Andrew Taggart

Archive for the ‘education’ Category

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Tree cutting

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 17, 2012 at 4:16 am

Socrates’ greatness was to be able to play with children, and to consider that his time was thus well spent…. Socrates lives a human life simply and humbly.

–Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone

*

Yesterday I bought bananas for Joan. She said she had plenty. Now I have four bananas to eat.

The rain from the past three days carried silt and stone from the neighbor’s yard into the back courtyard. At first, I thought the stones and such might have fallen from the sky since the fence separating the houses seemed well intact. As I cleaned up the mess, however, I saw how the rock could have passed beneath the wooden posts and settled like a temporary installation next to the august compost bin. The faux art would have to go into the rubbish bin, which is where it went, and now the courtyard is clean again.

On Sunday, Joan asked whether I could cut down an overgrown branch that might pose a hazard this winter. Calling this long arced being a branch is rather like calling a redwood a happy little tree. A branch it is not; half the tree it was, half a wishbone, half a life. I said I could come Monday and on Monday morning I put on the garden gloves, pulled out the hand saw, slipped on my sunglasses, and looked up at the branch (read: tree) like a manly man.

Let me tell you about this manly man. First he says Hmm… and then proceeds to ponder things mathematically. Should this branch fall that way, he reasons, it could very easily take out the tree beside it; and should it fall too far other way, it could smash in the other neighbor’s window. He calculates probabilities, devises a plan, and starts to cut.

I simply prayed.

I was relieved when the falling branch–20 feet long? 80 feet wide?–didn’t break the window of the brownstone next door. It fell cleanly into the middle of the courtyard. Then I cut the long branch into small logs, stacked them in a neat pile; broke the twigs, piled them neatly; swept the ground and left the patio newborn as the rain came and washed it.

Andy told Joan that he was impressed by my three stacks: leaves, small branches, logs for firewood. Joan tells me again that I am her best tenant ever. She is 89 years old. I am storing up her praise.

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Fan of an altostratus, pastel and askew

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling on May 16, 2012 at 3:59 am

Her

An hour ago, our skin, akin to clawed clay, came and combed in teeth of amethyst and bone–oh, you know, just a precipitous cappuccino.

Me

“Clawed clay” is so well described.

I’d only add:

the molten lava, like Jupiter’s eye and
the top-hatted man holding up his rather sad umbrella.

Her

A chimney sweep’s propeller in tow: fan of an altostratus, pastel and askew.

Me

A boy kneels down, unseen, giggles to himself. He holds a tie, a cord that’s wrapped around his big boy propeller. Oh but when he pulls… When he pulls!

He giggles to himself, kicks his feet the way he would if he were to throw a tantrum. But he’s not throwing a tantrum; he’s splitting himself with laughter.

He pauses, breathes, then pulls. The propeller unwinds and unwinds, first slowly, then rapidly, more rapidly, more rapidly like a top. It wobbles and rattles some, speeding up all the while. The three lines blur and blur, becoming a circle, a disc, a spinning planar world.

When the contraption finally lifts off into a sky clawed by clay, he is elated by the sense of deliverance. Yet as it rambles forth into the altostratus–pastel, molten, askew–he too feels pastel, molten, askew. He never knew, till now, what sadness really was. He stands wordless, his awe the awe of adults for whom release is always complex…

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Ethical life restored (VII)

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling on May 15, 2012 at 4:21 am

VII

Silent of speech is nature’s course.

Laozi, Daodejing, 23

Can we still follow nature’s course under nature’s gently guiding hand? I think so but only if we let nature return to its humble home and only after we learn again to listen to its silent speech.

In early May, a friend and I spent a week at a cabin on the outskirts of Woodstock. We dwelled in seamless being, a time scarcely open for recollection because only one seamless fabric, the whole all seeming a single day that was filled with textures and rhythms and shades. The whole was enfolded in quiet calm, a mood of flowing sober joy.

It was then that we laughed lightly at the sparrows and the dandelions; then that we hiked uphill and rested on overlooks; that we ate food made with chafed fingers and sewn into our souls; that we drank wine and were charmed with our giddiness and our ruddy cheeks; that we sat in silence, dangling our feet over large opal rocks and bony froth; that we held each other closely and cried in joy, occasionally in longing; that we listened to loving words, ours so soft and caring, as steady as rubbing palms; that we slept when our bodies were aching for rest and could do no more for us; it was then again, a pail filling and refilling, that we awoke to morning mists and falling rains and birdsong calling from the hillside.

There was, we knew, nothing extraordinary in this, nothing save the constant humming, the thrumming of life amid life, the sense of being our best and our most spontaneous, of living according to our heart songs and day chants and night hymns. We were falling in love, this is true, but we were in love most especially with this way of living, with this way of being in touch with nature. For our natures were again following nature’s silent course and then love was all we knew.

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Life is not like water (VI)

In philosophical counseling, ethics, education, politics on May 14, 2012 at 4:19 am

VI

We have been following nature’s course through modernity with a view to solving an enigma. How could it be so self-evident during earlier epochs that the virtuous person would, without question, live according to nature when it became just as self-evident in our time that the morally upright person would have to act contrary to nature? The answer is to be discovered, in key part, in the disappearance of what the young Hegel once called the “friendliness of life.”

The leitmotiv of human life as one that flowed like water was well-known in the ancient world. The Daodejing says that “The highest goodness is like water,” Xenophanes says that ”All things that come into being and grow are earth and water,” and in one of the extant fragments from Thales we read, simply, that “Life is water.” Among Daoists in particular, it would have been counterintuitive to speak of fighting against water or of striving to swim upstream, perhaps as absurd as Don Quixote fighting windmills or Sisyphus trying to push a boulder uphill. Yet this does not mean that water was always an easy friend.

The paradigmatic example of water’s ferocious power is, of course, the story of the flood. In the Early Theological Writings, Hegel writes that where once there existed unspoken amity, friendliness, and love, the flood sundered man from nature, evoking a “disbelief in nature” and, in turn, giving rise to man’s desire for mastery. Coming to consciousness of his world, man would build a tower impregnable to sea fury and though his wounds would never heal, at least he could console himself with the thought that he would never be harmed again.

Examined closely, the myth of the flood is a story of the emergence of higher order abstract reasoning on the heels of the destruction of a natural amity between friend and friend, human beings and the natural world. And where one might just as well imagine human beings weathering the storm and, once the flood had subsided, giving thanks to the earth and the sun, making love to each other and kissing their children and their gods all in the hope of restoring the general friendliness of life, one observes instead the construction of semi-permanent structures, forms of protection, bulwarks against harm and wounds and possible injuries.

One could do worse than to read this myth as an allegory for modernity. The breakdown of a previous social order led, out of fear and hope and, yes, also hubris, to the supervenience of principle upon lost love. If you do not love me anymore, then let us settle up, call in the law, summon forth the lawyers, draw up our contracts. Let us legislate and codify, regulate and systematize, making ourselves into good Confucians, middle managers, and dutiful bureaucrats. Above all, let everyone follow the rules (and, in the boudoir, eroticize transgressing them).

Given this disenchanted nature, morality must be a struggle against life, a set of duties trumping our inclinations, a list of obligations that at times terminate in tragic conflict. For us, morality must be deliberative and obligatory while nature remains mechanistic, undirected, following its own separate course. Now morality must be universalizable–stern and rigorous stuff–applicable mainly to the good will or good outcomes, or else it succumbs to mere cant, empty relativism, or the shameless will to power.

In Patterns of Moral Complexity, the contemporary moral philosopher Charles Larmore writes candidly about what he deems the “heterogeneity of morals.” He concludes, “We have to live with the fact that we have obligations we cannot honor.” All right, but what obligations are these and why can’t they always be honored? Larmore claims that the principles of partiality, deontology, and consequentialism are the three principles that constitute modern morality. We are partial, he believes, in that we have particular projects that we deem good and that we seek to realize. In the pursuit of final aims that are ours, we do not expect others to value or pursue the same. Additionally, we have incontrovertible duties, as Kant held, duties that admit of no exceptions and that enjoin us always to act, or to abstain from acting, in a certain way (telling the truth, keeping our promises, never using another as a means, and so forth). Finally, we have an obligation to bring into being the most good or least evil overall. To say, therefore, that modern life is “morally complex” is just to say that there will be scenarios in which one principle may come into conflict with another and this with tragic implications. Larmore once again: “I do not think there is any systematic principle [that is, any higher order principle transcending these three] that will decide these conflicts.” Larmore’s honesty is telling, and I think he is right about the inevitability of tragic conflict in modernity, provided we accept the assumption that morality consists solely of incommensurable obligations.

For Larmore takes for granted what we moderns also take for granted–that we act on principles and that these principles “lie,” in his words, “at a high level of generality.” But this is only true once we take on board the assumption that nature is ‘other’ and that our fellows are not our friends but strangers, mere acquaintances, and potential foes. Our distrust runs deep. Yet when life is going well, there is no principle that we apply with rigor and constancy but, more simply, the face to face, the touch, the besito; no abstractions but your words; no Confucianism but, says the Daodejing, “filial piety and fraternal affection” arising and holding us close to one another.

An order collapses, “The state is in chaos,” and “there arises the loyal minister.” These are Laozi’s words of caution. Indeed, once nature flees from us and we, in our turn, seek to bring it back to us by taming it, then we and nature go our separate ways. Truly, modern life may be like H20, but it is not like water. Recognizing as much, we poets of life long for ethical life to be restored.

Part VII (final) tomorrow: Ethical Life Restored…

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Kant’s tribunal (V)

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 12, 2012 at 4:21 am

V

One of Hegel’s enigmatic theses from the Preface to The Philosophy of Right is that the actual is rational. The contemporary scholar Robert Pippin glosses this proposition–rightly, in my view–as a demand that being be intelligible. As human beings, we long for order in reality so much so that is scarcely conceivable that we could live at all were we utterly incapable of seeing how we fit into the general schema of things.

Philosophy may very well be the way we go about bringing order to lived reality. In a recent interview, the professional philosopher Raymond Geuss stated quite elegantly that philosophy is thinking in a systematic spirit without recourse to a system. Kant, a systematic philosopher from the first, did not pay heed to Geuss’s delicate distinction between being systematic and building systems. Instead, he developed a grand system in order to hold at bay the powerful forces, the plentiful incoherencies, the fragmented traditions running through the Western tradition and spilling into the modern world. In so doing, he took on board his contemporaries’ disenchanted conception of nature while also seeking to find a place for human beings in this newly emerging age.

The pressures thrust upon this backwaters man from Konigsberg were immense and, depending on your standpoint, Kant could either be charged with hubris or timidity. It is worth recalling that, by the end of the medieval period, the nominalists had already unwittingly and, contrary to their intentions, assigned God a minor role in what was to be a modern drama. If, as nominalists insisted, God acted from a distance from his creation, then it was only a matter of time before deists would see him as bringing the world into being and then removing himself utterly from the order of creation. The Creator and creation were no longer analogous but heterogenous. For their part, materialists would call the deists’ bluff, seeing no reason why efficient causality and the laws of nature could not, on their own, be sufficient to supply explanations for the mechanics and development of nature. Once a deist, Voltaire would later on throw his lot behind atheist materialists; to him, it seemed a logical progression. Applying Ockam’s Razor, materialists would do their part to cut God out of the drama entirely. He was, after all, an unnecessary and unwarranted otherworldly hypothesis. Given world enough and time, this-worldliness would win out and Nietzsche’s madman declaring God’s death would come as no surprise to us.

Nature, accordingly, was governed by mechanism, not directed by teleology. Nature did not flow like water; it consisted of analyzable properties and was governed by physical law. But could this be all for surely it felt as if we humans could act for reasons and with ends in mind. Or were we deluded in regarding ourselves as purposive beings? In addition, since nature was nothing but spatial extension–this, remember, the truth about which Pascal was absolutely horrified–what were we human beings to make of the richly hued, fine-grained objects we perceived and tasted, never mind the blushes and loves we shared? What on earth did we know and where on earth were we anyway?

Kant may have been an awkward Pietist and a tedious man, but he was, in all things, an exceptionally elegant thinker. In his day, he aroused everyone’s interests, was admired by most, was imitated by many, and yet managed to satisfy almost no one completely with his philosophical solutions. For Kant was, by turns, a man of measure, probity, and boldness who cautioned his contemporaries against flying too far beyond from realm of sense experience but who urged them nonetheless–dared them even?–to explore the limits of human comprehension.

His conclusions dazzle and puzzle at one and the same time. Here are a few: God’s existence can neither be proven nor disproven, neither affirmed nor denied by rational means; the world may be finite or infinite, a totality or not; we may have free will, we certainly must regard ourselves as acting under the idea of freedom, but human understanding cannot show this to be the case; we are a part of mechanized nature insofar as we have bodies and yet we are a part from nature insofar as we are rational persons; objects do indeed have secondary qualities yet these qualities are the results of our conceptual contributions and yet reality could not possibly appear to us the way it does unless we brought to bear such conceptual deliverances upon that which we receive; and–to round out this very partial list–we are warranted in regarding nature in teleological terms, provided we treat natural beings not as really striving toward final aims but as if they could. Kant’s conclusions, as I say, are breathless, tending toward the beautiful or the sublime depending on one’s mood.

The challenge presented to Kant–as momentous as it was impossibly demanding–was to reconstruct a modern moral order on the ruins of a medieval cosmos. Kant’s critical project is perhaps most succinctly characterized as the attempt to return us to ourselves but on a higher plane of abstraction. One or two levels up (or out), Kant’s is doubtless a fitting project for an increasingly abstract world of law and calculation, of modern states and international trade, a world, above all, that was beholden to a Theoretical Vision. Fitting, yes, but wrongheaded from the first.

This Theoretical Vision first becomes apparent in the question of what we can know and believe. In epistemology, Kant’s question-changing approach is to not to listen to nature as a lover listens to the wind chimes but to issue it a summons to appear in a certain light. And this is precisely what occurs as nature is brought to higher order conceptuality. When we ask, “What can we know?,” we are, Kant thinks following Locke’s lead, inquiring first about what contributions we are making to our comprehension of reality and second about the manner of reality’s appearing to us. We are not asking about nature as it is in itself, such a question being either poorly formulated, unintelligible, or, in any case, beyond the bounds of human understanding. We are asking about ourselves as subjects who come to represent reality. Given this orientation, reality is, as it were, ‘forced’ to appear in the terms we give it, the highly abstract terms of space and time, of efficient causality, of substance, and so forth.

In some respects, Kant’s elucidation of our claims to knowing is little more than a preparatory exercise for an elaboration on our moral lives. By the eighteenth century, it had already become common sense, one baldly stated by Hobbes and held by more cynical types like Bernard Mandeville, that human beings were thoroughgoingly self-interested agents who acted solely for the sake of realizing their own happiness. In time, the marketplace would come to be the sphere in which rational actors would seek to maximize their self-interest and satisfy their preferences. Still, although Kant granted that as natural beings we wanted to be happy where being happy just was identical with satisfying our inclinations regardless of the content of these inclinations, he could not stomach the thought that egoism could hold sway throughout the entirety of social life. But then where would some universally binding claims be discoverable, the herculean task of which would be to hold you fast to me and me tightly to my highest obligations? Where could we find the secular form of morality that would replace God’s edicts? Where indeed.

It is here that Kant draws on the analogy of natural law and moral law, the first applying to empirical beings, the second to rational persons. It is also here in the moral realm where he wishes to show that humans are capable of giving themselves law and of binding themselves to it, thereby transcending the siren calls of their lower natures as appetitive beings even as they achieve their higher ends as rational persons.

Less important for our purposes is getting straight the particulars of Kant’s supreme moral principle, the Categorical Imperative; far more important for us to grasp the Theoretical Vision Kant espouses and bequeaths us. The Theoretical Vision works by ripping humans out of nature, only to reintroduce nature to us in the guise of theoretical entities for use, consumption, analysis, and circumspection. One sees in Kant’s critical philosophy the apotheosis of human beings’ standing over and against nature and coming to confront an estranged reality as a set of theoretical entities revealing themselves to scientific investigations into their truth. Kant’s world, which is very much our own, presents us with over-there objects that are seemingly readymade for theoretical investigation. From a distance, we inspect objects, breaking them up into analyzable parts; we speak of objects as having discernible properties (recall Locke’s primary qualities); we regard morality as being law-like and as applying without exception; we think of humans as deliberative beings from the first, always on the verge of acting rightly or wrongly; we apply principles and laws to cases (e.g., bioethics, foreign policy); we accuse each other of hypocrisy (that is, of acting contrary to stated principle); we think of God, if we do at all, as an abstract entity; we speak to each other in terms of valid and sound arguments; we offer defenses of our firm positions; we conceive of material reality in terms of its abstract uses, its resources, its utility, its market value. In the end, we touch money, eat calories, act based on permissions and forbidden fruits, visit museums filled with mounted butterflies, and have nearly forgotten how to listen to or see each other.

In place of a way of being with nature, we have put Theory. By submitting nature to our questions, we can no longer let be. By submitting human nature to law, we can do no otherwise than act contrary to the natural world, restraining ourselves to act in accordance with duty, not in keeping with the rhythms of love. Whither has fled human beings who were once so fully immersed in a way of being that all these theoretical questions would never have emerged in the first place? Where is the full fecundity of sensuous experience? Where is still that elemental love of living flowingly according nature’s course?

Part VI: Life is not like Water…

Part VII (final): Ethical Life Restored…

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Locke’s qualities (IV)

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 11, 2012 at 4:53 am

IV

The sober minded Englishman John Locke read the Frenchman Descartes’ work approvingly, finding the “way of ideas” especially edifying for his empirical pursuits into the question of what we can know. Just as we must first examine our instruments before we can attend to what the instruments are measuring, so, Locke insisted, we must analyze our perceptual apparatus before we can hope to grasp with any certainty the contents of our perceptual experiences. Despite Locke’s being an empiricist and Descartes a rationalist, it is of far greater importance that they shared the same point of departure. For them as for their contemporaries, nature was already disenchanted, and our mental lives were presumed to be distinct from physical reality. But if this is the case, how can mind and world become reacquainted with each other?

This disenchanted picture is most clearly on view in Locke’s crucial distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was written in 1690, presents us with an epistemic puzzle. On the one hand, Locke wants to save our common sense intuitions about perceptual experience. He wants to say that there are objects with sense properties; that we do indeed see the redness of balls, surely do touch velvety fabrics, do smell fragrant roses, can taste the oakiness of wine, and so on. On the other hand, he turns our intuitions on their heads by seeking to show how the qualities that we think are in the objects themselves are really not in them at all. Where, then, is this redness in the red balls we claim to perceive there? More generally, if not of redness and rounds, of what do material objects like red balls actually consist?

Locke’s reply is that material objects consist entirely of particles whose intrinsic properties are mass, extension, shape, and velocity. According to Locke, primary qualities are those properties that are intrinsic to as well as indispensable for the object. They are (1) those properties that are in the objects themselves (intrinsic properties), (2) those without which the object would not be what is (necessary conditions), and (3) those that in fact make it what it is (constitutive conditions). To say that an object has a certain mass is just to say that it has that mass in itself and hence independent of whatever observations we make or could make about it.

By contrast, secondary qualities are secondary or “derivative” by dint of their not being in the objects themselves; they are instead relational properties that arise in our apprehension of whatever objects happen to appear to our senses. Whereas mass is something that is universal and essential to material bodies, the sensation of warmth is neither essential nor universal. But why is so? Locke reasons that warmth is correlative with my proximity to an object—the closer I get to a fire, the warmer I feel—as well as with the sensitivity of my sense organs—at some distance D1 from the fire, I would likely report feeling hotter than you would were you stationed at D2. As a result, due to the impact of our presence on the object in view and due also to the particular sensitivity of our perceptual apparatus, we have good reason to believe that such a quality as being warm can only be felt relative to the way we happen to be.

To a large degree, Locke is saying that the property of warmth comes and goes while that of mass stays the same with the metaphysical implication that permanence is to be privileged over variability. He is saying this, but he is also saying considerably more.

The epistemic puzzle is not alleviated, however, by this distinction, since Locke leaves us to wonder how we are to understand how particles that do not appear to our sense organs nevertheless produce in us the form of red balls, bluish nights, and swaying ailanthus trees. Here, Locke appeals to the “powers” or “dispositions” of the object to produce in us the ideas of being red, being loud, and so on. Secondary qualities are, in his words, “nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us; and depend on those primary qualities.” Recall that Locke’s first blow to common sense involved smuggling colors and suchlike in through the back door by means of denying that colors exist in the things themselves. Now, color returns, albeit in neutered form, redness now a “power” or “disposition” within the object, a power to work on our sense organs. This line of argument rules out the thought that our idea of redness could correspond to the stretch of reality presently before us. But what in the objects produces these ideas in us, ideas that seem to bear no resemblance to mass or velocity? And by what mechanism? Locke’s answer: the particles themselves bring out these secondary qualities in us by means of a causal mechanism—or, more precisely, by means of efficient causality.

For those of us with a poetic spirit, the results of Locke’s empiricism are nothing if not unsettling. Nature, here bleached of attributes, awash only in particles, capable of strange “powers,” returns to us but only at a once remove. Worst still, our ordinary reality–those rocks and stones and trees of which Wordsworth writes so movingly–is either derivative or unreal but in either case much less interesting. For not only is the life of the natural world far less vitalistic inasmuch as seeds no longer ‘express’ themselves as trees, birds no longer greet their mates with song, and rivers no longer flow toward the sea; not only do our senses become passive and receptive, dull feelers of sensuous life; but–as we shall find in what follows–our aesthetic sense becomes attenuated, our sense of the face to face more opaque, the feel of experience less intense, less vibrant, more epistemically impoverished. In Locke’s picture of disenchanted nature, the distance between mind and world grows as vast as the distance between your face and mine, my touch and yours, our mouths and tongues and teeth. No longer do we know the world or each other by kissing; we know all, if we know at all, by analyzing mechanized bodies occupying space and time.

Kant, the greatest modern philosopher, has his work cut out for him, for he has inherited the disenchanted picture of nature from Descartes, Locke and others. Kant’s solution is to domesticate all his progeny: God will neither be proven nor disproven; man will be both apart of and a part of nature; teleology will return to nature in the form of the as if; and morality will be contrary to nature, raised to law, upheld by reason. Especially important to giving shape to modernity in general and to Kant’s system in particular was the emergence of a novel background assumption: the world functioned in accordance with an analogous set of laws. Just as nature followed physical law, so man followed moral law in ethics, general principles in psychology, the law of the marketplace in civil society, and positive law in politics. So we will see, particularly in the case of morality running contrary to nature.

Part V tomorrow: Kant’s tribunal…

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Descartes’ materalism (III)

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 10, 2012 at 5:46 am

III

The medieval worldview effected a happy if strenuous synthesis between Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology. The appeal of Aristotle’s conception of the cosmos was that it made nature intelligible to human comprehension. The cosmos was anthropocentric in design, finite in size, spherical in shape, and interconnected in and out, top to bottom–from the mutable and perishable sublunary realm where humans dwelled to the farthest reaches of the immutable and eternal celestial realm where the Unmoved Mover resided. In this conception, each element had its natural place, earth being closest, followed by water, then air, and finally fire. If every being had its place in this steady state which was without absolute beginning or end, each also had its essence through change. The Four Causes in particular opened being to human investigation, allowing us to ask questions of itself and, in turn, of ourselves.

According to Aristotle, the question, “Why is this so?,” could be given four different, but not unrelated, answers. It is so, he averred, because this object consists of this matter (material cause), is shaped by this form (formal cause), is brought into being by this other being (efficient cause), and is moving in the direction of this end (final cause). Key to Aristotle’s philosophy, and more generally to ancient philosophy, was the background assumption that every being in the cosmos had to ‘hang together just so’ within a unified vision of being. In De Anima (On the Soul), for instance, Aristotle holds that any organic body is numerically identical with the particular soul-body or form-matter composite. And in the Nichomachean Ethics, he argues that the final end of ensouled man is eudaimonia (human flourishing or faring well) and sees no reason why this conclusion does not follow from an extended inquiry into man’s nature as a rational animal. Above all, each being strives to imitate the Unmoved Mover, an attractive and self-sufficient deity.

Quite apart from the vexed theological question of how a finite cosmos existing in a steady state could be combined with a Christian story of Genesis ex nihilo, Aristotle’s design surely had its charms, not least to medieval theologians. The Scholastic Thomas Aquinas referred to Aristotle simply and reverently as The Philosopher in his voluminous writings on theology, ethics, physics, and logic. Aquinas saw much to approve of in Aristotle’s works except that he found it necessary to amend Aristotle’s premise that humans could achieve human flourishing in this life when the latter, Aquinas observed, was only possible in the next. The goal of Aquinas’s thought was to harmonize immanence and transcendence, creation with the creative being. He did so, at least in part, through analogical reasoning, claiming that humans resembled God in key respects but surely not in all respects.

During this time, human beings “naturally longed for its divine source” (Louis Dupre) and this longing was expressed in God’s active and loving participation in being. Though not identical with His creation, God was ever present as a causal force: more like touching than like a single push. Indeed, Aquinas’s five ways to God are better understood as meditations than as rational demonstrations, for each is meant to remind the believer of how reason can be enlisted in the  support of revelation. It should come as no surprise, then, that each way should end with et hoc est quod omens vocant Deum (and this is what everyone understands by God).

The synthesis between Aristotelianism and Christianity held sway so long as this world was taken to be the best and most intelligible world. The Scholastics thought so, with Aquinas being their most vocal and perceptive representative, but the nominalists, led by William of Ockham, posed a challenge that would prove unanswerable, a challenge that would open the passage to modernity and change, possibly for good, our understanding of nature as well our place within it.

Almost overnight, the nominalists overturned the intelligible conception of God as a benevolent being whose design is rational through and through, replacing it with a voluntarist God who willed this world but who could have willed some other. For would it not be a severe limitation on God’s potency to imagine that this world was the only world God could have brought into existence? And would not his potency be best expressed by holding back than, as the Neoplatonists held, by expressing himself entirely in the fullness of plenitude? The threat nominalists presented was not simply ‘intellectualist’; it was thoroughgoingly ‘vitalist’ for it became impossible to grasp God’s nature who could be acting arbitrarily, creating this world with no better reason than to show his power. If this is correct, then God is ‘opaque’ to human understanding and hence the analogy previously drawn between the Creator and creation was severed.

The conclusion to the conflict between God’s benevolence and God’s power was that God came to be seen as being ‘other than’ human being and the world began to lose its sense of being a home. Perhaps this was to be expected during a period in which humanism, ancient skepticism, and the Reformation–not to mention the Black Death–reintroduced philosophers like Montaigne to the ‘problem of the criterion’: the problem, that is, of what standard can determine what we can know about some subject with absolute certainty. Suffice it to say, the natural and human world became set apart from God’s awesome divinity. When He acted, he did so from a distance, thus leaving the question of teleology up in the air.

As has often been noted, Descartes’s materialism represents a turning point in the history of the West. Descartes inherited Scholastic and nominalistic concepts of God and creation at the same time that he helped inaugurate a scientific conception of nature. Where the medieval cosmos had effected a rapprochement between nature and divinity, the scientific worldview slowly peeled man off of nature and made God irrelevant.

So Descartes stood in the midst of these raging rivers, these great conceptual dissonances, these fragmented traditions. What sense did he make of his multiple inheritances? To begin with, he claimed, following Aristotle, that reality consisted solely of substance where substance is understand as self-sufficient and thus in no need of any other thing to support its existence. According to Descartes, reality could be divided into divine substance, thinking substance, and material substance, and yet he also urged in the next breath that the only true substance was God. On the one hand, our minds were dependent for their continued existence on God, as were our bodies. On the other hand, God had become, as in the nominalist conception, ‘opaque’ to human understanding and to this extent removed from the world we experienced. In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes confides that the divine substance “transcends the natural capacity of our wits.”

God’s disappearance from reality is no more evident than in number 28 of Principles. He writes, in what is perhaps one of the greatest understatements of the seventeenth century,

That we should not consider the final causes of created things, but only their efficient causes.

Material reality was, on this construal, to become the realm of efficient causes. A scientific understanding could trace out the cause that brought about this event, but it must remain agnostic about an entity’s reason for being. “Why is this object here? What place does it have in the order of things? Why, indeed, is there something rather nothing?” These questions would have to go unanswered, later unasked, later still forgotten.

At the same time that material reality was grasped entirely in terms of efficient causes its attributes were to be blanched of sensuous qualities. Whereas our thinking consists of willing and perception, material reality just is ‘spatial extension.’ When we analyze the concept of spatial extension, we discover only position, size, shape, and motion, all of which are in accord with the nature of efficient causality.

We are well on our way to understanding how ethics would have to run contrary to nature (see Part I). More than any other philosopher, Immanuel Kant would come to grapple with this question, embracing a disenchanted nature, striving to hold open a place for human beings beyond the material world of efficient causes, seeking to honor purposive action within the realm of human reason, and attempting to ‘re-sensualize’ nature by means of aesthetic judgment.

Before we come to Kant, however, we must pass through Locke. Descartes already takes as a given that sensuous properties are distinct from intrinsic properties; Locke makes the case even more explicitly. Whatever happened to nature’s sensuous properties like touch and taste and sight? When indeed did a red ball stop being a red ball, becoming unreal or derivative instead? In Part IV, we turn to Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities…

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Pascal’s dread (II)

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 9, 2012 at 3:55 am

II

Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and a Catholic apologist. C.S. Lewis was a converted Christian and a scholar of medieval literature. Both turned their eyes toward the cosmos. The medieval cosmos, they would have seen, was a delicate synthesis of Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology. Aristotelianism insisted on the finite scope and spherical design; Christian theology built in a creative being acting within the cosmos yet also standing apart from it. The design was beautiful and harmonious, so starkly unlike the shape and substance of the modern world as to be all but unrecognizable and inconceivable to us moderns.

Both Pascal and Lewis, separated by 300 years, separately mourned the loss of the medieval cosmos. We must imagine Lewis ill at home here. We need do not such thing in the case of Pascal and this because he told us so with force and in anguish.

Pascal’s stance toward the epochal transformation was one of considerable dread. He was horrified by–in Alexandre Koyre’s words–the metamorphosis of the “closed world” into the “infinite universe.” In his Pensees, Pascal lamented that the “eternal silence of infinite spaces fills me with dread.” Pascal’s mood indicates that he is set apart from this new order of things and despairs of its ever being a home. Here, he implies, is a mathematicized universe of indefinite extension, a universe at once soundless and voiceless, song-less and devoid of life. Where in this conception of arbitrary and featureless nature, where in this unanimated matter, can human beings find themselves? Where can they revel and sing, where come to ‘proper measure’, where glory in God’s great creation? For will they not be exiled from song, fated to look on from without at a world that cannot possibly be ‘their own’? If Pascal could grasp the math, he yet despaired of finding a reason for the world’s existing at all. Whence his dread.

Ever the educator and Oxford don, Lewis is keen to take us on a visual tour of how a medieval cosmos might have looked and felt to its native denizens. In The Discarded Image, a book on medieval theology he finished not long before his death in 1964, Lewis eulogizes at length, stressing the aesthetic feel of things:

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out—like one looking from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is ‘outside the city wall’. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith’s Lucifer, ‘the army of unalterable law’, but rather the revelry of insatiable love [as from Neo-platonic and Christian God]. We are watching the activity of creatures [most notably, planets which were alive but also angels] whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of the faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection his own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him the fullest measure of which their nature is capable. You need not wonder that one old picture represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile [the First Movable, the final sphere before Heaven where God resides] as a girl dancing and playing with her sphere as with a ball. Then, laying aside whatever Theology or Atheology you held before, run your mind up heaven by heaven to Him who is really the centre, to your senses the circumference, of all; the quarry whom all these untiring huntsmen pursue, the candle to whom all these moths move yet are not burned.

Whatever else the medieval man felt he must have felt the sensuous properties–the dazzling sun, the quenched thirst, the dancing girl–inhering in the nature of the cosmos and wherever his eyes looked they would have been raised up in joy and wonderment at the beauty of being.

It is not quite as simple as saying that the scientific conception of nature replaced an aesthetic conception, though saying this much would be a start and would take us a good deal further. It is to say, however, that Descartes’s materialism, Locke’s metaphysics, and a more general turn from practice to theory would be turning points in the story of how nature disappeared and how human beings could no longer ‘see themselves’ as fitting into this new and estranging order.

Part III: We turn to Descartes’s argument for efficient causality tomorrow…

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Acting contrary to nature or living according to nature? (I)

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 8, 2012 at 3:50 am

I

Somewhere near the passage to modernity, the philosophical tree sprouted some branches and grew dead. How many branches, pray, before it breathed its final breath? The contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt holds up his fingers, counts two, and then shades in a third. The first branch is epistemology which, he says, is concerned with “what we believe.” The second branch is ethics whose chief subject, Frankfurt does not doubt, is ”how to behave.” The final branch is no mere twig for it covers the rest of human existence. It is, Frankfurt announces, the question of “what we care about.”

We are only in the third paragraph of Frankfurt’s germane essay, “The Importance of What We Care About,” when he elaborates on the scope of ethics. “Ethics focuses on the problem of our relations with other people. It is concerned especially with the contrast between right and wrong, and with the grounds and limits of moral obligation.” Frankfurt’s italics are intended to underscore the sharp contrast he wishes to draw between other people (ethics) and the self (care), between right and wrong (ethics) and importance (care), between obligations (ethics) and desires (care).

I sense mystery in Frankfurt’s design, a mystery whose shape can only be hinted at in the following remarks. Frankfurt’s neat and exacting tripartite division of philosophy transforms believing, moral reasoning, and caring into three separate enterprises, each of which is said to dwell in its own proper place: believing with a scientific conception of nature, commanding and complying with human conduct, and caring with an individual’s life projects. Because of this structure, it follows that ethical action, just because it exists solely within the realm of moral obligation, must be contrary to nature.

In this, Frankfurt is a progeny of Immanuel Kant. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Kant had cautioned us not to be “seduced” by our unruly inclinations. “The human being,” Kant states with great certainty in his 1785 ethical treatise The Groundwork of a Metaphysics of Morals,

feels within himself a powerful counterweight to all the commands of duty, which reason represents to him as so deserving of the highest respect–the counterweight of his needs and inclinations, the entire satisfaction of which he sums up under the name of happiness. Now reason issues its precepts unremittingly, without thereby promising anything to the inclinations, and so, as it were, with disregard and contempt for those claims, which are so impetuous and besides so apparently equitable (and refuse to be neutralized by any command). (my italics)

In Kant’s picture, moral philosophy urges us to let our reason outweigh our inclinations; it does so by means of making and holding fast to obligations. Kant’s argument to this effect turns on the metaphysical distinction between humans and God. God, he thinks, can only will infallibly yet human beings’ fallibility–the fact that we err, are easily seduced by our desires, are tempted to pursue our own happiness at all costs–requires that we subjugate our passions to our reason if we intend to act well. “Necessitation” is Kant’s word for a rational being’s learning to turn his will in the direction of his higher obligations despite his will not being “by its nature necessarily obedient.”

In Kant as in Frankfurt, to act morally is to do what we ought, not as we want. The outline of this modern mystery, one filled with struggle and strife and vacillation, is revealed once it is juxtaposed with ancient philosophers’ entirely different conception of the relationship between ethics and nature. In the modern world, ethics is indeed acting contrary to nature; in the ancient world, ethics is living according to nature. How did we go from “according to” to “contrary to”? How, indeed, did ethics get prised apart from nature, and what conception of nature made this prising apart possible?

Part II tomorrow…

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Loving my body entirely

In education, meditation, philosophical counseling on May 7, 2012 at 5:14 am

A few weeks ago, I asked what a body can do. I wanted to change the question from “What does a body look like when it is at rest?” to “What does a body feel like when it is functioning properly?” The latter question is a very good one, and yet it leaves hanging a more basic question of how one comes to love one’s body. My body may function properly, surely, but perhaps I do not love it. What, then, would cause me to love it? With a friend, I was writing further about this yesterday and came to see why it has come so naturally for me to love my body.

The reason I love my body fully, wholeheartedly, unquestionably is that it fits my philosophical form of life so seamlessly. It feels as though this kind of body is just the right kind of body for the life that is worth leading–namely, a philosophical life.

Two spiritual exercises (ascesis) led me to this conclusion. The first spiritual exercise–the ‘view from above’–called my attention to the various forms through which my body has passed on its way to philosophical life, with each form fitting for that way of life. My baseball-and-lifting body were fitting for a hyper-masculinized late 90s way of life: mildly hedonistic, showy, virile, cocksure. My climbing body, more lithe, more sinewy, lengthier, was fitting for the itinerant way of life embodied in climbing: the life of travel, the approach to the crag, the carrying of gear, the pensiveness of the boulder project, the steadiness of powerful movement.

In the above, what we are surveying are at one and the same time the fitting of form to way of life and the transformation of one form into another. Let us ask: what appeal did that kind of body have for that form of life? Let us consider: why did that kind of body pass away, passing into another, the following form? Let us say: the body thinks along the path of inquiry. The immediate aim of this long survey is to achieve a sense of gratitude for all one’s body has done.

The second spiritual exercise turns my attention to all the present alone. I am learning to take supreme joy in the mundane activities that make up my day: my typing these words; my dodging children while running around the Park yesterday; my hiking with a friend last week; my sitting on a park bench on Saturday and touching another friend’s shoulder; my… The joy I experience in these acts is immense and immeasurable. Oh words, you fail me.

The conclusion to this story, as I stated at the outset, is that my body is as fitting as it could possibly be for the life I lead. It feels rather as if there were a ‘pre-established harmony’ in the universe (this term a nod to Leibniz) such that my body were properly attuned to the cosmos. At 5 foot 9 or 10, I am not too tall or too short. Imagine me having a conversation with a conversation partner and being 6’6″ (domineering) or 4’5″ (diminutive). I am properly sized. I am also properly shaped: thin, flowing, rather Pleistocene looking, if I had to summon forth a couple word description. In my movements, I am firm yet flexible; subtle, light and graceful; quiet, soft-stepping, never loud or heavy or sharp. I feel Daoist.

The one word I’ve heard constantly over the past two years is that I have a ‘calming’ presence. I couldn’t imagine a more fitting body for my philosophical life. Because of this, I feel entirely in my body. Indeed, I love my body entirely for however long it is my body; for however long this is, I desire to have no other.

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