The Thomistic tradition, Part II

Concluding my overview of the main varieties of Thomism, with some final outtakes taken straight from the Aquinas cutting room floor:

6. Analytical Thomism: This newest approach to Thomism is described by John Haldane (pictured at left), its key proponent, as “a broad philosophical approach that brings into mutual relationship the styles and preoccupations of recent English-speaking philosophy and the concepts and concerns shared by Aquinas and his followers” (from the article on “analytical Thomism” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich). By “recent English-speaking philosophy” Haldane means the analytical tradition founded by thinkers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which tends to dominate academic philosophy in the English-speaking world. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) and her husband Peter Geach are sometimes considered the first “analytical Thomists,” though (like most writers to whom this label has been applied) they did not describe themselves in these terms, and as Haldane’s somewhat vague expression “mutual relationship” indicates, there does not seem to be any set of doctrines held in common by all so-called analytical Thomists. What they do have in common seems to be that they are philosophers trained in the analytic tradition who happen to be interested in Aquinas in some way; and the character of their “analytical Thomism” is determined by whether it tends to stress the “analytical” side of analytical Thomism, or the “Thomism” side, or, alternatively, attempts to emphasize both sides equally.

We might tentatively distinguish, then, between three subcategories within the group of contemporary analytic philosophers who have been described as “analytical Thomists.” The first category comprises analytic philosophers who are interested in Aquinas and would defend some of his ideas, but who would also reject certain other key Thomistic claims (perhaps precisely because of their perceived conflict with assumptions prevalent among analytic philosophers) and thus fail to count (or even to count themselves) as “Thomists” in any strict sense. This sort of “analytical Thomism” might be said to emphasize the “analytical” element at the expense of the “Thomism.” Anthony Kenny (who rejects Aquinas’s doctrine of being) and Robert Pasnau (who rejects certain aspects of his account of human nature) would seem to exemplify this first tendency. A second category within analytical Thomism would comprise thinkers who do see themselves as Thomists in some sense, and who would argue that those aspects of Aquinas’s thought which seem to conflict with assumptions common among analytical philosophers can be interpreted or reinterpreted so that there is no conflict. This approach might be said to give both the “analytical” and the “Thomistic” elements of analytical Thomism equal emphasis, and is represented by thinkers like Geach, Brian Davies, and C. F. J. Martin (all of whom would attempt to harmonize Aquinas’s doctrine of being with Frege’s understanding of existence) and Germain Grisez and John Finnis (who would reinterpret Aquinas’s ethics so as to avoid what Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy”). The work of Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump also possibly falls into this second category, though since it is often interpretative and scholarly rather than programmatic, it is harder to say.

Thomists of other schools have been very critical of both of these strains within analytical Thomism, sometimes to the extent of dismissing the very idea of analytical Thomism as being no more coherent than (in their view) “transcendental Thomism” is. But there is a third possible category of “analytical Thomists,” namely those whose training was in the analytic tradition and whose modes of argument and choice of topics reflects this background, but whose philosophical views are in substance basically just traditional Thomistic ones, without qualification or reinterpretation. Here the “Thomism” would be in the driver’s seat and the “analytical” modifier would reflect not so much the content of the views defended but rather the style in which they are defended. The work of writers like Gyula Klima and David Oderberg seems to fall into this category. Moreover, some writers who appear to fall into the second category of analytical Thomists when writing on certain topics seem closer to this third category when writing on others. (Martin, Davies, and Haldane would be examples, since while some of their work attempts to harmonize analytic themes with Thomistic ones, at other times they are more inclined to challenge certain common analytic assumptions in the name of Thomism.)

In addition to the various schools of thought within Thomism that I have been describing, other approaches could be distinguished. For example, while Aquinas is generally understood to be an Aristotelian, commentators like Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995) have emphasized the Platonic elements in his thought. John Deely advocates bringing Thomism together with semiotics, the general theory of signs and signification. I have not attempted to be comprehensive, and what I have said about the main approaches has been brief and oversimplified. But hopefully it will give the reader some (very general) guidance through the gigantic and often bewildering body of literature on Aquinas and Thomism. In the interests of full disclosure, I might mention that my own understanding of Aquinas has been influenced most by the work of writers in the Neo-Scholastic, Laval/River Forest, and Analytical schools (especially the third category of analytical Thomism that I distinguished). In particular, I follow these approaches in reading Aquinas as the pivotal figure in an ongoing “Aristotelico-Thomistic” tradition, a “perennial philosophy” which has its roots in the best of ancient Greek thought and continues to this day.

Further reading:

Treatments of the history of and various schools of thought within Thomism can be found in: Romanus Cessario, A Short History of Thomism (Catholic University of America Press, 2003); Helen James John, The Thomist Spectrum (Fordham University Press, 1966); Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Blackwell, 2002); Ralph M. McInerny, Thomism in an Age of Renewal (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); and Brian J. Shanley, The Thomist Tradition (Kluwer, 2002). Useful collections of essays can be found in: Victor Brezik, ed., One Hundred Years of Thomism: Aeterni Patris and Afterwards, A Symposium (Center for Thomistic Studies, 1981); Deal W. Hudson and Dennis Wm. Moran, eds., The Future of Thomism (American Maritain Association, 1992); and the series Thomistic Papers published by the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas (Meridian Books, 1958) contains a useful collection of papal statements on the significance of Aquinas for Roman Catholic thought. Gerald A. McCool has developed a controversial interpretation of the recent history of Thomism in a series of books; see his Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (Fordham University Press, 1989); From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (Fordham University Press, 1989); and The Neo-Thomists (Marquette University Press, 1994). His interpretation is debated in John F. X. Knasas, ed., Thomistic Papers VI (Center for Thomistic Studies, 1994).

The Neo-Scholastic approach to Aquinas is summarized in Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought (B. Herder Co., 1950; reprinted by Ex Fontibus Co., 2006). A recent treatment of Garrigou-Lagrange’s thought is Richard Peddicord, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P. (St. Augustine’s Press, 2005). Presentations of existential Thomism can be found in Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952) and Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent (Vintage Books, 1966). John F. X. Knasas, Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists (Fordham University Press, 2003) is a recent defense and Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Catholic University of America Press, 2006) a recent critique. Two recent introductions to Laval/River Forest Thomism are The Writings of Charles De Koninck, Volume 1, edited and translated by Ralph McInerny (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) and Benedict M. Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). For transcendental Thomism, see Joseph Donceel, ed., A Marechal Reader (Herder and Herder, 1970). For Lublin Thomism, see Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II (Eerdmans, 1997). For analytical Thomism, see the chapter on Aquinas in G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Basil Blackwell, 1961); John Haldane, ed., Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); The Monist, Vol. 80, No. 4 (1997), a special issue on Analytical Thomism edited by Haldane; and Craig Paterson and Matthew S. Pugh, eds., Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue (Ashgate, 2006).

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.

Quine as a conservative

For newer readers and others who might be interested, I will occasionally be reprinting some old posts from the now defunct Conservative Philosopher and Right Reason group blogs. Here is a piece that originally appeared in two parts on The Conservative Philosopher, on January 31, 2005 and February 9, 2005 respectively. (I have edited slightly to remove some now irrelevant references reflecting the time they were first posted. Not that anyone would notice.)

Part I:

W.V. Quine was unquestionably one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Almost the entirety of his body of work was in areas of philosophy far removed from ethics and politics: logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, epistemology and metaphysics. But he also happened to be politically conservative, and very occasionally he would express his conservatism in print. Two examples are the entries on “Freedom” and “Tolerance” in his book Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. They are, like nearly everything Quine wrote, elegant in style and well worth reading.

Quine’s conservatism raises interesting questions about the relationship between a philosopher’s metaphysical commitments and his ethical and political commitments. It would be hard to deny that the sort of commonsense metaphysics associated with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had a bearing on the conservative character of their moral and political views, or that the radicalism of Marx’s social theory was at least in part a consequence of his brand of materialism. Yet while Quine’s metaphysical position was among the most radically revisionist of any that philosophers have produced – physicalist, behaviorist, eliminativist – his political views were, again, conservative.

It is hard to think offhand of too many parallels in the history of philosophy. It is true, of course, that Hume’s far from commonsense epistemology and metaphysics also went hand in hand with a kind of conservatism, but then again Hume was also inclined to emphasize how irrelevant the results of abstruse philosophical speculation were to ordinary life, and inclined also halfway to give back to common sense with his right hand, via an appeal to the primacy of “custom and habit,” what his left hand had taken away via philosophical criticism. Quine, committed as he was to scientism, seemed less inclined then Hume to think that common sense would remain more or less intact regardless of the findings of scientists and philosophers.

There is a very widespread belief these days that ethics can be done more or less without paying attention to metaphysics. I think this is completely mistaken, and that most of the philosophers who hold this belief, being almost always metaphysical naturalists of one stripe or another and rarely having their naturalism challenged, have lost sight of how deeply they are themselves committed to what is really just one metaphysical position among others, and of how deeply it has in fact permeated their moral theorizing.

I also think that it is no accident that naturalistic philosophers tend toward unconservative positions in ethics and politics. Naturalists have a tendency to suppose that the methods of the natural sciences are the right models to apply to the study of the human world. Since the history of natural science has often been a history of proving common sense wrong where matters far removed from everyday human life are concerned, the expectation understandably forms that common sense is likely to be wrong where the human world is concerned as well. This is an attitude Michael Levin has called the “skim milk” fallacy – the fallacy of assuming that “things are never what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream” – and there are good Burkean and Hayekian reasons for thinking that it is indeed a fallacy. It is, Burkeans and Hayekians would argue, unlikely that deep errors about human nature would persist within common sense, given how crucial a right understanding of the human world is to the success of everyday human intercourse, and even to survival.

(I should qualify these remarks by saying that it is the scientistic brand of naturalism, which is the kind predominant in contemporary philosophy, that I claim has the implications I am speaking of here. The sort of naturalism associated with Wittgenstein, concerned as it is, in its way, to defend common sense, is very different, and for obvious reasons more conducive to a conservative position in ethics and politics.)

Whether or not I am right about all this, Quine would seem at least on the surface to be a counterexample to the claims I just made. But I think that in fact he is not, if only because his philosophical and political views seem to have had absolutely nothing to do with one another, even on a subconscious level. As far as I can tell, Quine’s philosophical and political thinking were conducted in two different and hermetically sealed off compartments of his mind. Even with Hume, one can detect a clear connection between his metaphysics and epistemology on the one hand and his politics on the other: the centrality of custom and habit in the former finds a parallel in the conservatism of the latter. There seems to be no similar systematic connection in Quine’s thinking.

Far more than other contemporary naturalists, Quine apparently never so much as entertained the possibility that conservative political views might sit uneasily with such a radical metaphysical position. Most naturalistic philosophers end up at least subtly re-conceiving the world of everyday human life along naturalistic metaphysical lines, and this influences they way they think about ethics, whether they realize it or not. Naturalism tells them we’re just clever animals, or “machines made of meat,” or whatever, and at some level the ethical theory reflects that. The average human being doesn’t think this way, of course, and indeed the average naturalistic philosopher doesn’t think this way either in day-to-day life. It is simply too inhuman a way to think about human beings to be possible to sustain for very long. Like the Humean skeptic, the naturalistic philosopher, once he exits his study, leaves the revisionist metaphysics behind and deals with other human beings as creatures having souls (whether you interpret “soul” in the traditional metaphysical sense or in a more figurative Wittgensteinian sense). Unfortunately, though, most naturalistic philosophers seem to write on ethics and politics while they’re still in the study. Quine did not. His conservatism was apparently not an intellectual one, but a matter of ingrained temperament. (That definitely does not mean it was an irrational one, as every conservative understands.)

That’s my armchair speculation anyway, for what it is worth. In any event, whatever one thinks of Quine’s metaphysical position – and for my part, I cannot think of a metaphysical position I am less sympathetic with – it is surely as powerfully developed and articulated as any in the history of philosophy, and deserving of close study. Some philosophers regard it as a brilliant drawing out of the surprising truths implicit in the physicalistic premises Quine starts with; others (like John Searle, and me) regard it as a reductio ad absurdum of those premises. Either way, Quine cannot be ignored.

Part II:

Here are some relevant quotes from Quine’s writings, which should give a sense of his political views.

From Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary:

“Freedom from the trammels of an age outworn can mean quandaries at every turn, for want of a rule, a precedent, a role model, even a vivid self-image” (p. 68)

“Freedom to remodel society, gained by revolution, can be a delicate affair. Society up to that point, if stable at all, was stable in consequence of the gradual combining and canceling of forces and counter-forces, some planned and some not. The new and untested plan shares all the fallibility of the planner, this young newcomer in a complex world. Maybe the new order bids fair to overprivilege a hitherto underprivileged group; maybe it will presently prove to underprivilege all. It is delicate, and delicacy is seldom the revolutionary’s forte. The constraint imposed by social tradition is the gyroscope that helps to keep the ship of state on an even keel.” (p. 69)

“Democratic regard for civil rights and due process affords a shelter for subversive efforts of enemy agents and for seditious activities of native sympathizers. An enemy despot can send his fifth column through democracy's open gates while keeping his own gates secured. Some restraints on democratic tolerance are thus vital to the survival of democracy. Excessive restraints, on the other hand, would be an abdication of democracy. Such, then, is the delicate balance of tolerance.” (pp. 206-7)

“Moral censorship down the years had monitored an ill-defined limit of legitimacy that was regularly pressed, tested, and moderately violated by the literary, artistic, and popular forces for prurience. Burlesque skits had made merry with sexual themes by double entendre and thinly veiled allusion that brought down the house. Press the bounds, however narrowly drawn, and titillation was assured. Withdrawing the bounds did away with the titillation. So far, perhaps, so good; but this was the least of the effects. Pornography burgeoned, ready with ever more extravagant lures lest custom stale. Also apart from such excesses the public prints, films, and broadcasts relaxed their restraints to a marked degree. General standards of taste in speech and behavior could then be counted on to evolve or dissolve apace, dictated as they are by the public prints, films, and broadcasts. It was a bewilderingly abrupt relaxation of the restraints of centuries, and no small achievement on the part of vocal students, liberal English teachers, and a few docile jurists. There were deeper social forces, also, that have yet to be understood. One conspicuous factor, superficial still, was the widespread spirit of rebellion induced by the Vietnam war, when sympathy with the enemy was open and defiant. Insofar, tolerance of the sort that we first considered played a role: tolerance of subversion.” (pp. 207-8)

From “Paradoxes of Plenty” in Theories and Things:

“It was in the increased admittance and financial support of students that the new prodigality [of the post-war university] came its most resounding cropper. Marginal students came on in force, many of them with an eye on the draft, and they soon were as bored with college as they had been with school. In their confusion and restlessness they were easy marks for demagogues, who soon contrived a modest but viable terror. A rather sketchy terror sufficed, in the event, to bring universities to their knees.” (p. 197)

From The Time of My Life: An Autobiography:

“[At the time of the student demonstrations at Harvard] feeling ran high in the faculty between a radical caucus at one edge, which backed the vocal students, and a conservative caucus at the other edge, in which Oscar Handlin played a leading role and I an ineffectual one. Attendance at faculty meetings exceeded all bounds; we had to move them from the faculty room in University Hall to the Loeb Theater. In previous years I had seldom attended, but now duty called. At one of these crowded faculty meetings, two shabby black undergraduates demanded to be admitted and heard. Henry Rosovsky had done a conscientious job of devising a program of Black Studies that might accommodate the new racism without serious abdication of scholarly standards; but the two black youths demanded more radical provisions, on pain, they hinted, of fire and destruction. The serried ranks of faculty, flecked with eminent scholars and Nobel laureates, were cowed – a bare majority of them – by the two frail, bumbling figures and voted as directed. What price scholarly standards, what price self-respect?” (pp. 352-3)

“At Syracuse in May 1981 I received an honorary degree, my twelfth, along with Alexander Haig, who gave the address. Radicals dressed in bloodied nuns’ garb protested our alleged aggression in Salvador and tried to silence him, but he coped admirably and I liked his thoughts on public policy.” (p. 452)