Plotinus contra modernity

Plotinus’ thought is sublime. We find in it not only an important statement of the classical theistic position that all reality derives from an absolutely simple first cause, but also the notion that our fulfillment lay in our return to that cause. (The theme of God as our First Cause and Last End, He from Whom the world derives and to Whom it will return, would later go on to provide the structure for Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.) As Fr. Copleston has said, “from the point of view of Christianity itself, Neo-Platonism had an important function to fulfil, that of contributing to the intellectual statement of the Revealed Religion, and so the convinced Christian cannot but look with sympathy, and a certain reverence, on the figure of Plotinus, to whom the greatest of the Latin Fathers (and so the Universal Church) owed no inconsiderable debt.” (A History of Philosophy, volume I)

Nor is it in metaphysics alone that we can find inspiration in him. There is also his moral vision. Consider this beautiful passage from the first tractate of the Fifth Ennead (MacKenna translation):

What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?

The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self-ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine.

Admiring pursuit of the external is a confession of inferiority; and nothing thus holding itself inferior to things that rise and perish, nothing counting itself less honourable and less enduring than all else it admires could ever form any notion of either the nature or the power of God.

We see from these words that Plotinus would condemn not only the naturalism that is the ruling ideology of our age, but also the liberalism that is its moral concomitant. It is “self-will” and “the desire for self-ownership” that leads the soul to deny its true source in the divine. (Libertarians take note.) The O’Brien translation has “desiring to be independent” in place of “self-ownership,” and renders the next sentence: “Once having tasted the pleasures of independence, they use their freedom to go in a direction that leads away from their origin.” We are by nature oriented to the divine; that alone can fulfill us. When, as moderns are prone to do, we make an idol of freedom and “reserve the right” to pursue some other good as if it were highest, we implicitly deny our nature. The resulting madness leads us “further and further” from the divine to the point of what Plotinus calls “self-depreciation” and the pursuit of what is “inferior” to the soul – sensual pleasure, money, and worldly power. The sequel to thus living contrary to reason, like mere animals, cannot fail to be a tendency to sentimentalize the non-human world. “Honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien” – Plotinus might as well have been describing the contemporary environmentalist or animal rights activist. That the liberal-cum-naturalist avant-garde now effectively denies reason itself (in the name of reason!) would have surprised Plotinus not at all.

Plotinus rises up to condemn this modernist disease. We must be grateful to him for that. Not that his work was without error. His conceptions of both God and the soul need to be corrected in an Aristotelian-Thomistic direction (or so we A-T types would contend). His ethics, like that of all Platonists, is excessively rigorist because of its failure to see that the soul is the form of the body, and thus that man is an essentially embodied creature. For the Platonist, “each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body,” as the Phaedo memorably puts it. But from the A-T perspective – though itself too austere from the point of view of the modern liberal – this is a touch melodramatic. Pleasure must always be subordinated to intellect, and to the knowledge of God which is our natural end, but it has its place in a normal human life. For A-T, you can enjoy your top sirloin, martini, and tobacco, then retire to the bedchamber with the wife, all in good conscience. Some asceticism now and then is a good thing for everyone. And an entire life of asceticism is indeed a higher form of existence for those called to sacrifice lower goods in the interests of a single-minded pursuit of the highest one. But the lower goods remain goods, and those who do not have the calling in question are guilty of no moral failing for pursuing them in moderation.

All the same, in the age of MTV, pot clinics, internet pornography, and “supersizing,” Plotinus’ stern ethos is a welcome corrective. Compared to the war between the ancients and the moderns, the dispute between Platonists, Aristotelians, and Thomists and other Scholastics is a mere family squabble.

Pre-Christian apologetics

Christianity did not arise in a vacuum.  The very first Christians debated with their opponents in a cultural context within which everyone knew that there is a God and that he had revealed himself through Moses and the prophets.  The question, given that background, was what to think of Jesus of Nazareth.  Hence the earliest apologists were, in effect, apologists for Christianity as opposed to Judaism, specifically.  That didn’t last long.  As Christianity spread beyond Judea into the larger Mediterranean world, the question became whether to accept Christianity as opposed to paganism.  Much less could be taken for granted. 

Still, significant common ground for debate was provided by Greek philosophy.  In Book VIII of The City of God, Augustine noted that thinkers in the Neoplatonic tradition had seen that God is the cause of the existence of the world; had seen also that only what is beyond the world of material and changeable things could be God; had understood the distinction between the senses and their objects on the one hand, and the intellect and its objects on the other, and affirmed the superiority of the latter; and had affirmed that the highest good is not the good of the body or even the good of the mind, but to know and imitate God.  In short, these pagan thinkers knew some of the key truths about God, the soul, and the natural law that are available to unaided human reason.  This purely philosophical knowledge facilitated Augustine’s own conversion to Christianity, and would provide an intellectual skeleton for the developing tradition of Christian apologetics and theology.

Plotinus on divine simplicity, Part III

We have now examined Plotinus’ arguments for the One and for Intellect and Soul. Plotinus’ doctrine of three divine “hypostases” is famously reminiscent of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. What is the relationship between the doctrines? I don’t mean “What is the historical relationship between them?” Both before and after Plotinus’ time, Christian theologians have found metaphysical concepts derived from Greek philosophy useful in articulating the doctrine of the Trinity, and have modified those concepts in various ways as they have applied them. But tracing this complex history is not to the present point. What I am asking is rather: What is the logical relationship between Plotinus’ doctrine and Trinitarianism – where each is considered ahistorically, as a “finished product”?

Certainly they are not the same doctrine. For one thing, Plotinus was, of course, a pagan rather than a Christian. (His student Porphyry was notoriously hostile to Christianity.) His position purports to be founded on purely philosophical arguments, whereas the Trinity is, according to Christian doctrine, something accessible only through divine revelation. Indeed, the Trinity is said to be a mystery – not in the sense that it is in itself in any way contrary to reason, but rather in the sense that the unaided human intellect is too limited either to arrive at it on its own or fully to understand it even once it has been divinely revealed. For another thing, many of the details of Plotinus’ conception of the three hypostases and their relations are simply incompatible with what the doctrine of the Trinity says about the three divine Persons. For example, the relationship between Plotinus’ hypostases is evidently subordinationist, whereas the Persons of the Trinity are equal in divinity.

All the same, mightn’t one argue that doctrines like that of Plotinus are at least pointers to the Trinity? Not that his views pointed historically to it – Trinitarianism was well established before Plotinus, even though the crucial formulation associated with the Council of Nicea would not be arrived until over half a century after his death. The suggestion on the table is rather that, considered as a piece of natural theology, Plotinus’ position points philosophically to something like the Trinity. The idea would be this: The human intellect cannot arrive at the doctrine of the Trinity per se, but it can discover grounds for suspecting that there must in some way be even more to the “personal” aspect of the divine nature than God’s having intellect and will – like the congenitally blind man who might suspect even apart from the testimony of the sighted that there is more to the physical world than what his four working senses tell him, even if he cannot in principle grasp what it is.

Nor need such a judgment be based merely on the fact that Plotinus posits exactly three divine hypostases. Consider Aquinas’s account of the Trinity in Summa Theologiae Part I, Questions 27-43. (Brian Davies provides a useful summary of Aquinas’s position in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas.) Aquinas compares the Father’s begetting of the Son to the intellect’s forming a concept of itself; and he compares the proceeding of the Holy Spirit to the willing or loving of this concept that the intellect knows. As we have seen, intellect and the directedness toward an object that love or desire manifest provided Plotinus with ways of characterizing the second and third of his hypostases.

What is missing from Plotinus’ account to prevent it from dovetailing more completely with the doctrine of the Trinity – or so this line of thought we are considering might continue, anyway – is Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy. It is because Plotinus is so emphatic about the absolute simplicity of the One that he must make of Intellect and Soul derivative hypostases rather than anything like distinct Persons in one divine substance. For he refuses to make any distinctions at all within the One itself. And yet Plotinus also affirms that the Forms are in the One, even if only “virtually”; and they must be there if the One is to explain the rest of the world, for a cause cannot give what it does not in some sense have to give. Hence Intellect and Soul are also there virtually. But if they are there even virtually, they are there. The doctrine of analogy, which informs Aquinas’s understanding of divine simplicity, can help us understand how this can be so. For Aquinas, there is in God something analogous to power in us and something analogous to knowledge in us; but where in us power and knowledge are distinct, in God they are the same thing, and it is precisely the fact that we are attributing power and knowledge to God in an analogous rather than a univocal sense that makes this intelligible. Similarly, perhaps we could say that what exist in a distinct way outside the One – the Forms, but also (more to the present point) Intellect and Soul – exist within the One as one, different only in our (analogous) descriptions of them, but not different in themselves. And in that way (or so it might seem) we can think of One, Intellect, and Soul as united in a way reminiscent of the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three Persons in one divine substance.

Does this proposed line of thought show, then, that Plotinus’ doctrine is a philosophical “pointer” to the doctrine of the Trinity? Not so fast. For one thing, any attempt to reconcile Plotinus with Aquinas via the doctrine of analogy can only be taken so far. It is true that the doctrine of analogy shows how we can predicate power, knowledge, goodness, etc. of God in a manner consistent with divine simplicity. But we cannot say that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are identical in the way we can say that God’s power, knowledge, and goodness are identical, on pain of confounding the divine Persons and lapsing into heresy. Hence, whatever we might get by tucking up Intellect and Soul together with the One via the doctrine of analogy, it isn’t the Trinity.

For another thing, even if it is arguable that Plotinus’ doctrine nevertheless “points” to the Trinity in some vague way, this is something the Trinitarian himself would have to insist could not possibly be recognized except “after the fact.” That is to say, there can be no question of some philosopher who has no familiarity with Christian teaching on the Trinity independently discovering it, or even discovering something that “points” to it in anything but the vaguest way. For if that were possible, the Trinity wouldn’t be a mystery, wouldn’t be something we couldn’t possibly know of apart from divine revelation – it would instead be just one more piece of natural theology among others.

Skeptics might regard this emphasis on mystery as a shameless ploy to ward off potential criticism, but in fact it is, when properly understood, quite clearly the opposite of that. Trinitarian theologians insist that the doctrine is not contrary to reason – that it is perfectly coherent, and that every skeptical attempt to prove otherwise accordingly must be, and can be, answered. They do not claim that attempts to demonstrate the doctrine’s incoherence can legitimately be waved away by shouting “mystery!” Given this apologetic interest, it might seem they would welcome any purported purely philosophical demonstration of the Trinity that removes all mystery, as a means of shutting the skeptics up for good. But in fact they are hostile to such attempts, and Trinitarian orthodoxy requires them to be. The Trinitarian position is, as I have said, that the doctrine is in itself perfectly in harmony with reason but also that our intellects are too limited to grasp it. This entails both an insistence on defending the doctrine in a negative way, by rebutting attempted refutations, and an insistence that positive purely philosophical demonstrations of its truth are impossible.

Would-be scoffers should keep in mind that naturalists like Colin McGinn have taken a position similar to this as a way of staving off dualist objections, claiming that there is a purely naturalistic explanation of consciousness but that our minds are constitutionally incapable of understanding that explanation. They’ve even labeled this view “mysterianism.” Only someone who assumes that, if there really is a God, then the divine nature simply must be fully comprehensible to us, can object in principle to the parallel view defended by the Trinitarian. And why would anyone make such a foolish and ungrounded assumption?

So, Plotinus’ doctrine of the three hypostases is neither the same as the doctrine of the Trinity, nor something that bears anything but a very general analogy to it. With the doctrine of the Trinity already in hand, we can indeed see in Plotinus some interesting parallels, and even make use of them in spelling out Trinitarianism. But we could never have gotten to the Trinity from Plotinus, or from any other system of purely natural theology. If we are to know anything at all about it, it can only be by divine revelation.

Stoljar on intentionality

Daniel Stoljar’s new book Physicalism is a very useful overview of its subject. However, its brief treatment of intentionality (and of some other topics too) evinces a deep misunderstanding of dualism, a misunderstanding that seems to be very common in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Stoljar begins his discussion with the following characterization of intentionality:

The intentionality of a mental state is its aboutness. When I think of Vienna or believe that the computer is on the desk or fear that the planet will get hotter, I instantiate mental states which are in a hard to define sense about Vienna, or the computer on the desk or planet Earth. The idea is that mental states (and speech acts) have a property rather like signs, sentences, and gestures; that is, they are about or represent things other than themselves. (p. 200)

So far so good; at least, that is an accurate characterization of what modern philosophers, whether physicalists, dualists, or idealists, tend to mean by “intentionality.” (Whether they are right to think of it this way is a question I will return to later.) Stoljar then suggests that the reason intentionality is philosophically problematic is that it is supposed to involve a relation that might hold between a thinker and something else, and yet lacks three key features one would expect such a relation to have. First, if I bear a relation to something else, one would expect that that something else exists; and yet I can think about something that does not exist (e.g. Valhalla). Second, if I bear a relation to something else, one would expect that there is some particular thing I bear it to; but I can think about a man without there being some man in particular I am thinking of. Third, if I bear a relation to some thing A and A = B, then one would expect that I thereby bear that relation to B; but if I am thinking about Vienna, then even though Vienna is the birthplace of Schubert, it doesn’t follow that I am thinking about the birthplace of Schubert, about whom I may know nothing. (To use the technical jargon, ascriptions of intentional mental states are often non-extensional or intensional, insofar as we cannot always substitute co-referring expressions salve veritate; that is to say, intentionality-with-a-t is often – though, it is important to note, not always – associated with intensionality-with-an-s.)

Now, Stoljar acknowledges that these features of intentionality are philosophically puzzling. But he claims that they pose no special difficulty for physicalism. In particular, they give us no reason to favor dualism over physicalism, for they are as problematic on the former view as on the latter. Says Stoljar: “[S]uppose classical dualism is true and I am some sort of complex of an ordinary physical object and soul; it is still impossible for me to stand in a relation to things that don’t exist! In sum, the paradoxes of intentionality will remain whether physicalism is true or not, hence they do not concern physicalism.” (p. 201)

There are two problems with this. First, it does not get to the heart of the problem of intentionality. Second, it rests on a misunderstanding of dualism. Let’s take them in order.

Consider the following dialogue:

Policeman: Ma’am, some bad news, I’m afraid. Your son just robbed a liquor store. Caught him red-handed with the cash tucked in the glove compartment, along with a few bottles of Tanqueray, vermouth, and tipsy olives that he tossed in the back seat.

Mom: Oh dear. I suppose he’s in trouble for being under 21. Or was he speeding in the getaway car?

Policeman: Well, there is that, I guess. But here’s the main thing: He robbed a liquor store.

Stoljar reminds me a little bit of Mom. Yes, the “paradoxes of intentionality” that he calls attention to are important. But it is intentionality itself, and not the “paradoxes,” that is of the greatest interest. Even if the objects I thought about always existed, or were always particular, or never generated non-extensional contexts – that is to say, even if intentionality exhibited none of the “paradoxical” features in question – the “aboutness” of my thoughts would remain. And it is that “aboutness” that the dualist takes to pose the chief difficulty for physicalism.

There are at least two ways to see how – a commonsense way and a more technical way. The commonsense way is this. Consider the word “cup” as you might write it in ink. Now consider a set of splotches that forms after your ink bottle leaks overnight, among which there are three right next to each other that by chance look vaguely like this: CUP. The set of splotches looks like the word, but it isn’t. The word has meaning, the splotches do not. But this has nothing to do with the physical properties of either. The ink is the same in both cases, as are the shapes. We can even imagine a case where your penmanship is bad enough and/or the splotches are distinct enough that their appearance is indistinguishable from the word “cup” that you’ve written. In general, it is not the intrinsic physical properties of letters, words, and sentences, whether written or spoken, that give them the meaning they have. Rather, their meaning derives from the conventions established by language users. It is an accident of history that the sequence of shapes cup has meaning and the sequence of shapes - ( ^ does not. Intrinsically, the first sequence is as meaningless as the second. But what is true of ink splotches and sounds seems no less true of all other physical phenomena. They all seem obviously devoid of meaning until someone decides to use them to convey meaning. As John Searle puts it, words, sentences, and the like, considered as material objects, have only “derived intentionality.” We are able to impart meaning to them by virtue of having thoughts with “original intentionality” – your thought about a cup represents or means cup without anyone having to form a convention of using it to mean that. But if neural processes are as devoid of original intentionality as ink marks, sounds, and the like, then it is hard to see how thoughts could be identified with neural processes, or claimed to supervene upon them. And the same is true of any other purported physicalistic basis for mental phenomena.

Now, there are various things a physicalist might want to say in response to this, but the point is that the problem intentionality is claimed to pose for physicalism here can obviously be stated in a way that makes no reference to the “paradoxes of intentionality.” If the commonsense point just made constitutes a difficulty for physicalism, it would do so even if the paradoxes in question did not exist.

The more technical way of making the point is to emphasize that the conception of “the physical” that physicalism typically presupposes is a mechanistic one – that is to say, one which (as I have discussed ad nauseam, e.g. here) takes matter to be devoid of any immanent or intrinsic final causality or teleology of the sort affirmed by the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition the early moderns sought to overthrow. For the Scholastics, efficient causes in the natural order inherently “point to” or are “directed at” their effects, and in sweeping aside immanent final causality the moderns rejected the claim that any natural phenomenon inherently and irreducibly “points to” or is “directed at” anything at all. Intrinsically, the natural world is for them comprised instead of “nothing but” meaningless, purposeless particles in motion or the like. (Descartes, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and other early mechanists did of course think of ends or goals being imposed on the world by God, but precisely because they were mechanists opposed to Aristotelianism and Scholasticism, they saw the resulting purposes or meanings as extrinsic to the world rather than inherent. See the great many posts on this theme that I’ve written over the last several months, as well as the discussions in The Last Superstition and Aquinas.)

Now, if intentionality involves something “pointing to” or being “directed at” or “about” something beyond itself, and the mechanistic conception of matter underlying physicalism holds that there is no such thing in nature as something inherently and irreducibly being “directed at” or “pointing to” something else, then it seems at the very least difficult to see how intentionality could possibly be something material or physical. I had reason to make this point in my recent post on Chomsky. But though Stoljar quotes the same passage from Jerry Fodor that I cited there, he does not see (as Fodor does, though Fodor does not make explicit reference to the anti-Aristotelian mechanistic revolution) that it is the moderns’ own conception of matter, rather than the “paradoxes of intentionality,” that generates the difficulty.

Again, the point is not that the physicalist might not have a good response to points like the ones I’ve been making – I don’t think so, but that’s another issue. The point is rather that it misses the point to address the problem of intentionality as if the paradoxes Stoljar calls attention to were at the heart of it, and as if it had nothing to do with the nature of “the physical.” Both the commonsense point and the technical point (as I have called them) show that the problem has very much to do with the nature of the physical, and nothing essentially to do with the paradoxes.

But how, the physicalist might still ask, does dualism fare any better? For as Stoljar suggests, wouldn’t any objection to a physicalist account of intentionality apply mutatis mutandis to any dualist alternative? Or as Clayton Littlejohn once objected in a remark in Victor Reppert's combox: “It seems like causal pathways in an immaterial substance would have the same content fixation problems as causal pathways in a physical substance.”

As I have said, this sort of objection seems increasingly common in contemporary philosophy of mind, but it is deeply confused. What dualist ever said anything about “causal pathways in an immaterial substance”? Stoljar and Littlejohn seem to think that what the dualist means by an immaterial substance or soul is something that is just like a material substance – and in particular, something with distinct and causally interrelated parts – only not material, but instead “made out of” some other kind of “stuff” (“ectoplasm” maybe). In short, a kind of ghostly machine, but a machine all the same. But that is precisely what dualists – whether of a Platonic, Thomistic, or Cartesian stripe – do not think the soul is. For dualists have typically held that the soul is simple or non-composite, and thus not “made out of” causally interrelated parts of any sort. That its activities cannot be modeled on those of a material substance is the whole point.

How should we think of it, then? For the Cartesian, the essence of the soul is thought, and that is the entirety of its essence. Descartes does not say: “Gee, it’s hard to see how intentionality could be explained in terms of causal relations between physical parts. I therefore postulate an immaterial substance with immaterial parts whose causal relations are capable of generating thought and intentionality.” That would imply that in addition to thought, a soul has of its nature the various parts in question and their characteristic interrelations. And that is just what Descartes denies. A Cartesian immaterial substance doesn’t generate thinking. It is thinking, and that is all that it is. For that reason, and contrary to what Stoljar assumes, the Cartesian conception of intentionality cannot possibly be open to the same objections raised against physicalism. To say “Maybe a Cartesian immaterial substance – that is to say, something which just is its activity of thinking – could, like a physical substance, exist in the absence of intentional mental states” is just incoherent. A physicalist might want to raise some other objection to the Cartesian view, but Stoljar’s tu quoque is not open to him.

Now, for the Thomistic or hylemorphic dualist, the soul is to be understood, not as pure thought, but rather as the substantial form of the living human body. And qua form, it is not a complete substance in the first place, much less a material or quasi-material one. (Talk of the soul as an “immaterial substance” is thus for the Thomist at least misleading, though he does hold that the soul subsists beyond the death of the body as an incomplete substance.) Here too, though, talk of interrelated quasi-material parts, “causal pathways,” and the like is completely out of place. But for the Thomist, the Cartesian’s talk of inner “representations” is out of place too; as I have discussed elsewhere (e.g. here and here) the “representationalist” conception of the mind is an essentially modern one that the ancients and medievals generally would have rejected. As a consequence, the ancients and medievals would reject too the essentially modern way of framing the issue of intentionality that I have, for the sake of argument, been following up to now in this post. For instance, if a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of nature is correct, then natural phenomena really do have intrinsic final causes after all, so that (for example) material efficient causes inherently “point beyond” themselves to their effects. It would follow that a thought’s “pointing beyond” itself cannot be what makes it immaterial; and indeed, that is not the sort of argument the ancients and medievals gave for the mind’s immateriality. (Nor did they argue from “qualia” – that too, as I have noted many times before, is a very modern sort of argument for dualism, and presupposes a mechanistic approach to nature.) The ancients and medievals focused instead on such features of our thoughts as their universality and determinacy, which they took to be essentially incompatible with thought’s having any material organ. (See here, here, chapter 4 of Aquinas and chapter 7 of Philosophy of Mind.)

But that is a gigantic topic of its own. Suffice it for present purposes to note that with respect to Thomistic dualism no less than the Cartesian version, contemporary physicalists would do well to try better to “know their enemy” before dismissing him.

[For more on this theme, see my posts on Paul Churchland and dualism, here, here, and here.]

Churchland on dualism, Part III

To conclude our look at Paul Churchland’s critical discussion of dualism in his textbook Matter and Consciousness, let’s consider the arguments he presents against dualism. There are four of them, and they can be summarized as follows:

1. The argument from Ockham’s razor: Postulating two basic kinds of substance, material and immaterial, needlessly complicates our ontology if mental phenomena can be adequately explained in terms of material substance alone. That they can be so explained is indicated by the next two arguments:

2. The argument from the explanatory impotence of dualism: Materialist explanations can appeal to the many details of the brain’s structure and function revealed by modern neuroscience, while dualists have yet to provide a comparable account of the structure and function of immaterial substance.

3. The argument from the neural dependence of all known mental phenomena: As both everyday experience and neuroscientific research show, reasoning, emotion, and consciousness are all very closely correlated with various processes in the brain, which is not what we would expect if these mental phenomena were associated with an immaterial substance.

4. The argument from evolutionary history: The evolutionary process that gave rise to the human species proceeded via purely material mechanisms from a purely material starting point, so that the end result must itself be purely material.

Churchland acknowledges that none of these arguments is by itself absolutely conclusive. But he does think the third one “comes close to being an outright refutation of (substance) dualism,” and he clearly believes that in tandem the arguments consign dualism to the dustbin for all practical purposes. No doubt most materialists would agree with him. But in fact these arguments have, I maintain, no force at all against dualism. None. Dualism may or may not in fact be true – obviously I think it is true, but that is another issue. The point is that, even if it were false, these arguments have no tendency to show that it is.

How can I say that? Easy. Keep in mind first of all that, as I have emphasized in the earlier posts in this series, the chief proponents of dualism historically have not defended their position as an “explanatory hypothesis” put forward as the “best explanation” of the “empirical data.” That just isn’t what they are up to, any more than geometers or logicians are. They are attempting instead to provide a strict demonstration of the immateriality of the mind, to show that it is metaphysically and conceptually impossible for the mind to be something material. Their attempts may or may not succeed – again, that is another question. But that is what they are trying to do, and thus it simply misses the point to evaluate their arguments the way one might evaluate an empirical hypothesis. When Andrew Wiles first claimed – correctly, as it turned out – to have proven Fermat’s Last Theorem, it would have been ridiculous to evaluate his purported proof by asking whether it best accounts for the empirical evidence, or is the “best explanation” among all the alternatives, or comports with Ockham’s razor. Anyone who asked such questions would simply be making a category mistake, and showing himself to be uninformed about the nature of mathematical reasoning. It is equally ridiculous, equally uninformed, equally a category mistake, to respond to Plato’s affinity argument, or Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s argument from the nature of knowledge, or Descartes’ clear and distinct perception argument, or the Cartesian-Leibnizian-Kantian unity of consciousness argument, or Swinburne’s or Hart’s modal arguments, or James Ross’s argument from the indeterminacy of the physical, by asking such questions. As with a purported mathematical demonstration, one can reasonably attempt to show that one or more of the premises of such metaphysical arguments are false, or that the conclusion does not follow. But doing so will not involve the sorts of considerations one might bring to bear on the evaluation of a hypothesis in chemistry or biology.

Of course, Churchland, committed as he is to a Quinean form of scientism, thinks that all good theories must in some sense be empirical scientific theories. He rejects the traditional conception of metaphysics as a rational field of study distinct from and more fundamental than physics, chemistry, biology, and the like, and would deny that there is any such thing as sound metaphysical reasoning that is not in some way a mere extension of empirical hypothesis formation. But he cannot simply assume all of this in the present context without begging the question, because this sort of scientism is precisely (part of) what the dualist denies. (As we have seen in earlier posts on naturalism, this kind of circular reasoning is absolutely rife in naturalist thinking.)

It is obvious, then, why Churchland’s first two arguments have no force, for they simply misconstrue the nature of the case for dualism. If any of the dualist arguments just mentioned works, then the immateriality of the mind will have been demonstrated, and asking “But do we really need to postulate immaterial substance?” or “How much can we really know about such substances?” would not be to the point. For we would not in that case be hypothetically “postulating” anything in the first place, but directly establishing its existence; and its existence will have been no less established even if we could not say much about its nature.

But this brings us to an additional problem with Churchland’s second argument, which further underlines just how embarrassingly uninformed he is about what dualists have actually said. In developing his “explanatory impotence” objection, Churchland complains that dualists have told us very little about the nature of “spiritual matter” or the “internal constitution of mind-stuff,” about the “nonmaterial elements that make it up” and the “laws that govern their behavior.” This is, for anyone familiar with the thought of a Plato, an Aquinas, a Descartes, or a Leibniz, simply cringe-making. The soul is not taken by these writers to be “made up” out of anything, precisely because it is metaphysically simple or non-composite. It is not a kind of “stuff,” it is not made out of “spiritual matter” (whatever that is), and it is not “constituted” out of “elements” which are related by “laws.” Nor is this some incidental or little-known aspect of their position – it is absolutely central to the traditional philosophical understanding of the soul. As is so often the case with naturalistic criticisms of dualism, theism, etc., Churchland’s argument is directed at a breathtakingly crude straw man.

This appalling ignorance of the actual views of dualists manifests itself again in Churchland’s third argument. Churchland himself admits that this argument has no effect against property dualism, since property dualism itself takes the brain to be the seat of mental phenomena. But he fails to see that it has no effect against the other main varieties of dualism either, given what they actually say about the relationship between the mind and the brain.

For starters, let’s take Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylemorphic dualism. The A-T view is that the intellect is immaterial, but that sensation and imagination are not. Hence it is no surprise at all that neuroscience has discovered various neural correlates of mental imagery and the varieties of perceptual experience. Moreover, A-T holds that though intellect is immaterial, its operation requires the presence of the images or “phantasms” of the imagination. Hence it is no surprise that neural damage can affect even the functioning of the intellect. Most importantly, the soul, of which intellect, sensation, and imagination are all powers, is not a complete substance in its own right in the first place, but rather the form of the body. The way intellectual and volitional activity relates to a particular human action is, accordingly, not to be understood on the model of billiard ball causation, but rather as the formal-cum-final causal side of a single event of which the relevant physiological processes are the material-cum-efficient causal side. That alterations to the body have mental consequences is thus no more surprising than the fact that altering the chalk marks that make up a triangle drawn on a chalkboard affects how well the marks instantiate the form of triangularity. It is important to emphasize that none of this involves any sort of retreat from some stronger form of dualism, as a way of accommodating the discoveries of contemporary neuroscience; it is what A-T has always said about the relationship between soul and body. There is absolutely nothing in modern neuroscience that need trouble the A-T hylemorphic dualist in the slightest.

What about the Cartesian dualist? Don’t the differences between Descartes’ views and those of his Scholastic predecessors make him vulnerable to the findings of neuroscience in a way the latter are not? No, they don’t. For one thing, and as I have noted in an earlier post, Descartes’ views on this subject were not in fact quite as different from those of his predecessors as is often supposed. For example, Descartes’ view appears to have been that it is the intellect, specifically, which is to be identified with the ego he thinks is capable of existing apart from the body. Sensations, emotions, and the like he regarded, not as purely mental phenomena, but rather as hybrid properties which can be predicated only of the soul-body composite, and not the soul alone. Hence even on Descartes’ view it is not at all surprising that neuroscience has discovered all sorts of correlations between various aspects of perceptual experience and various emotional states on the one hand, and various processes in the brain on the other.

Now what is true is that the Cartesian has a difficulty explaining mind-body interaction that the A-T view does not have, as I have discussed here and here. And the reason is that Descartes rejected the notion that the soul is the formal cause of the body. That is an enormously consequential difference between the two views. But it has nothing to do with the specific question about whether a dualist need be troubled by the discovery of detailed correlations between mental phenomena and neural phenomena, which is what is at issue in the argument of Churchland’s under consideration. In particular, even the Cartesian need not be troubled by the fact that intellectual activity too (and not just sensation, emotion, and the like) can be dramatically affected by changes to the brain.

Why not? For one thing, as Churchland himself admits, the Cartesian regards the brain as a “mediator” between the soul and the rest of the body, so that we should expect that damage to this mediator will prevent the intellect from receiving the information it derives from the body and from controlling bodily behavior as well as it normally would.

But there is a deeper consideration. Consider the following analogy: A typed, written, or spoken token of the word “bark,” considered merely as a material object, has all sorts of complex physical properties, and those physical properties are highly relevant to its status as a word, as a bearer of linguistic meaning. Alter the physical properties of the token too radically, and it can no longer convey the meaning it once did. For example, if the ink should smear, the sound be muffled, or the power source to a word processor be cut off, the word will disappear, or might at least become so distorted that it becomes unintelligible. It would be absurd, though, for someone to suggest that these facts lend any support whatsoever to the claim that a word token qua word token is exhausted by its physical properties. It clearly is not. It is, for example, indeterminate from the physical properties alone whether the “bark” in question is the bark of a dog or the bark of a tree. Indeed, since the fact that the relevant sounds and shapes are associated with a certain meaning is entirely contingent, an accident of the history of the English language, it is indeterminate from the physical properties alone whether the word has any meaning at all. In short, the physical properties are a necessary condition for any particular physical object’s counting as a word token, but they are not a sufficient condition. And piling up bits of physicochemical knowledge about word tokens cannot possibly change this fact in the slightest, for it is a conceptual point about the nature of words, not an empirical point about what the latest research in phonetics (or whatever) has turned up.

In the same way, the dualist claims to be making a conceptual point about the relationship between mind and body, one to which neuroscientific research, important and interesting as it is in itself, is irrelevant. The existence of such-and-such physiological phenomena may well be a necessary condition for the existence of intentional human actions, intelligible speech, and so forth, but it is not and cannot be a sufficient condition. And that remains true whether we are interpreting dualism in A-T terms or in Cartesian terms. A-T regards the soul as the formal cause of a single substance of which the matter of the body is the material cause. Cartesians regard mind and matter as two distinct substances. Either way, there is not, and in principle cannot be, anything distinctively mental in matter as such, any more than a word token, considered merely as an arrangement of ink marks or a pattern of sound waves, has any meaning on its own. Or at least, there cannot be if dualism is correct. No amount of neuroscientific evidence can undermine this judgment, because what is at issue is whether any purely material phenomena at all, neurological or otherwise, can in principle be mental.

“But doesn’t that make dualism unfalsifiable?” If “unfalsifiable” means “not subject to rational evaluation and criticism,” then no, of course it isn’t unfalsifiable. Metaphysical arguments, like mathematical arguments, are perfectly susceptible of rational analysis and refutation, even if, like mathematical arguments, such analysis does not involve the weighing of probabilities, the comparison of alternative empirical hypotheses, etc. If “unfalsifiable” means instead “not subject to refutation via empirical scientific research,” then yes, dualism is unfalsifiable in that sense. But so is mathematics, and yet that doesn’t detract from its status as a rational field of investigation. Again, if the materialist wants to insist that all rational inquiry must ultimately be a kind of empirical scientific inquiry, he is welcome to make the case, but he cannot simply assume the truth of scientism when criticizing the dualist, otherwise he will simply be begging the question.

And that brings us, finally, to the fourth of Churchland’s arguments, the argument from evolution. Here again we have an argument that is entirely without force, and the main reason should be obvious from what has just been said: Dualism is a metaphysical theory, not an empirical hypothesis, and thus it is not the sort of thing that could be refuted by empirical biological findings any more than by neuroscientific ones.

But there is more to be said. Churchland’s fourth argument is also question-begging. For whether Darwinian evolution – which is supposed to be a purely materialist theory – is in fact a complete explanation of human nature depends on whether human nature is entirely material. And of course, the dualist’s claim is precisely that human beings are not and cannot be purely material, in which case no purely materialist theory could possibly provide a complete explanation of human nature. Hence it is no good to merely to assert, as an argument against dualism, that Darwinism has already explained human nature in materialist terms. That simply assumes the falsity of dualism without proving it.

Nor is it any good to stamp one’s feet and insist that if Darwinism entails materialism, then we had all better be materialists. Because here’s a newsflash: If Darwinism entailed that 2 + 2 = 5, what that would show is, not that 2 + 2 = 5, but that Darwinism is false, or at least needs to be seriously modified. Similarly, if Darwinism really does entail materialism, but the arguments of an Aquinas, a Descartes, or a James Ross show that materialism is false, then so much the worse for Darwinism. It had better adapt itself to the metaphysical facts, or be selected out. Like so many other naturalists, Churchland waves the “evolution” talisman as if it sufficed to shut off all debate, assuring us that in light of Darwinism we “are creatures of matter” and “should learn to live with that fact.” But this is sheer, question-begging bluff, not serious philosophical argument.

We have seen, then, over the course of these three posts, that Churchland’s treatment of dualism in Matter and Consciousness, though purporting to be a balanced summary, is in fact almost completely worthless both as a guide to what dualists have actually said and as a critique of dualism. And this is a textbook! And a widely used one, which has long been in print – it was one of the books I was taught out of as an undergraduate, and (I am ashamed to say) as a teacher I once used it myself. It took me many years to see just how bad it is. Most students who have read it probably have no idea, and never will.

But that’s how bad ideas spread: By ignorance and intellectual dishonesty smugly masquerading as expertise. Here, as with the debate over theism, the naturalistic skeptic can maintain the illusion of rational superiority only to the extent that he and his readers remain ignorant of what the great thinkers of the past have actually said. For to paraphrase Cardinal Newman, to be deep in history is to cease to be a naturalist.

Mind-body problem roundup

For readers who might be interested, I thought it would be useful to gather together in one place links to various posts on the mind-body problem and other issues in the philosophy of mind.  Like much of what you’ll find on this blog, these posts develop and apply ideas and arguments stated more fully in my various books and articles.  Naturally, I address various issues in the philosophy of mind at length in my book Philosophy of Mind, of which you can find a detailed table of contents here.  (The cover illustration by Andrzej Klimowski you see to the left is from the first edition.)  You will find my most recent and detailed exposition of the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) approach to issues in the philosophy of mind in chapter 4 of Aquinas.  There is a lot of material on the mind-body problem to be found in The Last Superstition, especially in various sections of the last three chapters.  And there is also relevant material to be found in Locke, in the chapter I contributed to my edited volume The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, and in various academic articles.

Two, four, six, eight! Who do you reincarnate?

Could there be such a thing as reincarnation?  A necessary condition would be the truth of some form of dualism.  So far so good, since (I would say) some form of dualism is true.  But which form?  There are at least three to choose from: substance dualism, the version associated with Plato and Descartes; property dualism, associated with the likes of John Locke, David Chalmers, and (the early) Frank Jackson; and the hylemorphic dualism defended within the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical tradition.  Are all of these equally favorable to a defense of reincarnation?

Modern biology and original sin, Part I

Our friend John Farrell has caused a bit of a stir in the blogosphere with his recent Forbes piece on modern biology and the doctrine of original sin.  Citing some remarks by Jerry Coyne, John tells us that he agrees with Coyne’s view that the doctrine is “easily falsified by modern genetics,” according to which “modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals” rather than just two individuals.  Those who have responded to John’s piece include Michael Liccione, Bill Vallicella (here and here), James Chastek, and Mike Flynn. 

Several things puzzle me about John’s article.  The first, of course, is why he would take seriously anything Jerry Coyne has to say about theology.  (We’ve seen ample evidence that Coyne is an ignoramus on the subject -- some of the relevant links are gathered here.)  The second is why John seems to think that the falsification of the doctrine of original sin is something the Catholic Church could “adapt” to.  (John’s article focuses on Catholicism.)  After all, the doctrine is hardly incidental.  It is de fide -- presented as infallible teaching -- and it is absolutely integral to the structure of Catholic theology.  If it were wrong, then Catholic theology would be incoherent and the Church’s teaching authority would be undermined.  Hence, to give it up would implicitly be to give up Catholicism, not merely “adapt” it to modern science.

A Hartless God?

Lest the impatient reader start to think of this as the blog from hell, what follows will be – well, for a while, anyway – my last post on that subject.  Recall that in earlier posts I set out a Thomistic defense of the doctrine of eternal damnation.  In the first, I explained how, on Aquinas’s view, the immortal soul of the person who is damned becomes permanently locked on to evil upon death.  The second post argued that since the person who is damned perpetually wills evil, God perpetually inflicts on that person a proportionate punishment.  The third post explains why the souls of the damned would not be annihilated instead.  In this post I will respond to a critique of the doctrine of eternal damnation put forward by my old sparring partner, Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, in his article “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo” (from the September 2015 issue of Radical Orthodoxy).

Was Aquinas a dualist?

At the start of chapter 4 of Aquinas (the chapter on “Psychology”), I wrote:

As I have emphasized throughout this book, understanding Aquinas requires “thinking outside the box” of the basic metaphysical assumptions (concerning cause, effect, substance, essence, etc.) that contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted.  This is nowhere more true than where Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is concerned.  Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading.  For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind-body problem.”  No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body.  Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, i.e. an immaterial substance of the sort affirmed by Descartes.  Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the “qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called “intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms.  At the same time, he does not think of intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do.  Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle position between these options.  But neither is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers under the label “property dualism.”  And so forth.

Searle, Aquinas, and property dualism

In an addendum to his article “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist,” John Searle suggests that property dualism really entails substance dualism. For it describes mental properties as “arising from” and existing “over and above” the brain, and “these metaphors suggest that… consciousness is something separate from the brain” given that “uncontroversial properties of the brain, like weight, shape, colour, solidity, etc.” are not said to exist in that way. For consciousness to exist “over and above” the brain requires that it be “a separate thing, object, or non-property type of entity.”

Searle’s claim here seems reminiscent in some ways of Aquinas’s argument for the subsistence of the human soul at Summa Theologiae I.75.2:

Therefore the intellectual principle which we call the mind or the intellect has an operation "per se" apart from the body. Now only that which subsists can have an operation "per se." For nothing can operate but what is actual: for which reason we do not say that heat imparts heat, but that what is hot gives heat. We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called the intellect or the mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent.

Aquinas has argued earlier for the first claim made in this passage, viz. that intellectual operations do not involve a bodily organ. What he saying here is that this claim entails that that which carries out these operations, the human soul, must “subsist” apart from the body; it isn’t a mere accident or attribute of the body. The reason is the Scholastic principle that agere sequitur esse, activity follows upon being. Heat, as a mere accident or attribute, cannot cause something to be hot; rather it is the substance which has the heat that causes something else to be hot. Similarly, an operation which is not carried out by any bodily organ but which – qua operation rather than substance – cannot exist apart from some substance or other, must inhere in something immaterial.

So, when Searle tells us that immaterial mental properties would have to inhere in something immaterial rather than in a material object like the brain, he is saying something which seems to dovetail with Aquinas’s argument.

Still, things are a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, unlike many contemporary property dualists, Aquinas does not regard consciousness (as contemporary philosophers tend to understand “consciousness”) as immaterial. Rather, it is intellectual activity (grasping abstract concepts, reasoning, etc.) that he takes to be immaterial. Second, Aquinas is not only not a property dualist, he is not (contrary to appearances) a substance dualist either, certainly not in the way that sort of view has been understood since Descartes. Rather, he is a hylemorphic dualist. From a Thomistic point of view, substance dualism, property dualism, materialism, idealism, neutral monism, and all other post-Cartesian theories of the mind presuppose a mistaken and muddleheaded conception of both mind and matter – a conception which (among other things) makes it very difficult for contemporary philosophers even to understand the Thomistic view. As when dealing with Aquinas’s position on other specific philosophical questions, the only way properly to understand what he says about the relationship between mind and body is to situate it within his general metaphysics, which presupposes an understanding of the notions of act and potency, form and matter, substance and accident, essence and existence, analogical predication, etc. I set all this out in Aquinas, with chapter 4 devoted to Aquinas’s psychology and how it differs radically from contemporary substance dualism, property dualism, etc.

Now, some further reading, while you wait for your copy of Aquinas to arrive: First, my essay “Why Searle Is a Property Dualist,” which explains why Searle’s own anti-materialist arguments in philosophy of mind do in fact entail property dualism, despite his attempt to avoid this result. Second, check out David Oderberg’s article “Hylemorphic Dualism” for an overview of the Thomistic position. Third, take a look at Alfred Freddoso’s article “Good News, Your Soul Hasn’t Died Quite Yet” for a discussion of some of the differences between the Thomistic view and the standard modern ones (and why Catholics, especially, should be wary of the latter, including modern versions of dualism).

Plotinus on divine simplicity, Part II

We’ve seen how Plotinus argues for the existence of God (or “the One”), and how his conception of God includes something like the doctrine of divine simplicity. But we also noted that for Plotinus, the One is but one of three divine “hypostases,” the other two – Intellect and Soul – being derivative from the One. Let’s look now at how he derives these two further hypostases (once again following Lloyd Gerson’s helpful lead).

First, as a Platonist, Plotinus is committed to the existence of the Forms, for the usual sorts of reasons. (See chapter 2 of The Last Superstition for a refresher course on Platonism. Though the book ultimately opts for Scholastic realism rather than Platonic realism, I try to make it clear why Platonism is intellectually attractive.) Given the Forms’ existence, Plotinus appears to take the following line of reasoning to demonstrate the existence of his second divine hypostasis:

1. The Forms constitute a complex system of eternal necessary truths.

2. This system can exist only virtually in the One, not actually, since the One is not complex but absolutely simple.

3. So there must be a separate, derivative hypostasis to ground the actuality of these truths.

4. But eternal truths cannot exist except as contemplated by an eternal knower.

5. So this derivative hypostasis must be an Intellect.

Once again, let’s comment on the argument step by step (and once again, not everything I have to say by way of commentary should be attributed either to Plotinus or Gerson). Things are what they are because they instantiate certain Forms or universals. This individual triangle and that one are what they are because they instantiate triangularity, this individual cat and that one are what they are because they instantiate catness, and so forth. The Forms are, accordingly, essential to any complete explanation of the world. They are eternal and necessary – this or that triangle comes and goes, but triangularity does not and cannot. They are also logically interrelated in a way that entails various eternal and necessary truths – anything instantiating triangularity necessarily also instantiates trilaterality, anything instantiating threeness necessarily also instantiates oddness, and so forth.

That gives us step (1) of the argument. And the eternity and necessity of the Forms, together with their status as (part of) the ultimate explanation of things, would seem to entail their divinity. Since the One is the divine source of all, the Forms must exist in the One. And yet, as step (2) tells us, since the system of Forms exhibits a kind of complexity, it cannot exist “actually” in the One, which is absolutely simple, but only “virtually.” (Think of the way fire exists “virtually” in a match in a way it does not exist even virtually in a toothpick, since the former has an inherent power to generate fire that the latter does not. The fire exists “actually” only when the match is struck.)

At the same time, the Forms must exist “actually” if they are to explain anything. Hence, step (3) concludes, there must be a second-most fundamental explanatory principle of all reality after the One, in which the Forms are actualized – divine (since it is eternal, necessary, and part of the ultimate explanation of the world) but derived from the One. What is the nature of this “hypostasis” (to use the traditional Neo-Platonic language)? Anticipating a line of thought that would later become associated with St. Augustine, Plotinus argues that though eternal truths exist independent of the material world and independent of any finite mind (this much being familiar from Plato), they must nevertheless exist only as contemplated by some mind, namely an infinite mind (step (4), a move that arguably goes beyond Plato and makes Plotinus’ position a “Neo-” Platonism, though Plotinus himself didn’t see it that way). And thus we reach the conclusion that the second hypostasis must be thought of as a kind of divine Intellect.

But we are, in Plotinus’ view, still short of a complete account of the ultimate causes of the world. This brings us to his argument for Soul, the third of the three hypostases, which can be summarized as follows:

1. Intellect, since it contains the Forms, explains why things have the natures they have.

2. But the objects of the Intellect are not distinct from the Intellect itself.

3. And some things desire objects outside themselves (e.g. a plant “desires” to grow and flourish).

4. So Intellect cannot explain these desires.

5. So a third hypostasis is needed to explain them, namely Soul.

This argument might seem even more difficult to understand than the other two we’ve considered, but I think if we unpack it carefully we can see that it is not all that mysterious, at least given certain key metaphysical assumptions held in common by many ancient philosophers. Keep in mind that the point of Plotinus’ theory of the three hypostases is to show what must be the case if the world we know is to exist at all. It is to provide an ultimate explanation. The One is the ultimate explanation of the being or existence of things. Intellect is the explanation of their natures. But the world of our experience has, we might say, both its static and its dynamic aspects. The nature of a cat is what it is, unchangingly. As step (1) reminds us, Intellect is the explanation of why it has that nature. But as a living thing, a cat also goes through stages of development. It doesn’t exhibit every aspect of its “catness” all at once. In general, living things exist in a way that involves the gradual realization of various ends. Plants “desire” or “seek” to grow and flourish, acorns “aim” to become oaks, and so forth. Most living things do not consciously seek to realize such ends, of course. What we have here is best understood along the lines of Aristotle’s conception of final causality, “goal-directedness” in nature that is for the most part entirely unconscious and unthinking.

This “dynamic” side of the natural order is something Intellect does not explain. The reason is that goal-directedness or final causality involves one thing being “directed toward” something outside itself, and there is nothing like that in Intellect. As I have noted in several earlier posts (e.g. here and here), for ancient and medieval philosophers, thought does not involve the intellect’s “representing” the world outside it, but rather a kind of identity of the intellect with the nature of the thing it knows. This is why step (2) tells us that (the divine) Intellect is not distinct from the Forms it knows; in knowing a Form it does not “point to” something beyond itself, but is rather, in a sense, identical with the Form. (Again, see the earlier posts just linked to for more on this conception of thought.) Since there is no “pointing beyond itself” in Intellect, step (4) concludes that Intellect cannot account for those aspects of the natural world (noted in step (3)) that do involve a thing’s “pointing beyond itself” – that involve “desire,” goal-directedness, final causality. (Plotinus focuses on living things, but to the extent that final causality, properly understood, pervades the natural order in the ways discussed in many previous posts, all of material reality would seem to require such explanation for the same reason living things do.) There must, then, be a third-most fundamental explanatory principle of all reality after the One and Intellect, one which accounts for this “directedness” of things towards certain ends outside them, and this is what Plotinus means by Soul.

It will not have escaped the reader’s notice that Plotinus’ three divine hypostases – the One, Intellect, and Soul – are at least vaguely reminiscent of the three divine Persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Is the parallel more than superficial? I’ll address this question in a third and final post on Plotinus and divine simplicity.

Monkey in your soul?

Before we get to part II of my series on modern biology and original sin, I want briefly to reply to some of the responses made to part I.  Recall that my remarks overlapped with points recently made by Mike Flynn and by Kenneth Kemp in his American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article “Science, Theology, and Monogenesis” (which, I have since discovered, is available online).  If you haven’t yet read Flynn and Kemp, you should do so before reading anything else on this subject.  As they argue, there is no conflict between the genetic evidence that modern humans descended from a population of at least several thousand individuals, and the theological claim that modern humans share a common pair of ancestors.  For suppose we regard the pair in question as two members of this larger group who, though genetically related to the others, are distinct from them in having immaterial souls, which (from the point of view of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and Catholic theology) are a necessary condition for the possession of genuine intellectual powers and can be only be imparted directly by God.  Only this pair and their descendents, to whom God also imparts souls and thus intellects, would count as human in the metaphysical and theologically relevant sense, even if the other members of the original larger group are human in the purely biological sense.  As Kemp writes:

Against “neurobabble”

Every written token of the English word “soup” is made up of marks which look at least vaguely like “s,” “o,” “u,” and “p.”  Of course, it doesn’t follow that the word “soup” is identical to any collection of such marks, or that its properties supervene on the material properties of such marks, or that it can be explained entirely in terms of the material properties of such marks.  Everyone who considers the matter knows this.

To borrow an example from psychologist Jerome Kagan, “as a viewer slowly approaches Claude Monet's painting of the Seine at dawn there comes a moment when the scene dissolves into tiny patches of color.”  But it doesn’t follow that its status and qualities as a painting reduce to, supervene upon, or can be explained entirely in terms of the material properties of the color patches.  Everyone who considers the matter knows this too.

Somehow, though, when neuroscientists discover some neural correlate of this or that mental event or process, a certain kind of materialist concludes that the mind’s identity with, or supervenience upon, or reducibility to, or complete explanation in terms of neural processes is all but a done deal, and that the reservations of non-materialists are just so much intellectually dishonest bad faith.  In a recent online op-ed piece for The New York Times, and in an apt phrase, philosopher of mind Tyler Burge criticizes this tendency as “neurobabble,” which produces only “the illusion of understanding.”  For it is as fallacious as any parallel argument about words or paintings would be.

Why not annihilation?

Another post on hell?  Will this series never end?  Never fear, dear reader.  As Elaine Benes would say, it only feels like an eternity.  We’ll get on to another topic before long.

Hell itself never ends, though.  But why not?  A critic might agree that the damned essentially choose to go to hell, and that it is just for God to inflict a punishment proportionate to this evil choice.  The critic might still wonder, though, why the punishment has to be perpetual.  Couldn’t God simply annihilate the damned person after some period of suffering?  Wouldn’t this be not only more merciful, but also more just?  

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.