligible in the first sense has no coherent content; what is unintelligible in the second sense has a coherent content, but one which, given our cognitive limitations, we are incapable of grasping. Trinitarianism would be falsified only if it were shown to be unintelligible in the first sense, but not if it is unintelligible only in the second. Indeed, that it is “unintelligible” in the second sense is exactly what Trinitarian theologians mean when they say that the doctrine of the Trinity is a “mystery.” They do NOT mean that it contains a self-contradiction, or that it is unintelligible in itself, or even that we cannot have any understanding of it at all. They mean instead that the limitations of our minds are such that, though it is perfectly consistent and intelligible in itself, we cannot adequately grasp it.

Hence even to show that no construal yet given of (1)-(7) yields a consistent set of sentences would not be to show either that the doctrine of the Trinity contains a self-contradiction, or that it is unintelligible in the sense in which skeptics say it is.

But wouldn’t this at most show only that the set (1)-(7) might be consistent and intelligible? Could we ever have rational grounds for believing that it really is consistent and intelligible (even if we couldn’t see how)? Sure we could. We would have such grounds if we had grounds to believe that the doctrine of the Trinity is true. For if it is true, then it must be logically consistent and intelligible in itself, even if not fully intelligible to us. And our grounds for believing it to be true and (thus) consistent and intelligible would be even stronger if we had independent grounds for believing that it is exactly the sort of thing we should expect to find mysterious if it were true.

As it happens, we have all of these further grounds. For we can know through pure reason that God exists, and we can know through pure reason that God has the various attributes traditionally ascribed to him. (See The Last Superstition for the executive summary.) In particular, we can know that He is Pure Act, Being Itself, the Supreme Intelligence, and absolutely simple. But given the way the human intellect works (e.g. by grasping things in terms of genus and species), and given that God’s possession of these attributes places Him beyond any genus, we can also know that it is impossible for the human intellect fully to grasp the divine nature. Hence we can know that the doctrine of the Trinity is precisely the sort of thing we should expect to find mysterious even if it is true, indeed especially if it is true.

So is it true? Well, consider further that the immateriality and immortality of the soul are also knowable through pure reason. (Again, see TLS.) And with the existence of God and the immortality of the soul in place, the stage is set for the defense of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a historical fact. For while the evidence for Christ’s resurrection is strong even apart from these pieces of background knowledge, it is overwhelming in light of them. If we already know through pure reason that there is a God who could raise a man from the dead and an immortal soul the re-embodiment of which could guarantee that the resurrected man is the same man as the one who had died, then the standard dodges skeptics use to avoid accepting the resurrection (e.g. Antony Flew’s Humean appeal to the a priori improbability of resurrections) won’t fly.

Now, we can also know (I claim) that Christ claimed to be divine, and made reference to the Father and the Holy Spirit as Persons distinct from Himself. Since He was resurrected – something which (based on the correct metaphysical analysis of the soul and its relationship to the body) only God could accomplish – it follows that a divine seal of approval was, as it were, placed upon Him and upon His teaching. Hence we can infer that what He taught – which includes (by implication) the doctrine of the Trinity – must be true.

Obviously all of this raises many big questions. I realize that. I’m summarizing. (See the work of writers like William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne, and the esteemed Tim and Lydia McGrew’s recent lengthy article on the resurrection, for some of the details.) But supposing all of this can be made out, as I claim it can be, the doctrine of the Trinity would be rationally justified. To be sure, we would believe it on faith, but where “faith” means, not a groundless “will to believe,” but rather the acceptance of the teaching of an authority whom reason itself has told us is infallible.

More can be said; again, to say that the Trinity is a mystery does not mean that reason cannot make any headway at all in understanding it. The great Trinitarian theologians have real insights to impart to us. (See here for part of Brian Davies’ fine summary of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology in chapter 10 of The Thought of Thomas Aquinas.) There is also the crucial consideration – powerfully emphasized and developed by Gyula Klima in a series of articles – that the work of the medieval philosophers cannot properly be understood apart from the logical and semantic doctrines they were committed to, doctrines often different from, but every bit as rigorous and defensible as, the logical and semantic presuppositions contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted. These doctrines must inform our understanding of their work on the Trinity no less than our reading of their more purely philosophical works.

We should keep in mind too that several prominent and formidable contemporary philosophers of mind – Chomsky, McGinn, and Fodor, for example – have at least tentatively put forward a kind of “mysterianism” of their own as a way of explaining why certain phenomena seem incapable of naturalistic explanation. It may be, they say, that our minds are closed off from an understanding of (say) consciousness. Perhaps there is a correct naturalistic explanation, but one our minds cannot grasp given the limits nature has put on them. Now Trinitarians are often accused of resorting to obfuscation or mystery-mongering as a desperate and dishonest way of avoiding the falsification of their creed. And yet somehow these naturalistic “new mysterians” are never themselves accused (at least not by their fellow naturalists) of intellectual dishonesty or desperation. Funny, that. In any event, if there is a God, then given what He is supposed to be, it is even less likely, indeed far less likely, that our minds would be able adequately to grasp Him than it is that we should be able to understand consciousness (or whatever). That is to say, if an appeal to “mysterianism” is a plausible way of defending naturalism – I’m not saying it is, but suppose it were – it is far more plausible as a defense of Trinitarianism.

There is this difference, though: Naturalism is demonstrably false (again see TLS), while Trinitarianism is true. So, mysterianism is a moot point in the first case. Awful luck for naturalists, but there it is.

Anyway: The skeptic’s claim that the doctrine of the Trinity is rationally unjustifiable – a claim which formed a key component of my own youthful atheism – is itself unfounded. God is real, and He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Davidson’s anomalous monism

Donald Davidson’s article “Mental Events” is widely considered a classic of twentieth-century philosophy of mind, and for good reason. It contains as clever an argument for materialism as anyone has ever given. And in the course of giving it, Davidson presents, albeit in a notoriously sketchy form, a profound and important argument against the possibility of a type-type mind-brain identity theory. To use such an argument as a key component in a case for materialism – now that’s the sort of ballsiness we pay philosophers the big money for!

Like all of Davidson’s work, the article has many nuances and cannot fully be understood apart from the context of his body of writings as a whole, which more or less consisted of a great many other articles (the most important of which have now been collected in The Essential Davidson). But the basic structure of the argument is fairly simple. It goes like this:

1. At least some mental events interact causally with physical events.

2. Events related by cause and effect fall under strict laws connecting events of the kinds to which the cause and effect belong.

3. There are no strict laws on the basis of which we can predict and explain mental phenomena.

4. If some mental event M causes a physical event P, there must be some description under which M and P are related by a strict law [From 2]

5. This law can only be a physical law, not one expressed in terms of mental concepts [From 3]

6. But if M falls under a physical law, then it has a physical description.

7. And if it has such a description, then it is a physical event.

8. So (at least some) mental events are physical events.

This summary is a bit loose, but let’s suppose that it can be tightened up so as to yield a valid argument. Should we accept the premises? Certainly they seem reasonable enough, at least given the assumptions operative in most contemporary philosophy of mind. There is no glaring falsehood here; the argument is a serious one, worthy of our consideration. So what happens when we probe more deeply?

Davidson calls step 1 the Principle of Causal Interaction, and it is the least controversial premise of the argument. There have, of course, been philosophers who have denied it, but most, whether their position is materialist or dualist, would not. And they are right not to do so – at least given a certain construal of “interaction.” Let’s concede this one for now and come back to it later.

Step 3 is Davidson’s famous Principle of the Anomalism of the Mental, and constitutes the argument’s most original contribution to the philosophy of mind. It is this principle that shows, in Davidson’s view, that no type-type identity theory is possible, because such a theory requires that we can at least in principle correlate mental event types and brain event types in a law-like way. As I have said, though, his argument for the principle is notoriously sketchy. How exactly is it supposed to go?

The answer, which requires adverting to broader themes in Davidson’s philosophy of mind and language, goes something like this: Consider a “radical interpretation” scenario like Quine’s famous “gavagai” example. You’re an anthropologist attempting to translate the language of a heretofore unknown tribe. The speakers tend to utter “gavagai” in the presence of rabbits. As Quine argues, it may turn out that, depending on what metaphysical assumptions you attribute to the speakers of this language, “gavagai” could be translated as “rabbit,” or “temporal stage of a rabbit,” or “undetached rabbit part”; and three complete manuals of translation might be prepared, each of which reflects one of these possible translations and adjusts the translations of other native utterances accordingly. Now, leave aside the various ontological and semantic theses Quine illustrated with this example (indeterminacy of translation, inscrutability of reference, etc.). What Davidson is interested in is the way in which we cannot even begin to make sense of the linguistic utterances of an alien speaker of this sort without attributing to him a vast network of beliefs, desires, intentions, and other mental states. We will conclude that he means “Lo, a rabbit!” only if we assume that he conceptualizes his experiences in terms of substances (say) rather than temporal stages. Furthermore, we will conclude that that’s what he means only if we assume too that he really believes that a rabbit is present and that he intends to express that belief via this particular utterance. We will make these further assumptions, in turn, only if we also assume that his mental states are at least for the most part rational and coherent, so that he would not (for example) infer from the fact that he is seeing a rabbit that a rabbit must not be present. Even that is not the end of the story, though. For further evidence – other things the speaker says in other contexts – may lead us to revise these various judgments, so that we revise also our understanding of what he meant when he said “gavagai.” And there may be several equally plausible interpretations, each associated with its own alternative attribution of beliefs, intentions, and the like.

Now while the example is an extreme one, Davidson’s view is that something like this set of circumstances confronts us, albeit to a much less radical extent, even in ordinary linguistic contexts. Our interpretation of anyone’s linguistic behavior always involves the attribution to him of one of several possible sets of beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like, and is always revisable in light of further evidence. But by the same token – and this is the key point – our attribution of mental states to him is also always subject to the same interpretive problems. Just as we might alter our judgments about what he means in light of our assumptions about what is going on in his mind, so too might we alter our judgments about what is going on in his mind in light of our assumptions about the meaning of his linguistic and other behavior. Mind, language, and behavior are so inextricably linked that none can be understood apart from the others, and our making sense of the whole in any particular case requires attributing to a subject at least minimal adherence to standards of rationality and coherence. Otherwise we simply could not meaningfully regard what is going on with him as language and thought at all.

Now in Davidson’s view, there is as he puts it “no echo” in physical science of any of this. In understanding a physical system qua physical, we do not and need not attribute to it beliefs, desires, or any other sort of intentionality, and we do not expect it to abide by norms of rationality. Such systems are governed instead (at least on the modern “mechanistic” conception of the natural world) by patterns of brute, purposeless efficient causation. This should already make us suspicious of the very idea of a one-to-one match-up between mental state types and physical state types. The notion seems to rest on a category mistake, a failure to understand that the network of rationally-cum-semantically interrelated mental states is no more susceptible of a smooth correlation with a particular network of causally interrelated physical states than the content of a book can be smoothly correlated with a certain kind of physical format (a modern printed book, say, as opposed to a scroll, wax tablet, or electronic book). As Wilfrid Sellars might put it, the “space of reasons” and the “space of causes” are simply incommensurable.

As Jaegwon Kim suggests in his introductory text Philosophy of Mind, Davidson might accordingly be understood as arguing that if there were a law-like correlation between mental events and physical events, this would entail that what is happening in a person’s mind could be determined in a way we already know on independent grounds to be in principle impossible. In particular, it would follow that we could at least in theory “read off” a person’s thoughts directly from an inspection of his brain, without making any reference to the various alternative ways those thoughts might cohere with other thoughts or with his linguistic and other behavior. Since this is (given what was said above) something we cannot in principle do, it follows that there is no such law-like correlation between the mental and the physical. All of this suggests the following argument in defense of Davidson’s step 3:

A. The meaningful attribution of mental states to someone is governed by norms of rationality which find “no echo” in physics.

B. But if there were strict laws connecting mental events with brain events, then the attribution of mental states could proceed without reference to such norms.

C. So there are no such laws.

(None of this is inconsistent with the fact that we can often draw reliable inferences about what someone is thinking from his speech and behavior, and even from what is going on in his brain. The claim is rather that it is impossible even in principle to have a complete and, more to the point, entirely determinate understanding of his thoughts based only on knowledge of his behavior and physiology. I have addressed this issue previously here.)

All of this seems to me to be essentially correct, and it is not a small point either. (As readers of Davidson know, he bases a number of interesting philosophical theses on his analysis of the interrelationship between mind and language, including a penetrating critique of conceptual relativism.) The “anomalous” half of anomalous monism is thus well-established. What about the “monism” half? Is the mental identical with the physical, despite there being no law-like correlation between them?

My answer, which will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog, is No, it is not. And the reason Davidson’s argument fails to show otherwise is that his conception of causation is (in my estimation) radically deficient. As I have argued elsewhere (e.g. here), the correct way to understand mental-physical “interaction” is on the model of what Aristotelians call formal causation rather than efficient causation. And one reason for thinking so is that conceiving of it on the model of efficient causation makes it hard – for materialists no less than for dualists – to avoid epiphenomenalism (as I noted here). To return, as promised, to Davison’s premise 1, then: If it is interpreted to mean (as Davidson himself did not mean it) that the mental and physical “interact” as formal and material cause, respectively, then this premise is certainly true (though in that case it cannot then be appealed to in an argument for materialism, since the Aristotelian conception of causation is incompatible with materialism). If instead it means (as Davidson intended) that they “interact” in the order of efficient causes, then though such a premise might be appealed to in support of materialism, it is false.

For the same reason, step 2 – what Davidson calls the Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality – is also in my view false. For it reflects a mechanistic view of nature, on which the material world is utterly devoid of any inherent goal-directedness or final causality and is governed instead entirely by (a stripped down version of) efficient causality. And as I have argued elsewhere (and at greatest length in The Last Superstition) this conception of nature is ultimately incoherent. By the same token, step 7 is false as well from an Aristotelian point of view. The fact that an object or event can be described in the quantitative terms typical of modern physical theory simply does not entail that such a description exhausts what is true of it. Rather, such a description is necessarily selective, abstracting away those features of the world which are irrelevant to the narrow purposes of predicting and controlling natural phenomena, but which must nevertheless be incorporated into any complete, metaphysical account of its nature.

It is only fair to note, however, that the premises in question are ones a Cartesian dualist must have a harder time dismissing, given that the Cartesian, like the materialist, is committed to a mechanistic and exclusively quantitative conception of the material world. It is no surprise, then, that Davidson should think the anomalism of the mental cold comfort to the dualist. Even here, though, the Davidsonian cannot be too smug, given that Davidson’s position only underlines the threat that epiphenomenalism poses to materialism as much as to Cartesian forms of dualism.

In any event, the fact remains that Davidson’s position, like all forms of materialism, ultimately derives whatever strength it has from the false supposition that, realistically, “there is no alternative” to materialism (or physicalism, or naturalism) if one rejects modern forms of dualism – a supposition that rests on a studied ignorance among contemporary philosophers of the true nature of the conceptual revolution by which the moderns displaced Aristotelianism (for an account of which see TLS).

The interaction problem, Part II

In an earlier post, I suggested that one of the advantages of hylemorphic dualism over Cartesian dualism is that its notion of formal causation allows it to sidestep the interaction problem. For if the soul is the form of the body, rather than a distinct substance in its own right, then there is no question of two substances having to “interact” in the order of efficient causes on the model of two billiard balls. There is rather just the one substance, a human being, having (as every other material substance has) two constituents, its form (or soul) and its matter (or body). The “interaction” between them is no more problematic than the “interaction” between the form of a tree and the matter that makes up the tree. For soul and body do not “interact” in the first place the way two distinct things do; they together constitute a single thing. My intention to raise my hand is not one event which has somehow to get into causal contact with another, physical event. It is rather the formal-cum-final cause of a single event of which the activity in my nervous system and arm is the efficient-cum-material cause. The solution to the “interaction problem” is to break out of the conceptual Procrustean bed of the mechanical picture of the world and return to a philosophy of nature informed by Aristotle’s four causes.

(Actually, saying that this “sidesteps” the interaction problem is misleading and anachronistic, since it conveys the false impression that hylemorphic dualism was motivated in part by a desire to solve the interaction problem. In fact there was no interaction problem until early modern philosophers like Descartes abandoned hylemorphism and redefined matter, mind, and causation in an explicitly anti-Aristotelian way. As I show in The Last Superstition, the “mind-body problem,” like the “traditional” philosophical problems of induction, personal identity, causation, and many others, is largely a consequence of the early moderns’ mechanistic revolution.)

Some modern dualists have suggested that the interaction problem is oversold in the first place. And they are right to complain that materialists fling it around much too glibly. To be sure, the interaction problem really is a problem for Cartesian dualism, but it is not (by itself, anyway) a refutation of it. Let’s briefly consider why – before going on to see why it is nevertheless a serious enough problem that any dualist is well-advised to consider opting for hylemorphic dualism over the Cartesian variety (especially given that, as I would argue, there is already ample independent reason to adopt hylemorphism as a general metaphysics).

One reason why the interaction problem does not strictly refute Cartesian dualism is that the Cartesian dualist could always simply deny that mind-body interaction is real in the first place, and opt for occasionalism, or parallelism, or epiphenomenalism. Of course, the extreme oddity of these views leads many critics of Cartesian dualism to regard recourse to them as little better than an admission of defeat, a desperate appeal to a deus ex machina. As Bill Vallicella notes (without necessarily endorsing the judgment) both Malebranche’s occasionalism and Leibniz’s pre-established harmony have been accused of deploying a deus ex machina strategy, especially since both literally appeal to God to resolve the question of the mind-body relationship.

But though the charge is common, it is unfair. Malebranche and Leibniz both had independent philosophical reasons for believing in God, and both also had independent reasons for denying that there could be causal interaction between created substances (any substances, not just mind and body). And given their respective specific understandings of the nature of substances, Malebranche had good reason to think that God continuously mediates between them, and Leibniz to think that God does not do so but instead established a universal harmony between them at creation. Hence, Malebranche quite naturally concluded that (for example) when you decide to have a beer your body moves towards the fridge, not because the decision causes the bodily movement, but because God, on noting that you have made that decision, causes the body so to move. And given his different conception of substance, Leibniz quite naturally concluded instead that the decision and the bodily movement in question were each simply the natural unfolding of what was pre-programmed into each substance at their creation. These views of the mind-body relationship were not developed simply to deal with the interaction problem, but flowed naturally from two sophisticated and independently defensible metaphysical positions.

Defensible, but still bizarre, rarely actually defended, and subject to various objections of their own. And most modern dualists would agree with materialists that it would be preferable to avoid occasionalism and pre-established harmony if one can manage it. Hence the greater popularity of epiphenomenalism, according to which mental events do not cause physical events but are rather merely the ineffectual byproduct of the flux of physical events. When you decide to have a beer, the decision itself (or at least the conscious awareness of it) is not what causes your body to walk over to the fridge. Rather, entirely unconscious physical events caused your body to do so, and in the process also caused the conscious experience of making the decision in question, which event itself had no causal efficacy at all.

Though not much less bizarre than occasionalism and pre-established harmony, epiphenomenalism at least has this advantage over them as a way for Cartesian dualists to deal with the mind-body problem: Materialists too seem led into it, so that they can’t plausibly use it as a stick with which to beat dualists. For materialist theories of mind have a notorious problem explaining the efficacy of mental content. If (as materialists tend to hold) it is only the physical properties of mental states which give them their power to cause other physical states, then their mental or intentional content seems epiphenomenal. For example, if we suppose, as a materialist might, that my decision to have a beer is identical with or at least supervenes upon some event in my nervous system, then if it is only the physiological properties of that event that enter into the explanation of how it caused my bodily movements, the fact that it involved a representation of beer, specifically, or indeed had any representational content at all, drops out as causally irrelevant.

So, if materialists as well as Cartesian dualists are faced with the possibility of having to swallow epiphenomenalism, the former cannot accuse the latter of having a special difficulty in accounting for mind-body interaction. Still, this is more a rhetorical victory for Cartesian dualism rather than a substantive one. For epiphenomenalism is notoriously unsatisfactory, and not just because it is odd to say that your decision to have a beer is not what caused you to go to the fridge. If our mental states can have no causal influence whatsoever on our bodies, it would seem to follow that we cannot even talk about them. Indeed, the epiphenomenalist himself could not even talk about his thoughts about epiphenomenalism. For those thoughts would be as inefficacious as any other mental state or event. When he says “Epiphenomenalism is true,” the fact that he thinks it is true has absolutely nothing to do with his saying so. This is bizarre at best and incoherent at worst. And though epiphenomenalists have tried to find various ways around the problem, it would be better not to have to deal with it in the first place.

So, a Cartesian dualist is well-advised not to deny that mind and body interact. And this brings us to the second reason why a Cartesian dualist has a right to complain that his critics’ appeal to the interaction problem is often too glib. As Bill Vallicella has pointed out in several past posts, whether a Cartesian dualist can account for mind-body interaction depends on what view of causation one is assuming. And there is at least one view of causation – a regularity theory – on which no interaction problem arises at all for Cartesian dualism. As Bill has suggested:

Suppose we say that:

Event-token e1 causes event-token e2 if and only if (i) e1 temporally precedes e2, and (ii) e1 and e2 are tokens of event-types E1 and E2 respectively such that every tokening of E1 is followed by a tokening of E2.

On this Hume-inspired theory (sans the contiguity condition), causation is just regular succession. If this is the correct theory of causation, then there is nothing problematic about mental events causing physical events, and vice versa.

About this, Bill is absolutely right. If such a regularity analysis is correct – and there are philosophers who would defend such an analysis on grounds independent of their position on the mind-body problem – then the interaction problem is solved. At the very least Cartesian dualists can plausibly hold that objections to their position based on the interaction problem are less conclusive than their critics often let on.

But the “if” in question is a very big one. Is such a regularity theory of causation really plausible in the first place, or at least plausible enough to show that Cartesian dualism really can account for mind-body interaction after all? I think not. One reason why is that apart from its use of the word “cause,” the proposed analysis is perfectly compatible in substance with occasionalism, parallelism, and epiphenomenalism. For on each of those views, it is perfectly possible to say that a mental event of type M is always followed by a physical event of type P, in which case, on Bill’s suggested regularity theory, M will count as the cause of P. But an “interactionist” theory which differs in substance not at all from occasionalism, parallelism, or epiphenomenalism – all of which deny interaction – is an “interactionist” theory in name only.

Another problem with the proposed regularity analysis is that it simply doesn’t capture what we mean by “cause.” As Hume himself recognized, the connection we take to hold between a cause and its effect is not just a regular one, but also a necessary one. We don’t just think A was in fact followed by B, but that in some sense it had to be followed by B. Of course, Hume thinks there is no objective source for this idea of necessity, that it has to be traced to a purely subjective expectation on our part. For he holds that there is nothing in our ideas either of a cause or of its effect that necessarily links them together. Objectively speaking, causes and effects are “loose and separate,” and any effect or none could in theory follow upon any cause.

This Humean result is what makes “regularity” theories of causation seem at all plausible. But what they really give us is not causation, but rather only some replacement for causation. (The same holds true, I would say, for counterfactual analyses of causation.) So, no appeal to such a theory really solves the interaction problem at all. Rather, it simply adds one mystery to another, saying, in effect: “Causation in general is already mysterious, so why shouldn’t mind-body interaction be?”

The thing is, the reason causation in general is mysterious is the same reason mind-body interaction in particular is: the mechanistic revolution that displaced the Aristotelian-Scholastic model of explanation, throwing out formal and final causes and trying to make do with bastardized versions of material and efficient causes. As I have noted in earlier posts and discuss at length in TLS, one of the main arguments the Aristotelian tradition gives for formal and final causes is that without them efficient causation becomes unintelligible. Unless there is something in the nature (or “substantial form”) of a thing by virtue of which it “points to” or is “directed at” the generation of a certain effect (as its final cause) then there is no way to account for why exactly it produces that effect as opposed to some radically different effect, or none at all. Hume was merely drawing out the inevitable consequences of the mechanistic revolution. (And even here Hume is, as always, overrated, since the skepticism vis-à-vis causation implicit in the rejection of formal and final causes was already foreshadowed in Ockham and the late medieval nominalist tradition.) The way to solve both the interaction problem and the problem of causation is, accordingly, the same: a return to the Aristotelian metaphysics early modern philosophy displaced.

Descartes’ “clear and distinct perception” argument

The “clear and distinct perception” argument is one of two arguments for mind-body dualism Descartes gives in the sixth of his famous Meditations on First Philosophy. It can be summarized as follows:

1. Whatever I have a clear and distinct idea of is capable of existing just as I understand it, at least in principle (e.g. if God creates it that way).

2. I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as simply a thinking, non-extended thing.

3. I have a clear and distinct idea of my body as simply an extended, non-thinking thing.

4. So I and my body are capable, at least in principle, of existing apart from each other.

5. So I am distinct from my body.

Does the argument work? Most contemporary philosophers would say No. I would say No and Yes and No.

Huh? Bear with me.

Here’s the first “No” part. For one thing, Descartes is, by all accounts, wrong to think of extension as the essence of matter, and thus as the essence of the human body. From an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective (which is my perspective) there is obvious reason to reject this view, since A-T rejects the entire modern mechanistic conception of matter of which it is just a variation. But even those who accept this mechanistic conception – which includes almost all contemporary philosophers, even if (usually) only implicitly and unreflectively – would allow that “extension” (i.e. those properties of matter which can be defined geometrically, more or less) is too crimped a way of spelling out the mechanistic idea. They would allow all sorts of other mathematically quantifiable properties to feature in our characterization of matter as well. (What they share with Descartes is the insistence that, whatever matter is, formal causes and, especially, final causes will simply not be allowed to count as part of the material world.)

For another thing, A-T would also obviously reject Descartes’ implied assimilation of the self to the mind. Though the mind (specifically the intellect) is immaterial, “I” am nevertheless not distinct from my body from the A-T point of view, certainly not without serious qualification. In fairness to Descartes, he did not – contrary to the standard caricature (one now being vigorously combated by Descartes scholars) – actually hold that the body is non-essential to a human being, as if we were all really just ghosts trapped in machines (to allude to Ryle’s famous parody). He explicitly denies that “I” am in my body the way a pilot is in a ship, as if the body were an inessential excrescence. On the contrary, he believed that soul and body form a kind of organic unity, that a human being was an irreducible composite of the two, having attributes (namely appetites, emotions, and sensations) which cannot be predicated of either the soul alone or the body alone. The trouble is that, having abandoned the Aristotelian idea that the soul is the form of the body, and emphasizing as he does that it is the ego itself (and not just some part of the person) which is distinct from the body, he had a devil of a time explaining just how such an organic unity was possible. Hence it is no surprise that the “ghost in the machine” conception of human nature came to be seen as paradigmatically Cartesian, whatever Descartes’ own intentions. (Notoriously, what a thinker wants to conclude is not always what his premises actually imply.)

So, to the extent that Descartes’ argument depends on these assumptions, it is open to criticism. But it can fairly easily be fixed up to avoid these problems. For “myself” in step 2 and “I” in steps 4 and 5, just read “the mind” or (more exactly – and as we’ll see in a moment, as much in line with Descartes’ understanding of the mind as with the A-T view) “the intellect.” For “extension” just plug in either the Aristotelian view of matter or your favorite mechanistic conception. (It makes no difference for this specific argument.) Even if the resulting argument does not get us to precisely Descartes’ brand of dualism, it will definitely get us to some form of dualism, if it is otherwise unobjectionable.

Is it otherwise unobjectionable? Here we come to the “Yes” part of my initial reply. The main objection contemporary philosophers have to Descartes’ argument concerns its second premise, and it is an objection Hobbes raised in the Third Set of Objections to the Meditations. Even if it is conceded that Descartes has a clear and distinct idea of himself as a thinking thing, how can he be so sure that that which is doing the thinking is non-extended or, more generally, non-corporeal? The fact that he doesn’t conceive of corporeality when he conceives of thinking doesn’t show that thinking isn’t corporeal, any more than conceiving of triangularity without conceiving of trilaterality shows that something could be triangular without being trilateral.

So, Descartes needs some way of showing that thought can occur in the absence of anything corporeal or bodily. How about (after the fashion of some contemporary dualists) an appeal to metaphysical possibility, in particular to possible worlds? As in: “It is metaphysically possible for the mind to exist apart from the body” or “There is at least one possible world where mind exists apart from the body”? Nix that. From an A-T point of view, anyway, while these statements are perfectly true, they presuppose dualism and thus cannot be used to establish it. You cannot know what is possible for a thing, or what it might be like in various possible worlds, until you know its nature or essence. (Contemporary philosophers who try to define essence in terms of possible worlds thus have things backwards.) Hence, you cannot assert that there is a possible world in which mind exists apart from body, or that it is metaphysically possible for mind to exist apart from body, until you know the mind’s nature. And its nature is exactly what the Hobbesian objection calls into question.

A better way to show that thought can be incorporeal is just to show that it cannot be corporeal. This is a better way for two reasons. First, it establishes an even stronger claim than the one in question – always nice work if you can get it. Second, it is easy to do.

The reason is one we have examined in several earlier posts (such as this one). The objects of the intellect are abstract concepts, which are universal rather than particular, and determinate or exact rather than indeterminate or inexact. And the thoughts in which these concepts feature are (at least often) as universal, determinate, and exact as the concepts themselves. Yet nothing material has or can have these characteristics. Material objects and processes are inherently particular rather than universal, and also inherently indeterminate or inexact. Hence thoughts cannot possibly be identified with anything material. The point can be and has been developed at greater length (by writers like James Ross, and by me in The Last Superstition and Philosophy of Mind and in the earlier post just linked to) but the basic idea is fairly simple, is as old as Plato and Aristotle, and was endorsed and developed by various Scholastic writers.

The irony is that Descartes himself at least hints at this very argument when, earlier in the Sixth Meditation, he draws a rigid distinction between imagination on the one hand – which he apparently takes to be corporeal – and intellect on the other, which alone he identifies with the self he takes to be incorporeal. (The famous example of the chiliagon – which the intellect understands even though the imagination cannot form an image of it – is presented in this context.) This parallels the Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrine that intellect is immaterial while sensation and imagination are material. It is often supposed that Descartes assimilates sensation, imagination, and intellect into an amorphous something called “the mind,” but this is not the case. His view of their relationship is actually fairly close to that of his Scholastic predecessors. Here as elsewhere Descartes is, as contemporary Descartes scholars have made an industry of documenting, far more Scholastic than one would expect the Father of Modern Philosophy to be. (If only he had been consistently Scholastic, he would have really had something! – though he would not have had this claim to paternity. But we’d all have been better off, and Descartes could have spared himself a few millennia in purgatory.)

The thing is, once this Platonic-Aristotelian-Scholastic point has been developed in support of (our reformulated version of) premise 2, it more or less establishes dualism all by itself, so that the rest of the argument becomes otiose. Hence, Descartes’ argument works, but only if reformulated to such an extent that it amounts to little more than a restatement of an idea that had more or less already been around for millennia. The distinctively Cartesian bits – the stuff about “clear and distinct perception,” the assimilation of the self to the intellect, and the conception of matter as extension – are either wrong or irrelevant. So, as a Cartesian argument for dualism, the argument doesn’t really work after all. What is true in it isn’t new, and what is new isn’t true.

How typically modern!

Give me that old time atheism

Last night I was dipping into Roy Abraham Varghese’s Great Thinkers on Great Questions, an interesting collection of interviews with a number of prominent philosophers (including A. J. Ayer, G. E. M. Anscombe, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Ralph McInerny, Brian Leftow, Gerard Hughes, and many others) on topics mostly related in one way or another to religion. Some of Ayer’s remarks brought to mind how different earlier generations of agnostics and atheists had been, not merely culturally (as Roger Scruton has noted) but philosophically. Ayer, though a notorious lifelong foe of religion, was not a materialist. In his famous book Language, Truth, and Logic, he attempted (as he reminds us in the Varghese volume) to reduce physical objects to “sense-contents,” entities which were intended to be neutral between mind and matter but which were in fact (as Ayer admits) closer to the mental than to the physical side of the traditional mental/physical divide. Hence the resulting position was “much more nearly mentalistic than physicalistic.” And to the end of his life he apparently always rejected any attempt to reduce the mental to the physical.

The reason for this is that even agnostic and atheist philosophers of Ayer’s generation generally recognized that materialism is just prima facie implausible. As I have noted in some earlier posts (here and here), and as I discuss at length in The Last Superstition, dualism was by no means a deviation from the broadly mechanistic conception of matter contemporary philosophy has inherited from the 17th century, but rather a natural consequence of that conception, given its highly abstract and mathematical redefinition of the material world. If matter is what the mechanistic view says it is, then (it seems) there is simply nowhere else to locate color, odor, taste, sound, etc. (as common sense understands these qualities, anyway), and nowhere else to locate meaning (given the banishment of final causes from the material world), than in something immaterial. And until about the 1960s, most philosophers (the occasional exception like Hobbes notwithstanding) seemed to realize that, short of returning to an Aristotelian hylemorphic philosophy of nature, the only plausible alternatives to dualism were views that tended to put the accent on mind rather than on matter – such as idealism, phenomenalism, or neutral monism.

The last of these, as its name implies, was officially committed to the view that the basic stuff out of which the world is constructed is “neutral” between mind and matter, but notoriously it tends to collapse into either phenomenalism or idealism. In my atheist days, it was the version of neutral monism developed by Bertrand Russell (or rather a riff on that version developed by F. A. Hayek) that I took to be the most plausible approach to the mind-body problem. (In recent philosophy, Russell’s views have been developed, in a way that seeks to avoid any sort of idealism, by Michael Lockwood; and, in a way that to some extent or other concedes their idealistic implications, by Galen Strawson and David Chalmers. In my Russellian days I was more attracted to Lockwood’s approach.) After a brief flirtation with materialism while an undergrad, I was more or less inoculated against it by John Searle’s writings, and came to regard the Russellian approach as the most plausible way to defend a naturalistic (if non-materialistic) view of the world.

Most naturalistic philosophers are not at all attracted to this approach, however, precisely (I would suggest) because of its tendency to collapse into some sort of philosophical idealism. For to make mind out to be the ultimate reality is – as the history of 19th century idealism shows – to adopt a view which must surely strike most naturalists as “too close for comfort” to a religious view of the world. To be sure, Chalmers and Strawson do not take their position in anything like a religious direction, but so far few other naturalists have been willing to follow them.

But if they were wise, they would do so. Chalmers and Strawson are in fact among the most interesting philosophers of mind writing today, in part because of their attempt to defend a kind of naturalism while acknowledging the very deep philosophical difficulties inherent in materialism. (Strawson famously dismisses materialism as “moonshine.”) As I have been lamenting in recent posts, most contemporary philosophical naturalists (to say nothing of non-philosophers who are naturalists, such as the New Atheists) have only the most crude understanding of the theological views they dismiss so contemptuously. In the same way, they tend also to be absurdly overconfident about the prospects of a materialist or physicalist account of the mind.

Earlier generations of philosophical atheists or agnostics – Ayer, Russell, Popper, to name just three – knew how difficult it is to defend such an account, and thus avoided grounding their atheism or agnosticism in a specifically materialist metaphysics. Some of their contemporary successors – Lockwood, Chalmers, Strawson, Nagel, Searle, Fodor, McGinn, Levine, among others – have, to varying degrees, some awareness of the same problems. Consequently, at least some of these people realize that naturalism itself (which seems most plausible precisely when spelled out in materialist terms) is by no means obviously right; it is something that requires a very great deal of effort to defend, and cannot blithely dismiss its rivals. Unfortunately, the bulk of contemporary philosophical naturalists – Dennett and Rey being by no means idiosyncratic in this regard – seem forever lost in their dogmatic slumbers.

ADDENDUM: I should note that Strawson does sometimes call his version of Russell's position "real materialism," and that Lockwood has occasionally said similar things. By contrast, Grover Maxwell, another Russellian who influenced both Lockwood and Strawson, repudiates any kind of "materialist" label even though his views are more or less identical to theirs. And Chalmers sometimes characterizes his own variation on Russellianism as a kind of "dualism"! So, the terminology here can get confusing. The point is that all of these authors reject materialism in the standard (Smart, Armstrong, early Putnam, Davidson, Dennett, Churchland, et al.) sense.

The less Rey knows, the less he knows it

Apropos my post on straw man arguments in the philosophy of religion, reader Bobcat calls my attention to this article by philosopher of mind Georges Rey, which purports to show that theism, when held to by anyone with at least “a standard Anglo-European high school education,” necessarily involves self-deception. And for Rey, that includes – indeed, maybe especially includes – highly intelligent theists who happen to be philosophers. Rey starts out by acknowledging that he is “not a professional philosopher of religion and has no special knowledge of theology.” With that much, anyway, the reader can agree, for Rey’s article proves it conclusively. Why Rey thought himself nevertheless qualified to open his mouth on this subject is another question entirely, and the answer is by no means clear. I’ll leave it to those interested in plumbing the psychological depths of academic blowhards to consider whether self-deception might be a factor.

Now, my longtime readers know that I am loath ever to indulge in polemics, but I’m afraid in this one case the temptation is simply too great to bear. For Rey’s article is not merely mistaken on this or that point. It is not merely bad. As the kids would say, it totally sucks. Indeed, although it is of course better written than the average freshman term paper, it is even less well-informed. I apologize to those whose tender ears find it hard to bear such un-collegial harshness (not that Rey himself gives a hang about that vis-à-vis his theistic colleagues). All I can say in my defense is: Read the thing yourself and see.

Rey is not an unintelligent man. Indeed, he is a very intelligent man, and anyone who wants to understand the clever ways in which contemporary materialists attempt to surmount the many difficulties facing their position would do well to read his work in the philosophy of mind. It’s mostly wrong, of course, but still intelligent and worth reading. The article in question is another story. It is an object lesson in how ignorance coupled with arrogance can lead an intelligent man to make a fool of himself. (Not that another one is needed in this Age of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens.)

If any reader out there wants to evaluate Rey’s efforts at amateur psychoanalysis, knock yourself out. I’m more interested in the excuse Rey thinks he has for indulging in psychoanalysis in the first place. Why accuse even educated theists of being, not merely mistaken, but self-deceived? The reason, Rey repeats ad nauseam, is that the traditional arguments for God’s existence are obviously fallacious, are so bad that he simply can’t believe anyone takes them seriously, commit “blatant sophistries,” etc. Yet surprisingly, he says very little about exactly what the problems with them are supposed to be. As the impatient reader sifts through the trash talk and psychobabble in search of substance, he soon finds, first, that what Rey actually has to say about the arguments probably wouldn’t fill one side of an index card; and second, that it’s all wrong anyway.

One problem with Rey’s discussion of the arguments (such as it is) is the extremely crude, anthropomorphic conception of God he is working with. Like many atheists, he supposes that God is, like us, a “mental being” (as Rey awkwardly puts it) only “not subject to ordinary physical limitations.” Start with a human being, and abstract away the body parts. Then abstract away the limits on knowledge, and expand the range of sensory experience to include immediate perception of every corner of physical reality. Imagine that every experience of willing something is followed by the realization of that which is willed – for example, wanting the Red Sea to part is followed by the parting of the Red Sea, wanting a leper healed is followed by skin returning to normal, and so on. Throw in as well the tendency always to want to do what is right. Etc. The result is something like a super-duper Cartesian immaterial substance with a cosmic Boy Scout’s merit badge, far grander than any of the objects (material or immaterial) familiar from our experience, but differing from them in degree rather than kind.

It is no surprise that, with this “working model” of God, Rey and other atheists think Him comparable to Zeus, gremlins, ghosts, etc. To be sure, something like this conception – a conception Brian Davies has labeled “theistic personalism” and others have called “neo-theism” – has (unfortunately) featured, at least implicitly, in some recent work in philosophy of religion. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the God of classical theism – of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Leibniz, and countless others. It has absolutely nothing to do with the God of the great Christian creeds or the great Church Councils. That God is not “a being” among others, not even a really grand one, but Being Itself or Pure Act. Concepts like power, knowledge, goodness, intellect, will, etc. do apply to Him, but not (as in theistic personalism) in a univocal sense but rather in an analogous sense (where “analogy” is to be understood not on the model of Paley-style “arguments from analogy” – which in fact apply terms to God and to us in univocal senses – but rather in terms of Aquinas’s famous doctrine of analogy). And attributions of power, knowledge, will etc. to God are all necessarily informed by the doctrine of divine simplicity. Our philosophical conception of Him is not modeled on human beings or on any other created thing; rather, it is arrived at via reflection on what is entailed by something’s being that which accounts for the existence of anything at all.

Rey, it is evident, knows absolutely nothing of all this, nothing of the radical distinction between the classical theistic conception of God and every other conception. But this is not some mere family dispute between theists, something that can be ignored for purposes of making general claims about religion. If you don’t know how classical theism differs from everything else, and in particular from the anthropomorphic conceptions of God underlying tiresome pop atheist comparisons to Zeus and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then you simply do not and cannot understand the arguments of Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al., and cannot understand the claims of Christianity as it has historically understood itself. It will not do to pretend that what your Uncle Bob or some TV evangelist has said about God can serve well enough as research for an argument against religion, any more than Uncle Bob’s or the evangelist’s conception of quantum mechanics would suffice as a “backgrounder” for an assault on modern physics.

So, Rey simply doesn’t know the first thing about what the people he dismisses as in thrall to self-deception even mean when they talk about God. That’s one problem. The other problem is that he evidently has no idea either of how the main traditional arguments for God’s existence are supposed to work. He is, for example, obviously beholden to the tiresome canard that defenders of the Cosmological Argument never explain why a First Cause would have to have the various divine attributes (unity, intellect, omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, etc.). This, I dare say, is an infallible sign of incompetence vis-à-vis the subject at hand; whenever you are reading an atheist writer who makes this common but preposterous claim, you can safely let out a contemptuous chuckle, close the book, and waste no further time with him, because you can be morally certain that he does not know what he is talking about.

As anyone who has actually cracked either the Summa Theologiae or Summa Contra Gentiles knows, Aquinas (to take just one example) actually devotes literally hundreds of pages of rigorous and painstaking argumentation to deriving the various divine attributes. (He does so in several other works as well.) Similarly detailed argumentation for the divine attributes can be found throughout the Scholastic tradition, in Leibniz and in Clarke, in more recent writers like Garrigou-Lagrange, and indeed throughout the 2,300-year old literature on the traditional theistic arguments beginning with Plato and Aristotle. The allegation that “Even if there’s a First Cause, no one’s ever shown why it would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.” is simply an urban legend. It persists only because hack atheists like Rey tend to read only other hack atheists, or read serious theistic writers only in tiny snippets ripped from context. (To judge Aquinas’s case for God’s existence by reading only the Five Ways – which were never meant to be anything more than an “executive summary” of arguments whose details are developed elsewhere – is like judging the arguments presented in Rey’s book Contemporary Philosophy of Mind by reading only the analytical table of contents.)

Rey confidently tells us that “the one argument” that tries to show that God “has a mind” – the correct way to put it would be to say that there is in God something analogous to intellect – is, “of course,” Paley’s design argument. But Aquinas’s Fifth Way is another – rather well-known – argument that takes the divine intellect as its focus. Like Richard Dawkins and most other atheists, Rey probably assumes that the Fifth Way is a mere riff on the basic design argument idea, but if so then he is once again just manifesting his ignorance, since the arguments could not be more different. Design arguments take for granted a mechanistic conception of nature, while the Fifth Way appeals to final causes; design arguments are probabilistic, while the Fifth Way is a strict demonstration; design arguments don’t claim to prove the existence of the God of classical theism, while the Fifth Way does just that; design arguments focus on complexity and especially the complexity manifest in living things, while the Fifth Way is not especially interested in either; design arguments have to deal somehow with objections based on evolutionary theory, while the truth or falsity of evolution is utterly irrelevant to the Fifth Way; and so forth. (See The Last Superstition and my forthcoming book Aquinas for the details.)

And then, as I have already indicated, the historically most important versions of the other main theistic arguments (e.g. Aquinas’s, Leibniz’s, or Clarke’s cosmological arguments, Anselm’s ontological argument), when fully worked out, all also claim to show that there cannot fail to be something analogous to intellect in God (alongside the other divine attributes). The thing is, you have to actually read them to know this. Pretty tough break for Uncurious Georges, I know, but believe it or not, philosophy of religion is a little like philosophy of mind in requiring actual research now and again.

As always with these things, it just gets worse the more ink is spilt. “Again, I’m not a scholar of theology,” Rey reminds us, before opining on theology; “however, I’m willing to wager that few of the details [theologians] discuss are of the evidential sort that we ordinarily expect of ordinary claims about the world.” And then – hold on to your hats – he actually gives “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” as an example.

[Cue Don Martin sound effect.]

One wonders whether Rey was the sort of high school geek who desperately tried to prove his athletic bona fides to his locker room tormenters by bragging about all the “touchdowns” he used to make in Little League.

Whatever the answer to that, the all-grown-up Rey can’t resist one more self-inflicted wedgie. On the heels of his learned allusion to medieval angelology, he earnestly considers the question of whether theologians might be guilty of “intellectual sloth.”

Self-awareness, thy name is not Georges Rey.

Well, I’ve wasted enough time on this, so let me close with the following thought. Suppose someone started out an article on why all materialists are necessarily engaged in self-deception by saying “I’m not a professional philosopher of mind and have no special knowledge of the materialist literature. But here goes anyway…” Now, how do you think Rey would…

Ah, never mind.